By John Gruber

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Wednesday, 10 September 2025

iPhones 17 and the Sugar Water Trap ★

Ben Thompson has a wonderful take on yesterday’s event and what it says about Apple overall:

Apple, to be fair, isn’t selling the same sugar water year-after-year in a zero sum war with other sugar water companies. Their sugar water is getting better, and I think this year’s seasonal concoction is particularly tasty. What is inescapable, however, is that while the company does still make new products — I definitely plan on getting new AirPod Pro 3s! — the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates.

Apple’s Slate of Announcements Yesterday ★

Apple Newsroom posts:

• Apple unveils iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max

• Introducing iPhone Air, a powerful new iPhone with a breakthrough design

• Apple debuts iPhone 17

• Apple debuts Apple Watch Series 11, featuring groundbreaking health insights

• Introducing Apple Watch Ultra 3

• Apple introduces Apple Watch SE 3

• Introducing AirPods Pro 3, the ultimate audio experience

• Apple announces Final Cut Camera 2.0

Trump Hosts Dinner Humiliating Tech CEOs ★

The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

President Trump on Thursday led leaders of the world’s biggest technology companies in a version of his cabinet meetings, in which each participant takes a turn thanking and praising him, this time for his efforts to promote investments in chip manufacturing and artificial intelligence.

Tech titans including Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said “thank you” to the president, with some laying out how much their companies plan to invest in the U.S.

“Thank you for being such a pro-business, pro-innovation president. It’s a very refreshing change,” Altman said. “I think it’s going to set us up for a long period of leading the world, and that wouldn’t be happening without your leadership.”

Cook said Apple is expected to invest $600 billion in the U.S. “I want to thank you for setting the tone such that we can make a major investment in the United States and have some key manufacturing here. I think it says a lot about your leadership and focus on innovation,” Cook said.

This whole thing was so weird. I know this sounds crazy, but I genuinely think these CEOs were unaware that this dinner was going to be open to the press and filmed. They’re all unprepared and awkward. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t know what number to declare for Meta’s upcoming US infrastructure spend. Tim Cook said this:

I want to thank you for including me this evening. It’s incredible to be among everyone here, particularly you and the first lady. I’ve always enjoyed having dinner and interacting.

Those are not prepared remarks. I mean, what? He enjoys “having dinner and interacting”?

I’m not going to argue that any of these CEOs, Cook included, are playing this situation right. But it really shows the profound power imbalance. The president of the United States is so astonishingly powerful. And Trump is wielding that power in unprecedented ways. This entire fiasco is embarrassing, but the criticism really ought to be directed at Trump.

Apple Announces ‘Memory Integrity Enforcement’ ★

Apple Security Engineering and Architecture (SEAR):

Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) is the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort, spanning half a decade, that combines the unique strengths of Apple silicon hardware with our advanced operating system security to provide industry-first, always-on memory safety protection across our devices — without compromising our best-in-class device performance. We believe Memory Integrity Enforcement represents the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems.

That is, to say the least, an incredibly bold statement. But I think it’s true. This is a fascinating post, cogently written.

Base Storage is 256 GB Across Entire iPhone 17 Lineup ★

Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

For the first time, every model in Apple’s latest flagship iPhone 17 lineup features a base 256GB storage capacity, up from the lowest 128GB option in the iPhone 16 series. The regular iPhone 17 now comes in 256GB and 512GB storage options, while the all-new ultra-thin iPhone Air and the iPhone 17 Pro come in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities.

Meanwhile, the iPhone 17 Pro Max is offered in the same three capacities as the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro, but with the addition of a maximum 2TB option.

I know it’s been 18 years, but it’s kind of wild to compare today’s storage tiers to the original iPhone’s 4, 8, and 16 GB options.

Tuesday, 9 September 2025

A Few Details Apple Didn’t Mention During Its “Awe-Dropping” Event ★

Dan Moren:

There were no doubt some shouts of joy when Apple mentioned it had a new version of its MagSafe Battery, but if you want one of those to boost your phone’s longevity, be aware: it’s an iPhone Air exclusive. The key’s in the name “iPhone Air MagSafe Battery”—Apple says it “was created exclusively for iPhone Air” and only the iPhone Air is listed in the Compatibility section. Sorry iPhone 17/17 Pro users, you’re out of luck. (Alas, the same is true of the new iPhone bumper case too.)

This is a bit of a bummer. I really love Apple’s old MagSafe Battery Pack. (I’m using one right now, after a long day with lots of phone usage.) I love that they’re making a new one, but it literally only fits on the iPhone Air. It’s so tall that it doesn’t fit under the camera plateau on any other iPhone, new or old.

Another tidbit I didn’t notice during the keynote: it’s not the “iPhone 17 Air”. It’s just “iPhone Air”, no number. I’m not sure what to make of that. If they release a new one next year, will that be the iPhone Air 2?

Monday, 8 September 2025

Another Dyson Presentation ★

I loved watching this. My takeaway: don’t just say what it does, explain how it does what it does.

Sunday, 7 September 2025

TextJam ★

My thanks to TextJam for sponsoring this past week at DF. TextJam just launched last week, it’s a remarkable “1.0” release — a multi-player text editor / word processor with a novel twist on how humans interact with AI. TextJam introduces the metaphors of “pen” mode for writing in ink, when you know exactly what words you want to write, with “pencil” mode for text you want to use a prompt or just a simple dashed-off starting point for AI assistance. It sounds like it makes intuitive sense, and when you actually try it, it feels even more natural. I really love this metaphor of ink vs. pencil. It leaves you, the writer, in control, but also gives all the assistance you want.

TextJam also has other very clever ideas, like using “pinch” multitouch gestures for resizing text — pinch in to get AI suggestions for making the selected text shorter, pinch out to expand it. TextJam has integrations with all of the most popular LLM systems: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Llama, and more.

And that’s just talking about the cutting-edge AI-type features. TextJam is also a great collaborative editor, where you and your teammates can work together on the same document with really clever interface elements who made — or is currently in the processing of making — which changes.

You can say, “Well, why don’t I just use Google Docs for this?” Right? My answer is just look at the two of them. Google Docs is like 98 percent stuff no one uses and therefore everyone ignores. TextJam is focused on the features people actually use and understand. It just looks and feels so much more more comfortable and stylish.

Try it today for free.

Saturday, 6 September 2025

A Cynical Read on Anthropic’s Book Settlement ★

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:

And so you can’t help but wonder if part of the equation in this settlement wasn’t decidedly more cynical. Fresh off a new massive fundraise — one in which they raised far more than they were initially targeting, I might add — Anthropic has a lot of money. More than perhaps all but one of their competitors on the startup side. By settling for $1.5B, is Anthropic sort of pulling up a drawbridge, making it so that other startups can’t possibly come into their castle? I mean, am I crazy?

I’m not so sure I am. At $1.5B, there are only a handful of companies that could afford to pay such fines. Certainly OpenAI is one. Maybe xAI. And of course all the tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta. But could any other startup that has done any level of model training with such data? Probably not.

Kind of dastardly when you think about it this way.

Friday, 5 September 2025

Anthropic to Pay $1.5 Billion to Authors in Landmark AI Settlement ★

Hayden Field, reporting for The Verge:

In what’s potentially the first major payout to creatives whose work was used to train AI systems, Anthropic has reached an agreement to pay “at least” a staggering $1.5 billion, plus interest, to authors to settle its class-action lawsuit. The amount breaks down to smaller payouts expected to be approximately $3,000 per book or work. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said it’s “believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation.”

Thursday, 4 September 2025

Atlassian Acquires The Browser Company for $610 Million ★

David Pierce, writing for The Verge:

Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO of enterprise software giant Atlassian, was one of the first users of the Arc browser. Over the last several years, he has been a prolific bug reporter and feature requester. Now he’ll own the thing: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company, the New York-based startup that makes both Arc and the new AI-focused Dia browser. Atlassian is paying $610 million in cash for The Browser Company, and plans to run it as an independent entity.

The conversations that led to the deal started about a year ago, says Josh Miller, The Browser Company’s CEO. Lots of Atlassian employees were using Arc, and “they reached out wondering, how could we get more enterprise-ready?” Miller says. Big companies require data privacy, security, and management features in the software they use, and The Browser Company didn’t offer enough of them.

I get it. Later in the same article, there’s this:

As for what this all means for The Browser Company’s browsers, it’s still too early to say for sure. Miller promises no favored-nation features for Atlassian products, nor any Microsoft Edge-style popups begging you to sign up for Jira. Miller says the team is even more committed to being a truly cross-platform product, and that Windows in particular is about to get a lot more attention.

But “How could we get more enterprise-ready?” has never been a north-star principle for great user-focused software. I personally have never seen the appeal of Arc or Dia, but Safari truly speaks to me and my taste. Alternative browsers, by definition, are meant for people who are dissatisfied with existing browsers. So while I don’t use Arc or Dia, I’ve always been rooting for The Browser Company. I even dig the company name.

But this seems like bad news. I just don’t see how Atlassian/Jira DNA can possibly be a good thing to inject into an innovative user-focused web browser.

Investors Score the US-v.-Google Remedies Ruling a Win for Google and Apple ★

Dave Michaels and Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

“There are strong reasons not to jolt the system and to allow market forces to do the work,” Mehta wrote.

Wall Street analysts scored the ruling a huge win for Google and Apple since it allowed an existing arrangement to continue in which Google pays Apple more than $20 billion a year to be the default search provider on the Safari browser.

I’m picking nits here, but I think part of the ruling is that Google can no longer pay to be the default search engine. And, in my opinion, they never needed to, and never should have put that into their contracts for these deals. They’re just paying Apple (and Mozilla, and Samsung, and others) for the actual search traffic that goes to Google from those companies’ browsers. It’s up to Apple whether Google is the default Safari search engine (which it is, and will continue to be). It just won’t be in the terms of the deal that Google search has to be the default.

The ruling paves the way for the two companies to partner further on AI-related services on Apple devices, analysts said. Apple currently has a deal with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into various iPhone services. Apple and Google have had talks about striking a similar deal for Google’s AI system called Gemini.

I wonder if this antitrust ruling was the holdup on Apple announcing Gemini as an Apple Intelligence partner? Apple, famously, almost never talks about future plans, but at last year’s WWDC, Craig Federighi made conspicuous mention of Google Gemini as a potential Apple Intelligence partner — and now here we are 14 months later and it hasn’t yet happened.

Also, re: this decision being largely a win for Google — it just never made sense to me that Chrome even is a sellable asset.

Instagram Finally Launches an iPad App ★

There are finallys, and there are finallys. Apple shipped the original iPad in April 2010. Instagram shipped in October 2010 — and was iPhone-exclusive until 2012. That Instagram didn’t ship a native iPad version of its app until now is really one of the strangest things in tech. But here it is.

One significant difference from Instagram on phones is that on iPad, it defaults to the Reels view, and you have to tap below Reels in the sidebar to get to your following timeline. Adam Mosseri explains their thinking behind this in this Reel (natch).

Google Avoids Harshest Penalties in Search Monopoly Ruling ★

David McCabe, reporting for The New York Times:

Google must hand over its search results and some data to rival companies but does not need to break itself up by selling its Chrome web browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. The decision, by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, falls short of the sweeping changes proposed by the government to rein in the power of Silicon Valley.

Judge Mehta said in the 223-page ruling that Google must share some of its search data with “qualified competitors” to resolve its monopoly. The Justice Department had asked the judge to force the company to share even more of its data, arguing it was key to Google’s dominance.

Judge Mehta also put restrictions on payments that Google uses to ensure its search engine gets prime placement in web browsers and on smartphones. But he stopped short of banning those payments entirely and did not grant the government’s request that Google be forced to sell Chrome, which the government said was necessary to remedy the company’s power as a search monopoly.

“Notwithstanding this power, courts must approach the task of crafting remedies with a healthy dose of humility,” Judge Mehta said in Tuesday’s decision. “This court has done so.”

No forced divestiture of Chrome or Android, and Google is allowed to continue making traffic acquisition cost payments to companies like Apple (for search in Safari) and Mozilla (for search in Firefox). The decision seems very reasonable to me. And while the entire ruling is 223 pages, Judge Mehta included a good summary at the front. You can get a feel for it just by reading the first few pages.

Monday, 1 September 2025

Bernie Sanders: Kennedy Must Resign ★

Bernie Sanders, in a NYT op-ed:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign.

Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.

Powerful and to the point. Sanders, unlike the nine former CDC directors whose joint op-ed ran the next day, doesn’t pull punches. But there’s no point demanding Kennedy resign, because he won’t. Sanders, and the rest of us, should call on Trump to fire him. The buck stops with Trump. Trump fires his appointees all the time. Almost no one lasted long in the Trump 1.0 administration, and it’s unlikely anyone will last long in the Trump 2.0 administration. (Including, perhaps, Trump himself, who is clearly unwell.) Kennedy ought to be the first to go.

Trump smells it too, hence this “both sides” post on his blog this morning. Public opinion is strongly against this abject vaccine quackery.

Nine Former Directors of the CDC: ‘RFK Jr. Is Endangering Every American’s Health’ ★

William Foege, William Roper, David Satcher, Jeffrey Koplan, Richard Besser, Tom Frieden, Anne Schuchat, Rochelle P. Walensky, and Mandy K. Cohen — all of them former directors of the CDC, under every president from Jimmy Carter to Trump — in a co-bylined op-ed for the NYT:

What the health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D.C. director days ago — is unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.

Mr. Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing Dr. Monarez — which led to the resignations of top C.D.C. officials — adds considerable fuel to this raging fire. [...]

This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings.

It’s good that they’re speaking up, but it’s too mealy-mouthed. What’s going on at HHS under Kennedy isn’t merely “unacceptable” and “alarming”. It’s outrageous and shocking.

The Talk Show: ‘Ersatz PopSocket’ ★

For your holiday listening enjoyment: Special guest Andru Edwards joins the show. Topics include Google’s Pixel 10 event and the Pixel 10 family of devices, AI’s effect on computational photography, foldable phones, and some speculation on Apple’s September 9 “Awe Dropping” event.

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Sunday, 31 August 2025

Walk the World ★

My thanks to Impending for sponsoring last week at DF to promote their new app, Walk the World. You surely know some of Impending’s other apps, like the innovative checklist/task app Clear. Walk the World turns your steps — your real-world activity — into a new kind of virtual globe-trotting adventure.

Wouldn’t it be cool to know you’ve walked the length of the Boston Marathon this past week? You can conquer iconic hikes and trails from around the world presented as gorgeous map milestones to complete with your hard earned steps. It’s a genuinely novel idea for gamifying activity, executed with an exquisite attention to detail and exuberant sense of joy. Walk the World isn’t quite a game, but it delivers game-like fun.

If you enjoy or aspire to go on walks more regularly, and beautiful indie apps with fun new twists, this is your new healthy addiction. Try Walk the World free today for your iPhone.

Vintage Macintosh Programming Book Library ★

One more for my weekend spate of developer posts, but from the opposite of the LLM-assisted cutting edge: this wonderful collection of classic-era Mac programming books, carefully scanned as PDFs. These evoke nostalgia both for the classic Mac era and for the entire notion of “programming books”. (Via Michael Tsai and Rui Carmo.)

sosumi.ai: Apple Developer Docs for LLMs ★

Sosumi.ai:

Ever notice Claude struggling to write Swift code? It might not be their fault!

Apple Developer docs are locked behind JavaScript, making them invisible to most LLMs. If they try to fetch it, all they see is “This page requires JavaScript. Please turn on JavaScript in your browser and refresh the page to view its content.”

This service translates Apple Developer documentation pages into AI-friendly Markdown.

Perfect little audio easter egg on the page. Beautiful Markdown output too. Look at my boy, all grown up, teaching robots how to program.

I do regret, though, that I didn’t define or influence the fenced style for code blocks. If I had, instead of this:

```swift
// An array of 'Int' elements
let oddNumbers = [1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15]
```

You could do this, which looks so much better:

``` Swift:
// An array of 'Int' elements
let oddNumbers = [1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15]
```

Those all-lowercase language identifiers, with no preceding space, just look a little lazy. I realize why GitHub’s ```-fenced code blocks took off (they’re the only code block style most Markdown users know, I suspect), but they don’t look nearly as nice, to human readers, as my original tab-indented style.

Saturday, 30 August 2025

Notable Improvements to Coding Intelligence in Xcode 26 Beta 7 ★

From Apple’s Xcode 26 Beta 7 release notes:

• Claude in Xcode is now available in the Intelligence settings panel, allowing users to seamlessly add their existing paid Claude account to Xcode and start using Claude Sonnet 4. (155826755)

• When using ChatGPT in Xcode, users can now start a new conversation with either GPT-4.1 or GPT-5, with GPT-5 set as the default. (158342780)

• ChatGPT in Xcode provides two model choices. “GPT-5” is optimized for quick, high-quality results, and should work well for most coding tasks. For difficult tasks, choose “GPT-5 (Reasoning)“, which spends more time thinking before responding, and can provide more accurate results for complex coding tasks.

  In the OpenAI API, “GPT-5” corresponds to the “minimal” reasoning level, and “GPT-5 (Reasoning)” corresponds to the “low” reasoning level. (159135374)

That’s just three weeks from the launch of ChatGPT 5 to shipping support in Xcode. Also, these are just the built-in integrations. As announced at WWDC, Xcode 26 allows developers to use their API keys from other AI providers, or connect to models running locally, on-device (if they’re using an Apple Silicon Mac).

Thursday, 28 August 2025

Trump Fires CDC Director, Anti-Vax Wingnuts Now Running Asylum ★

Shelby Talcott, reporting under the euphemistic headline “White House Fires CDC Director Over Vaccine Disagreements”:

A showdown at the CDC culminated in the White House formally firing its director, Susan Monarez, on Wednesday night.

Monarez was ousted earlier in the day, after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked her to step down amid disagreements over changing vaccine policies, The Washington Post reported — and HHS confirmed her departure.

But Monarez’s lawyer, Mark Zaid, pushed back. Zaid said in a statement later that a White House staffer had delivered the news, and given that Monarez is a Senate-confirmed officer, “only the president himself can fire” her. “For this reason, we reject the notification Dr. Monarez has received as legally deficient and she remains as CDC Director,” Zaid said.

Four other top CDC directors also resigned Wednesday. “These high profile departures will require oversight by the” Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, panel chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., posted on X.

The “White House” didn’t fire Monarez. Donald Trump did. And while technically, she was fired over “vaccine disagreements”, yes, those disagreements weren’t scientific or medical. It was science on one side, and abject quackery on the other. We really needed the CDC five years ago. We’re in big trouble if we need them again before the US electorate ousts these wingnuts.

Here’s a headline, and coverage, from The Guardian that captures the situation with clarity and without mincing words: “CDC Chief ‘Targeted’ for Refusing to ‘Rubber-Stamp Unscientific, Reckless Directives’, Lawyers Say”

How AirPods Work ★

Truly phenomenal video from Real Engineering about a genuinely phenomenal product. In my review of the AirPods Pro 2 in 2023 — a year after they originally shipped, when the cases were changed to use USB-C — I called them “the best single expression of Apple as a company today”. That remains true. AirPods exemplify everything that sets Apple apart: miniaturization, “it just works” ease of use, opinionated design (you get them in any color you want, so long as it’s white), and, most of all, joyfulness.

It occurs to me that Apple doesn’t brag enough about its engineering accomplishments these days. Under their previous CEO, they’d spend more time in product introduction explaining how things work, like a lecture in a 101 college course. I miss that. This Real Engineering video fills in those gaps.

Wednesday, 27 August 2025

Masimo Sues U.S. Customs and Border Protection Over Apple Watch Blood Oxygen Ruling ★

Christopher Yasiejko, reporting last week for Bloomberg Law:

CBP exceeded its authority in an Aug. 1 internal advice ruling that overturned its own January decision without notice or input from Masimo, the medical-device maker said in a complaint filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Masimo brought claims under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause.

The CBP ruling is available here. As I read the CPB ruling, Apple’s argument goes something like this:

Masimo’s patents (the validity of which Apple disputes, but that’s neither here nor there for this ruling) cover a non-invasive device worn on the user’s body, that reads blood oxygen levels by shining light of various wavelengths through the skin, computes the reading on the device, and shows the result on device. With Apple’s workaround for watches sold in the US, the computation and the display of results occur off-device (on the paired iPhone), and thus the “redesigned” blood oxygen feature doesn’t violate Masimo’s patents.

The CBP’s investigation centered around whether the Masimo patents were “limiting” — which seems to mean a device that does all these things: the sensors, the computation of results, and the display of results. Masimo argued that the patents weren’t limiting, and apparently made no argument for how the import ban on Apple Watches should stand if the patents were found by CBP to be limiting. The CBP asked the International Trade Commission — the outfit that instituted the import ban — whether they considered the Masimo patents to be limiting, and the ITC responded yes, they did, that that was the entire basis of the import ban.

Masimo’s new complaint against the CBP makes mention of Apple’s Trump-pleasing series of announcements related to investments in US manufacturing, leaving it to the reader to interpet the implication that there’s a quid pro quo at play with the CBP ruling. But the CBP ruling’s timeline makes clear that much of the investigation took place during the Biden administration in 2024. It reads to me like that same decision would have been made, at the same time, if Kamala Harris had won last year’s election. But that’s the problem with a pay-to-play corrupt government like Trump’s, and Tim Cook’s willingness to play along to any degree, no matter how mild. By currying favor with Trump, it now looks like any decision from the U.S. government that goes in Apple’s favor might be because Apple curried favored with Trump. I genuinely do not believe that’s the case here. The ITC ruling was based on an interpretation of Masimo’s patents that they were limited to user-worn devices that read, compute, and display blood oxygen levels non-invasively, and given that U.S. Apple Watches no longer compute or display the results, they no longer violate Masimo’s patents.

Tuesday, 26 August 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Weird Turtle Fake Out’ ★

Matthew Panzarino returns to the show. Topics include 007 logo creator Joe Caroff’s death at 103, Google’s weird “Made by Google” event hosted by Jimmy Fallon, the UK supposedly dropping its demand for an iCloud encryption backdoor, and Apple’s workaround for the Apple Watch blood oxygen sensor patent stalemate.

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MacSurfer Returns Under New Ownership ★

After a 25-year run, the website MacSurfer closed in 2020. But, as brought to my attention two weeks ago by Nick Heer, MacSurfer quietly returned in June. No one seemed to notice until this month.

The original MacSurfer was a bit of a weird site. Content-wise it was a daily headline aggregator, with no original news or commentary. That made a lot of sense in 1995 and for a few years thereafter, when the web was new. I remember reading it somewhat regularly back then. But one never really “read” MacSurfer — you scanned it. Even the name harks back to the very early web, when, somehow, the idiom “surfing the Internet” took hold. (Thus leading to the name “Safari” for a web browser.) But MacSurfer stopped making as much sense with the advent of RSS, when it became easy to create your own custom aggregated collection of website sources. I didn’t want to dance on MacSurfer’s grave when it closed shop in 2020, but at the time, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t closed long before.

The revived MacSurfer hasn’t changed the concept, so I’m not sure who will read it now either. A firehose has a purpose, but it’s not for drinking.

The other thing that always struck me as strange about MacSurfer is that it was anonymous. There was no credit as to who was behind it. MacDailyNews is similar: longstanding and anonymous, and, to a lesser degree than MacSurfer, a bit of a firehose. But MacDailyNews’s unnamed author adds commentary to his posts. Crackpot wingnut commentary, oftentimes, but commentary nonetheless. Pseudonyms have a long, storied history. But I think it’s weird — and somewhat suspicious — not to put any name at all on your work.

The new MacSurfer, like the old one, remains unsigned. But after Eric Schwarz started blogging about the mysterious return of the site after its half-decade absence, the new owner, Ken Turner, reached out and agreed to an interview.

Apple to Debut TechWoven Cases for iPhone 17 Lineup ★

Supply chain leaker Majin Bu has the scoop, including photos of the cases and their packaging, of Apple’s second attempt at a fabric-based successor to leather iPhone cases. Apple’s first attempt two years ago, FineWoven, was so unpopular that they didn’t even offer a premium level of Apple-branded cases last year with the iPhones 16.

Apple dropped all use of leather two years ago, including watch bands and wallets. FineWoven was kind of shitty for those too — it just wasn’t a durable material, but Apple put it to use on products that demand durability. I mean that’s the entire point of an iPhone case in particular. These new TechWoven cases look good, and I doubt Apple will make the same durability mistake twice. The new cases have metal buttons (yay) but also a bottom lip on the case (boo). No word yet on whether Apple will replace FineWoven with TechWoven for Apple Watch bands and MagSafe Wallets too, but I bet they will. I doubt we’ll ever hear the word “FineWoven” again.

(Majin Bu has leaked photos of Apple’s new silicone cases, too.)

Elon Musk Bullshit Watch ★

Elon Musk, Friday:

Join @xAI and help build a purely AI software company called Macrohard. It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real!

In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI.

If it’s “a purely AI software company” why do they need to hire anyone?

Tulsi Gabbard Says the U.K. Government Has Backed Down From Its Demand for an iCloud Backdoor ★

Tulsi Gabbard — who, believe it or not, is the US director of national intelligence — on X last week:

Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our partners in the UK, alongside @POTUS and @VP, to ensure Americans’ private data remains private and our Constitutional rights and civil liberties are protected.

As a result, the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a “back door” that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties.

BBC News:

The BBC understands Apple has not yet received any formal communication from either the US or UK governments. “We do not comment on operational matters, including confirming or denying the existence of such notices,” a UK government spokesperson said.

Back in February, Apple pulled the Advanced Data Protection feature of iCloud from the UK, in what it deemed a necessary move to comply with the UK demand. Until and if Apple restores the ADP feature in the UK, I wouldn’t consider this over. I hope it’s true, but a Trump official tweeting that it’s true doesn’t make it true.

‘Less Fun Than a Barrel of Crackers’ ★

John McCoy, on the supposedly controversial Cracker Barrel rebranding:

But just because I doubt that these choices were motivated by politics doesn’t mean the detractors don’t have a point: something basic is being lost here. In both cases the companies have discarded character and context in an effort to streamline their identity. I have written previously about the often misguided penchant art directors have towards simplifying their brands. I suspect that the lion’s share (ha) of this tendency is simply following trends, and the current fashion in corporate design is simple, flat typography and short (often single-word) brand names. To the extent that someone actually gave this a thought, the rationale is to remove any attributes that might complicate a consumer’s attitude towards the brand. It also reflects the desire of new executives to mark their territory by peeing on it — see HBO’s constant rebranding, or Elon Musk destroying the only part of Twitter that had any value, its name recognition.

If you want to be charitable, and I try to be when I can, the move towards brand simplification also reflects a longstanding adage in design — be it visual art, design, writing, or engineering: “less is more.” This saying, often misattributed to Mies van der Rohe, emphasizes clarity and utility. The goal is to focus on what is essential. Practitioners of this belief make outsized claims about the effects of this approach.

This is via Jason Snell at Six Colors, and, on the presumption that all of you have the good sense to read Six Colors regularly, I’d let you encounter McCoy’s post there, but for my need to make a few side points, gleaned from Threads:

• The “controversy” is regarding the removal of the Uncle Herschel mascot (the cracker) and the barrel. But Josh Williams argues that the lettering itself is nicely done in the new mark, and I agree. But I also agree with McCoy’s larger point that minimalistic rebrandings are simply trendy and Cracker Barrel is very late to the trend, which, like all trends, will surely soon reverse.

• That it’s a controversy at all is the work of activist investor Sardar Biglari, CEO of midwest chain Steak ’n Shake. (Biglari’s father was a general under the Shah of Iran, and the family had to flee after the revolution.) Biglari has been trying to take over Cracker Barrel, Carl Icahn corporate-raider-style, for 15 years. That’s why Steak ’n Shake has been stoking the supposed controversy about Cracker Barrel on its X account. And Steak ’n Shake, under Biglari’s leadership, has been all-in as a MAGA brand whilst closing over 200 restaurants in the last 7 years. You can like or dislike the Cracker Barrel rebranding, but it’s not “woke”. It’s just minimal. The idea that it’s “woke” is just nonsense promulgated by Biglari to get the result we’re actually seeing, where pro-Trump media outlets (like Fox News) pick up on the rebranding as somehow “woke”, Cracker Barrel gets bad publicity and their stock price suffers, and maybe Biglari gets a chance to take over the chain, which is all he cares about.

• Last word goes to Gregory Wieber.

Update, 27 August: Cracker Barrel cries uncle.

Apple Event on September 9: ‘Awe Dropping’ ★

Right on schedule: second Tuesday of September, so long as that second Tuesday doesn’t fall on September 11. (Last year’s event went on Monday 9 September, probably because the Harris-Trump debate was already scheduled for Tuesday the 10th.) There’s an interactive animated version of the “heat map” event logo on Apple’s homepage. (A little bit odd that the second item below the event announcement, after a back-to-school promotion, is a “Meet the iPhone 16 family” promotion.)

Expected announcements for this event include:

• iPhones 17 (regular, Pro, Air)
• Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3
• AirPods Pro 3

Calvinball Makes the Supreme Court ★

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, on page 17 of her dissent in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association:

In a broader sense, however, today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. “[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible. This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules.⁶ We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.

The footnote refers to the OED’s entry for “Calvinball”.

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Saturday, 23 August 2025

Phoenix.new ★

My thanks to Fly.io for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Phoenix.new, their new AI app-builder. Just describe your idea, and Phoenix.new quickly generates a working real-time Phoenix app: clustering, pubsub, and presence included. Ideal for multiplayer games, collaborative tools, or quick weekend experiments. Built by Fly.io, deploy wherever you want. Just try it, and see how far you can go.

Friday, 22 August 2025

Base 3.0 ★

Nice update to Menial’s excellent SQLite developer tool for the Mac. Worth the wait.

Thursday, 21 August 2025

Apple TV+ Subscription Price Increasing From $10 to $13 Per Month, but the Annual Price Remains Unchanged at $99 ★

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

Apple today announced that the monthly price of Apple TV+ is rising in the United States and some international markets. From today, the monthly subscription will cost $12.99, up from $9.99.

Existing subscribers will see the price change 30 days after the next renewal date. The pricing for yearly TV+ subscriptions and the Apple One services bundle remains unchanged.

The annual price for a standalone TV+ subscription — unchanged, as Mayo reports — remains $99. The usual rule-of-thumb for subscriptions of any sort seems to be to charge 10× the monthly rate for an annual subscription. That’s exactly where the TV+ month/annual prices were before today. Now, the annual subscription price isn’t just a little bit cheaper than 12× the monthly price ($156), but a lot cheaper.

This seems to be a clear sign that streaming services are different than most subscriptions. People subscribe to newspapers or blog/newsletters and they stay subscribed, because they want to read regularly. Same for a music subscription, like Spotify or Apple Music — people want to listen to music all the time. Churn is just naturally higher with streaming video — people subscription hop. Subscribe, catch up on all the exclusive content you’ve missed, then unsubscribe. Subscribe again when there are a few more exclusive shows you’ve missed again. Unsubscribe again. And Apple TV+ has been reported to have higher than average churn. So I think today’s price hike, affecting only the monthly price, is about dealing with that. If you want to subscription hop, Apple TV+ is going to cost a bit more. If you want to stay subscribed to Apple TV+, you really ought to subscribe annually (or subscribe to Apple One and get Music, Arcade, and additional iCloud storage bundled together).

Fox One Streaming Service Launches ★

Fox (capitalization verbatim):

Fox Corporation today announced the official launch of FOX One, a bold new streaming service that brings together the full portfolio of FOX’s News, Sports and Entertainment branded content — all in one place, both live and on demand.

Available today across major web, mobile and connected TV platforms, FOX One is priced at $19.99/month with a 7-day free trial or $199.99/year, with the option to add-on B1G+ or bundle FOX Nation for an even greater value. Starting October 2, customers will also have the opportunity to bundle FOX One with ESPN DTC Unlimited for $39.99/month.

I just mentioned yesterday, re: MS NOW’s idiotic backronym, that Fox often styles its name in all caps without pretending the f-o-x letters stand for anything. Anyway, $20/month seems steep, but Fox carries a lot of sports.

Apple is promoting the launch prominently in the App Store (including Fox’s preferred all-caps styling), no doubt because Fox — unlike certain well-established streaming services — offers its subscriptions via IAP.

Meta’s Ray-Bans Have Sold 2 Million Pairs, Total, as of February ★

Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge back in February:

Two weeks ago, we exclusively reported Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks on how many pairs of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses the company had recently sold and might theoretically sell: 1 million pairs in 2024, with the possibility of reaching 2 million or even 5 million by the end of 2025.

But glasses giant EssilorLuxottica, which produces those glasses for Meta, has now publicly revealed 2 million pairs of Meta Ray-Bans have sold since their October 2023 debut, and that it’s aiming to produce 10 million Meta glasses each year by the end of 2026.

I mocked a report from Counterpoint Research this week for its Bezos Numbers on smart glasses sales growth. Here are some real numbers from the current market leader. For context, Steve Jobs’s stated goal for the iPhone, at launch in mid-2007, was 10 million iPhones sold by the end of 2008 — a goal they reached before the holiday quarter of 2008 even started.

I feel close to certain that smart glasses are going to be a big product category. But they’re not there yet. A few million units is something, but it’s not a hit. Given the current capabilities — a camera on your face, speakers on the temples, and a microphone for talking to the system — I don’t see how they currently beat a smartphone and wireless earbuds. If you already carry a phone and earbuds everywhere you go, when would you want Meta Glasses? For taking lower-quality photos and videos, and listening to lower-quality audio? I don’t think the product category is going to take off until there’s a visual HUD in the lenses, and that still seems years away, at any price.

Herdling ★

New video game, just out:

Herdling is a brand new adventure from Okomotive, creators of the atmospheric and acclaimed FAR games, and Panic, publishers of Firewatch.

Looks absolutely beautiful. Painterly. Darth says it’s good.

Available now for Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Epic Games Store. Not (yet?) in the Mac App Store — not because of any hassles regarding the App Store, but because there’s not (yet?) a Mac port of the game, period.

‘Micro-Soft’ ★

Added this footnote just now to yesterday’s piece on MSNBC’s rebranding to “MS NOW”:

Historical pedantry: from 1975–1979, Microsoft spelled its name “Micro-Soft”, with, yes, an uppercase S. But that’s not camel-case, and that hyphenated spelling is as much a footnote to Microsoft’s brand history as the woodcut Isaac-Newton-under-a-tree logo is to Apple. Microsoft’s logo from that era was very disco-’70s and kind of cool — but while “Micro” and “Soft” were broken across two lines, there’s no hyphen in the logotype.

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Wednesday, 20 August 2025

Claim Chowder: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Five Months Ago ★

Kwan Wei Kevin Tan, reporting for Business Insider five months ago:

Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic, said on Monday that AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the code in our software in a year.

“I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday.

Complete bullshit, but, I guess he still has one month to go. (Via Dave Winer on Threads.)

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