By John Gruber

• Archive
• The Talk Show
• Dithering
• Projects
• Contact
• Colophon
• Feeds / Social
• Sponsorship

OurCal: Shared calendar. Meet messenger.

This Election Will Not Look Surprising in History ★

This striking map from Apple News tells the story of the magnitude of the shift since 2024.

The late Lindsey Graham, on Twitter back in May 2016 (punctuation sic):

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.

The wheels of history grind slowly, but they do grind. By the time of his death, Graham was amongst the lickspittlest of Trump’s GOP toadies. Graham’s idiot sister ran for his vacant Senate seat in South Carolina and lost.

Former representative Liz Cheney, at the January 6 hearings in 2021:

I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.

Winston Churchill, perhaps apocryphally:

Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Abraham Lincoln:

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

‘Political Reckoning Shatters Trump’s Grip on Washington’ ★

Aaron Zitner, reporting for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal:

Rarely in American politics has a president traded away so much political support so quickly.

The losses that Republicans suffered on Tuesday marked one of the most decisive repudiations of a president in modern history. President Trump had re-entered the White House with advantages he lacked in his first term: a victory in the popular vote, a cadre of aides eager to expand his authority and cultural currency that had NFL players doing the “Trump dance” in the end zone.

Only two years later, his political standing has collapsed, all because of a dramatic miscalculation of his power to shape events. A war of choice with Iran and tariffs imposed on U.S. trading partners betrayed his promise to avoid foreign entanglements and tame inflation. His extraordinary interventions in his party’s primaries left Republicans with a set of unusually weak candidates.

The Democrats went from out of power in Washington to a massive majority in the House and an apparent 55-45 or even 56-44 majority in the Senate. Keisha Lance Bottoms was elected the first black woman governor in history — in Georgia. By a 9-point margin. Texas elected Democrats to the Senate and governor’s mansion. Kansas elected a Democratic senator for the first time in 94 years.

The fever, finally, well and truly broke.

Tuesday, 3 November 2026

Apple Begins Opening Siri AI to Developers ★

Apple Developer:

Starting today with the iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3, macOS 27.3, and visionOS 27.3 betas, a new Developer Preview enables any developer to integrate their app with Siri AI, giving businesses and developers new ways to reach and serve their customers. [...]

This developer beta offers a sneak peek at Siri AI app intents for developers. With this early Developer Preview, your app can work directly with Siri AI, giving you a first look at new ways to reach and serve your customers. This preview provides early access before first shipping to customers in a few months; and with submission to the App Store opening up in the spring, developers have time to explore, build, and help shape their experiences before launch. Try it out and share your feedback.

As you explore early, we will follow up with more details about the terms and usage policies for experiences enabled through Siri AI. More to share soon.

Greg Pierce (developer of Drafts and other fine apps):

This sounds amazing, and I didn’t think we’d see App Intents integration into Siri AI until next WWDC.

Siri AI is getting to the point of underpromising and overdelivering, which is where you want products to be. In 2025 things were so bad, Apple had overpromised and not just underdelivered, but delivered nothing.

iPad Mini (A20 Pro) Review Roundup ★

David Pierce at The Verge, on the Acoustic Display:

It means the sound fires out of the front panel rather than from speaker holes. (Some TVs currently work the same way.) It doesn’t sound any better than before, maybe a tiny bit bassier, but it also doesn’t sound worse, and if anything it’s slightly better to have the sound actually pointed at you instead of out the sides of the tablet. Mostly it’s a wash in service of the ruggedization, which is good enough for me.

Stephen Robles, on YouTube, thinks it sounds muffled at high volumes and doesn’t seem to like how you can feel the whole tablet vibrate at high volumes.

Tony Polanco at Tom’s Guide liked the Acoustic Display sound quality and praised the battery life (but only had time to run the battery test once):

In the Tom’s Guide battery test, which involves continuous web-surfing over Wi-Fi with the display set to 150 nits of brightness, the iPad mini 8 lasted for an astonishing 14 hours and 24 minutes! That’s nearly four hours longer than the previous model and Apple’s claims.

John Voorhees at MacStories was impressed by the Mini’s local AI performance:

The mini’s local AI capabilities extend beyond software optimized for the Neural Engine. To explore those, I ran Qwen 3.5 4B (4-bit) locally using a benchmark built into Russet, a local AI and developer tool. The 512GB iPad mini averaged a pace of 40 tokens per second across four sessions on both tests that output 128 or 256 tokens with a time to first token of 0.32 seconds for the 128 output token tests and 0.36 for the 256 output token tests.

I couldn’t compare the new mini’s local AI performance to my 6th generation iPad mini because it only has 4GB of memory, which is too little for the models Russet offers for download. Instead, I downloaded the same model on my 11-inch M4 iPad Pro and ran the same Russet benchmark. The A20 Pro came out on top in my tests. The Russet tests I ran use MLX, which runs on the CPU and GPU, so they don’t measure the benefit of the Dual 16-core Neural Engine. However, they do demonstrate the A20 Pro’s serious local AI capabilities.

MKBHD on the New A20 Pro iPad Mini ★

Marques Brownlee describes the two color choices as “annoyingly, slightly not black and slightly not white,” which is apt. He digs the acoustic display enough that he can imagine Apple bringing it to a future high-end iPhone (like if they do a big redesign next year for the 20th anniversary), but he says you can feel the whole iPad shake if you turn the volume up high enough.

And, of course, he dings it for not having a 120 Hz display, and wonders where Apple even sourced a high quality OLED that doesn’t support 120 Hz. I think that’s the wrong question to ask. It’s not about the display panel. It’s the display controller, and ProMotion requires a display driver that’s enough more expensive that adding it to the iPad Mini would either raise the price even further or cut into Apple’s profit margins. It’s the display controller, though, not the panel, in my understanding.

Safari 27.3 Beta Adds Vertical Tabs and Adaptive Dark Mode ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

With iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3, and macOS Golden Gate 27.3, Apple is making major updates to Safari. The browser is getting a Vertical Tabs layout, which can be used instead of the standard horizontal tab bar. It’s a change that pairs well with the iPhone Duo’s larger display, but it is available across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Vertical Tabs are located on the left side of the display and use icons by default to save space, but there is an option to make the tab bar wider to show website titles as well. Vertical Tabs work with both Topics and Tab Groups to keep things organized. Topics are created when automatic Apple Intelligence tab sorting is turned on in iOS 27. Pinning tabs by dragging, quickly swapping between Tab Groups, and other features also continue to work.

I got an advance demo of this last week and I’m really looking forward to trying it. I’ve gotten very used to horizontal tabs over the years, but a long time ago I was a devoted user of the Omni Group’s OmniWeb browser, of which one of my favorite features was its vertical tabs. That was so long ago, the tabs went in a drawer.

Apple is adding Adaptive Dark Mode for websites that don’t have a dark mode design option by default. If you use Dark Mode and then browse to a website with a bright background color, Safari will offer an option to “Try” Adaptive Dark Mode.

There are some popular Safari extensions that offer this (e.g. Noir), but Safari 27.3 has the feature built-in, and the demo I saw looked great. It kicks in for light-background websites that don’t offer a dark mode alternative presentation, and it allows for web developers to explicitly opt out.

The New York Times (et al.) Sues Brave for Copyright Infringement, Selling Scraped Content to AI Companies for Model Training ★

Jay Peters, The Verge:

The New York Times and a group of other publications have filed lawsuits against the company that makes the Brave web browser over alleged unlawful scraping to train AI and also letting users bypass their paywalls, as reported by Reuters.

According to a complaint filed by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, Brave Software has monetized its index of scraped websites by, in part, providing AI companies with paid access to “real-time online content from the Brave Index.” The AI companies then use that index to train their models, access content to “respond to specific user queries,” or both. Brave has allegedly provided “stolen copyrighted content” to “many” AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

Brave also promotes “hundreds of top publishers” as being accessible through its “Paywall blocker” feature in its browser.

Brave’s monetization strategies have long been shifty AF.

Steve Jobs on His Final Quarterly Analyst Call: ‘We Think the Open Versus Closed Argument Is Just a Smokescreen’ ★

After linking to it earlier today, I re-read Steve Jobs’s remarks from his last appearance on a quarterly analyst call. It’s a banger of a good read:

You know, even if Google were right, and the real issue is “closed” versus “open,” it is worthwhile to remember that open systems don’t always win. Take Microsoft’s “Plays For Sure” music strategy, which used the PC model — which Android uses as well — of separating the software components from the hardware components. Even Microsoft finally abandoned this “open” strategy in favor of copying Apple’s integrated approach with their Zune player, unfortunately leaving their OEMs empty-handed in the process. Google flirted with this integrated approach with their Nexus One phone.

In reality, we think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue, which is, “What’s best for the customer — fragmented versus integrated?” We think Android is very, very fragmented, and becoming more fragmented by the day. And as you know, Apple strives for the integrated model so that the user isn’t forced to be the systems integrator. We see tremendous value at having Apple, rather than our users, be the systems integrator. We think this a huge strength of our approach compared to Google’s: when selling the users who want their devices to just work, we believe that integrated will trump fragmented every time.

Prescient.

Chance Miller Reviews the New A20 Pro iPad Mini ★

Chance Miller, writing at 9to5Mac:

Unfortunately, the new iPad mini’s screen has one limitation: it doesn’t support ProMotion, or a 120Hz refresh rate of any kind. Instead, it’s still locked to 60Hz. This is an incredibly frustrating decision that I can’t quite wrap my head around.

Apple touts the iPad mini’s OLED screen as offering significantly faster pixel response time than the previous generation’s LCD panel, leading to improvements like smoother scrolling and reduced motion blur.

I’ve noticed that things like swiping between Home Screen pages, scrolling social media, and system animations are noticeably smoother. They aren’t, however, as smooth as an Apple device with a ProMotion display, and they’re not a substitute for a higher refresh-rate display.

Apple is very stingy with ProMotion. Until last year it was exclusively available in iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks that had “Pro” in their name. Last year they added ProMotion to two products without “Pro” in their names: the iPhone 17 and iPhone Air. This year’s $2,000 iPhone Duo of course offers it now too. Apple refreshed the $1,600 Studio Display last year but it still only supports 60 Hz; only the $3,300 Studio Display XDR supports 120 Hz. (Apple does not call this “ProMotion”.)

What makes this frustrating with the iPad Mini is that Apple doesn’t sell an iPad Pro smaller than 11 inches. With MacBooks and larger iPads, if you really care about ProMotion, you can spend money to get it. With a small iPad, however, you can’t.

My big question re: the new iPad Mini is the new “acoustic display”. Miller gives it a thumbs-up:

Essentially, Apple has designed special woofers that vibrate the display to produce low and midrange frequencies. For higher frequencies, custom tweeters are hidden between the glass and aluminum enclosure. Apple says this new system delivers louder audio, “punchier” bass, and clearer highs, despite the iPad mini’s significantly thinner design.

In practice, I think the new iPad mini sounds great. I’d choose headphones or an external speaker for serious music or video consumption, but day-to-day the iPad mini’s built-in speakers are perfectly adequate. (I’d bet that this Acoustic Display technology shows up in future iPhones too, and the iPad mini is serving as a test bed of sorts.)

Apple’s Analyst Calls Have Been Scripted for Decades ★

Bloomberg opinion columnist Dave Lee:

Apple investors and fans hoping to get an insight into the philosophy of new Chief Executive Officer John Ternus on Monday were left sorely disappointed. The 51-year-old’s first earnings call was a timid affair, with Ternus taking cover behind a carefully written script as analysts peppered him with questions.

This is stupid. I mean, it would have been fun if Ternus’s style on the analyst conference call had been loose and freewheeling. Just like it would have been fun if the questions from analysts hadn’t been mostly insipid and pointless. But nothing has changed here other than who the CEO is. Tim Cook’s quarter calls were snoozefests. Save those recordings and use them to help you sleep. And that’s exactly how Cook wanted them.

What Ternus should do is follow Steve Jobs’s lead, and skip these calls except when there’s something exceptional to address. Let CFO Kevan Parekh and COO Sabih Khan handle them, the way Jobs used to let Tim Cook and Apple’s then CFOs handle them. At one point in 2008, Jobs had only appeared on three of the calls in 11 years. He then appeared on the call in October 2008 to address the global financial crisis, and again in October 2010 (one year before he died) to celebrate Apple’s first $20 billion quarter and to throw shade at Android, BlackBerry, and competing tablets. In the 14 years of Jobs’s 2.0 stint as CEO, he only appeared on five quarterly calls. That’s the way to do it. Show up only when you have something worth saying. Otherwise the message remains clear: steady as she goes.

Apple’s New iPhone Release Schedule Seems to Pay Off ★

Horace Dediu, tweeting yesterday on Apple’s results:

iPhone grew at 17% sales which is amazing considering they did not launch the 18 or the Duo or the new Air in the quarter.

The Duo didn’t launch until October, which is Q1 (in Apple’s financial calendar). And the Air, last year, was not a big seller (putting it lightly). The big bet Apple made this year was postponing the regular iPhone 18 until the end of winter early next year. The pro models — Pro and Pro Max — combined sell more than the regular non-pro no-adjective iPhone each year, but the regular non-pro iPhone is Apple’s single best-selling iPhone model. The bet that Apple made is that those mainstream buyers don’t care if the regular iPhone 18 ships five or six months after the 18 Pros — and won’t care next year, or the year after that, or the year after that about this same schedule being followed by the iPhones 19, 20, 21, etc.

The other factor at play is that the just-reported quarter started in July, just after Apple raised prices on just about every major product it sells other than the iPhone. So it’s theoretically possible that this quarter’s sales were boosted by people buying year-old iPhone 17-generation models in anticipation of Apple raising prices with the new models in September (which is exactly what happened). But I don’t see how that can explain 17 percent growth in sales year-over-year. Some savvy enthusiasts definitely did this. I have heard from a few people who bought iPhone 17 Pros in August, concluding that they’d be better off saving money than spending more for an only incrementally better 18 Pro (which would no longer come in the all-time-great cosmic orange colorway). But general consumers don’t follow Apple that closely. There are around 1.6 billion iPhone users worldwide, and I bet at least an entire billion of them have no idea that Apple always holds an iPhone introduction event in early September.

We can’t call this new launch schedule a win until we see what happens in late February or early March when Apple launches the iPhone 18, 18e, and Air 2, but so far it sure looks like a win.

Monday, 2 November 2026

Apple Announces Record $114.5B Fourth-Quarter Results ★

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

On Monday, Apple announced record fourth-quarter earnings, with total revenue of $114.5B, up 12 percent from the year-ago quarter. iPhone revenue was up 17.5%, Mac revenue was up 23.7%, and Services revenue was up 9.8%. Wearables revenue was down 7.9% and iPad revenue was down 10.4%. [...]

And now, to help you visualize what Apple just announced, here is our traditional barrage of charts and graphs.

As usual, Snell also has a transcript of the analyst call — Ternus’s first as CEO. My favorite tidbit was his line at the end of this answer:

Richard Kramer, Arete Research: Your latest MacBook Pros included more iOS features like Touch and Dynamic Island as well as, obviously, Siri AI. Should we anticipate further close linking of macOS and iOS features, maybe even pointing at some point to a single unified OS, either for simplicity or to reduce costs?

John Ternus: Look, we are very proud of both the Mac and the iPad, and I think what you’ve seen over the years is we’ve really enjoyed the ability to bring features and capabilities across the ecosystem and create really compelling features that span things between handoff between iPhone and Mac and iPad, and so when we design the product, we’re looking at how can we make the best version of each and every product, and if you look at what we just did last week with the MacBook Pro, we took a huge leap forward. These MacBook Pros are better in every way than the ones that came before them, and we’re really proud of that, and so we don’t have any fundamentally different changes that we’re planning right now, nor would we talk about it anyway.

Sunday, 1 November 2026

WorkOS: Let Agents Sign Up for Your App Without a Browser ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. An agent can’t click through a signup page built for humans, so give it something it can read instead. Publish an auth.md file and agents register themselves without ever touching a browser login, and the user never gets pulled out of what they were doing.

With WorkOS auth.md, enroll in the dashboard and AuthKit publishes the file. Agents read it, register, and get scoped, short-lived credentials you control.

Make your app agent-ready today.

Friday, 30 October 2026

Sponsorship Openings for Daring Fireball (Including The Talk Show) ★

Sponsorships have continued selling briskly, of late. Knock on wood. As of yesterday, the next opening on the schedule wasn’t until the last week of December, and the Q1 2027 schedule is already filling up. However, due to some schedule rejiggering, next week is now open. Update: OK, next week has been sold, but Christmas week remains open. That’s a good week at DF. I keep posting and readers are often more bored than usual. Also a good week to promote games.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, just email me — especially if you can act quick for next week’s opening. I’m also booking sponsorships for Q1 and Q2 2027, and over half of those weeks are already sold. The rate for the two remaining weeks in 2026 is $11,000, and the rate for open weeks in 2027 is $12,500.

The sponsorship schedule for The Talk Show also has openings, including for the next few episodes in November and December. The general rule of thumb is that sponsorship spots on The Talk Show cost one-third the rate for the weekly spots on DF. I’m happy to work out deals a little lower than that for first-time sponsors. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to hear pitched on America’s favorite three-star podcast, get in touch.

12-core CPU / 12-core GPU:
    14-inch:        $2000
    16-inch:          N/A

    PROLED XDR:       N/A
    Nano-texture:    +150

    RAM:    16 GB      +0
            24 GB    +200
            32 GB    +400

    SSD:    1 TB       +0
            2 TB     +500
            4 TB    +1500

15-core CPU / 16-core GPU:
    14-inch:        $2500
    16-inch:          N/A

    PROLED XDR:      +400
    Nano-texture:    +150

    RAM:    24 GB      +0
            48 GB    +600

    SSD:    1 TB       +0
            2 TB     +500
            4 TB    +1500


18-core CPU / 20-core GPU:
    14-inch:        $2700
    16-inch:        $3000

    PROLED XDR:      +400
    Nano-texture:    +150

    RAM:    24 GB      +0
            48 GB    +600
            64 GB   +1000

    SSD:    1 TB       +0
            2 TB     +500
            4 TB    +1500

18-core CPU / 32-core GPU:
    14-inch:        $4100
    16-inch:        $4400

    PROLED XDR:      +400
    Nano-texture:    +150

    RAM:    36 GB      +0

    SSD:    2 TB       +0
            4 TB    +1000
            8 TB    +3000
           16 TB    +7000  (PROLED XDR only)


18-core CPU / 40-core GPU:
    14-inch:        $4700
    16-inch:        $5000

    RAM:    48 GB      +0
            64 GB    +400
           128 GB   +2000

    SSD:    2 TB       +0
            4 TB    +1000
            8 TB    +3000
           16 TB    +7000  (PROLED XDR only)

Friday, 30 October 2026

The Only Good Easter Eggs Are Whole-Assed Easter Eggs ★

Marcin Wichary on the original iPod easter egg on Apple Music’s website 404 page:

I am usually not a fan of easter eggs — most of them are poorly made — but this might be the best iPod recreation I’ve seen, and it’s an interesting thing to study:

• I think it generally covers all the modes etc.
• (with small exceptions) the typography looks accurate,
• it has the little “haptic” beeps,
• it has proper acceleration and the scrollbar,
• it has a little music library with various playlists,
• I have only noticed a few small bugs.

It looks real, sounds real, feels real. Don’t bother with your easter egg idea if you’re going to half-ass it.

Update: The original iPod itself had a great easter egg: a hidden version of the classic game Breakout. Apple’s new easter egg web-page iPod includes the hardware iPod easter egg. Just go to Settings → About and hold down the center button for 5 seconds. An easter egg in the easter egg. That’s how you do it.

GM to Pay $220 Million After Betraying Their Own Drivers’ Privacy ★

Jonathan Stempel, reporting for Reuters:

General Motors will pay $220 million to settle ​allegations that it illegally sold drivers’ private behavior and location data to brokers, who then sold the information to insurers that used it to set and sometimes increase rates.

The settlement, announced on Thursday, resolves claims by the attorneys general of 35 US states and the District ​of Columbia over the automaker’s Smart Driver program, which enrolled millions of drivers ​between 2016 and its discontinuation in 2024. Other regulators have also reviewed GM’s handling of driver data.

GM was accused of pitching Smart Driver to help ​people improve their personal driving safety, only to violate drivers’ privacy by reneging on its ​promise not to sell their data without permission. Many people who signed up were also enrolled in GM’s OnStar safety, navigation and diagnostic service.

Reuters’s milquetoast headline was “GM to Pay $220 Million to Settle Allegations It Violated Drivers’ Privacy”. They’re not mere allegations. They did it. They just betrayed their customers’ privacy to make a few quick bucks.

I’ve driven a few GM rentals in recent years, and I’d almost certainly never buy one of their cars just because they’re poorly-designed pieces of crap. But even if they made a decent car I wouldn’t buy it. They’re still seemingly digging in on the CarPlay thing, and they ratted out their own customers to insurance companies.

Patrick Stewart Dies at 86 ★

Aaron Couch, The Hollywood Reporter:

Patrick Stewart, the sophisticated actor who brought a Shakespearean touch to Star Trek and X-Men as he made an otherworldly transformation from British stage veteran to sci-fi icon, has died. He was 86.

Stewart died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles following “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia,” longtime spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak announced.

There’s an old adage that everyone’s favorite SNL cast is the one from their teenage years. It’s probably true for Star Trek too. My favorite is The Next Generation and it’s not even close. Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard was just so fucking cool. Smart, wise, firm, curious, empathetic, and just fucking cool. Those same adjectives seemingly all apply to Stewart himself.

See Kottke for a bunch more links.

Thursday, 29 October 2026

Apple Drops App Store Commission by a Whopping 4 Percentage Points in Taiwan ★

Apple Developer News:

Apple is making changes to the Taiwan storefront of the App Store, following discussions with the Taiwan Fair Trade Commission.

As of October 31, 2026, the commission rate for standard Apple In-App Purchase and paid app transactions will be 26% on the Taiwan storefront of the App Store on iOS and iPadOS. Currently, that rate is 30%.

Well there we go. The App Store in Taiwan — just like in Japan — is fixed.

A Health Update From Craig Hockenberry ★

Craig Hockenberry:

If you noticed that the Iconfactory sites were kinda broken last week, now you know why. It’s because I was kinda broken last week.

Now I’m finishing this post from a comfy chair on our deck. Typing into the latest version of WordPress and PHP. And I couldn’t be happier.

No, you teared up a little reading this.

Very good news from a very good friend.

Rolfe Winkler at The WSJ: ‘The Beleaguered Chip Sellers Getting Their Revenge on Apple’ ★

Rolfe Winkler, in a crackerjack story for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

Blevins, who left Apple in 2022, sometimes set up back-to-back meetings with suppliers so that rival sales teams might run into each other, stoking competitive tension. Sales representatives learned to pack nutrition bars to sustain them through negotiating sessions that Apple executives sometimes pushed past midnight without a dinner break. Blevins’s bad-cop reputation gave his staff leverage: They threatened to call him in if contract terms weren’t to their liking.

One significant contract term allowed Apple to audit its suppliers’ books. Flash makers typically had to designate Apple as a “most favored customer,” which guaranteed that no other buyer got a lower price, according to people familiar with the agreements. Apple’s audits allowed it to verify that no one paid less.

Apple caught Micron selling flash at cheaper prices to another customer and won an arbitration settlement worth tens of millions of dollars more than a decade ago, said people familiar with the dispute. Apple audited its suppliers so often that Blevins negotiated a volume discount with the auditor, Deloitte.

The whole story is a fascinating and entertaining read. But I don’t get the “revenge” angle in the headline. The biggest buyers can negotiate the best deals. Apple used to be the biggest buyer, by far, for flash memory chips. They negotiated, with hardball but above-the-board tactics, the best deals. Now, Apple isn’t the biggest buyer — the AI datacenter hyperscalers are. Apple no longer gets the best deals. But they’re still getting fair deals. Apple is still negotiating the best deals it can for itself. So where is the “revenge”? The pinch mostly isn’t being felt by Apple — it’s being felt by Apple’s customers, who now face significantly higher product prices.

I included “mostly” in the preceding sentence because Winkler, in collaboration with the research firm TechInsights, makes the case in the piece that the rising costs of flash memory have eaten into the remarkably juicy profit margins Apple has historically earned from higher-storage upgrades.

What I also don’t get, at all, is the participation in the story by Scott Nelson, the chief marketing officer at Kioxia (which I learned in this story is the new name for the company formerly known as Toshiba Memory Corporation), a major flash supplier. Nelson told Winkler he so loathes Apple that he shot his old iPod with a rifle and keeps the pieces on his desk. The article ends thus:

The industry’s low point came in 2023. The Covid-era, work-from-home device boom cooled, and flash prices bottomed out at 5 cents a gigabyte. Bernstein Research estimated the flash industry generated operating losses of $19 billion that year, while Apple earned $14 billion in gross profit selling extra flash storage.

Those were tough times that “I hope we don’t ever see again,” said Nelson, the Kioxia sales executive.

Yes, I’m sure the current AI datacenter mania will last forever, the bubble will never burst, and that even if it does, no one at Apple will remember Nelson’s participation in this story.

The Space Shuttle Discovery’s Starboard Side ‘s’ Is Upside Down ★

How Jason Snell beat me to linking to this, I don’t know. But like I said back in February, when it comes to signage, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” ought to be “Mind your H’s and S’s”.

Steven Levy on the New MacBook Pro, With, Yes, a Touchscreen ★

Steven Levy, writing at Wired with the scoop on the new MacBook Pros (News+ link):

This turnaround is a big deal to Apple fans. Ternus shrugs off the drama. “The Mac is first and foremost an indirect input device, built around the trackpad and keyboard. But I think there’s times when it’s comfortable and handy to have touch.”

Ternus and Apple want to make sure that the Mac faithful don’t panic that the 42-year-old franchise is losing its identity to Apple’s gangbusters mobile products. “We needed to get to a point where adding touch didn’t make the product lesser in any way. It didn’t make it heavier. It didn’t make it thicker. That came together with the OLED screen, the best display we’ve ever put into a Mac,” Ternus told me. “All of these things, and, oh yeah, it has touch as well.”

After a long fun day of hands-on exploration, briefings, and a slew of demos, not just most, but all of my concerns about touchscreen support adversely affecting the Mac UI have been allayed. I love it. These seem like exquisite machines even if you never want to touch the screen. I think what Ternus told Levy captures the truth of touch’s role: “All of these things, and, oh yeah, it has touch as well.”

Wednesday, 28 October 2026

Guessing the Name: MacBook Studio? ★

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

A teaser video shared by Apple CEO John Ternus today hints at a potential name for the rumored MacBook models with touch-enabled OLED displays: MacBook Studio. [...]

Apple is expected to show off the new MacBooks to selected tech reporters and content creators at an experience in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. Pacific Time today, and that is the home of Hollywood movie studios after all.

I went to bed last night thinking “MacBook Studio” was the best guess. I woke up this morning feeling like it was a name worth betting on. It just fits. There’s a Mac Studio desktop, Studio Display monitor, and Apple’s suite of pro software tools is named Creator Studio — and they just announced big updates to that yesterday. As I suggested yesterday, these should be a new MacBook line, not the new MacBook Pros.

If this is the name, Rossignol gets the Being Right Point for calling it.

(A bunch of readers chimed in to suggest “MacBook Touch”. That wouldn’t work for the same reasons that Apple didn’t even consider calling the Duo the “iPhone Fold”. Yes, they used “Touch” for the iPod Touch of yore, but (a) that was a different era, and (b) that was such a mediocre product name that most consumers referred to it by the wrong name, “iTouch”. Apple likes names that evoke a feeling, not that describe a specific feature of the product.)

Update: Welp, never mind.

Tuesday, 27 October 2026

Siri AI Expands to More Languages in OS 27.2 ★

Apple Newsroom yesterday:

With the 27.2 software updates released today, Siri AI — an entirely new version of Siri that is profoundly more capable, conversational, and personal — is expanding to more people around the world, with availability now in the French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish languages. [...]

Siri AI is currently unavailable in the EU in iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS. Apple is working constructively with the EU in an attempt to find a path forward.

Don’t hold your breath. (Or if you prefer, N’y comptez pas trop.)

Apple Creator Studio Updated With a Slew of AI Features, Along With a New Open JSON File Format for Keynote ★

Apple Newsroom, with software news for Apple’s “Pro and Tell” week:

Apple today introduced transformative updates to Apple Creator Studio, the powerful collection of creative apps designed to put studio-grade tools into the hands of modern creators across Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Final Cut Pro for Mac now includes built-in MotionVFX — an expansive collection of visual effects, plug-ins, transitions, templates, and motion graphics tools — as well as seamless editing in Pixelmator Pro. Apple’s curated Content Hub now includes video assets and is available in Final Cut Pro. Music creators using Logic Pro for Mac gain a new intelligent assistant in beta, an enhanced Stem Splitter that now separates drums, and a redesigned Browser that incorporates all sounds, with music understanding and even a Splice library. Pixelmator Pro introduces Generate Fill, which lets creators transform selected areas of an image using natural language. Keynote, Pages, and Numbers introduce new AI features in beta, including assistants that understand document context and new Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for workflow automation. They also add stock video in the Content Hub and new premium themes and templates.

Apple Creator Studio updates will be available on the App Store this November as a free update for existing subscribers.

That’s a lot. But this part at the end caught my eye:

Across Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, the Content Hub expands to include Apple-curated stock video footage, giving creators dynamic visuals to enhance presentations, reports, and spreadsheets. Subscribers also gain access to a fresh collection of professionally designed templates and themes. Keynote introduces support for Keynote Interchange Format (.keyx), an open JSON-based bundle file format designed to be readable and accessible to external tools, developer workflows, and AI agents.

Jesse Bunch, engineering manager for productivity apps at Apple, on X and LinkedIn:

Our new in-app assistants can help you get things done in record time. MCP allows you to bring your own agent if you want. And an open source format for Keynote (and Python library!) so you can create Keynote documents programmatically on any platform. Huge day for Creator Studio today.

I don’t think the Python library for the new Keynote Interchange Format is out yet, but neither are the updates to the Creator Studio apps. Very cool news, along the same lines as the new JSON-based format for Xcode projects that Apple announced last month.

Tuesday, 27 October 2026

What’s Left for ‘Pro and Tell’ Week: Touch-Enabled OLED MacBooks ★

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple on Wednesday will announce 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models featuring touch-enabled OLED displays with thinner bezels, a Dynamic Island instead of a notch, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and a lighter and slightly thinner design, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports. Apple is hosting a private “Pro and tell” experience in Los Angeles starting at 10 a.m. Pacific Time tomorrow.

I’m here in LA for the press shindig tomorrow. One thing I’ve been thinking about regarding these reported touch-enabled OLED MacBooks is that Gurman has reported for months that these new MacBooks will sport M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. Here’s Gurman back on June 26:

The MacBook models, positioned at the top of Apple’s lineup, will arrive between late this year and early next year, according to people with knowledge of the matter. They’re planned to be powered by the existing M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. [...]

The first touch-screen 14-inch and 16-inch models, code-named K114 and K116, will represent the biggest overhaul of Apple’s high-end laptops since the company began moving away from Intel Corp. chips in 2020. An Apple spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s plans.

Apple’s decision to use the M5 line before jumping to a future M7 is part of a broader shift in its chip strategy. The company is skipping M6-generation Pro and Max chips altogether, breaking from its usual approach. Bloomberg News reported on this strategy earlier this week.

If that’s all true, it’s certainly unusual for Apple to skip the Pro and Max variants for the M6 chip generation. But there have been oddities with the higher-end Apple Silicon chips before. (There was no M4 Ultra chip, for example, and the M3 Ultra didn’t appear until the March 2025 Mac Studio update, 18 months after the M3 generation debuted.) But what I would find downright weird is the possibility of shipping a second generation of MacBook Pro models based on the exact same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips that the current generation offers. They only came out in March. So what’s the idea here? That Apple replaces the current higher-end MacBook Pros with versions whose only upgrades are to the chassis and display, but the performance remains the same? That’s certainly possible, I guess, but it would be weird.

So I’m just wondering if tomorrow’s new touchscreen OLED MacBooks aren’t replacements for the current MacBook Pros, but instead are the start of a new MacBook family with another name. I don’t think they’d call them MacBook “Duos”, because they’re not two-in-one devices. MacBook “Ultras”, maybe — with the same specs as the MacBook Pros but more expensive displays? But “Ultra” seems like a wrong name for a MacBook because Apple’s M-series Ultra chips are (to date at least) desktop only. It’d be weird if the M5 Ultra is exclusive to the Mac Studio while the MacBook “Ultra” maxes out with the M5 Max. So maybe they just are the new MacBook Pros and this first OLED/touch generation uses the same chips as the ones from March?

That’s what I’m most curious about heading into tomorrow.

Apple Also Announces iMac With M6 ★

Just a speed bump, but speed bumps are good.

Pricing and configurations:

M6 with 2 Thunderbolt ports:
    Base price:    $1500

    RAM:   16 GB      +0
           24 GB    +200

    SSD:  256 GB      +0
          512 GB    +200
            1 TB    +500


M6 with 4 Thunderbolt ports:
    Base price:    $1700

    RAM:   16 GB      +0
           24 GB    +200

    SSD:  256 GB      +0
          512 GB    +200
            1 TB    +500
            2 TB   +1000


    Base price:    $2300

    RAM:   32 GB      +0

    SSD:  512 GB      +0
            1 TB    +300
            2 TB    +800

I list a separate base price for the 4-port, 32 GB RAM configuration in the table above because with 32 GB of RAM, the base storage goes from 256 to 512 GB. It’s effectively a $400 RAM upgrade and $200 SSD upgrade that are tied together, and that changes the upgrade prices to move up to 1 or 2 TB of SSD storage.

Nano-texture is a $200 upgrade, and the 2-Thunderbolt-port models have a $30 option for 2.5 gigabit Ethernet (by default it’s Wi-Fi only). The Ethernet port is on the power adapter. The 4-port models come with the Ethernet equipped power adapter.

Apple Introduces New Base MacBook Pro With M6, 14-Inch-Only ★

Apple Newsroom’s “Pro and Tell” announcement week continues:

Apple today announced the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, delivering even more performance, powerful on-device AI capabilities, and faster connectivity for college students, business users, creators, and more. M6 features an advanced 12-core CPU with the world’s fastest CPU core, so everything from productivity tasks to more demanding pro workflows feels incredibly fast and responsive. The 12-core GPU delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics and up to 25 percent faster AI workloads when compared to M5, making the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 a compelling value for users who need serious power. For those upgrading from M1, the performance gains are even more significant, with up to 11× faster graphics and up to 13× faster AI performance. With additional Neural Accelerators in the GPU and a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, M6 turns MacBook Pro into an even more powerful platform for AI — from taking advantage of Siri AI and Apple Intelligence features across apps and macOS to running LLMs locally, all while preserving user privacy. In addition, the 14-inch MacBook Pro features Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, while superfast storage makes working with large files, exporting projects, and running demanding AI workflows fly.

I questioned Apple’s decision to close up “superfast” there, but I stand corrected — it is, in fact, a perfectly cromulent adjective. I learn something every day.

Anyway, this is just the base MacBook Pro, the one that’s more like a MacBook Air Plus than a true professional laptop with an M-series Pro or Max chip. This tier of MacBook Pro has only ever been offered in the smaller 14-inch size. Prices seem unchanged from the post-June-price-hike M5 models:

Base price:     $2000

  RAM:  16 GB      +0
        24 GB    +200
        32 GB    +400

  SSD:   1 TB      +0
         2 TB    +500
         4 TB   +1500

Space black and silver colors, and nano-texture is available for $150 extra.

Monday, 26 October 2026

The NYT Seemingly Does Marissa Mayer Dirty ★

Alexandra Alter, in the lede for her profile of Marissa Mayer’s new AI startup Dazzle for The New York Times (gift link):

Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task.

Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.

So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle. Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer.

“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She thought it was perfect.

That anecdote is brutal. It makes it seem like Mayer has lost her mind. She’s getting roasted for it on social media. I suspected (and hoped) there was more to the story. There was. Here’s Mayer herself on X:

To be clear, I didn’t use Dazzle because I was overwhelmed by making a slide. I used it because summing up your child in a few bullets feels laughably limiting. And, since our team had just gotten an early prototype running, I wanted to see what deeper threads it might find.

She might just be hyping her startup. But she definitely didn’t tell The Times that she needed help from AI to remember that her own daughter is “empathetic, creative, and an animal lover”. She seemingly got done dirty by Alter and the Times on that use-case anecdote.

Apple Issues Statement on iPhone Duo’s Crack Problem ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Here is Apple’s full statement:

The response to iPhone Duo from early users has been incredibly positive, and we are seeing exciting things from developers who are rapidly updating their apps to take advantage of its unique form factor. We are aware of an issue impacting the inner display on a small number of iPhone Duo units. If users experience issues with their iPhone Duo display, they should contact AppleCare for a replacement.

The company says the problem affects a very small number of iPhone Duo units and appears to surface relatively quickly. Most iPhone Duo units are not affected. You do not need AppleCare+ to have your iPhone Duo replaced for this problem. If you bought from a carrier, you should contact AppleCare directly, not your carrier, to get your device replaced.

Did it cross Ternus’s mind to just say “You’re folding it wrong?”

(History doesn’t repeat, and in this case, it actually doesn’t even rhyme. Steve Jobs never told anyone they were “holding it wrong” with the iPhone 4 — he emailed a customer, “Just avoid holding it in that way.” But CNN went with the headline “Apple on iPhone Complaints: You’re Holding It Wrong” and that’s the line everyone wrongly remembers.)

Glenn Fleishman on Apple Notes and Markdown ★

Glenn Fleishman, writing at Six Colors, “Why Notes Will Never Let Us Edit Markdown”:

The Notes app added Markdown import and export in the version 26 operating system releases, and the macOS 27 Golden Gate update lets us copy and paste as Markdown. Why can’t we just write natively in that hoary, simple format?

I use Markdown all day, every day. In fact, I’m writing these words in Markdown without you even knowing it. All content-management systems (CMSes) I’m aware of support native Markdown entries when posting, and many writing and note-taking apps integrate Markdown conventions without needing to trumpet them.

Fleishman not only ably describes why Apple Notes doesn’t support editing in Markdown syntax, but also why it shouldn’t. It is correct for Notes only to natively support WYSIWYG editing. Normal users should never ever be exposed to formatting codes. Also, Markdown, as a language, can be malformed. It should be impossible for users to create a malformed note in Notes. If you could edit in Markdown in Notes, you could create malformed notes. That’s just gross. I can say that. Markdown isn’t for everyone. And even for me — Markdown’s creator — I don’t want it in Notes, which is the notes app I use.

I think Apple has done a really good job in the last few years adding import/export and copy/paste support for Markdown to Notes. That’s the right way for Notes to support Markdown. My biggest complaint with Notes’s recent Markdown support — as noted by Fleishman — is that most of these features are only on the Mac, not iOS.

IPAD MINI                    128 GB   256 GB   512 GB
A20 Pro (new)                 $700     $800    $1000 
A17 Pro (Q3 2026 price hike)  $600     $700     $900 
A17 Pro (Q4 2024–Q2 2026)     $500     $600     $800

Monday, 26 October 2026

A Simple Two-Step Shortcuts Shortcut Lets You Lock the iPhone Duo When You Close It ★

Federico Viticci:

Don’t like that the iPhone Duo doesn’t auto-lock when you close it?

You can fix it with this simple Shortcuts automation.

Two steps:

1. A conditional for when the iPhone is Closed.
2. Lock the screen.

I mentioned in my review that I kept closing the Duo expecting it to lock, like when closing a book (or a laptop, for that matter). And it didn’t occur to me that I could simply add this feature via Shortcuts. That’s cool. But I also mentioned in my review that I wouldn’t want that to happen every time I closed it. Sometimes you do want to just switch from the wonderful inner display to the miserable little outer display, and the last thing you want when you do that is to need to re-authenticate for the hundredth time of the day with Touch ID. It was just a wrong instinct I had, and I broke myself of that instinct after about a week or so of full-time Duo use. I stopped expecting it to lock on close. So while I think this shortcut is worth pointing out — and I especially think it’s a good reminder to think about Shortcuts when you find yourself wishing for features that aren’t in Settings — I recommend trying to break yourself of this habit if you have a Duo and find yourself with the same wrong close-to-lock instinct I initially had.

Update: Stephen Robles posted a clever version that only locks the Duo on close if it’s on the home screen; if any app is open, it stays unlocked. That’s much more tempting to try. (He includes that one in a whole video full of Duo tips on YouTube.)

Tiny Computers for iPhone Duo ★

If you’ve got or get a Duo and don’t try this out, you’re not hooked up right.

Update: But as Cabel Sasser notes, though incredibly fun, this was clearly made by a young Claude-aided developer who never used any of these actual old computers. Let’s just say there are a lot of ahistorical details.

Sunday, 25 October 2026

Sunnny ★

My thanks to Sunnny for sponsoring last week at DF. Sunnny’s pitch to B2B companies is simple: you store valuable customer information across a myriad of systems, making it hard to get a simple overview. Sunnny consolidates your customer data, cleans it, resolves identities, identifies relationships, and presents it neatly for you, your team, and your AI model.

Early access is open now.

Duo Users Are Registering the Base of Their Index Finger as a Touch ID Coping Strategy ★

Some guy on Reddit (with an illustration video):

Saw this online, tried it, and it works beautifully. Basically, I registered the lowest part of my right index finger. That part of the finger sits naturally when you go to swipe up at the phone.

This resolves a major issue I had where I couldn’t easily just look at my phone to glance through notifications on the lock screen. Now, it’s never been easier (shown at the end of the video).

This is arguably better than Face ID. The speed is up there, and the phone doesn’t need to be facing directly at you to unlock, this motion can be done as soon as you pick up the phone.

Tim Hardwick at MacRumors quotes the “arguably better than Face ID” line.

This idea is clever, and it does seem to work if you grip the Duo just right, but the idea that this is better than Face ID is a joke. Copium is a strong drug but it wears off quickly.

The Talk Show: ‘Lubricate the Inside of the Hinge’ ★

Special guest: Joanna Stern.
Special topic: The iPhone Duo.

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.

iPhone Portrait Mode, 10 Years In ★

Speaking of Johnnie Manzari, he wrote a post yesterday marking the 10 year anniversary of Portrait Mode:

Initially, Portrait mode was seen as a giant math problem. You’d do disparity calculations on the two sensors and output a depth map. The problem was this approach feels and looks digital; it feels fake. In areas without texture, it’s impossible to do this calculation. In areas with ultra fine detail, a lower resolution depth map leads to terrible transitions and a full resolution depth map takes forever to compute. One solution would be to reduce the amount of bokeh so the issues are not as obvious. But then you lose the whole point of the feature, which was to make it look like you had a large, wide-open lens.

The solution to this conundrum — the tradeoff between artifacts and the amount of blur — was quite elegant, but it took a while to stumble across. There’s a saying in painting that if you get the eyes right, nothing else matters. Inspired by this principle from oil painting, the idea was to make sure we never got the eyes wrong.

Matthew Panzarino:

I remember getting the call to test out portrait mode before its release. The marriage of history, art and computational science that came together to make this possible is still incredible to me to this day.

Saturday, 24 October 2026

Nicole Nguyen’s Duo Review for the WSJ ★

Nicole Nguyen (also with a 5-minute video), writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

Every time I used the Duo in phone mode, one-handed, I felt its heft. It’s wider and thicker than a Pro iPhone — and heavier, even compared with competing foldables. My hand actually hurts after using the Duo nonstop, straining to grip the device securely while trying to reach the far edge of the screen.

An Apple spokesman pointed to the Duo’s titanium frame for durability. Other folding models use a lighter aluminum. The company also moved the dock and common controls to the right to be more reachable (sorry, southpaws). Still, there were plenty of instances where my thumb found its limits: turning off the flash in the camera app, or typing the letter “A.”

There are people who can easily use two hands and won’t see this as a problem, including train commuters, frequent fliers or parents who wait around for kids to finish their activities. For me, I look forward to the day the Duo is lighter and thinner — maybe folding to the size of a deck of cards, like in the movie “Her.”

Interesting that she’d prefer a smaller Duo, not a bigger one, if Apple makes a second size. I agree that one-hand-ability is a problem with the Duo, but I also think the front screen is already too squat in terms of how much content it shows. I just think it’s the nature of foldables that they’re two-handed devices, even closed.

Her’s deck of cards foldable isn’t what I think we need to wait for. It’s Westworld’s super-thin trifolds — or even a bifold that’s more along those lines of thinness.

Reuters and the WSJ on the Duo Launch ★

Aditya Soni, Christine Chen, and Will Russell, reporting Friday for Reuters:

CEO Ternus played greeter at a store in Austin, Texas, throwing open the doors and high-fiving customers as they streamed in, a video ​posted on X by CBS Austin showed. A known car enthusiast, Ternus’s Austin visit coincides with this weekend’s Formula 1 US Grand Prix in the city, with Apple holding exclusive US broadcast and streaming rights to the racing series.

I was wondering why Ternus and retail chief Deirdre O’Brien were in Austin for the launch. Joz held down the fort and held court at the Fifth Avenue store.

Regarding reviews:

They also said the folded Duo is less handy for the quick tasks most users do daily and several prominent reviewers recommended against it for many Apple customers.

“It’s been a lot of fun trying the Duo out for a week, but it feels like I’ve gotten to use an extraordinarily polished prototype — not a finished product that I’d want to buy and carry,” wrote longtime Apple commentator John Gruber.

Tech commentator Marques Brownlee said in a YouTube ​review that for a regular person who mostly texts and browses, “it is probably a no. But if the $2,000 doesn’t mean much to you, and you like the idea, after the learning ​curve and getting used to not having facial identification, it is a really fun phone.”

In Berlin, YouTube content creator Patrick Wolter was impressed that the Duo works as a phone and an iPad in one.

Not sure Wolter set a high bar there.

Reporting for the WSJ (gift link), Rolfe Winkler quoted yours truly as well, with (IMO, and I feel I get to have an opinion here) a better line from my review:

“The outer device is, by far, the worst iPhone Apple has ever made. It’s a miserable fat little thing. The inner device is a splendid, joyful, beautiful tablet,” wrote John Gruber, a well-known Apple blogger, in his review. “The decision of whether you might want to buy a Duo is not easy, because only one of its two selves is good.”

Marion Barry Meets the iPhone Duo ★

Jay Peters, The Verge:

The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange bright line (or lines) across the right side of the display.

This crack problem doesn’t seem to be widespread, but it’s seemingly more than a handful.

Display Preferences

Copyright © 2002–2026 The Daring Fireball Company LLC.