Jason Snell on Apple’s Quarterly Results 

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

In the post-results call with financial analysts, Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America asked Cook for a little more detail about Apple’s search revenue, given its lucrative deal with Google, and whether that revenue growth might decelerate if Google’s search traffic were to be impacted by the growth of AI. Cook’s response was, if I do say so myself, an all-timer for these calls:

Cook: This is Tim. The advertising category, which is a combination of third-party and first-party, did set a record during the quarter.

Mohan: Okay, and sorry, just to be clear, both Apple’s own internal advertising and within the licensing individually set records?

Cook: I actually I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that the combination of the two set a record. We don’t divulge — I’m dodging the question intentionally because we don’t split it at that level.

Look, these calls are almost entirely Apple execs dodging the questions of fiscal analysts. At least Tim Cook admitted it this time. You want to know how much Google is paying us and if that’s growing or shrinking? Well, I’m not gonna tell you!

If Apple’s quarterly analyst calls were a podcast, “Dodging the Question Intentionally” would be a great episode title for this one.

Microsoft Earnings Suggest OpenAI Lost $11.5 Billion Last Quarter 

Matt Rosoff, writing for The Register:

If Microsoft owns 27 percent of OpenAI, it stands to reason under equity accounting that it bears 27 percent of OpenAI’s losses. Microsoft’s admission that it shaved $3.1 billion off its net income to account for its share of OpenAI losses therefore suggests OpenAI lost about $11.5 billion during the quarter. Microsoft declined to comment beyond confirming that the $3.1 billion loss “this year” referred to Microsoft’s current fiscal year, which started July 1, not the calendar year. So that’s a quarterly loss, not a nine-month loss.

That’s a humongous number for OpenAI given it reportedly generated only $4.3 billion in revenue for the first half of the year, but a sum that won’t hurt Big Daddy Redmond too much given it earned $27.7 billion in net income in the last quarter alone.

A pre-IPO startup is a different animal from an established publicly-held corporation, but an $11.5 billion quarterly loss is quite different from the $20–30-ish billion quarterly profits booked by the big six.

Apple Reports Strong Q4 2025 Results 

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2025 fourth quarter ended September 27, 2025. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $102.5 billion, up 8 percent year over year. Diluted earnings per share was $1.85, up 13 percent year over year on an adjusted basis.

“Today, Apple is very proud to report a September quarter revenue record of $102.5 billion, including a September quarter revenue record for iPhone and an all-time revenue record for Services,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.

Looking at Apple’s Consolidated Statement (PDF), the numbers look great across the board year-over-year: iPhone up 6%, Mac up 13%, iPad even, Wearables/Home even, and Services up 15%. Services now generates more revenue ($28.8 billion) than Mac, iPad, and Wearables/Home combined ($24.7 billion).

Six Colors, as usual, has Apple’s quarter illustrated in charts.

Here’s a comparison of net income (profit) from Apple’s peers for their most recent quarters:

  • Google (a.k.a. Alphabet): $35B (!)
  • Microsoft: $27.7B
  • Apple: $27.5B
  • Nvidia: $26.4B
  • Amazon: $21.5B
  • Meta: $2.7B, but would have been $18.6B if not for a one-time income tax charge of nearly $16B.
CarPlay Seems Essential for Rental Fleets 

Joe Rosensteel:

I have no plan to purchase a GM vehicle, but I do rent cars. GM makes up a sizable portion of rental car fleets. At some point in the future those cars will no longer support CarPlay. I’m not going to sign up for a GM federated ID that stores my login credentials in their cloud. I’m not going to individually sign into apps in the car like Google Maps with my Google ID that I use for way more than just navigation. There’s no chain of trust with me and this random car from GM. No convenience that is achieved in exchange for increased exposure risk for storing my sensitive data in a car I don’t own.

If GM goes through with this abandonment of CarPlay, I don’t see how they’ll continue to sell any vehicles to rental agencies. I would never rent a car without CarPlay, and I would never consider signing up for a GM cloud service just to drive a rental car. Complete dealbreakers.

‘Hi, It’s Me, Wikipedia, and I Am Ready for Your Apology’ 

Tom Ellison, at McSweeney’s:

How are my competitors doing, the ones you all insisted students use instead of me? That’s right, they were supposed to go to the American Journal of Social Sciences, Powered by OpenAI. Or museums, like the Smithsonian’s Charlie Kirk Shrine to American Greatness. I guess they can still count on credible journalism, once they get past the paywall for Palantir Presents: The Washington Post, so they read the Pulitzer-Bezos Prize–winning work of coeditors-in-chief Bari Weiss and Grok.

Wednesday, 29 October 2025

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Launches With AI-Cloned Pages From Wikipedia 

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

However, despite Elon Musk promising that Grokipedia would be a “massive improvement” over Wikipedia, some articles appear to be cribbing information from Wikipedia. At the bottom of the page for the MacBook Air, for example, you can see this message: “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.” In some cases, the cribbing goes farther than a rewrite: I’ve also seen that message on pages for the PlayStation 5 and the Lincoln Mark VIII, and both of those pages are almost identical — word-for-word, line-for-line — to their Wikipedia counterparts.

“Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” Lauren Dickinson, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia tells The Verge. You can read Dickinson’s full statement in full at the end of this article.

At launch, Grokipedia is to Wikipedia as a chewed piece of gum is to a fresh piece of gum still in its wrapper. And imagine that the gum was chewed by someone with a dipping tobacco habit.

Local Note: WMMR’s Pierre Robert Found Dead at 70 

Nick Vadala, reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Longtime WMMR-FM host Pierre Robert was found dead in his home Wednesday. He was 70.

Robert’s surname, I must point out, rhymes with Pierre (and with Colbert).

A native of Northern California, Robert joined WMMR as an on-air host in 1981. He arrived in the city after his previous station, San Francisco’s KSAN, switched to an Urban Cowboy format, prompting him to make the cross-country drive to Philadelphia in a Volkswagen van. “I came because of a relationship,” he told The Inquirer last year. “I was in love. The love part didn’t work out, but the job part did.”

As a newly minted Philadelphian, Robert began working at a local health food store as he interviewed for radio jobs around town, but found little luck initially. One day, while dining at Astral Plane, a long-closed restaurant formerly on Lombard Street, he introduced himself to WMMR program director Joe Bonnadonna and announcer Charlie Kendall, and despite getting on well with the pair, he learned there were no openings at the station.

But weeks later, he received a letter from Bonnadonna, and interviewed for a job at the station during a concert from Philly rock band The Hooters at the Chestnut Cabaret. He soon started working in the station’s music library and office making $3.50 an hour, and later began appearing on the air.

There’s no more Philadelphia a Philadelphia origin story than a radio host interviewing for his job during a Hooters concert at the Chestnut Cabaret — and then going on to stay at the same station for 44 years. Impossible for me to overstate just how much Robert’s voice was the voice of music for me and my entire friend group growing up and even through college. You tuned the dial to 93.3 FM and left it there.

My favorite bit of his was an obscure one, a character named Reginald the Butler. Robert always had Reginald on during the holidays, while spinning Christmas rock songs. But here’s a classic segment from 1988 with Robert and Reginald interviewing David Lee Roth, who was then on a solo tour and about to play the Spectrum.

Rest in peace, my fellow citizen.

PCalc 4.11.1 for Mac 

James Thomson:

I’ve released a small PCalc 4.11.1 update that’s out now for the Mac.

There was a bug with the theme getting reset, which I could have fixed in five minutes, but I ended up doing what I should have done over three decades ago, and added a dedicated section to the settings that puts all the visual customisation in one place.

No more having to search for all this stuff in a submenu somewhere!

After the glum news this week regarding Nisus Writer, it feels good to link to a similarly-aged Mac app that’s still thriving. If you’ve never tried PCalc, you’re missing out.

Toyota BEVs Gain Support for Apple Maps EV Routing 

Tim Hardwick, writing for MacRumors:

The Apple Maps EV Routing option will allow Toyota BEV users to plan travel routes that include stops for charging. Without it, drivers would have had to exit out of CarPlay in order to create a route that included charging stops.

Apple Maps’ EV Routing feature uses real-time data from the vehicle to guide drivers to their destinations more efficiently, automatically suggesting charging stops when needed. The system takes into account elevation changes and other driving conditions to decide when a recharge is necessary. If the vehicle’s battery level becomes too low, Apple Maps will automatically direct the driver to the nearest compatible charging station.

Meanwhile GM CEO Mary Barra is spending her lunch hour eating another jar of paste.

Samsung Shows Off Tri-Fold Smartphone at APEC Forum in Korea 

The Onion, in February 2004: “Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades”.

Trump Is Deeply Unpopular 

The Economist:

Presidents’ popularity tends to wane. In his second term Donald Trump’s has fallen faster than that of his recent predecessors.

Since modern polling began most presidents have started their terms with positive net approval ratings (the share of voters who approve of their job performance minus the share who disapprove). Both of Mr Trump’s terms began with public opinion split nearly evenly. In both cases his net approval rating quickly turned negative. Now it is -18, the lowest it has been since his inauguration — and three percentage-points lower than at any point in his first term.

State-by-state, Trump is only above water in nine states: Idaho, Wyoming, West Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, Utah, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama.

Reuters, with its own poll:

Donald Trump’s presidential approval rating fell in recent days, tying the lowest level of his term, as more Americans frowned on his handling of the cost of living, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.

The three-day poll, which concluded on Sunday, showed 40% of Americans approve of the Republican leader’s job performance, compared to 42% in an October 15-20 Reuters/Ipsos poll. Trump’s popularity has been within a percentage point or two of its current level in every Reuters/Ipsos poll since mid-May. The share of people who say they disapprove of his performance has grown, from 52% in a May 16-18 poll to 57% in the latest survey.

So the Economist has him at -18, Reuters at -17.

Tuesday, 28 October 2025

OpenAI Acquires Sky, a Still-in-Beta System-Wide AI Automation Tool for the Mac 

Other Mac-related news from OpenAI last week:

Sky is a powerful natural language interface for the Mac. With Sky, AI works alongside you, whether you’re writing, planning, coding, or managing your day. Sky understands what’s on your screen and can take action using your apps.

We will bring Sky’s deep macOS integration and product craft into ChatGPT, and all members of the team will join OpenAI.

Two of the founders of Software Applications Incorporated, the company behind Sky, are Ari Weinstein and Conrad Kramer, who a decade ago co-created Workflow, which Apple acquired in 2017 and turned into Shortcuts.

Federico Viticci got an advanced look at Sky and wrote a glowing preview back in May.

Thoughts, Observations, and Links Regarding ChatGPT Atlas

Tuesday, 28 October 2025

OpenAI, one week ago:

Today we’re introducing ChatGPT Atlas, a new web browser built with ChatGPT at its core.

AI gives us a rare moment to rethink what it means to use the web. Last year, we added search in ChatGPT so you could instantly find timely information from across the internet — and it quickly became one of our most-used features. But your browser is where all of your work, tools, and context come together. A browser built with ChatGPT takes us closer to a true super-assistant that understands your world and helps you achieve your goals.

A few minutes into the 22-minute introduction video, Ben Goodger,1 engineering lead for Atlas, says:

“We wanted to make sure that Atlas didn’t feel like your old browser, just with a chat button that was bolted on. But instead, we made ChatGPT the beating heart of Atlas.”

After giving it a try over the last week, to me Atlas feels like … Chrome with a chat button bolted on. I do not see the appeal, at all, despite being a daily user of ChatGPT. Atlas offers nothing to me that’s better than using Safari as a standalone browser and ChatGPT’s excellent native Mac app as a standalone AI chatbot. But, for me, my browser is not “where all of [my] work, tools, and context come together”. I use an email app for email, a notes app for notes, a text editor and blog editor for writing and programming, a photos app for my photo library, a native feed reader app for feed reading, etc. My web browser is for browsing pages on the web. Perhaps this sort of browser/chat hybrid appeals better to people who live the majority of their desktop-computing lives in browser tabs.

  • The main interface isn’t a combo search/location field, but rather a chat/location field. Instead of getting search results for a query, you get a chat response. If I wanted this I’d just ask my prompt in ChatGPT. Oftentimes — usually, even — I really do want a list of search results, and I want them fast. ChatGPT responses in Atlas are not a list of web pages, and are — compared to Google Search or my preferred search engine, Kagi — very slow. ChatGPT is many things but a good search engine replacement it is not. But that seems to be the entire premise of Atlas.

  • Atlas offers an agent mode where it actually surfs the web for you. One of the demos from their launch video involved getting a list of ingredients from a recipe on a web page, and then allowing Atlas to buy all those ingredients for you. That seems crazy to me. Do not want.

  • Atlas is a Chromium browser, supports Chrome extensions, and but currently is only available for the Mac. It’s not particularly Mac-like though, as Michael Tsai notes:

    Alas, it doesn’t support AppleScript and has System Settings–style preferences.

    System Settings-style preferences are certainly better than Chrome-style “settings in a web page tab”, though. Also, in my testing, Atlas doesn’t make good use of Apple Passwords for autofill.

  • ChatGPT is running a promotion that offers users increased rate limits if they make — and keep — Atlas their default web browser. I’ve never before seen a web browser offer any sort of incentive like this for making it your default. This promotion strikes me as simultaneously clever and icky.

  • Simon Willison’s initial thoughts echo my own:

    I continue to find this entire category of browser agents deeply confusing.

    The security and privacy risks involved here still feel insurmountably high to me — I certainly won’t be trusting any of these products until a bunch of security researchers have given them a very thorough beating. [...]

    I also find these products pretty unexciting to use. I tried out agent mode and it was like watching a first-time computer user painstakingly learn to use a mouse for the first time. I have yet to find my own use-cases for when this kind of interaction feels useful to me, though I’m not ruling that out.

  • Lastly, Anil Dash’s assessment is rather scathing, “The Browser That’s Anti-Web”:

    In the demo for Atlas, the OpenAI team shows a user trying to find a Google Doc from their browser history. A normal user would type keywords like “atlas design” and see their browser show a list of recent pages. They would recognize the phrase “Google Docs” or the icon, and click on it to get back to where they were.

    But in the OpenAI demo, the team member types out:

    search web history for a doc about atlas core design

    This is worse in every conceivable way. It’s slower, more prone to error, and redundant. But it also highlights one of the biggest invisible problems: you’re switching “modes”. Normally, an LLM’s default mode is to create plausible extrapolations based on its training data. Basically, it’s supposed to make things up. But this demo has to explicitly walk you through “now it’s time to go search my browser history” because it’s coercing the AI to look through local content.

    Chat is a great interface for, well, chatting. People love texting. And it turns out that chat conversations are a very good user interface for interacting with LLMs. We humans enjoy texting with other humans, and we enjoy texting with LLMs. But typed-out text commands are not a good user interface at all for browsing the web. We had an entirely text-based Internet before the World Wide Web, and the point-and-click visual metaphor of the Web won out.

    Dash, later on:

    It’s no coincidence that hundreds of people who work at OpenAI, including many of the most powerful executives, are alumni of Facebook/Meta, especially during the era of many of that company’s most egregious abuses of people’s privacy. In the marketing materials and demonstrations of Atlas, OpenAI’s team describes the browser as being able to be your “agent”, performing tasks on your behalf.

    But in reality, you are the agent for ChatGPT.

    During setup, Atlas pushes very aggressively for you to turn on “memories” (where it tracks and stores everything you do and uses it to train an AI model about you) and to enable “Ask ChatGPT” on any website, where it’s following along with you as you browse the web. By keeping the ChatGPT sidebar open while you browse, and giving it permission to look over your shoulder, OpenAI can suddenly access all kinds of things on the internet that they could never get to on their own.

    This jibes with my impression after giving Atlas a try. The point of it doesn’t seem to be to provide a better web browser for me to use, but rather, to provide ChatGPT with the personal context of my digital life that it otherwise couldn’t get.

That last point raises the question of just how stable we should consider the Apple-OpenAI partnership for ChatGPT-backed Apple Intelligence features. Apple’s goal for a “more personalized Siri” — the whole thing Apple promised at WWDC 2024 but had to postpone for a full year early this year — is for the ecosystem of native apps on Apple platforms, particularly iOS and MacOS, to serve as the personal knowledge context for personalized AI features through App Intents. That’s the basis for the “When is my mom’s flight arriving?” type of interaction that Apple has promised, but still has not delivered. The premise of Atlas (and its brethren AI-integrated browsers like The Browser Company’s Dia and Perplexity’s Comet) is that you should live your entire desktop computing life inside your browser, which in turn will give the AI agent that is integrated with your browser the contextual knowledge for your entire life.

OpenAI’s ambitions are clearly at odds with Apple’s.

OpenAI’s advantage here is that ChatGPT is the most popular LLM chatbot in the world, by far. Apple doesn’t even have an LLM chatbot of its own, let alone a good or popular one. But Apple’s advantage is a big one: most people don’t live their digital lives on desktop computers, where it’s an option to do most things in a web browser. Most people’s primary computing devices are their phones — and even for people whose primary devices are desktop computers, their phones are much-used satellite devices. And on both iOS and Android alike, people live their mobile digital lives through native apps, not websites. 

  1. Goodger is a titanic figure in the web browser world, having helped create Mozilla Firefox in the early 2000s, and then joining Google in 2005 to help create Chrome. I noted last year that Goodger leaving Google for OpenAI was a pretty clear sign that OpenAI was creating its own web browser. ↩︎

Tuesday, 28 October 2025

Nisus Writer: Schrödinger’s Word Processor 

Joe Kissell, writing at TidBITS:

For more than a year, we’ve heard scattered complaints: problems with Nisus Software’s website, particularly the user discussion forum; slow or absent responses to support requests; assorted bugs; and other issues. But earlier this week, on 22 October 2025, the reports changed to: “Did you know the Nisus website is completely down, and that Nisus Writer is no longer in the Mac App Store? Does this mean Nisus is out of business?”

On the one hand: The site is back online as I write this. The app still works. I’m writing the first draft of this article in Nisus Writer Pro on a Mac running macOS 26 Tahoe, and it’s fine. You can still download it and buy a license. At least one person is actively involved in the company, to some extent. It’s (mostly) alive!

On the other hand: All available evidence suggests that development and support for Nisus Writer have ceased, and barring some new information, its future is doubtful. It’s (mostly) dead!

I’m going to tell you what I know. (Well, most of what I know.) I’m also going to speculate a bit, because despite my best efforts, I have been unable to obtain verifiable information about certain topics, though I have a pretty good idea of what’s likely the case.

Seems like an ignominious demise for a once-great app. Nisus Writer has been an acclaimed Mac-only (and Mac-assed) word processor since 1989. I never got into it, but I could always see the appeal. Nisus had a macro language for automation and regex-style advanced search and replace. But when I wanted features like those, I wanted them in a plain text editor, not a word processor, so I got into BBEdit.

Apple Loses Landmark U.K. Lawsuit Over App Store Commissions

Monday, 27 October 2025

Sam Tobin, reporting last week for Reuters:

Apple abused its dominant position by charging app developers unfair commissions, a London tribunal ruled on Thursday, in a blow which could leave the U.S. tech company on the hook for hundreds of millions of pounds in damages. The Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) ruled against Apple after a trial of the lawsuit, which was brought on behalf of millions of iPhone and iPad users in the United Kingdom.

The CAT ruled that Apple had abused its dominant position from October 2015 until the end of 2020 by shutting out competition in the app distribution market and by “charging excessive and unfair prices” as commission to developers. [...] The case had been valued at around 1.5 billion pounds ($2 billion) by those who brought it. A hearing next month will decide how damages are calculated and Apple’s application for permission to appeal.

Dan Moren and I discussed this at some length in the new episode of The Talk Show that dropped over the weekend. What makes this ruling interesting isn’t that it’s particularly significant or different from other regulatory/antitrust investigations around the world. It’s the fact that it’s completely in line with other regulatory/antitrust investigations regarding the App Store (and Play Store) from around the world.

When is the last time an investigation regarding the legality of the App Store’s dominant market position went in Apple’s favor, in any country? I can’t recall one. Apple is clearly fighting a losing battle here. Whether Apple ought to be losing all these legal and regulatory battles regarding the App Store is, from a strategic standpoint, almost irrelevant. The obvious fact is, they are losing them.

Apple has approached all this regulatory conflict from a perspective that they’re right, and the regulators are wrong. That the App Store, as Apple wants it, is (a) good for users, (b) fair to developers, and (c) competitive, not anti-competitive, legally. But even if Apple is correct about that, at some point, after being handed loss after loss in rulings from courts and regulatory bodies around the globe, shouldn’t they change their strategy and start trying to offer their own concessions, rather than wait for bureaucrat-designed concessions to be forced upon them?

However Apple thinks all of this should work out is not the way it is working out. The best time to adjust the rules of the App Store — its exclusivity on app distribution for the entire iOS platform, the exclusivity of Apple’s IAP for purchasing digital content, the commission percentage splits on IAP — was over a decade ago. The next best time to make those adjustments is now. 

Monday, 27 October 2025

App Store IDs Hint at Possible iPad Versions of Pixelmator Pro, Compressor, Motion, and MainStage 

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple might be preparing iPad apps for Pixelmator Pro, Compressor, Motion, and MainStage, according to new App Store IDs uncovered by MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris. All four of the apps are currently available on the Mac only. A quick overview of each app:

  • Pixelmator Pro: Professional image editing app acquired by Apple earlier this year
  • Compressor: Final Cut Pro companion app for compressing audio and video files
  • Motion: Final Cut Pro companion app for creating 2D/3D titles, transitions, and effects
  • MainStage: Logic Pro companion app for live performances

There is already a less-capable Pixelmator app available for the iPad and iPhone.

Interesting though that — just like Final Cut and Logic — these new pro apps are reportedly iPad-only, with no support for iPhone.

Also: still no Xcode, even for iPad.

Gurman Reports That Apple Is Preparing to Sell Ads in Maps Starting in 2026 

Mark Gurman, in his weekly paywalled Power On column for Bloomberg:

I reported a few years ago that Apple was working to bring more advertising to iOS. Well, now that effort is gaining traction — with a plan to start the ads as early as next year. The company is focusing on Apple Maps, which will allow restaurants and other businesses to pay to have their details featured more prominently within the app’s searches.

The concept is quite similar to Search Ads inside of the App Store, where developers can pay for their software to appear in a promoted slot based on user queries. I’m told the Maps version will have a better interface than what Google and other companies offer inside of mapping services. The Apple approach also will leverage AI to ensure that results are relevant and useful.

The big risk Apple faces here is a potential consumer backlash.

I don’t love the ads in the App Store, but I don’t hate them. They’re restrained, and clearly labeled. I do, however, despise the ads in Apple News. They’re low-quality, distracting, highly repetitive, and appear far too frequently within articles.

Joe Rosensteel: ‘Creative Neglect: What About the Apps in Apple?’ 

Joe Rosensteel, writing at Six Colors, regarding the demise of Apple’s Clips app:

It’s not that it was completely inept, but it was an aimless showcase to demonstrate what Apple could do. It withered over the course of eight years before it was quietly killed.

At no point did it supplant iMovie for iOS as the fun, easy-breezy video editor, which is also in a similarly stagnant state. The only updates iMovie has received in the past year were onboarding screens for permissions settings.

Why is it that Apple can make what is widely regarded as the best video recording experience on any smartphone, but it can’t make a good video editor for a smartphone? Is it partly because these apps don’t have direct payments, so they can only ever be demos for hardware and services that do earn money?

Rosensteel is concerned about the radio silence from Apple regarding Pixelmator and Photomator, the apps (and team) that Apple acquired a year ago:

Of course, Apple may be assembling its own mirror of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite so that it can charge one bundle price for access to a suite of pro apps, and maybe that’s why pricing for everything is frozen in place, and the iPad Pro apps aren’t in step with the Mac ones.

That’s what I hope: that Apple is somewhere near the cusp of announcing some sort of “pro apps” subscription.

Inside the Math That Detects Cheating on Sports Bets 

Dian Zhang and Ignacio Calderon, reporting for USA Today:

Even before Terry Rozier dropped out of the 2023 NBA game in which he’s accused of rigging his statistics, computers at an “integrity monitor” firm flagged a flood of bets that did not match a mathematical model of how this game should go. The company, now called IC360, alerted the NBA and sportsbooks about the unusual bets coming in on Rozier’s performance.

The investigation that led to the arrest of the Miami Heat point guard and dozens of others for illegal gambling started with math. It ended Oct. 23 with Rozier charged with manipulating his performance in that 2023 game so that gamblers in the know could win tens of thousands of dollars.

Beep. Boop. Busted.

Federal authorities allege more than $200,000 poured in betting that Rozier would turn in a below-average performance in that game after Rozier told another defendant he would drop out of the game early with an injury. Rozier played 9 minutes, 34 seconds for the Charlotte Hornets in the game against the New Orleans Pelicans before leaving with an injury and finished under his usual totals for points, assists and 3-pointers.

A lot of these stories about cheating on sports betting involve characters who aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. Makes me wonder how many inside-info cheaters are getting away with it, because they’re not doing anything conspicuous like placing very large wagers on very obscure games or prop bets.

Behind the Design: Adobe Premiere on iOS 

Adobe Design profiles Adobe’s new Premiere app for iOS, and interviews Christopher Azar, group design manager for Adobe Video, regarding the thinking behind the app and its design:

What was the primary goal when you set out to design Premiere on iOS?

Christopher Azar: Our goal was to design a professional-grade product that carried the powerful, precise spirit of Premiere while feeling modern, approachable, and even fun. We call our vision “intuitive precision”: a high-performance, intelligent tool powered by cutting-edge AI that enables creators to work how and where they want — in the field, experimenting, and honing their storytelling craft.

That meant making this editing power available to a broader creative community. Desktop software has traditionally been built for professionals with large budgets. Our goal was not only to make a professional tool easier to use, but to make it available to more people than ever before. I would have wanted to use this app when I was coming up as a creative, so I’m excited we’re providing high-quality software for everyone who wants it — without a big investment in time or money.

It really does seem like a breakthrough app for the platform. An Android version is in the works, Adobe says, but for now, Premiere is an iOS exclusive. Kind of weird that Apple itself makes Final Cut Pro for both the Mac and iPad, but still hasn’t made a serious video editing app for the iPhone.

Sunday, 26 October 2025

The Talk Show: ‘You and Frank Sinatra’ 

For your weekend listening enjoyment, a new episode of America’s favorite 3-star podcast, with special guest Dan Moren. Topics include Atlas, ChatGPT’s new web browser (or anti-web browser) for the Mac; Apple’s loss in a “landmark” regulatory lawsuit in the UK regarding App Store commission rates; multiple reports of poor sales for the iPhone Air; and Apple’s M5 product announcements: MacBook Pro, iPads Pro, and Vision Pro.

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The Sad State of Macintosh Hardware Back in 2018, at the Tail End of the Intel Era 

Worth a re-link, following up on my post yesterday linking to Stephen Hackett’s “Boring Is What We Wanted”, here’s Rogue Amoeba co-founder Quentin Carnicelli, writing back in 2018:

At the time of the writing, with the exception of the $5,000 iMac Pro, no Macintosh has been updated at all in the past year. Here are the last updates to the entire line of Macs:

  • iMac Pro: 182 days ago
  • iMac: 374 days ago
  • MacBook: 374 days ago
  • MacBook Air: 374 days ago
  • MacBook Pro: 374 days ago
  • Mac Pro: 436 days ago
  • Mac Mini: 1,337 days ago

Worse, most of these counts are misleading, with many machines not seeing a true update in quite a bit longer. While the Mac Mini hasn’t seen an update of any kind in almost 4 years (nor, for that matter, a price drop), even that 2014 update was lackluster. [...]

Rather than attempting to wow the world with “innovative” new designs like the failed Mac Pro, Apple could and should simply provide updates and speed bumps to the entire lineup on a much more frequent basis. The much smaller Apple of the mid-2000s managed this with ease. Their current failure to keep the Mac lineup fresh, even as they approach a trillion dollar market cap, is both baffling and frightening to anyone who depends on the platform for their livelihood.

Five years into the Apple Silicon era, and Apple is doing exactly that. The situation has completely reversed. Apple Silicon has been an utter triumph for the Mac platform.

The Scenario Where ChatGPT’s WhatsApp Gateway Was Useful: Airplane Wi-Fi 

Yours truly on Friday, regarding the news that Meta is going to ban rival AI chatbots from WhatsApp:

Perhaps because I’m only a light user of WhatsApp, I had no idea that rival AI chatbots had accounts there. I just tried it with 1-800-ChatGPT and it seems pointless. It’s noticeably slower and uses an older model than just using the ChatGPT app.

A few readers have pointed to one good use case for this gateway: airplane Wi-Fi, particularly on airlines that offer “free” Wi-Fi for messaging apps like Apple Messages (iMessage) and WhatsApp. The ChatGPT app won’t work unless you pay for full Wi-Fi access on a flight, but WhatsApp does, and through January, you can interact with ChatGPT through that loophole. Clever.

Update: Similarly, these WhatsApp bot gateways are also useful in third-world countries with spotty Wi-Fi networking, but where Meta’s apps — including WhatsApp — are zero-rated against cellular network bandwidth caps. India is one prominent example. In some parts of the world, the only reliable networks are cellular, and the only “free Internet” is Meta’s suite of apps and services that are zero-rated on those cell networks.

Saturday, 25 October 2025

‘Boring Is What We Wanted’ 

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels:

Apple silicon has been nothing but upside for the Mac, and yet some seem bored already. In the days since Apple announced the M5, I’ve seen and heard this sentiment more than I expected:

This is just another boring incremental upgrade.

That 👏 is 👏 the 👏 point.

Back in the PowerPC and Intel days, Macs would sometimes go years between meaningful spec bumps, as Apple waited on its partners to deliver appropriate hardware for various machines. From failing NVIDIA cards in MacBook Pros to 27-inch Intel iMacs that ran so hot the fans were audible at all times, Mac hardware wasn’t always what Apple wanted.

Consider the MacBook Air — by all accounts the most popular Mac Apple sells. There was a March 2015 update, and then a very minor speed bump in June 2017. That June 2017 update was so insignificant that it didn’t even warrant its own press release from Apple. All it got from Apple was, at the very end of a press release touting updates to the iMac, MacBook Pro, and late great 12-inch MacBook, this single sentence: “Apple today also updated the 13-inch MacBook Air with a 1.8 GHz processor.”

It wasn’t until the very end of October 2018 that Apple released a significant MacBook Air update — the first models with retina displays. For the three-and-a-half-year stretch between March 2015 and October 2018, there wasn’t a single notable MacBook Air refresh — at a time when all other Macs had gone retina. Intel’s processor offerings were so unpalatable during that stretch that Apple just didn’t update their most popular Mac model.

WorkOS 

My thanks to WorkOS for their continuing support of DF with another sponsorship week. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. WorkOS provides a complete user management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and RBAC. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months. WorkOS simplifies MCP authorization with a single API built on five OAuth standards.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including OpenAI, Cursor, and Vercel.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Sora Has a Pervert Problem 

Katie Notopoulos, writing at Business Insider:

There are really two separate issues at hand: Should users be allowed to make fetish content of any woman who is stupid enough (like me) to allow anyone to make cameos of her? And how do you stop people from making fetish content of purely AI-generated characters that aren’t cameos of real people? Does OpenAI want to stop that? Maybe OpenAI thinks it’s fine for people to make belly-flation or foot-fetish videos as long as they’re not of a real person.

For now, I keep going back to a thought I had early on while scrolling Sora: There’s hardly any women on here, and it’s no wonder why. Women innately understand the risk of letting anyone make videos with their faces — the likelihood of something being creepy is extremely high. These fetish videos are kind of goofy — I have to admit I even cracked up a little at the centaur one — but overall, it’s an icky and somewhat menacing feeling seeing a lot of them.

Friday, 24 October 2025

Meta Announces Ban on Rival AI Chatbots From WhatsApp 

Eric Hal Schwarz, reporting for TechRadar:

Meta is closing the door on third-party AI assistants inside WhatsApp. Starting January 15, 2026, no general-purpose AI chatbot, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others, will be allowed to operate on the platform. The change is part of an update to WhatsApp’s Business API policy that bans developers of “large language models, generative AI platforms, or general-purpose AI assistants” from accessing the system.

In plain terms, Meta is locking down the world’s largest messaging app to ensure that the only chatbot you’ll find inside it is Meta AI.

Perhaps because I’m only a light user of WhatsApp, I had no idea that rival AI chatbots had accounts there. I just tried it with 1-800-ChatGPT and it seems pointless. It’s noticeably slower and uses an older model than just using the ChatGPT app. (You can also just place a regular phone call to 1-800-ChatGPT, which seems about as useful in today’s world as calling 555-FILM for Moviefone to get movie showtimes.)

OpenAI, on X, has taken the news in stride:

Meta changed its policies so 1-800-ChatGPT won’t work on WhatsApp after Jan 15, 2026.

Luckily we have an app, website, and browser you can use instead to access ChatGPT.

Via Kontra, who quips:

Why hasn’t the EU started an investigation of Apple already?!

Thursday, 23 October 2025

SerpApi’s Public Customer List 

At the bottom of their “Use Cases” page, SerpApi lists the following companies and organizations as customers (“They trust us. You are in good company. Join them.”):

  • Airbnb
  • Nvidia
  • Meta
  • Shopify
  • Perplexity
  • KPMG
  • Ahrefs
  • Grubhub
  • Samsung
  • AI21labs
  • United Nations (!)
  • Thomson Reuters
  • BrightLocal
  • Experian

From an August 21, 2025 report in The Information (paywalled up the wazoo, alas), however:

OpenAI also isn’t the only Google rival to use SerpApi data. SerpApi’s website previously listed Apple as a customer. In addition to partnering with Google on search, the iPhone maker develops technology to power searches in Safari — a lucrative deal that the judge overseeing the DOJ case could also nix.

Was Apple removed from the list because they’re no longer (or never were?) a customer, or because they remain a customer but don’t want to be listed?

Reddit Files Lawsuit Accusing ‘Data Scraper’ Companies of Stealing Its Information 

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times:

Eight years ago, SerpApi, a start-up in Austin, Texas, dived headlong into the byzantine world of using robots to “scrape” Google’s search algorithms, so it could collect information to help customers appear higher in search results.

Then OpenAI’s ChatGPT came along, kicking off an artificial intelligence revolution. As more tech companies began building A.I. chatbots to keep up, they needed large amounts of data to train their A.I. models — data that SerpApi had already gathered.

Practically overnight, a class of companies like SerpApi — known as “data scrapers” — found a new business selling data scraped from Google to companies looking to train their A.I. chatbots.

On Wednesday, the internet message board Reddit decided to fight the data scrapers. It filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York claiming that four companies had illegally stolen its data by scraping Google search results in which Reddit content appeared.

I’d never heard of — or at least never noticed — SerpApi until a few weeks ago, when a good friend asked me if I’d ever looked into them. The entire premise of their business is crazy. SerpApi prints the crime right on the tin, describing their service as a “Google Search API” and “Scrape Google and other search engines from our fast, easy, and complete API.” What makes this so crazy is that Google doesn’t offer a search API. SerpApi is offering the Google search API that Google itself doesn’t offer, and charging companies money for it. Everyone, upon hearing the premise and nature of SerpApi, asks the same question: How is this legal? The answer is, it probably isn’t. But right on SerpApi’s home page they claim to offer customers a “U.S. Legal Shield”:

The crawling and parsing of public data is protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. We value freedom of speech tremendously. We assume scraping and parsing liabilities for both domestic and foreign companies unless your usage is otherwise illegal. (Including but are not limited to: acts of cyber criminality, terrorism, pedopornography, denial of service attacks, and war crimes.)

My only surprise here is that it’s Reddit taking SerpApi (along with two similar companies, one from Lithuania and the other from Russia — the former Soviet states respect intellectual property about as much as China does) to court, not Google. Why Google hasn’t sued them yet, I don’t understand. Anyway, back to Isaac’s report for the Times:

Perplexity was one of those buyers, according to Reddit’s lawsuit. Perplexity had scraped Reddit data in the past without payment but agreed to stop after Reddit sent it a cease-and-desist order. Even so, citations to Reddit data in Perplexity search results jumped “fortyfold,” the lawsuit said. Reddit has spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-scraping systems over several years.

“Perplexity’s business model is effectively to take Reddit’s content from Google search results,” then feed it into an A.I. model and “call it a new product,” the lawsuit said.

Reddit said it had set a trap for Perplexity by creating a “test post” on its site that could “only be crawled by Google’s search engine and was not otherwise accessible anywhere on the internet.” Within hours, Perplexity search results had surfaced the content of that test post, the lawsuit said.

Google, which is not a plaintiff in Reddit’s lawsuit, has tried and failed to stop SerpApi and other data scrapers, according to the lawsuit and previous reporting from The Information.

The people leading Perplexity aren’t just shifty — they’re stupid. That whole company just reeks of being a scam.

See also: Reddit’s PDF of their lawsuit, Reddit v. SerpApi.

The Hollywood Reporter: ‘Is Jessica Chastain’s “The Savant” Ever Going to Be Released?’ 

Tony Maglio, The Hollywood Reporter:

The Savant, which originally had a Sept. 26 premiere date, was yanked in the weeks following the Sept. 10 assassination of conservative political pundit Charlie Kirk. Language on the landing page for the series has since vacillated from “Coming Soon” to “At a Later Date” to simply “2025.” As of this writing, the wording again reads, “At a Later Date.” (Lower down the same page it says, “Released: 2025” — likely an oversight.)

It’s odd the language has been tweaked several times over the course of the month. Altering wording on the app is a manual process, and since each new iterative phrase basically means the same as the last, why do it? Yes, “Soon” means soon and “Later” means later and “2025” literally means this calendar year, but it’s all close enough considering the shifting language was first noticed as summer turned to fall. To not premiere in 2025 feels like a death sentence for the series.

A spokesperson for Apple TV did not respond to The Hollywood Reporter’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for The Savant’s studio, Fifth Season, also declined comment.

Ominous vibe.

Wednesday, 22 October 2025

GM Plans to Soon Ditch CarPlay and Android Auto on All Its Vehicles, Not Just EVs 

Nick Statt, The Verge:

GM plans to drop support for phone projection on all new vehicles in the near future, and not just its electric car lineup, according to GM CEO Mary Barra.

In a Decoder interview with The Verge’s Nilay Patel, published Wednesday, Barra confirmed GM will eventually end support of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto on both gas-powered and electric cars. The timing is unclear, but Barra pointed to a major rollout of what the company is calling a new centralized computing platform, set to launch in 2028, that will involve eventually transitioning its entire lineup to a unified in-car experience.

Someone should investigate whether Mary Barra is a mole planted at GM by Ford. (Previously.)

New M5 Vision Pro and Dual Knit Headband Are Assembled in Vietnam, Not China 

MacRumors:

Apple’s upcoming wave of new smart home devices, including a smart home display, indoor security camera, and tabletop robot, will also be made in Vietnam, according to Bloomberg.

Signal Moves Ahead on Post-Quantum Computing, But Still Sucks Ass When You Switch Phones 

Graeme Connell and Rolfe Schmidt, writing earlier this month on the Signal blog:

We are excited to announce a significant advancement in the security of the Signal Protocol: the introduction of the Sparse Post Quantum Ratchet (SPQR). This new ratchet enhances the Signal Protocol’s resilience against future quantum computing threats while maintaining our existing security guarantees of forward secrecy and post-compromise security. [...]

What does this mean for you as a Signal user? First, when it comes to your experience using the app, nothing changes. Second, because of how we’re rolling this out and mixing it in with our existing encryption, eventually all of your conversations will move to this new protocol without you needing to take any action. Third, and most importantly, this protects your communications both now and in the event that cryptographically relevant quantum computers eventually become a reality, and it allows us to maintain our existing security guarantees of forward secrecy and post-compromise security as we proactively prepare for that new world.

It is impressive that Signal is ahead of the curve on post-quantum computing. But speaking as someone who is currently switching between multiple phones regularly, they need to get their shit together on basic stuff like using more than one phone with the same Signal account, and making it take just a minute or less to switch your primary Signal phone from one device to another. Right now it takes me over 30 minutes to switch Signal from one phone to another, and I’m not a particularly heavy user of the app. Normal people don’t use Signal because it offers, by far, the worst and most limited user experience of any major messaging app. Signal is never going to get most people to even give the app a fair chance when the user experience is so much worse than Apple Messages and WhatsApp.

Again, I don’t mean to disparage the technical ingenuity of their post-quantum ratchet achievement. But they’re bragging about defenses against hypothetical threats from the future when, right now today, you still can’t use the same Signal account from two different phones.

Apple Pulls Dating Apps Tea and TeaOnHer From the App Store 

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Reached for comment, Apple confirmed the apps’ removal, saying it removed Tea Dating Advice and TeaOnHer from the App Store because they failed to meet Apple’s requirements around content moderation and user privacy. The company also said it saw an excessive number of user complaints and negative reviews, which included complaints of minors’ personal information being posted in these apps. Apple communicated the issues to the developers of the apps, a representative said, but the complaints were not addressed. (Request for comment from the app developers has not yet been returned.)

Specifically, Apple cited violations of its App Review Guidelines 1.2, 5.1.2, and 5.6. Rule 1.2 says apps with user-generated content should offer reporting and blocking features and should remove objectionable content. Rule 5.1.2 says apps can’t use or share someone’s personal information without permission, and Rule 5.6 says excessive customer reports and negative reviews violate Apple’s Developer Code of Conduct. [...]

After going viral and generating controversy, Tea suffered a data breach over the summer, with hackers gaining access to 72,000 images, including 3,000 selfies and photo IDs submitted for account verification, as well as 59,000 images from posts, comments, and direct messages.

Later, a rival app called TeaOnHer launched to offer men the ability to dish on women in the same way, but it was beset by security issues that exposed users’ personal information, including government IDs and selfies, TechCrunch discovered in August.

Seems odd to me that Apple only pulled Tea from the App Store now, three months after multiple disastrous security breaches revealed their amateur hour approach to security. See previous coverage here at DF: July 26, July 28, and July 30.

Adam Driver Says Bob Iger Nixed a Kylo Ren ‘Star Wars’ Film He Pitched With Steven Soderbergh 

Jake Coyle, reporting for the AP:

Driver says he took a concept to Soderbergh for a film that would take place after 2019’s “The Rise of Skywalker.” That movie culminated in Ren’s redemption and apparent death. Driver had undertaken the trilogy with an arc in mind for Ren that inverted the journey of Darth Vader. As the trilogy evolved, it didn’t play out that way. Driver felt there was unfinished business for Kylo Ren, or as he was known before turning to the Dark Side, Ben Solo.

Soderbergh and Rebecca Blunt outlined a story that the group then pitched to Kennedy, Lucasfilm vice president Cary Beck and Lucasfilm chief creative officer Dave Filoni. They were interested, so the filmmakers then pulled in Scott Z. Burns to write a script. Driver calls the result “one of the coolest (expletive) scripts I had ever been a part of.”

“We presented the script to Lucasfilm. They loved the idea. They totally understood our angle and why we were doing it,” Driver says. “We took it to Bob Iger and Alan Bergman and they said no. They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that.”

“It was called ‘The Hunt for Ben Solo’ and it was really cool,” adds Driver. “But it is no more, so I can finally talk about it.”

Soderbergh, in a statement, said: “I really enjoyed making the movie in my head. I’m just sorry the fans won’t get to see it.”

So an entire trilogy based on the dumb idea that Emperor Palpatine somehow survived Darth Vader tossing him down a 50-mile deep shaft into a hyper-matter reactor, that was fine. But a Steven-Fucking-Soderbergh-helmed Star Wars movie that maybe would’ve required a little bit of a shrug to accept the premise, nope.

Ke Yang, Apple’s Head of ChatGPT-Like AI Search Effort, Was Poached by Meta 

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg last week:

The executive, Ke Yang, is leaving for Meta Platforms Inc., according to people with knowledge of the matter. Just weeks ago, he was appointed head of a team called Answers, Knowledge and Information, or AKI. The group is developing features to make the Siri voice assistant more ChatGPT-like by adding the ability to pull information from the web. [...]

The new Siri is being developed as a joint effort between Apple’s artificial intelligence and machine learning group, known as AIML, and the Siri engineering team now overseen by Craig Federighi’s software organization. Within AIML, Yang was regarded as the most prominent executive working on the new Siri initiative. His exit ranks among the biggest departures from Apple’s AI organization this year — a period marked by a steady exodus of top researchers building the company’s AI core models.

Roughly a dozen members of that team — known internally as Apple Foundation Models — have departed, including its founder and lead scientist, Ruoming Pang. He and a number of others also joined Meta, which is building a new group called Superintelligence Labs.

I am reminded of a piece Guy English wrote back in 2012, “Three Things That Should Trouble Apple”, and that I’ve long thought his third item, “People”, ought to have been the first:

Ultimately, the retention of talent will be Apple’s Achilles’ heel.

The smartest people will always want to be working on the smartest thing. Sometimes that comes together in one amazing project. iOS has been that project for this decade.

If there’s a problem for Apple it’s that they’ve already invented the future. It’s a done deal. The best and brightest engineers and product managers may move on to other ventures. Less likely to succeed, of course, but that’s less of an issue for them given the rainfall of AAPL gains. We’ll have to see what happens.

Nikkei Asia: ‘Apple Slashes iPhone Air Production Plans, Boosts Other 17 Models’ 

Lauly Li and Cheng Ting-Fang, reporting for Nikkei Asia:

Production orders for the iPhone Air have been cut nearly to “end of production” levels, despite it only becoming available in China last week, due to weak demand in other markets, multiple sources briefed on the matter said.

Under the initial production plan, the iPhone Air accounted for roughly 10% to 15% of overall new iPhone production this year, said two sources familiar with the plan. The model is seen as strategically paving the way for the first foldable iPhone, expected to debut in 2026, three people with knowledge of the matter said. Nikkei Asia earlier reported that Apple has high hopes for the launch of such a phone next year.

Apple has told multiple suppliers to largely reduce component and electronics module orders for the iPhone Air, two people with direct knowledge of the situation said. One supply chain manager said production orders for the iPhone Air from November onward will be less than 10% of the volume compared with September. Another supplier executive said they received a similar notice from Apple. [...]

By contrast, demand for the iPhone 17 model and iPhone 17 Pro has exceeded expectations. Apple has increased production orders for the baseline iPhone 17 by about 5 million units and also added orders for the high-end iPhone 17 Pro, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

I don’t understand the argument that the iPhone Air “paves the way” for a foldable iPhone next year. Either the iPhone Air is a desirable iPhone that can stand on its own or it isn’t. I firmly believe it is. Apple obviously did too. If they didn’t they wouldn’t have shipped it. There was no reason to ship the iPhone Air “in preparation” for a foldable iPhone next year if they didn’t think the Air would be a success on its own. They could have just started with the foldable next year.

One thing that’s weird about these reports of low sales numbers for the iPhone Air is that it doesn’t seem like Apple is advertising it at all. If I were Joz, I’d be advertising the hell out of it. I’ve been watching a lot of sports on commercial TV since September, and I haven’t seen a single ad for the Air. Tons of commercials and billboards for the orange iPhone 17 Pro, but zip for the Air.

Also, as I just wrote Monday and have repeated oft before, take these numbers with huge grains of salt. Whether the numbers are from “research firms” or supply chain sources, they’re not from Apple, and sales numbers that aren’t from Apple have often proved to be way wrong.

Don Mattingly Finally Headed to the World Series 

Reason enough to be rooting for the Blue Jays. Put this man in the Hall of Fame already. For chrissake his name is Donnie Baseball.

Tuesday, 21 October 2025

Trump Said to Demand Justice Department Pay Him $230 Million for Past Cases 

Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager, reporting for The New York Times:

President Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that any settlement might ultimately be approved by senior department officials who defended him or those in his orbit.

The situation has no parallel in American history, as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims. It is also the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president’s former lawyers atop the Justice Department.

Subject only to the approval of his own lickspittle cronies.

Jim Ray:

In the world where Antonin Scalia dies six months earlier and RBG retires at some point before the third cancer diagnosis, a bankrupt Trump sits in a maximum security prison and costs us a single Secret Service patrol.

1.5 Miles of Aluminum Foil Is, in Fact, No Big Whoop 

Here’s an update I just posted to yesterday’s piece on organized phone theft rings in London:

I forgot to apply one of the core tenets of Brian Kernighan’s wonderful book Millions, Billions, Zillions ($19 in hardcover from Amazon; BookShop.org link to indie booksellers): always do some back-of-the-envelope double-checking of the math in news stories. 1.5 miles of aluminum (or even aluminium) foil from Costco is just 12 rolls at 200 meters each. I wouldn’t blink my eyes at someone with a dozen rolls of foil in the cart at Costco.

Consumer Confusion Regarding USB Power Adapters 

Yours truly, yesterday:

The problem I see with the MacBook power adapter situation in Europe is that while power users — like the sort of people who read Daring Fireball and Pixel Envy — will have no problem buying exactly the sort of power adapter they want, or simply re-using a good one they already own, normal users have no idea what makes a “good” power adapter. I suspect there are going to be a lot of Europeans who buy a new M5 MacBook Pro and wind up charging it with inexpensive low-watt power adapters meant for things like phones, and wind up with a shitty, slow charging experience.

Actual email, from actual reader D.B. today:

Anecdotes to support your point about normal customers not knowing which power adapter to pick, I’ve had both my mother and a mid-level IT director at my work complain that their Macs no longer hold a battery. In both cases, they were using a 5 watt USB-A charger.

It’s hard for people to understand that not all USB chargers are the same.

And from actual reader D.K.:

My mother in law called me to ask why her MacBook Air no longer turned on. She had called AppleCare and they told her to bring the computer to a store for repairs. Turns out she was using a very old 5 watt USB-A iPhone charger.

And of course, the real danger isn’t using an underpowered charger. It’s thinking you can save a few bucks by buying a cheap high-watt third-party charger and then burning your house down.

Two Excellent New iPhone Camera Apps: Not Boring’s !Camera and Adobe’s Project Indigo

Tuesday, 21 October 2025

The lower atrium at Steve Jobs Theater, WWDC 2025.

I took the above photo on Monday, June 9, this year at WWDC. Keynote day, around 1:30pm PT. I captured it using my iPhone 16 Pro and Not Boring’s !Camera app, using the built-in Mono Tokyo LUT. Like the other apps in Not Boring’s growing suite, !Camera can be mistaken by the too-cynical as a toy. It is fun and colorful, and some of its features exist for the sake of fun alone. But, just like Not Boring’s other offerings (my favorites: !Weather, !Calculator, and !Habits), it’s a genuinely serious tool. And of the bunch, I think !Camera is the most innovative. The fact that it’s fun makes me want to use it — a vastly underestimated attribute of tool design. From Not Boring’s website:

Go from snap to sharing without any editing. !Camera is the first camera app to enable professional-level color grading with 3D LUTs (“lookup tables”) used in high-end workflows by pro photographers to achieve realistic film simulations and unique cinematic looks. Use !Camera’s designed presets, add LUTs from your favorite creators, or make and import your own! New Styles and collaborations released every season.

!Camera looks gimmicky but I assure you it’s not — and what might strike you as gimmicky is really just plain fun and whimsical. My affection for it, and my use of it, has grown, not shrunk, as the months have gone by. While my hardware Camera Control buttons (plural, as I’m currently testing multiple iPhones) remain set to open Apple’s own Camera app, which I continue to use by default, I keep !Camera’s simple widget on my iPhones’ Lock Screens to launch it quickly after unpocketing my iPhone.

!Camera’s use of LUTs for filter-like effects opens the app to a wide world of non-proprietary looks. The best source I’ve found for new LUTs to import is the Panasonic LUMIX Lab app — Panasonic’s built-in LUTs are boring, but the app has a whole community of user-submitted LUTs and I’ve found several of them that are lovely. !Camera’s custom “SuperRAW” format, is, in my opinion, key to the appeal of the app:

No more flat lifeless photos, no AI processing, no weird artifacts. Our SuperRaw™ photo processing has been crafted to showcase more film-like tones and preserve a photo’s beautiful natural grain.

Rather than fighting the nature of the small (and thus, noisy) sensors in the iPhone camera systems, SuperRAW processing embraces the noise, imbuing images with natural-looking grain. The results, to my eyes, are genuinely film-like. If you want, you can configure !Camera to save a raw DNG file alongside each capture, for post-processing in an app like Darkroom, Lightroom, or Photoshop. I’m glad that option is there, but I just shoot in SuperRAW, which saves ready-to-share HEIC files with the LUT applied in my camera roll, so what I see is what I get.

Each of Not Boring’s apps is available for a $15/year subscription, but the way to go is Not Boring’s $50/year “Super !Boring” subscription, which grants you a license to their entire suite of apps. I was already a Super !Boring subscriber when !Camera launched, so, effectively, I got it for free. $50/year isn’t nothing, but it’s not much, and subscriptions have proven to be the best monetization strategy for indie developers in today’s world.

Project Indigo

Marc Levoy, Adobe fellow, and Florian Kainz, principal scientist, on the Adobe Research blog back in June:

Second, people often complain about the “smartphone look” — overly bright, low contrast, high color saturation, strong smoothing, and strong sharpening. To some extent this look is driven by consumer preference. It also makes photos easier to read on the small screen and in bad lighting. But to the discerning photographer, or anybody who views these photos on a larger screen than a phone, they may look unrealistic. [...]

What’s different about computational photography using Indigo? First, we under-expose more strongly than most cameras. Second, we capture, align, and combine more frames when producing each photo — up to 32 frames as in the example above. This means that our photos have fewer blown-out highlights and less noise in the shadows. Taking a photo with our app may require slightly more patience after pressing the shutter button than you’re used to, but after a few seconds you’ll be rewarded with a better picture.

As a side benefit of these two strategies, we need less spatial denoising (i.e. smoothing) than most camera apps. This means we preserve more natural textures. In fact, we bias our processing towards minimal smoothing, even if this means leaving a bit of noise in the photo. You can see these effects in the example photos later in this article.

One more thing. Many of our users prefer to shoot raw, not JPEGs, and they want these raw images to benefit from computational photography. (Some big cameras offer the ability to capture bursts of images and combine them in-camera, but they output a JPEG, not a raw file.) Indigo can output JPEG or raw files that benefit equally from the computational photography strategy outlined here. [...]

In reaction to the prevailing smartphone look, some camera apps advertise “zero-process” photography. In fact, the pixels read from a digital sensor must be processed to create a recognizable image. This processing includes at a minimum white balancing, color correction to account for the different light sensitivity of the red, green and blue pixels, and demosaicing to create a full-color image. Based on our conversations with photographers, what they really want is not zero-process but a more natural look — more like what an SLR might produce. To accomplish this, our photos employ only mild tone mapping, boosting of color saturation, and sharpening. We do perform semantically-aware mask-based adjustments, but only subtle ones.

You may recognize Levoy’s name. After a distinguished career at Stanford teaching computer science, Levoy spent 2014 to 2020 leading the computational photography team at Google for their highly-regarded-as-cameras Pixel phones. In 2020 Levoy left Google for Adobe, and Indigo is one of the first fruits of his time there.

Allison Johnson of The Verge — notably, she came to The Verge by way of DPReview — wrote a splendid piece on Indigo shortly after the app debuted, under the headline “Adobe’s New Camera App Is Making Me Rethink Phone Photography”:

If you hate the overly aggressive HDR look, or you’re tired of your iPhone sharpening the ever-living crap out of your photos, Project Indigo might be for you. It’s available in beta on iOS, though it is not — and I stress this — for the faint of heart. It’s slow, it’s prone to heating up my iPhone, and it drains the battery. But it’s the most thoughtfully designed camera experience I’ve ever used on a phone, and it gave me a renewed sense of curiosity about the camera I use every day.

You’ll know this isn’t your garden-variety camera app right from the onboarding screens. One section details the difference between two histograms available to use with the live preview image (one is based on Indigo’s own processing and one is based on Apple’s image pipeline). Another line describes the way the app handles processing of subjects and skies as “special (but gentle).” This is a camera nerd’s love language.

Slow and battery-draining is exactly why Apple hasn’t pursued these sorts of advanced computational photography techniques in the built-in Camera app. Apple’s Camera app is super-fast and takes extraordinary effort to go easy on the battery. Apple is making entirely different trade-offs — correctly — for the default Camera app. Pro and prosumer photographers may want to make completely different trade-offs when it comes to image processing time and energy.1 (For the last few years, Apple has shot its keynote events using iPhone cameras exclusively, but they use apps like Blackmagic Camera, not the built-in Camera app, to shoot them.)

I’m deeply intrigued by Indigo, and I have a few friends who’ve shown me some extraordinary photographs taken with the app. If they hadn’t told me, I’d have wagered their photos were taken with dedicated large-sensor digital cameras, not phones. Johnson described Indigo as “not for the faint of heart”, and I’m just faint-hearted — or perhaps lazy — enough that, when venturing to a third-party camera app during the past few months, I’ve reached for !Camera, not Indigo, mainly because I don’t want to bother with any sort of manual post-processing for any but my very favorite of favorite images. But Indigo — available free of charge from the App Store — is well worth your attention.2 I hope it’s an app that Adobe is serious about maintaining and developing into the future. 

  1. Johnson also interviewed Levoy last month on The Vergecast. The interview starts at 30m:22s. ↩︎

  2. Indigo is currently iOS-only, but in their introductory blog post, Levoy and Kainz write: “What’s next for Project Indigo? An Android version for sure. We’d also like to add alternative ‘looks’, maybe even personalized ones. We also plan to add a portrait mode, but with more control and higher image quality than existing camera apps, as well as panorama and video recording, including some cool computational video features we’re cooking up in the lab.” Also worth noting: Indigo’s computational photography is so tied to specific hardware that it doesn’t yet support any of the iPhones 17 nor the iPhone Air. ↩︎︎

Tuesday, 21 October 2025

‘Apocryphal Inventions’ 

Jonathan Hoefler:

The objects in the Apocryphal Inventions series are technical chimeras, intentional misdirections coaxed from the generative AI platform Midjourney. Instead of iterating on the system’s early drafts to create ever more accurate renderings of real-world objects, creator Jonathan Hoefler subverted the system to refine and intensify its most intriguing misunderstandings, pushing the software to create beguiling, aestheticized nonsense. Some images have been retouched to make them more plausible; others have been left intact, appearing exactly as generated by the software. The accompanying descriptions, written by the author, offer fictitious backstories rooted in historical fact, which suggest how each of these inventions might have come to be.

These images represent some of AI’s most intriguing answers to confounding questions — an inversion of the more urgent debate, in which it is humanity that must confront the difficult and existential questions posed by artificial intelligence.

This project is art.