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Immersive 3D video with spatial audio: Coming soon, exclusively in Sandwich Vision’s Theater on Vision Pro, available on the App Store. The bandwidth-constrained immersive livestream Tuesday night looked cool; the on-demand version coming in a few days will look amazing.

Audio-only version: In the usual place, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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Watch on a big screen if you can (real, or virtual). All credit and thanks for the video production go to my friends at Sandwich, who, as ever, are nothing short of a joy to work with.

Top third-party developers rightly rejected the design, adopting open source code from Brent Simmons to disable the default “icons in all standard menu items” behavior.

Wonderful news in MacOS 27 Golden Gate: the icons are gone. It’s like Tahoe’s menu item icons never happened. Prokopov noted it on Mastodon with before and after screenshots, and mentions that Apple has updated the Human Interface Guidelines accordingly:

Use menu item icons sparingly and with purpose. Icons allow people to find menu items more quickly, and help clarify what selecting an item does. Use an icon to highlight the most common actions and key features of your app, file system locations, connected devices, visual concepts like rotating or flipping an image, and user-generated content like folders and documents. Don’t display an icon if you can’t find one that clearly represents the menu item.

This updated advice in the HIG is perfect. Screenshot:

MacOS 26 Tahoe — across every Apple app on the system — is a living example of the updated HIG’s “what not to do” example illustrations (including the second section about groups within a menu). If you’re stuck using Tahoe until Golden Gate arrives, recall this tip to alleviate the problem to some extent.

This is my favorite news from all of WWDC this week. I mean that. In a small way I mean it because I so loathe this aspect of MacOS Tahoe. But in a large way I mean it because it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team. I don’t know if all the untalented hacks are gone, but the untalented magazine-designer hacks with clout and influence all left with Alan Dye. I’ve chatted with a few people from Apple’s design team this week and they’re all loving the work they’re doing and the direction they’re taking Apple’s platforms. Backtracking on these idiotic menu item icons was a necessary first step.

Enter auth.md. By exposing a single, machine-readable Markdown file at your service root, AI agents can dynamically discover your OAuth Protected Resource Metadata, parse required scopes, and authenticate seamlessly.

With native support in WorkOS AuthKit, you can now implement this protocol out of the box, giving AI tools a standardized, secure way to log into your application.

Read the auth.md docs.

I recently launched the macOS version of Shopie, an app I first released on the iOS App Store late last year. Shopie helps you keep track of products you’re interested in by letting you create wishlists and notifying you whenever a product’s price, availability, and other details change.

Unlike my other apps, where I typically blend AppKit (or UIKit) with SwiftUI, Shopie is built entirely in SwiftUI. I wanted to keep it that way to maximize code reuse across iOS, iPadOS, and now macOS. This post explores how far SwiftUI can take you on the Mac in 2026, especially if your goal is to build an app that feels truly native to the platform. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive review of SwiftUI on macOS. It’s simply a collection of recipes and issues I ran into while porting Shopie, a fairly small app, and keeping it 100% SwiftUI.

Andrade’s examples are copious. His conclusion is damning:

Apple dropped the ball here. AppKit was ahead of its time and UIKit was a more polished version of AppKit. A serious cross-platform framework that unified the two should have happened long before SwiftUI. Instead, Apple left AppKit to fossilize and then tried to leapfrog the problem.

You can see the result everywhere. SwiftUI is productive, modern, and often delightful, right up until you try to make a really good Mac app. Then suddenly you’re fighting the framework for things the Mac solved 20 years ago.

There’s something really wrong with SwiftUI. Amongst the apps I use, the best example is Apple Journal. Basic stuff that’s worked reliably for decades — some things that heretofore had worked forever — are dangerously broken. If you’re running MacOS 26 Tahoe, open Journal and make a new dummy entry. Type something like “The quick brown fox.” Then double-click on the word “brown” and delete it. Now invoke Undo.

What you expect is for the word “brown” to reappear. What happens is ... the whole sentence disappears. Gone. Invoke Redo and you only get back to “The quick fox.” The word “brown” is just gone forever. It’s nowhere in the Undo stack. That’s just profoundly fucked up. I’ve never seen anything like this with an AppKit app, ever. (I’ve never seen it with a UIKit app either — and the same thing happens on iOS with Journal. It’s just that you notice it less often because we don’t invoke Undo and Redo nearly as often there.)

I actually use the Journal app and I’ve lost entire sentences of text to this incompetent implementation of Undo. Editing text in Journal is dangerous because SwiftUI is so bad at something as fundamental as text editing. AppKit has had this solved since 1989 or so, a decade before Apple reunified with NeXT. And my example here is just one of many. Andrade documents a whole bunch more in his post. [Shopie is a good modern Mac app — you can practically see from reading his post that Andrade’s hands are scarred from dozens of paper cuts.

So while the world is largely focused on Apple’s AI-related announcements at WWDC tomorrow, I’ve got SwiftUI (on all platforms) and Mac-assed Mac development high on my list. Apple’s developer message used to be that it was not just easy to develop apps for their platforms, but that it was easy to develop good idiomatically native apps. You got the correct complex behavior — for things like Undo/Redo — out of the box. That’s still true for AppKit and UIKit, but it’s never been true for SwiftUI, and SwiftUI is now seven years old. That’s too long for any excuses to hold water.

Long argument short, Times New Roman isn’t bad, but it isn’t good. It is the median choice. But most of the circuit courts use it: the Third, Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh. It could be worse: the First circuit not only uses Courier New (the worst version of Courier, so of course it’s the one Microsoft shipped with Windows), but fully justifies their text — contrary to the nature of a monospaced font. (The Fourth circuit only recently switched from Courier New to Times New Roman — an upgrade, to be sure, but a disappointingly mediocre one.) It could be better: the Second and Seventh use Palatino. (Note how much better that Seventh Circuit decision looks than the Second’s, with its wider margins creating a narrower column of text.)

But it can be much better. The Fifth Circuit was long typographically superior to its peers, using Century Schoolbook — a highly legible font with great tradition and the right vibe. But in 2020, the Fifth Circuit upgraded, switching to Equity, Matthew Butterick’s excellent type family (which, of course, is used throughout Butterick’s own web book, Typography for Lawyers). Here’s a before and after tweet noting the change. The results are typographically sublime (including improved margins).

The gold standard is the U.S. Supreme Court, which uses Century Schoolbook. Yes, I just praised the Fifth Circuit’s change from Century Schoolbook to Equity as an upgrade, but tradition and consistency have their place. The Supreme Court’s typographic style has been stunningly consistent for — no pun intended — well over a century. (If only that were true of their recent decisions. Rimshot.) Here is last month’s Louisiana v. Callais decision — the gerrymandering / redistricting case. Here is 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education. I’d give the nod to the older one, which made better use of proper small caps, but the overall consistency is obvious.

Here is the 2026 edition of the Rules of the Supreme Court. Not only does the Court use Century Schoolbook for its own decisions, it requires submissions to the Court to use the same (p. 44):

The text of every booklet-format document, including any appendix thereto, shall be typeset in a Century family (e. g., Century Expanded, New Century Schoolbook, or Century Schoolbook) 12-point type with 2-point or more leading between lines. Quotations in excess of 50 words shall be indented. The typeface of footnotes shall be 10-point type with 2-point or more leading between lines. The text of the document must appear on both sides of the page.

Every booklet-format document shall be produced on paper that is opaque, unglazed, and not less than 60 pounds in weight, and shall have margins of at least three-fourths of an inch on all sides. The text field, including footnotes, may not exceed 4⅛ by 7⅛ inches.

Why the extra one-eighths of an inch instead of just 4 × 7? I don’t know. But 4⅛ × 7⅛ is exactly the size of the text field in the court’s own decisions.

Now compare the current 2026 rulebook to this edition printed in 1910 (with rules adopted in 1884). The consistency is striking — but, once again, the older version makes better use of small caps and just has a bit more vim and vigor to it. Just look at page 44, for example. It’s perfect. The current Court’s document formatters should aspire only to more closely ape the confidence and sturdiness of this older one. A century from now, U.S. Supreme Court decisions should look as similar to today’s as today’s do to those from a century ago.

The various circuit courts using lesser typefaces, looser margins, and lazier formatting should follow the Fifth’s lead and get their shit together. Tuck your shirt in, comb your hair, straighten your tie, and pop a mint in your mouth. If you’re a United States federal court, your typographic style should reflect that.

Back in 2020, Butterick took a well-deserved victory lap when the Fifth Circuit adopted Equity.¹ He quoted Fifth Circuit Judge Don Willett, a typography fan who spearheaded the restyling project, on its rationale. Willett wrote:

[Why] did the circuit devote finite judicial energy to swapping typefaces and widening margins? Simple answer: Our job is not just to present clear opinions, but to present our opinions clearly. Getting the law right is, of course, our tip-top priority. Nothing matters more. ... But good enough is never good enough. Our work is consequential, impacting the lives and livelihoods of real people walloped by real problems in the real world. The stakes are high, and we must present our best opinion, not merely a passable one. And that presentation begins before the first word is ever read.

Much more recently, I quizzed Ternus and global marketing head Greg Joswiak about Apple’s future, specifically its plans to get ahead of the AI transformation. Ternus acknowledged that AI is “an immense kind of inflection point,” but couched it as one of many leaps that Apple has navigated. Each hit product — the Apple II, the Mac, iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone, iPad — piggybacked on a previous product. “We never think about shipping a technology,” he said. “We want to ship amazing products, features, and experiences, and we don’t want our customers to think about what [underlying] technology makes it possible. That’s the way we think about AI.”

That’s fine, but I look back to the mid-2000s when everybody was waiting for Apple to come out with a phone. When Jobs finally delivered in January 2007, the product defined the mobile era. It’s a big ask for Ternus to do something similar for the AI age — but it’s an opportunity that must be seized. AI threatens to disrupt the entire iPhone ecosystem. By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for that,” may be replaced by “Let the agent do that.”

I’m a huge longtime Steven Levy fan, but this is nonsense. It’s hard to read this and not worry that he too has lost his mind to the AI snake-oil hypesters. What Ternus told him is exactly right. The Apple way is never to ship a technology. The iPod wasn’t about MP3 files. It wasn’t about 1.8-inch hard drives. It was about music. The iPhone did define the mobile era (which we’re still very much in), but Apple doesn’t need to capitalize on every single market the mobile era opened up. Social media is a defining component of the mobile era. It comprises the entirety of Meta’s value and a sizable slice of Google’s (via YouTube). Apple doesn’t have a social network business. It’s fine — because the way people consume and create social media is using their phones.

Does AI “threaten to disrupt the entire iPhone ecosystem”? It’s possible, but it doesn’t seem nearly as likely to me as Levy asserts. Changing the iPhone ecosystem? Sure — that’s already true. Obviating the iPhone ecosystem? I don’t see it. Levy’s argument reminds me of the hype around “the cloud” when that first became a term. It’s so meaningless when used broadly (e.g. “Everything will soon be in the cloud”) that it could mean anything. It’s step #2 in the gnomes-stealing-underpants master plan.

The idea that AI agents “will have already figured out where [we] need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request” strikes me as pure fever dream high-on-the-hype fantasy. I’m just going to step outside a restaurant when I’m done eating a meal and a ride-share is going to be there, waiting for me, without my having hailed it? Every time? And I’m going to find this pleasing, not creepy? And ride-share drivers are going to respond to all these requests, because the requests will never be wrong? And this is going to happen, somehow, without my carrying a phone with me? And this is going to happen in the next four years? I don’t think I’d want this even if it were plausible, but it doesn’t sound plausible.

Actual products have to be real. Actual experiences have to rely on actual products. How exactly in Levy’s end-of-this-decade scenario will we tell our “always-on AI agent” to get us home? What microphone is listening to the command? What speaker is telling us the request was understood and acted upon? What screen do we look at to see how far away the hailed car is? I’d bet a pretty large sum of money that in 2030, when someone hails a ride-share vehicle to take them home, the most common product they’ll use to do that will be their phone. Whether they’re doing it via a verbal command issued to an “always-on AI agent” or good old tapping and swiping, it’ll be a phone.

If you think that people will buy smaller devices to replace their phones, and use those to talk to “always-on AI agents” instead, you have to answer some questions. What company is the best in the world at making smaller-than-phone personal computing devices? What device will people use as their camera? What device will people use as their screen, for watching videos, playing games, texting, and (one hopes) reading? My answers to those three questions: Apple, phone, phone. Why would smaller devices — you know, like watches, earbuds, and, say, glasses — work independently rather than pair with the phone that you’re almost certainly still going to be carrying with you?

Only a fool would argue that Apple can stand on the sidelines and ignore AI. It’s very different from, say, social media that way. Social media doesn’t pervade everything in technology. You can ignore social media as a user. (And you’re probably more productive, and happier, if you do.) A company can eschew social media as a business. AI, on the other hand, is pervasive. It can’t be ignored. But it’s just technology.

Wireless networking is pervasive too. But Apple doesn’t have “a killer wireless networking product”.¹ Wireless networking simply pervades everything Apple makes. I’m hard pressed to think of a single product Apple makes that doesn’t use some combination of Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth, and proprietary wireless protocols. There was a time, not too long ago, when Apple didn’t make a single product with wireless connectivity. Now it’s pervasive in all their devices. That’s more what AI is going to be like. There’s not going to be one “killer AI device”. Everything is going to be an AI device, to some extent, just like how everything today is a wireless connectivity device, to some extent.

Postscript: “Existing Stakeholders Have a Say in the Future”.