By John Gruber

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Thursday, 1 October 2026

Yankees Sweep Boston in Two Games, by Combined Score of 18-2 ★

In the 6th inning last night the Yankees were only ahead 2-0, and Red Sox first baseman and all-around jackass Willson Contreras hit a home run, closing it to 2-1. Contreras decided to walk around the bases. The baseball gods do not look kindly upon that sort of ostentatiously belligerent showboatery. (Especially when your team is still losing.) Contreras circled the bags after his dinger like a rooster letting you know he just banged a few hens — but at a slower pace.

In the next inning, Contreras wasn’t paying attention and his laziness allowed a Yankee to reach base after striking out on a wild pitch. That started the rally that resulted in the blowout final score.

Wednesday, 30 September 2026

Gurman Reports Apple Is Launching New ‘Smart Home’ Products on October 13 ★

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (gift link):

Apple Inc. plans to make its long-delayed push into the smart-home market on Oct. 13, marking a critical product expansion for the company under new Chief Executive Officer John Ternus. At the center of the strategy is a smart-home hub code-named J490, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple also plans to announce the first update to the HomePod mini since that device’s 2020 debut and its first new TV set-top box since 2022. [...]

The home hub will take the form of a roughly 6-inch square display, with versions that can be mounted on a wall or placed on a countertop, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the products haven’t been announced. [...]

Because the device is intended to remain stationary, it has a single FaceTime camera on the front and no rear camera. The product has microphones and speakers in its connected base. The hub is about as thick as an iPhone, and its display is surrounded by a quarter-inch, black bezel reminiscent of older iPads. It has rounded corners and no sharp edges. The device lacks a battery, so it has to be plugged in at all times, and there are no volume or power buttons.

The product comes in Apple’s standard gray aluminum finish and includes a USB-C port for power. The screen sits above a metal, round base with multiple rings of perforated speaker holes and connects to it through a polished metal arm. Users can manually tilt the display forward or backward. And the base has a rubberized bottom to help it stay on a table.

If you think that sounds like the beloved but short-lived “sunflower” iMac G4 from 2002, that’s exactly what Gurman says it resembles. As is so often the case, Gurman seems to know many details about the device, but yet doesn’t know its name, or price. Presumably the speakers are good enough to serve by themselves, but how good are they? Can they be paired with HomePods to create stereo pairs?

The hub’s defining feature will be its ability to serve multiple members of a household. It is designed to recognize who is speaking to it or approaching it, and then display personalized content and provide answers based on that person’s data and accounts. When a user walks up, for example, the device will show that person’s contacts, messages, calendar appointments, notes and preferred app layout. The interface can then change automatically when another recognized household member approaches. It will also have a mode for visitors that hides personal information.

The device identifies users by their voices or through a facial-recognition system, though the latter is less reliable than Face ID on the iPhone. Users can require secondary authentication through an iPhone if they don’t want to rely solely on voice or facial recognition. The iPhone also serves as a fallback when the hub cannot identify someone correctly.

Given that Apple Watch is used as an identifier to unlock your Mac (and, says Apple, iPhone Duo), it would make sense if that worked with this device too.

Anthropic’s IPO Prospectus Is a Fucking Doozy ★

Echo Wang, reporting for Reuters yesterday:

Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than ​industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.

This is a strong clear lede, but even so it falls short of expressing the true magnitude of what Anthropic represents. To wit, not that “AI” as a field will prove more profoundly transformational than industrialization, electricity, and the Internet, but that Anthropic alone will. This is not an IPO that makes sense if you consider Anthropic one among peers, even a short list placing them alongside just (say) OpenAI, Google, and Meta. It only makes sense if you believe Anthropic is on the cusp of winning a race to create a godlike super intelligence, and that first godlike super intelligence will take over the world.

You know, something exactly akin to the “rapture” events that religious cultists believe are coming.

But the cost to get there will be staggering. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years, according to the prospectus.

If you believe that they’re profitable now you’re as crazy as they are. They’ll seed stories to the press that they’re now profitable, using accounting methods they won’t define (and wouldn’t pass muster for a public company) but won’t make such claims in writing.

The prospectus details how the company has grown sharply in the last year — while also posting wider losses. Revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, even as the company lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding writedowns of various liabilities mostly tied to previous fundraising, according to the documents, reported here for the first time. [...]

Anthropic said nearly a quarter of its revenue came from two customers last year, and as part of its risk factors, warned that many of its largest clients were not locked into long-term contracts and could cut or stop spending.

I don’t think this is complicated. Their revenue is accelerating rapidly because they’re selling compute at a loss. They spent $13 billion to make $5 billion last year. Their revenue is growing rapidly, yes, but their costs are growing even faster. They’re already on the hook for half a trillion dollars on cloud computing expansion but their revenue is precariously reliant on a few big-spending whales who aren’t under contract, and commodity open source models are rapidly closing the gap. If Anthropic is losing a fortune now with $13 billion in costs how are they going to break even spending $100+ billion per year? Don’t worry, their godlike AI will figure that out?

Gary Marcus:

Anthropic’s proposed valuation is easily calculated, as -50 times 2025 losses.

The more they lose, the more they win!

Tuesday, 29 September 2026

Follow-Up on my Spitballed Predictions for Apple’s October ★

Regarding my post yesterday speculating on how Apple’s October — seemingly set to be a big one — might play out, a friend asked if any or all of the new stuff might be released through Apple Newsroom announcements only. Good question. Let’s run through the rumored new hardware products:

• Apple TV hardware: I’d love to say no, but the answer is yes. I could see this coming out as a simple announcement with new specs. I really want to see Apple double-down in this space, reinvigorate it. I think watching TV on Apple TV hardware is by far the best experience out there. Yet its market share is very low. Apple TV is to the living room today what the Mac was to desktop computing in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Everyone sees it as too expensive and they have no idea why they’d actually be happier if they had one. So I hope Apple makes it a big part of a keynote/event, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
• iPad Mini: Yes, could be just a press release.
• HomePod Mini: Yes, could be just a press release.
• HomePod-type thing with a screen (maybe they will just call it “HomePad”?): No way — if this is coming, it has to be unveiled with a keynote video and some sort of media event with hands-on demos. And if they’re going to have some sort of event/show for this, they might as well unveil the above things there too.
• MacBooks with OLED touchscreens: No way could this be released only with a press release.
• M6 iMacs: Could be just a press release, but if they’re going to have some sort of event/show for the touchscreen MacBooks, why not include these at the start of that?

Destroy Any Website ★

Desktop only, and you definitely want sound on. (Update: Now works great on mobile devices, too!)

With things like this I always start with Kottke.org. No idea why, because it’s quite possibly the last site on the entire web I’d want to see actually destroyed. (Well, second-to-last.)

Monday, 28 September 2026

Bastardica ★

“A foundry for bastard web fonts.” The default is a version of Times New Roman but every 7th glyph is replaced with one from Arial, but you can dial up whatever bastardization you want.

This is why I’m not at all worried about AI destroying the world. Look at the horrible things human beings have made.

‘When Did Google Get So F-Ing Weird?’ ★

Sancho Panza:

I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks.

Kagi, the search engine I’ve been using for a few years now, gave me the exact sort of results to Panza’s query that he was looking for.

Joanna Stern Pokes the Pickle ★

If anyone could devise a funny way to measure battery life, it’s her.

‘Donald Decodes’ Interview Craig Federighi Regarding the iPhone Duo ★

Apple executives seemingly did very few interviews after the iPhone event three weeks ago. The best, perhaps by far, is this 11-minute video with Craig Federighi by “Donald Decodes”, a Chinese language creator. His YouTube account only has 1,100 followers (and only had 500 at the time of the video) and only one other video — presumably he’s got a big following in China. Very insightful questions about the Duo user interface — and Federighi gives very thoughtful answers. The question (and answer) about “back” swiping really gets to the heart of what makes iOS so much more cohesively designed than Android, spatially.

Why Stolen Device Protection Makes Passwords Safer ★

Glenn Fleishman:

Leaving Stolen Device Protection enabled does mean that you may have to wait an hour in some scenarios to manage aspects of your Apple Account, make changes to Face ID or Touch ID, change your device passcode, and a few other actions. But this minor inconvenience might assuage the kinds of concerns that Scott wrote in about, and make you more comfortable that your big basket of secret eggs won’t scramble.

I put off enabling Stolen Device Protection for a while after it came out, because I’m stubborn and trust myself to a degree that’s probably irrational. But when it became the default I enabled it, and haven’t once regretted it.

Jeremy Stern’s Profile of Mark Zuckerberg for Colossus ★

Jeremy Stern, in a massive and massively good profile of Mark Zuckerberg for Colossus:

Unsure of my own ability to evaluate such things, I leave Meta HQ and spend another few days in Palo Alto and San Francisco ahead of my interview with Zuckerberg, seeking out a number of MSL’s competitors and investors who agree to speak to me on background. Many of them take pleasure in what they describe as the organizational “mess” of MSL, in the people there allegedly being motivated more by money than by true belief, and in Zuckerberg as a maker of boredom-relief apps and targeted advertising, not of godlike intelligence or the singularity.

I’m inclined toward sympathy with much of what they say, though I am also irritated and want to shove them in a locker. While I am not the first to chafe at their combination of messianism, contempt for ordinary consumers, and denial that they, too, are rapacious capitalists, I am apparently the first to ask them to steelman the outcome in which Zuckerberg, in light of his long history, survives and expands. Which turns out to be simple:

AI is not, in fact, God. Instead, it does math and solves a limited set of problems humans face, and is otherwise simply useful and cool. Anthropic, and to a lesser extent OpenAI, have trouble ever accepting this fact. Zuckerberg does not. He has not spent a decade comparing his company to the Manhattan Project, and thus he is not above pushing the frontier of AI to help people book airline tickets, make dinner reservations, and edit photos. He will use it to drive down the cost of serving his users to zero, and to drive up his revenue by improving ads. He will use cash from the ad business — and his ownership of data centers, chips, and other infrastructure that Anthropic and OpenAI have to pay to rent — to undercut them on price. The potential install base for his AI is 3.6 billion people, who don’t care whether a given model is six months behind the frontier.

If AI commoditizes, then Anthropic and OpenAI go to zero, and value accrues instead at the complements Meta already dominates, like distribution, attention, personalization, and commerce. If it doesn’t commoditize, then at least he is not his competitors’ prisoner the way he’s been with Apple, and all he has to do is remain within six months of the frontier, which he’s already close to. Heads, he wins; tails, he wins.

Until last week I’d somehow never heard of Stern and never heard of Colossus (of which Stern is editor-in-chief). But on Thursday Ben Thompson published an interview with Stern at Stratechery — in the wake of this astonishingly well-written, insightful, and dare I say fair 15,000-word profile of Zuckerberg. It’s incomprehensible to me that heretofore I was unaware of Stern’s work or Colossus’s existence.

There is so much of the piece that I do not want to spoil, but I very much want to talk about. (Tummy drums!) I quoted the bit above simply because that third paragraph summarizes my own take on AI so well — along with my take on what is profoundly wrong with Anthropic in particular, and OpenAI to some degree.

Whatever your expectations are for a “long profile of Mark Zuckerberg”, Stern’s piece will surprise and delight you.

Muse, Instagram, and VLC Lookalike Rip-Offs in the Mac App Store ★

Jeff Johnson:

In other words, Muse AI is a blatant copy of Muse from Meta, the latter of which is currently the #1 iOS App Store download in the United States. I don’t know where Muse AI ranks in the iOS App Store, but I do know that it’s currently the #20 Mac App Store download in the US.

It wasn’t languishing in obscurity — it had risen to #20 in the Mac App Store. A lot of Mac users are very confused when they’re told that Mac apps are available but they’re not in the Mac App Store, so it’s a rife opportunity for scammers. In the same post Johnson also documents an app named “App for Instagram º” and another named “Video Player for VLC”, both of which use rip-off icons in addition to their rip-off names. “Muse AI” is now gone, but “App for Instagram °” and “Video Player for VLC” are both still there.

I do wonder what the guy who made Muse AI was thinking. How long did he think he was going to get away with this?

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Monday, 28 September 2026

Duo-Man ★

Vidit Bhargava (developer of LookUp and Movie Buzz):

Duo-Man offers the complete walkman experience on the iPhone Duo. Open the Duo to pick and “insert” the cassette, Close the Duo to start listening.

Yes, I actually recorded the button clicks and static noise from a real Walkman!

More like this, please.

Sunday, 27 September 2026

Mux: Turn Your Video Into Context ★

My thanks to Mux for sponsoring last week at DF. Video isn’t just something to stream; it’s structured data you build with.

Mux Robots — hosted AI workflows — turns video into context. Generate chapters, find key moments, translate audio, and more, through one API call, with no model hosting to maintain. Each workflow is evaluated against real video, not generic benchmarks. Configure the workflows once, and every new upload runs automatically.

Mux is video infrastructure trusted by Patreon, Substack, and Perplexity. Start building for free. Use code FIREBALL for an extra $50 credit.

Katie Notopoulos on Alexandr Wang’s ‘Faux-Hallmark Pap’ ★

Katie Notopoulos, in a short tweet thread regarding Alexandr Wang’s “Why We’re Building Muse” essay:

This makes me feel insane! This is faux-hallmark pap and if you believe for 1 sec that he cares about helping people “spending more time with family” or “opening a bakery” you don’t need to wait for AI to kill us; you’re stupid enough to drown from looking up at the rain.

My take is much closer to Notopoulos’s than to Manton Reece’s. I think it’s fascinating that Wang’s essay doesn’t sound at all like the sterile neutered voice of a Meta executive. I think it’s his voice, and he really wrote it. I just think the sentiment he’s expressing is creepy.

Wang wrote that Muse “Clears the way and solves all the problems it can until the human part, the wanting and the dreaming, is all that’s left.” That’s dystopic, not utopic. It’s the actual creation and doing of things that makes life worthwhile — not just wanting and dreaming about it.

Wang’s premise only reaffirms my longstanding hunch that Zuckerberg sees Buy n Large as the good guys in Wall-E.

Saturday, 26 September 2026

Reelizer Returns ★

Back in 2011 I linked to Reelizer, a splendid archive of movie posters curated by Roger Erik Tinch. Reelizer went away for a few years, but Tinch has brought it back, seemingly better than ever. Huzzah.

Alexandr Wang: ‘Why I’m Building Muse’ ★

Alexandr Wang, blogging on X:

Now imagine every person on earth with a second mind beyond their own. A general manager whose whole job is to find out what you want and make sure it happens. Someone that hears the half-sentence, “I feel like there’s something more I could be doing,” and helps fill in the blanks. This might not be a genie in a bottle, but it can be someone that says, “This is the thing you’ve been dreaming of your whole life. Let’s go get it. Here’s how.” And then builds a plan. Sends the email. Makes the phone call. Finds the funding. Keeps you on schedule. Clears the way and solves all the problems it can until the human part, the wanting and the dreaming, is all that’s left.

Via Manton Reece, who writes:

This is a mission statement. It’s ambitious and clear. Compared to Meta’s usual “connecting people” pitch — which we just translate to “scale to everyone and serve ads” — this new statement from Alexandr feels almost shockingly personal and new.

Apple’s Other Recent ‘Duo’ ★

I keep mentioning Apple’s 1992 groundbreaking PowerBook Duo series as a precedent for the iPhone Duo’s name. But of course in 2020, Apple released the MagSafe Duo Charger, a wonderful Lightning peripheral for charging an iPhone and Apple Watch at the same time. It even folded.

A brief note on the PowerBook Duo, while I’m at it. I got an email this month from Dave Rothschild, a now-retired former Apple employee who helped spearhead that project, and he emphasized that the internal motto was always “Best of Both Worlds”, abbreviated internally to just “BOBW”. At the time, laptops were just profoundly less powerful than desktop computers, but desktop computers of course were the opposite of “portable”. The Macintosh Duo was a terrific success, because it really did achieve that “best of both worlds” experience. Here’s a 2015 retrospective on the PowerBook Duo by Christopher Phin that captures and illustrates just how groundbreaking it was.

BOBW is exactly what the iPhone Duo needs to be. It needs to be a great iPhone on the outside, and a great mini tablet on the inside.

Bonus link: Rothschild’s daughter Gabby made a nice “This is not Apple’s first Duo” video, including footage of her dad doing the initial on-stage demo back in 1992.

International Standard Paper Sizes ★

Markus Kuhn:

In the ISO paper size system, the height-to-width ratio of all pages is the square root of two (1.4142 : 1). In other words, the width and the height of a page relate to each other like the side and the diagonal of a square. This aspect ratio is especially convenient for a paper size. If you put two such pages next to each other, or equivalently cut one parallel to its shorter side into two equal pieces, then the resulting page will have again the same width/height ratio.

Same principle as using the square root of 2 to achieve a very similar aspect ratio on both the iPhone Duo’s inner and outer displays. With the international paper system, you can do things like scale up 2× or scale down 0.5× without changing the relative margins. E.g. print or photocopy at 50 percent to get two virtual pages per printed page of output. It’s an elegant system.

Microsoft Took the ‘Copilot+ PC’ Brand Out Behind the Shed ★

Zac Bowden, Windows Central:

In 2024, Microsoft and Qualcomm kicked off a new category of Windows hardware it called “Copilot+ PCs” that set the baseline for a new wave of AI-first computers, and launched with exclusive features that would not be made available on PCs that didn’t meet a new set of system requirements.

The launch didn’t go smoothly. [...]

I’ve noticed that none of the Surface PCs launched in 2026 include the Copilot+ PC moniker in their product names, unlike the Surface PCs that launched in 2025 and before. Now, you have to go digging to find any mention of Copilot+ compatibility in specification sheets.

Microsoft’s had to dig a lot of holes in the ground behind that shed over the years. The lesson here is that good devices are just good devices. A good PC is going to be a good PC for AI too. Wasting time with special branding is a distraction from the core task of just making the devices good.

The Talk Show: ‘I’m Thinking X, Not X’ ★

Andru Edwards returns to the show to discuss Apple’s big September event and their new products: the iPhones 18 Pro and Duo, AirPods 5, and Apple Watch Series 12/Ultra 4.

Sponsored by:

• Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year, while supplies last, with code talkshow50off.
• Notion: The collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side, with a developer platform teams can build on.

Friday, 25 September 2026

Mr. Choyka Is Apparently Doing Well ★

A reader asked if this Gary Choyka who hit two holes-in-one in the same round of golf back in 2020 is the same Gary Choyka who was my history teacher 30+ years ago. Indeed it is. He looks good. (He was a hell of a basketball player too.)

Stock UI in MacOS 27 Eschews Clarity ★

“Thibault”, in post on Mastodon responding to Brent Simmons’s “stock Mac UI” post that I just linked to:

It reminded me of my own explorations with the macOS design language, especially the modern title/toolbar which I believe is one of the most foundational design regression on the platform.

I played with the idea of redesigning the Finder with the original hierarchy but keeping the current Liquid Glass styling. Though it’s still far from what I’d like to see on my Mac, I thought I’d share.

Here’s his subtle mockup:

The changes in Thibault’s redesign, if you describe them verbally, sound minor. But looking at the differences feels like a huge — and much needed — breath of fresh air. It relaxes my nervous system to see obvious differentiation for window chrome at the top. The hierarchy is clear: this area is the window, this area is the content of the window.

Apple’s MacOS 27 Golden Gate stock UI deliberately does away with that differentiation, for no good reason. I crave clarity, and Apple’s current MacOS design language rejects clarity. Like: where exactly can you click to drag a window around? That ought to be obvious; instead it’s literally a guessing game. And Thibault’s simple example also shows that the problem has nothing to do with “Liquid Glass” controls.

Brent Simmons on ‘Stock’ Mac UI ★

Brent Simmons:

To recap: the reasons for using stock Mac UI are 1) user familiarity, which we’ve known for a while just isn’t a thing, and 2) hoping to be able to expend less developer effort, which we’ve seen can work against you.

But there’s another reason: the stock Mac UI is designed by Apple, the best designers in the world, and do you really think you can do better? Really?

The app world is full of people who think they’re better and they’re really, really, really not.

Well, I still think Apple has the best collection of UI designers in the world, but, for whatever reasons, the guidance from above on how the Mac UI should look is missing the mark. I’m not blaming the people doing the work — they’re doing great work with the direction they’re given.

So this — bad direction — is where the secret third reason falls down. And we’re left with no real reason to stick with stock Mac UI (except for wanting approval from longtime Mac people like me, and you really shouldn’t care about that at all).

I was hesitant to quote anything from Simmons’s post, because you really ought to read the whole thing. (I’ve always loved the way Brent writes.) But I really like his emphasis throughout the piece on the term “stock Mac UI”. Debating the nuances of what it means for software to be “Mac-like” is one of the through lines of Daring Fireball since the very beginning. It doesn’t mean just one thing, and it doesn’t encompass just a few things. It’s a lot of things. But that makes it susceptible to picking and choosing — what one considers “Mac-like” might just be what one personally prefers.

But using the stock Mac UI — or building your custom UI atop (or in OOP terms, subclassing) stock Mac UI controls — is so thoroughly agreed-upon as a fundamental aspect of Mac-like-ness that it’s seldom even discussed. This relatively short post from Simmons bursts that bubble — or if you’ll permit a grosser but perhaps more apt metaphor, lances that boil. The emperor has no clothes, and MacOS’s stock UI is bad. It’s that simple.

At the end of the post Simmons includes two screenshots of NetNewsWire after a day of noodling where he removed the stock window chrome and toolbar (the venerable NSToolbar, perhaps the stockiest of stock UI elements) and replaced them with custom controls. If you told me 10 or 20 years ago that Brent Simmons spent a day replacing NSToolbar in NetNewsWire just to see what it looked like, I’d have called him on the phone to see if he was OK.

But today, after the last few years of Apple losing the plot with the Mac user interface, I look at these two screenshots and my first thought isn’t that they look old-school. It’s simply that they look refreshingly Mac-like. Understated, humble, and obvious. Not nostalgic. Just ... good. And more Mac-like than the actual current version of NetNewsWire, which thoroughly embraces the stock Mac UI from Apple.

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Friday, 25 September 2026

Regarding the Provenance of Charm Within Meta ★

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg Wednesday, after Meta’s 2026 Connect keynote (gift link):

Meta Platforms Inc. unveiled a palm-sized, dedicated gadget for using Muse, the company’s popular new artificial intelligence assistant, pushing deeper into the AI devices market with a surprise announcement.

The product, unveiled on stage by Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, was born out of the company’s new design lab led by former Apple Inc. interface design chief Alan Dye and its Superintelligence AI group. [...]

Dye, the former Apple design executive, and Billy Sorrentino, one of his top deputies at the iPhone maker, were two of the driving forces behind the project and the creation of the Muse character-based interface, Bosworth said.

Meta recruited the executives at the end of 2025, forcing Apple to shake up its own design team to fill the void left by their absence. Dye and Sorrentino hired a slew of other designers from Apple as well, and they contributed to Muse Charm as well as the interface of its Muse smartphone apps, Bosworth said.

On today’s episode of Dithering (which you should subscribe to), Ben Thompson dropped a juicy tidbit about this (starting around 5m:15s):

Thompson: By the way, do you want to hear some gossip about this?

Gruber: Yeah, of course!

Thompson: Well, Mark Gurman has a piece crediting Alan Dye. Utter and complete theft of credit is what I’m hearing. Alan Dye doing Alan Dye things.

Muse Looks Cute, but Looks Are Deceiving ★

Jason Aten, in a good follow-up to his previous column at Inc. (the one where he described how Muse, running on his Mac, read his Messages database):

The entire reason Muse is interesting is that it isn’t just a chatbot, but can actually do things for you. But that promise also comes with a pretty high bar of responsibility. If your goal is to put a powerful AI agent on millions of devices, you have to be incredibly clear about what’s happening, and what people are agreeing to.

If your primary audience does not understand what Full Disk Access means, you should not surprise them with “I’m reading your text messages.” It’s unreasonable to expect them to learn about things like virtual machines, permission architectures, macOS TCC, Sentinel agents, or database synchronization in order to understand what the thing is doing or what is happening with their personal information.

Having an agent installed on people’s computers that appears overeager to access their information or take action on their behalf isn’t helpful. It’s terrifying.

Aten makes some good points about the inherent tension between Muse — especially in the context of running on your Mac desktop — being powerful cutting-edge technology yet being presented by Meta in an extremely consumer-friendly package. Muse is getting a lot of attention — including mine — because it’s both groundbreaking technically (each user gets their own entire persistent Linux VM running in Meta’s cloud) and because it’s packaged in an easy-to-install easy-to-use way. It’s literally presented as a cute mascot. It’s the first consumer-accessible agentic AI system, and Meta has truly done an amazing job with that. But it’s a genuinely open question whether consumers have any understanding what this means. If you buy a power saw that can cut your fingers off, you are almost certainly aware that you are buying a power saw that can sever your fingers. You may or may not choose to use it with appropriate carefulness. But you know just by looking at it that a power saw (or a nail gun, or a chef’s knife, or a hammer, or any other powerful tool) is dangerous. I don’t think people realize how powerful — and thus dangerous — Muse is, especially if it’s running on your Mac.

I Was Not Blown Away by Eli Tan’s ‘I Was Blown Away’ Review of Meta Muse ★

Eli Tan, writing for The New York Times, “I Gave My Life Over to Meta’s A.I. Agent and Was Blown Away” (gift link):

For one final task, I asked Wren for a good way to spend that $44.99 it had saved me. At this point, it knew my life pretty well. I thought it might suggest something altruistic, like donating the money to charity or buying flowers for my girlfriend, who was recovering from surgery.

Instead, it suggested something even better — buying bowls from Heath Ceramics, a local ceramics maker with a dedicated following, on Facebook Marketplace, one of my favorite pastimes.

Reading Tan’s “blown away” review (which words only appear in the headline, but it’s his byline under it) made me feel like I was on a hidden camera show. Like I’ve been told I’m about to be served some blow-you-away good coffee and what I’m tasting sure tastes like Folger’s fucking crystals. I’m not saying Muse isn’t capable of blow-you-away things, but I sure didn’t read any of them in Tan’s review. And then, at the end, it steers him toward buying something from ... Meta’s own Facebook Marketplace? And the reaction isn’t a hard eye roll?

I get the feeling that Tan believes he’s supposed to be impressed by Muse so he wrote a piece saying he was impressed even though he didn’t use it to do a single impressive thing. If Tan asked the new Siri AI for a recommendation on what to do and it suggested he go to an Apple Store and buy new AirPods, would he not think that a bit cynical? Or if Alexa suggested that he should buy more Kindle books?

Here’s Rusty Foster, over at Today in Tabs:

Tan and Johnson both seem like they have totally ordinary middle class white collar 2026 American lives, so I don’t mean anything personal against them when I say these reviews both make their authors sound like the biggest imaginable losers. You can’t call a guy to pick up a branch? Within two weeks? You can’t actually pick up a branch yourself with your own meat hands and throw it in the woods or something? What do you mean you had your robot shop for collectible ceramics? Is there any other part of collecting ceramics as a hobby besides shopping for them? Is your hobby now “having bowls?” Hi, I’m Eli Tan, writer for the New York Times. In my leisure time I enjoy owning dishes.

Thursday, 24 September 2026

Victoria Song on Meta Muse’s Cuteness ★

Victoria Song, in her Optimizer column/newsletter for The Verge:

I’ve been aggressively avoiding Muse since it launched a few weeks ago. Sure, some of that is because I was busy testing other devices. But the number-one reason why is that I am horribly vulnerable when faced with extreme cuteness.

Alas, at Meta Connect, I couldn’t escape this pink-cheeked fella with his plush ivory fur, and so I finally downloaded the app once I returned to my hotel room. He was plastered on every screen during the keynote. My eye twitched with maximum cute aggression when Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth showed us his Muse agent Cooper. The duderino was dressed in a lil pilot outfit because he’s Boz’s test pilot. My face scrunched with rage when Cooper picked up his pudgy round arms to wave. It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen at a tech keynote. The tiny demon in my head thought to itself, “I WANT TO SQUISH ITS LITTLE FACE.” [...]

Most people I know would say that Meta stuffing an AI agent into everything and anything feels sinister. Now look at Jolly’s little smile. Tell me it doesn’t make the corners of your mouth twitch slightly upward. If you honestly say no, you’re stronger than I am.

What attracted Song to Muse is what has, to be honest, turned me off. I don’t think it’s because I’m stronger than Song. I just think it’s weird that Muse wants me to give it a name and design a cartoon mascot for it. My impression of Muse isn’t that it’s even vaguely cute. I’m not trying to be obtuse here. I see that it’s supposed to be cute. I can see why some people see it as cute in the way it’s clearly intended to be cute. But I just see it as phony. And I despise phoniness as much as Holden Caulfield did.

My wife and son both love cilantro. I can’t stand it. I’m one of those people who thinks it tastes not just like soap, but soap that I’d regret washing my hands with because if I did I’d hate how my hands smell and I’d want to find another sink with different soap to scrub that off. I don’t have better taste than my wife or son. (My wife says quite the opposite.) It just registers differently for me.

Muse’s cutesy appearance and tone hits my mind like cilantro hits my tongue. I want my humans and animals warm, and my computers cold. Fun? Sure! But not cute. That’s a fine line between fun and cute, but I know it when I see it, just as surely as I know when something has cilantro in it.

Joanna Stern Interviews Mark Zuckerberg ★

Great interview from Stern, as usual, seemingly conducted on the old set of Three’s Company. She opened by asking if AI is going to wipe out humanity, and I think Zuck whiffed by not simply laughing and saying no. She also directly asked his thoughts on people calling Meta Glasses “pervert glasses”.

Regarding the shift from “the metaverse” to AI, Zuckerberg likened it to Apple having started work on touchscreen tablets and then pivoting to turn the technology into the iPhone first. His point being that it’s not that iPads weren’t a big successful idea, but they’re not as big as phones.

There are four big players in consumer AI: Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. I don’t think Zuckerberg mentioned any of the others by name — neither in his Meta Connect keynote, nor in this interview with Stern. But much of what he unveiled and explained, in both, makes the case for Meta as the leader in this space. Compared to Google, Meta is highly focused and Google is seemingly utterly unfocused. Focus matters when you’re trying to ship something new while exploring uncharted territory. Compared to OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta has consumer-product chops. If there’s no moat around the AI model technology — and I’m ever more convinced there is not — it’ll be the products AI is wrapped into that matter.

Meta Connect Keynote 2026 ★

Meta’s annual keynote yesterday was a tight 55-minute live event held on their campus in Menlo Park. I watched the whole thing this morning, before recording tomorrow’s episode of Dithering. (Which you should subscribe to.)

It was a good keynote. Consumer products announced:

• Third-generation Meta Glasses with cameras.

• A new glasses product: Ray-Ban Meta Audio. These are audio-only smart glasses, with microphones and speakers, but no camera. Zuckerberg pitched them as being less expensive, having longer battery life, and looking much more like regular glasses. All of those things are true, but he deftly avoided the privacy backlash against glasses with cameras. They’re not that much less expensive than the camera models, starting at $350.

• Meta VR Glasses. Slogan: “The weight is over.” Some similarities to Vision Pro: use cases include immersive movies and sports, virtual displays for computing, and gaming; the computer is a thick phone-sized puck connected to the glasses via a cable. Some significant differences from Vision Pro: Meta VR Glasses only weigh 100g; Vision Pro weighs 750–800g. It’s almost an order of magnitude difference by weight. Also: these are only going to cost $1,300. Not out yet, coming in “spring”. I used to think I’d at least use my Vision Pro when I fly, but I haven’t taken it with me on a flight in two years. It’s too big and too heavy — a small piece of carry-on luggage unto itself. By dint of their weight alone, Meta VR Glasses seem far more comfortable, and also far more portable. They look a lot more like regular sunglasses than Vision Pro (or Meta’s own Quest goggles) — but they definitely don’t look like regular sunglasses.

• Meta Charm. A pendant/stopwatch-sized thing with a screen and fingerprint reader, that serves as a dedicated device for interacting with Muse. Will supposedly have 5G cellular connectivity in addition to Wi-Fi, but it’s not a phone. Vaporware at the moment but supposedly shipping by December. No price given. My daily “World in Brief” newsletter from The Economist described Charm thus: “Imagine a tiny smartphone that can’t do 95% of the things that the one in your pocket can.”

The star of the show wasn’t any of the hardware products but Meta Muse. Muse is the through line for Meta this year. If there’s one thing I think Zuckerberg did wrong in the keynote, it’s that he didn’t explain where Muse stands compared to Meta AI. I’m pretty sure that the answer is that Muse, as an AI agent, is a superset of Meta AI, a mere chatbot. If you use Muse, you should have no reason to use Meta AI; if you use Meta AI, Zuckerberg should have encouraged you to upgrade to Muse. I think that’s the gist. But it would have been good for Zuckerberg to explain it.

‘Apple Opens Apple Music Hall, a State-of-the-Art Live Music Venue in London’ ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced the opening of Apple Music Hall, a brand-new state-of-the-art live music venue in London’s storied Battersea Power Station, designed to connect artists and fans through bespoke, intimate performances unlike anywhere else.

Apple might be the most interesting architecture company in the world this century. They have a core look and feel they apply to their own facilities built from the ground up (e.g., Apple Park, certain flagship retail stores), but they also have tremendous respect for historic buildings they take over.

The balconies in Apple Music Hall are bronze, but the lighting (at least in Apple’s photos) is so warm that the balconies look a little like giant Mac Minis.

Ed Zitron’s AI Prediction Track Record ★

Dan Luu serves up some copiously documented claim chowder:

After this point, most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future. Note that I didn’t attempt to catalogue statements that are nonsensical or were simply factually incorrect statements at the time, such as his December 2024 claim that “Generative AI’s products have effectively been trapped in amber for over a year.” January 2026 claim that “[models are] basically the same as they were a year ago. They have the same efficacy”. Zitron has not only made forward-looking statements that AI capabilities will not improve, he’s also consistently made backwards-looking statements that capabilities have not improved which, while obviously false at the time, seem to play well to his base (along with his other false statements). If you connect all his statements together, it’s implied that AI had the same capabilities in January 2026 as they did in December 2023 (and if you connect later statements, it’s actually implied that capabilities in August 2026 are the same as in December 2023, though to be fair to Zitron he frequently contradicts himself and has also admitted to limited improvement in mid 2026).

Copland D11E4, Emulated in Your Browser ★

Michael Steil:

Apple’s ill-fated Copland operating system is notoriously hard to run on real hardware, and has not previously been available in emulation. Here is the last build, D11E4 from June 1996, in an improved DingusPPC.

Playing around with the GXSlidemaster app, I found a bug. The keyboard shortcut for File → Print One is ⌥⌘P, but the menu manager displays it as ⌘π (because Option-P is how you type a lowercase pi; add Shift to get an uppercase pi (∏)). I should file a Radar.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever used Copland before. It wasn’t just hard to run on real hardware, but hard to get. It’s fun but kind of gross to see it boot up spewing console detritus rendered in good old bitmapped Monaco 9 (inside windows — even as an early developer build Apple was still Apple). There’s really not much there there, though. The only work they’d accomplished was under the hood, and there’s seemingly nothing of actual interest in the user interface.

Wednesday, 23 September 2026

Changes to App Tracking Transparency in the E.U. ★

Apple Developer:

As part of agreements with select European competition authorities, Apple is introducing changes to its App Tracking Transparency framework in the European Union. Beginning with iOS 27.2 and iPadOS 27.2, developers will have the option to use an alternative version of the App Tracking Transparency system prompt in the EU. The requirements for when you must seek permission to track users will remain the same. Due to legal requirements, only the alternative version of the system prompt is available for apps distributed in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Romania.

In addition, for users in the European Union, you can reprompt [sic] a user via the App Tracking Transparency system prompt one year after the user’s previous choice in your app’s App Tracking Transparency system prompt, regardless of whether that choice was to accept or reject. A user cannot be re-prompted if they have disabled “Allow Apps to Request to Track” (renamed to “Allow Apps to Request to Link Your Activity Across Companies” in the EU) in their device’s Settings.

As Benjamin Mayo notes, “Allow Apps to Request to Link Your Activity Across Companies” is catchy.

The gist of this is that there are three constituent groups: Apple, users, and third-party developers. I’ve long argued that Apple prioritizes those groups in that order. What DMA/EU proponents have fooled themselves into believing is that the European Commission works to move users into, or at least closer to, the top spot. The truth is that they (and national regulatory authorities in Europe) work to move third-party developers and publishers into a more privileged position, at the expense of users’ privacy and experience. Users don’t want to be tracked without permission. Apple doesn’t want users to be tracked without their permission. But an awful lot of third-party developers and publishers want to track users without their permission or knowledge.

Just getting the term changed from “tracking” (one word, easily understood) to “linking your activity across companies” (five words, obfuscated) tells you all you need to know.

See also: Nick Heer has a different take at Pixel Envy.

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Wednesday, 23 September 2026

‘Prepare to Ship’ Is a Clever Software Solution That Allows iPhone 18 Pro Max to Ship With a Battery That Would Otherwise Exceed International Shipping Regulations ★

Apple Support:

iPhone 18 Pro Max offers a huge increase in battery life, in part due to increasing the battery capacity to over 20 watt-hours (Wh). Devices with a single-cell battery over 20 Wh have additional shipping requirements in most countries and regions. To address these requirements, iPhone 18 Pro Max uses an innovative battery-firmware solution that limits battery capacity to below 20 Wh from the time it’s manufactured through its transport from the factory. When you activate your iPhone, the limit is removed and the battery’s full charging capacity is available.

After activation, if you need to ship your iPhone 18 Pro Max for a repair, trade-in, return, or as a gift for example, use the Prepare to Ship feature in Settings. This feature discharges your battery to below 20 Wh and sets a charge limit so your iPhone stays below this limit while shipping. This can be reversed and you can reset your charge limit after shipping.

The battery in iPhone 18 Pro Max is safe, including for shipping and air travel. This process is needed only to meet shipping requirements and isn’t required while traveling or for any other iPhone model.

(Via The Verge.)

App Store Scam of the Week: ‘Update My Phone & Apps: Guide’ by Tair Olzhasev ★

“Update My Phone & Apps: Guide” is an iOS app from developer Tair Olzhasev. By default, the only thing it does for free is give you a “Check for Updates” button that launches the system Settings app. It doesn’t even take you to the General → Software Update screen. It just takes you to the root level of Settings.

Everything else it purports to do requires a $15/week subscription. That’s $780 per year. (It does offer a three-day free trial before weekly billing starts.) These other features, gated behind the “pro” subscription:

• Clear device status: iOS version and storage usage at a glance
• One-tap shortcut to system update settings
• Tip of the Day with practical hacks and best practices
• Lightweight, private, and fast — no accounts or tracking
• Optional Premium for extra guidance and tools

In other words, the app does nothing that iOS doesn’t automatically do for all users. Absolutely nothing. I came across it from a user on Mastodon who discovered their father was paying $8/week ($416 per year) for it. It seems like the esteemed Mr. Olzhasev, savvy businessman that he is, changes the subscription price frequently.

Olzhasev’s other two apps are Thermal Camera Filter Effects (a neat trick, given that iPhones do not have thermal cameras or heat sensors) and Settings App: Simulator, a $15 app that admittedly gives you just what it says on the tin. It’s an inaccurate mirror of the Settings app “so you can practice without changing the real system.”

Update, next day: These apps are no longer in the App Store.

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Wednesday, 23 September 2026

Super Intelligence, Indeed ★

President Donald Trump, in a prepared speech before the United Nations General Assembly yesterday (one-minute video clip from Aaron Rupar, posted on Bluesky):

The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence — being spoken of so much, now — here and after officially called “super intelligence”, changing the name. The use of the word “artificial” makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful. In fact it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States’ documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term “super” as opposed to “artificial”. So it’s “super intelligence”. In other words, welcome to the world of super intelligence dash SI. SI. Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better. It is much better. And it’s much more accurate. Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t, we’re going to find out pretty soon. Super intelligence.

Pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to say the “dash” aloud, but other than that, no signs of dementia or madness. Sharp as a tack, directly addressing the nation’s top concerns regarding AI.

Paul Krugman:

In the 1971 comedy film Bananas a third-world nation’s strongman announces his new policies:

From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.

Tuesday, 22 September 2026

Meta’s Muse Logomark, Designed by Jessica Hische  ★

Bill McCool, writing at Dieline:

This past Wednesday, lettering artist, designer, and author Jessica Hische took to Threads to announce that she had worked alongside Meta’s team to create the icon and logotype for their agentic AI, Muse. Acknowledging that people would be “mad because it’s AI and Meta,” Hische sought to explain at least why she had taken the gig in the first place. Obviously, she took some flak for working with Meta. While plenty of comments voiced support, just as many chastised her for even considering the project, which I can mostly sum up as a general narrative thread of “How could you?”

FWIW, it’s pretty rich to criticize someone for working with Meta while you’re very much using a Meta product to issue said criticism. But I digress.

I like the Muse mark/icon. It’s both an obvious “M” and yet at the same time, not an “M”. It’s friendly but not un-serious.

And, as Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang noted today on X (not Threads), it doesn’t look like a butthole. (Yet Meta AI’s logo/icon is a little butthole-y.)

Meta’s New Muse AI Agent Read Jason Aten’s Messages Database ★

Jason Aten, writing for Inc:

Then, yesterday, I was having a conversation with my Primary Technology podcast co-host, Stephen Robles, about the new iPhones. Moments later, I got a push notification from Muse suggesting that the conversation we were having would make for a good column and offered to put together research for me to write about. It even flagged a message from my editor about having a column ready for Monday.

Not only had I not asked it to do that sort of thing, I never gave it permission to read my messages. In fact, I remember explicitly choosing not to let it have access to my messages, calendar, and other personal information.

Stranger still was what happened when I asked Muse how it knew.

Like I told Aten on Threads, Muse was right about one thing: it did give him a good idea for a column. Later on, Aten writes:

I also want to be clear about something else: If your response to this is that, of course, Meta would do this — it’s Meta — you are just letting them off the hook. You’re normalizing behavior that should not be normal, and you should not let them off the hook.

My response to this is a little more complex than that. At the top level, this is why I don’t run any AI agents, from any source, on my production/work Macs where all my personal information and communication apps are. And if I eventually do, I’ll pay surgical attention to the permissions I grant them.

But at a second level, I do think “Of course Meta would do this”. If I were going to run an AI agent on my personal Mac today, Meta’s would be among the last I’d choose. They’re the proverbial scorpion and we’re the frogs. I’m genuinely curious about Muse, and might soon try it — but I’ll try it on a machine without most of my data on it. This isn’t “letting them off the hook” — this is keeping Meta on the hook, where they belong.

Why Didn’t Google Build Muse? ★

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:

The number one response I’ve gotten to my thoughts on Meta’s Muse personal assistant agent is some variation of “I will never trust Meta with my data.” But the number two response is arguably more interesting (and related): “Why didn’t Google build this?”

The short answer to this is undoubtedly: they’re working on it. But the longer answer is probably more interesting here too.

Siegler’s take is basically that Google lacks focus. They’ve got multiple AI agent products, none of which are hitting — which as he points out has been their decades-long problem with messaging apps. Say what you want about Meta as a company and Mark Zuckerberg as a leader, but they (and he) have focus. I make fun of them (and him) for going all-in on “the metaverse” only to lose all interest in it just a few years later, but to play devil’s advocate, that’s how focus works.

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