Jason Snell, at Macworld:
\n\n\n\n\nMy first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to\ngoing out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had\nreturned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as\nCEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turnaround in terms of\nproducts at all. Beyond the release of the iconic “Think\nDifferent” ad campaign, there was nothing.
\n\nApple’s survival hung by a thread. Steve Jobs asked everyone to\ntrust him. At Macworld Expo, he had enlisted Bill\nGates–Bill Gates, of all people!–to help him instill belief in the\nworld that Apple would find a way to survive.
\n\nThe world was skeptical, to say the least. My family asked what\njob I thought I’d get once Apple went out of business. The\nmagazine I had worked at for four years, MacUser, had\nfolded, and some of us had been transferred over to our rival,\nMacworld, presumably to publish issues until Apple finally gave up\nthe ghost and died. We existed to minimize the loss exposure of\nour respective publishing companies.
\n\n1997 was weird, folks. And that’s how my tenure at Macworld\nstarted.
\n
Link: macworld.com/article/3175482
\n" }, { "title" : "Day One Journal", "date_published" : "2026-07-04T21:02:43Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-04T21:02:44Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/04/day-one-journal", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/04/day-one-journal", "external_url" : "https://dayoneapp.com/blog/introducing-daily-chat/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nMy thanks to Day One Journal for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Day One first launched in 2011 and has been the stalwart of journaling apps on Mac and iOS ever since. Day One’s apps exhibit a commitment to technical and design excellence, and, more importantly, everything they do is deeply informed by the intense personal nature of keeping a journal. (Or journals — Day One lets you create as many separate journals as you want.) The Day One Mac app is Mac-assed and the iPhone and iPad apps are, well, iOS-assed. Fast, familiar, consistent, and intuitive.
\n\nDay One recognizes that many people struggle with journalling not because they can’t write, but because they don’t know how to begin or what a “good” journal entry about their day looks like. That’s why they built Daily Chat, a guided reflection experience that helps you talk through your day, organize your thoughts, and shape them into a journal entry.
\n\nEarly testers commented: “Day One’s new Daily Chat is a true game changer for my daily journaling. The AI-powered chat makes capturing thoughts effortless and inspires creativity like never before. Writing my diary has never been this intuitive and fun!”
\n\nTry it for yourself, it will change the way you think about journaling.
\n\nLink: dayoneapp.com/blog/introducing-daily-chat/
\n" }, { "title" : "From the DF Archive: ‘Electron and the Decline of Native Apps’", "date_published" : "2026-07-04T19:28:45Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-04T22:25:25Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/04/from-the-archive-electron-decline-of-native-apps", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/04/from-the-archive-electron-decline-of-native-apps", "external_url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2018/12/electron_and_the_decline_of_native_apps", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nYours truly, back in 2018:
\n\n\n\n\nI don’t share the depth of their pessimism regarding native apps,\nbut Electron is without question a scourge. I think the Mac will\nprove more resilient than Windows, because the Mac is the platform\nthat attracts people who care. But I worry.
\n\nIn some ways, the worst thing that ever happened to the Mac is\nthat it got so much more popular a decade ago. In theory, that\nshould have been nothing but good news for the platform — more\nusers means more attention from developers. The more Mac users\nthere are, the more Mac apps we should see. The problem is, the\nusers who really care about good native apps — users who know\nHIG violations when they see them, who care about performance,\nwho care about Mac apps being right — were mostly already on\nthe Mac. A lot of newer Mac users either don’t know or don’t care\nabout what makes for a good Mac app.
\n
This eight-year-old piece holds up well. My concern was justified, but so too was my lack of defeatist pessimism. Truly native, idiomatically correct Mac-assed Mac apps are resurgent. Electron and its brethren non-native frameworks have not receded, but they haven’t gained further ground. For every Claude (Electron) there’s a ChatGPT (AppKit). I’m seeing more new good Mac apps released today than I was in 2018, and longstanding Mac stalwarts continue to thrive. High tide seems to have passed without washing the native platform away.
\n\nApple itself is a good example. The Mac version of Journal, first introduced in MacOS 26 Tahoe, is a profound disappointment — not just because of serious bugs but because it’s un-Mac-like in sad ways. You can’t open an entry into its own window, for example. But the brand-new Siri app in the developer betas of MacOS 27 Golden Gate is pretty Mac-like. You can double-click chats in list view to open them in their own windows, for example. (You can’t double-click chats in grid view to open them into windows, though — presumably a bug.) Siri is not a great Mac app but it does feel like a Mac app, and it’s only a 1.0 in its second developer beta. It doesn’t feel like an iOS app running in a Mac window, like Journal does.
\n\nThe ironic frustration with Anthropic’s Claude app being an Electron turd is that Claude and especially Claude Code are so capable of helping to create good native Mac apps. It’s one thing for a big company or organization with cross-platform aspirations but no institutional Mac expertise, like Notion or Slack or Discord, to choose Electron to create their Mac client. It’s another when it’s a company like Anthropic, whose only product’s single most impressive ability is generating programming code, including high-quality AppKit and SwiftUI code for the Mac. To return to my hammering-screws-into-the-walls metaphor from yesterday, it’s as though the building into which Anthropic decided to hammer all the screws is a renowned screwdriver factory.
\n\nLink: daringfireball.net/2018/12/electron_and_the_decline_of…
\n" }, { "title" : "Fantastical 4.1.15 Adds Calendar Mirroring", "date_published" : "2026-07-04T16:57:22Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-04T21:47:22Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/04/fantastical-calendar-mirroring", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/04/fantastical-calendar-mirroring", "external_url" : "https://flexibits.com/blog/2026/06/double-booked-never-heard-of-it-meet-calendar-mirroring-in-fantastical/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nFlexibits:
\n\n\n\n\nCalendar Mirroring allows you to connect two separate calendars\n(like work and personal) so that events from one automatically\nshow up on the other.
\n\nThe best part? No event information is sent to Flexibits servers\nor saved outside of your device.
\n\nYou can choose to show full event details or just block the time\nout as a mysterious, professional “Busy”. Your coworkers don’t\nneed to know you’re getting a root canal, they just need to know\nyou’re unavailable.
\n
In Flexibits’s example scenario, the idea is that you have a personal calendar with important events that you want to mirror to your work calendar, to block the times for those events off — and you might just want them marked as “Busy” on your work calendar, rather than revealing the actual details.
\n\nI’ve been using this feature in beta for a few months and love it, even though my use case is seemingly simple. For recording episodes of Dithering, Ben Thompson and I have a shared Microsoft 365 calendar. (You can guess which of the two of us set that up by that fact.) Fantastical has long had terrific built-in support for Microsoft 365 accounts. So for me, those events have always just shown up in Fantastical. For me.
\n\nThe problem is, my wife and I share an iCloud calendar, where we put events we want each other to know about. My Dithering recordings have never shown up there. Ben and I record on a pretty regular schedule, but it’s always been a minor irritation that my wife can’t see when I’m booked for Dithering. Fantastical’s new mirroring feature solves this perfectly. I set up a mirror to copy all events from my Dithering calendar to my family calendar, keeping the original event titles rather than obscuring them as “Busy”. (The titles all just say “Dithering”.)
\n\nThe icing on the cake is Fantastical’s longstanding “Combine identical events” preference setting. Because I have that setting on, I don’t see duplicate “Dithering” events — one from my Dithering calendar, and another from my family calendar. I just see one event for each scheduled recording, with a striped dual-color swatch that indicates that this one event exists on both calendars. It’s just perfect.
\n\nOne more thing: Also somewhat recently, Fantastical added support for Anthropic’s MCP to integrate your calendaring with Claude Desktop and every other AI agent that supports the standard. David Sparks made a short demo video that shows it off. I don’t really use Claude so this didn’t hit for me personally, but it seems cool enough that it made me at least consider, for a moment, switching from ChatGPT to Claude. Then I remembered what the Claude app is like.
\n\nLink: flexibits.com/blog/2026/06/double-booked-never-heard-of-it…
\n" }, { "title" : "★ Claude’s Criminally Bad Electron Mac App Is an Inside Job", "date_published" : "2026-07-03T21:24:05Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-04T01:12:15Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/claudes_criminally_bad_mac_app_is_an_inside_job", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/claudes_criminally_bad_mac_app_is_an_inside_job", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nAnthropic released the first version of the Claude “desktop” app for MacOS in October 2024 — an Electron clunker that did not impress UI designers. When it came out, I wrote:
\n\n\n\n\nChatGPT’s native Mac app, on the other hand, is a truly\nnative Mac app. It looks like a Mac app and feels like a Mac app\nbecause it really is a Mac app. I’ve liked it ever since it\nlaunched back in May, and it keeps getting better. And\nI keep using it more and more as my go-to resource for answering\nquestions.
\n\nI asked Claude, “What is the best way to engineer a native Mac\napp? What frameworks and developer tools should one use if the\ngoal is a great Mac experience?” Claude’s answer\nstarted by positing it as a decision between SwiftUI and AppKit.\nPerhaps Anthropic’s Mac engineers should have asked Claude this\nsame question before they built this turd of an Electron app.
\n
In March of this year, linking to Anthropic’s announcement that Claude Code and Claude Cowork can take control of your Mac to accomplish agentic tasks, I returned to the same question:
\n\n\n\n\nThe Claude Mac client itself remains a lazy Electron clunker. If\nClaude Code is so good I don’t get why they don’t prove it by\nusing it to make an even halfway decent native Mac app.
\n
I’m not the only one who has pondered this. Drew Breunig wrote “Why is Claude an Electron App?” in February this year:
\n\n\n\n\nOn the surface, this ability should render Electron’s benefits\nobsolete! Rather than write one web app and ship it to each\nplatform, we should write one spec and test suite and use coding\nagents to ship native code to each platform. If this ability is\nreal and adopted, users get snappy, performant, native apps from\nsmall, focused teams serving a broad market.
\n\nBut we’re still leaning on Electron. Even Anthropic, one of the\nleaders in AI coding tools, who keeps publishing flashy agentic\ncoding achievements, still uses Electron in the Claude desktop\napp. And it’s a slow, buggy, and bloated app.
\n\nSo why are we still using Electron and not embracing the\nagent-powered, spec driven development future?
\n\nFor one thing, coding agents are really good at the first 90% of\ndev. But that last bit — nailing down all the edge cases and\ncontinuing support once it meets the real world — remains hard,\ntedious, and requires plenty of agent hand-holding. [...]
\n\nFor now, Electron still makes sense. Coding agents are amazing.\nBut the last mile of dev and the support surface area remains a\nreal concern.
\n
I’m with Breunig up until the point where he accepts coding agents struggling with the final 10 percent as a justification for choosing Electron to create a Mac app. Plenty of people — individuals and teams alike — are using Claude Code to create terrific new native Mac apps. Just among my friends, Glenn Fleishman, Lex Friedman, and Jason Snellman, have all in recent months used not just AI coding assistants in general, but Claude Code specifically, to create genuinely native Mac apps that meet their own personal high standards for Mac-assedness, forged through decades of literally professional Mac snobbery. A comprehensive catalog of Mac-assed apps made with the assistance of Claude Code, would, I suspect, be remarkably long.
The struggle with the last 10 percent is unrelated to AI coding. It’s the nature of all software engineering. There’s a well-known adage that Wikipedia names the “Ninety-Ninety Rule”, attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs:
\n\n\n\n\nThe first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent\nof the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code\naccounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
\n
Cargill’s mathematically humorous formulation resonates because it not only explains why the final 10 percent consumes half the time, but also why software projects tend to take twice as long as expected. This universal truth holds whether the code is human-written, AI-generated, or a mix of both.
\n\nBreunig gets closer to the truth in a postscript, linking to the Hacker News thread discussing his post. The top-rated comment in the HN thread is from Boris Cherny, who works at Anthropic on the Claude Code team. Cherny wrote:
\n\n\n\n\nBoris from the Claude Code team here.
\n\nSome of the engineers working on the app worked on Electron back\nin the day, so preferred building non-natively. It’s also a nice\nway to share code so we’re guaranteed that features across web\nand desktop have the same look and feel. Finally, Claude is\ngreat at it.
\n\nThat said, engineering is all about tradeoffs and this may change\nin the future!
\n
I would rephrase the guarantee that “features across web and desktop have the same look and feel” as guaranteeing that the Mac app is restrained by the limits of the web and cut off from the breadth of idiomatically native functionality provided by the Mac’s native frameworks. Electron guarantees that an app feels just as wrong on all platforms. But the more relevant tidbit is this sentence: “Some of the engineers working on the app worked on Electron back in the day, so preferred building non-natively.” So it’s not that Claude somehow prefers Electron, but that “some of the engineers” at Anthropic do.
\n\nSome is doing some heavy lifting there, given that “some of the engineers” includes Felix Rieseberg, currently Anthropic’s engineering lead for Claude Cowork and Claude Code Desktop, and previously engineering lead for the Claude apps for MacOS and Windows. Rieseberg didn’t merely “work on Electron back in the day”. He is one of the principal people responsible for creating Electron, and remains today one of three members of the Electron project’s Administrative Working Group that “oversees the entire governance and project”. He literally wrote the book on Electron.
\n\nFelix Rieseberg, quite obviously, is the answer to the question why Claude is an Electron app. It’s like wondering why all the screws in a building were hammered into the walls, and then finding out that the guy who oversaw construction founded and co-owns the world’s biggest hammer manufacturer. Windows uses Philips head screws, Linux uses hex screws, and MacOS requires Torx (of course) — but a hammer works the same way with all screws. That’s Electron. That’s Rieseberg’s baby.
\n\nRieseberg, it turns out, hasn’t only had a hand in Claude being an Electron app. Per both his personal home page and LinkedIn profile, before joining Anthropic he spent over two years as the engineering manager for the desktop team at Notion, whose client for Mac is a massive 518 MB Electron app and a notoriously non-native experience.1 Before Notion, Rieseberg spent 2016–2021 “as a Senior Staff Engineer and Engineering Manager at Slack, where I got to support a team of amazing C++ engineers building the cross-platform desktop framework Electron — as well as Slack’s desktop apps for macOS, Windows, and Linux.”2
\n\nFinding out that one guy — who is a senior Electron maintainer — has led the teams for the desktop clients for Slack, Notion, and now Claude is like discovering that it was one guy — whose family business was a distillery — who helmed the Titanic, piloted the Hindenburg, and then served as air traffic controller for Amelia Earhart.
\n\nNotion, it’s worth pointing out, has perhaps seen the error of their ways. Apple prominently featured Notion during the Platforms State of the Union technical keynote at WWDC last month, saying, “And apps that previously used cross-platform or web technologies like Notion are migrating their user interface to SwiftUI because they want a level of performance and UI consistency that other technologies can’t deliver.” This, just one year after Rieseberg left for Anthropic. Perhaps Claude will similarly seek to wash the Electron stink off the Claude app eventually. I suspect an Electron codebase is like sap, though — sticky, dirty, and harder to wash off the longer you wait. ↩︎
\nBefore getting promoted to engineering manager in charge of all of Slack’s “desktop” apps, Rieseberg started at Slack as engineering team lead for Windows, which offers an inkling as to his platform taste. ↩︎︎
\nMike Dano, in a long (too long, I say) report for Ookla (makers of the nifty Speedtest app):
\n\n\n\n\nFurther, few other countries in the world followed in the mmWave\nfootsteps of the U.S., with international spectrum regulators\ninstead putting a focus on releasing mid-band spectrum for 5G.
\n\nHowever, mmWave networks haven’t disappeared. New drive test data\nfrom Ookla’s RootMetrics, coupled with crowdsourced information\nfrom Ookla’s Speedtest Insights, shows the ongoing growth of\nmmWave 5G networks in the U.S., as well as the remarkable\nperformance characteristics of those systems.
\n\n\n
\n- \n
Across all of RootMetrics’ testing in the second half of 2025,\nin both urban (metro) and rural (state) areas, mmWave showed up\nin 2.2% of Verizon’s samples. For AT&T, that figure was 0.2%.\nFor T-Mobile, that figure was almost 0% (and as a result, this\nreport will mainly focus on Verizon and AT&T).
- \n
Verizon’s mmWave connections showed up in 75 markets in the\nfirst half of 2024 (out of a total of 125 markets), a figure\nthat rose to 91 in the second half of 2025. That’s almost triple\nthe number of markets where RootMetrics recorded AT&T mmWave\nsystems in the second half of 2025. 5G mmWave from T-Mobile,\nmeanwhile, only showed up in 1 market covered by RootMetrics\ntechnicians during the second half of 2025.
- \n
Most mmWave samples were obtained within 150 meters (about 500\nfeet) of a mmWave transmission site, reflecting the spectrum’s\nrelatively diminutive coverage area. However, download speeds\nover mmWave connections reached beyond 1 Gbps in some markets.
- \n
Denver, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Boston are top mmWave cities\nfor Verizon. Roughly 60% of RootMetrics’ outdoor testing\nsamples landed on Verizon’s mmWave in these cities in the\nsecond half of 2025.
So mmWave is almost entirely a U.S. thing, and within the U.S. mostly a Verizon thing and sort of an AT&T thing.
\n\nPreviously: A year ago I linked to an Ookla report on the iPhone 16e’s cellular performance, it being the first iPhone to ship with an Apple C-series modem. Performance was very good!
\n\nLink: ookla.com/articles/a-return-to-mmwave-5g
\n" }, { "title" : "Introducing the Safari MCP Server for Web Developers", "date_published" : "2026-07-02T21:55:31Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-02T21:55:31Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/safari-mcp", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/safari-mcp", "external_url" : "https://webkit.org/blog/18136/introducing-the-safari-mcp-server-for-web-developers/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nSaron Yitbarek, writing on the WebKit blog, with a nice post-WWDC surprise:
\n\n\n\n\nIn Safari Technology Preview 247, we’re introducing the\nSafari MCP server — a Model Context Protocol server for web\ndevelopers that makes your web development and debugging workflow\nfaster and more powerful. We know agents are increasingly integral\nto the coding process and the Safari MCP server gives your agent\nthe ability to know how your code actually renders in the browser\nby connecting it to a Safari browser window.
\n\nAny MCP-compatible client can connect to the Safari MCP server. By\nconnecting your agent to a Safari browser window, your agent can\nemulate what your users experience, giving it the information it\nneeds to debug more autonomously, like access to the DOM, network\nrequests, screenshots, and console output.
\n
MCP is Anthropic’s open protocol, so it was designed for Claude, but all sorts of other tools use it too — Gemini CLI, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and more. MCP really is open, not “open”.
\n\nLink: webkit.org/blog/18136/introducing-the-safari-mcp-server-for…
\n" }, { "title" : "EveryMac Turns 30", "date_published" : "2026-07-02T21:31:04Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-02T21:52:25Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/everymac-turns-30", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/everymac-turns-30", "external_url" : "https://everymac.com/whatsnew/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nEveryMac:
\n\n\n\n\nThirty years is a long time — and a great deal has changed since\nthen — but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been\nthere to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the\noriginal 128k to the current line. Thank you very much for your\nsupport through the years.
\n
Daring Fireball turns 24 next month, which doesn’t sound that much younger than 30. But the way things work (in my mind at least) is that sites that are still around but were established years prior to my starting Daring Fireball are the real “old guard”. I still feel like DF is a newcomer next to a site like EveryMac. 1996 for chrissakes. Steve Jobs wasn’t even back at Apple yet. What a great run it’s been and continues to be for EveryMac.
\n\nMichael Tsai (whose eponymous blog is the same age as Daring Fireball) asked EveryMac proprietor Brock Kyle how it started. The final line of his answer: “I miss the ethos of those days.”
\n\nLink: everymac.com/whatsnew/
\n" }, { "title" : "I Repeat Myself (5G vs. LTE Edition)", "date_published" : "2026-07-02T20:32:31Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-02T20:32:32Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/i-repeat-myself", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/i-repeat-myself", "external_url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/03/23/5g-battery-life", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nBack in March 2022, Nicole Nguyen of The Wall Street Journal compared the battery life effects of 5G vs. LTE by streaming videos on several iPhone and iPad models. She found that using LTE saved significant battery life. (It would be nice if someone re-ran similar tests on more recent devices — just because it was true with the iPhone 13 Pro doesn’t mean it’s true with current models. But I’ll bet it is.)
\n\nAnyway, linking to her report, I wrote:
\n\n\n\n\nWith both regular 5G and LTE, I typically get between 50–100 Mbps\ndown — and I see a regular 5G connection far far more often than\nI do 5G ultra wideband. I don’t see any practical advantage to\nregular 5G compared to LTE. Those crazy-fast ultra-wideband\ndownload speeds are like owning a car that can go 200 MPH. So I’m\njust going to set my iPhone to use LTE all the time and save\nbattery life. I’ll turn 5G Auto back on if I ever run into a\nsituation where my LTE signal seems weak or slow.
\n
Which rings several bells with my “A Tale of Two Modems” post yesterday, regarding an AppleInsider report that data stolen from Apple supplier Tata Electronics shows that Apple is going to use Qualcomm’s mmWave-supporting cellular modems only in models of the iPhone 18 Pro sold in the U.S.
\n\nBut so what happened to my LTE setting? If I switched to LTE in 2022 because the battery life savings were noticeable and 5G’s faster download speeds were not, how’d I wind up back on 5G in 2026 and switching to LTE again only earlier this month?
\n\nI don’t remember exactly, to be honest. I do know that I never switched back to 5G because I found LTE slow. As best I can remember, I switched back at some point when testing a new iPhone and ... just stopped thinking about it and never switched back to full-time LTE. But I’m on LTE again now, and I’m not switching back unless (a) I do find LTE slow, or (b) someone publishes results from a testing showing that 5G no longer consumes more battery power than LTE on current iPhone models.
\n\nOh, and to that point — a few readers emailed to say that one reason to prefer 5G, especially if you’re within range of a mmWave tower, is if you’re sharing your cellular connection to a Mac (or multiple Macs) via hotspot tethering. Yes, for sure. Another point that’s been raised is that 5G is supposedly better than LTE in crowded/congested situations like a stadium or arena full of people. Maybe? But in both cases, you know those situations when you encounter them, and you can use LTE all day most days and just turn on 5G when you’re using your iPhone as a hotspot, or when you find yourself in a crowded stadium. I’m saying try turning 5G off day-to-day, not telling you to sign up for a cellular plan without 5G (which I’m not even sure you can buy anymore).
\n\nLink: daringfireball.net/linked/2022/03/23/5g-battery-life
\n" }, { "title" : "Truth Social Is Still Just Trump’s Blog", "date_published" : "2026-07-02T19:38:45Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-02T19:38:46Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/truth-social-is-still-just-trumps-blog", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/truth-social-is-still-just-trumps-blog", "external_url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2025/06/truth_social_is_just_trumps_blog", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nAfter I linked to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posting on Twitter/X about the Trump administration allowing Anthropic to once again release Claude Fable 5, I was reminded once again that no one else in the Trump administration uses Truth Social other than Trump himself. Not even Lutnick, a lickspittle among lickspittles.* The rest of them all use X. Which in turn reminds me of my observation from a year ago:
\n\n\n\n\nI’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks, and in that time,\nTrump’s own posts on Truth Social have made the news on a\nnear-daily basis. I’ve never once, ever, seen a post from anyone\nelse on Truth Social make the news. Trump is not just the one and\nonly person of consequence using it, his is the one and only\naccount on Truth Social that you ever, ever hear about.
\n\nIf Truth Social were actually meant to compete with X, Threads,\nBluesky, and Mastodon, this almost certainly would have been a\nsource of conflict between Trump and Musk. Because, if it were\nmeant to be an actual competitive social network, it would occur\nto Trump to require all his flunkeys and toadies not only to post\nto Truth Social, but to stop posting to X. But he hasn’t done\nthat, because Truth Social is functioning as intended: it’s just\nan outlet for Trump to spew his demented mad-king musings\n(today he’s retweeting calls for him to be added to Mount\nRushmore) and, most importantly, get some of his all-caps-laden\nbangers read aloud on the TV news.
\n
* Every single time I type Lutnick’s name I’m tempted to spell it “Nutlick”, but that’s too immature for the hallowed pages of this website.
\n\nLink: daringfireball.net/2025/06/truth_social_is_just_trumps_blog
\n" }, { "title" : "‘A Perfect Reflection of Trump’s Washington’", "date_published" : "2026-07-02T19:14:31Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-02T19:15:15Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/perfect-reflection", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/perfect-reflection", "external_url" : "https://politicalwire.com/2026/06/19/a-perfect-reflection-of-trumps-washington/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nTaegan Goddard, two weeks ago at Political Wire:
\n\n\n\n\nThe Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become an almost\ntoo-perfect metaphor for Donald Trump’s presidency.
\n\nHe promised a quick, cheap fix.
\n\nInstead, taxpayers got a no-bid project that ballooned to more\nthan $14 million, delivered a freshly painted pool in “American\nFlag Blue,” and then promptly watched it turn green with algae as\nthe new coating began to peel just days after it was supposedly\nfinished.
\n\nThat is Trumpism in miniature: a grand declaration, a flashy\ncosmetic overhaul, a politically connected contractor, and an\nimmediate failure blamed on someone else.
\n\nWashington was supposed to be made beautiful again.
\n\nInstead, the Reflecting Pool now looks like a murky swamp — a fitting reflection of a capital overwhelmed by corruption\nand chaos.
\n
Like I just wrote, it’s all kayfabe. It was never about actually improving the Reflecting Pool. All that mattered was that Trump said he would. The only real part was the taxpayer money funneled to a Trump crony. Just like how in pro wrestling, they charge fans real money for tickets. That’s real too.
\n\nJust like in pro wrestling, Trump has even explained it all away by pinning the blame on non-existent “vandals” who not only caused the weeks-old $14-million pool lining to peel, but somehow filled the pool with left-wing algae. When I was a kid there was a WWF wrestler named “Cowboy” Bob Orton. Orton broke his arm (for real) and was given a special dispensation to wrestle while wearing a cast. Orton’s arm was actually broken for 8 weeks, but it was kayfabe “broken” for an entire year — during which he used the cast to bash the heads of his opponents when the referee was “distracted”. Trump’s Reflecting Pool vandals are no more real than the doctors who vouched that Orton needed to wear a hard cast for an entire year. (Orton might as well be Trump’s next secretary of health and human services.)
\n\nKatie Rogers at The New York Times yesterday reported on how the entire city of Washington is now a fenced-in mess for the nation’s 250th birthday, the ostensible occasion for all these supposedly beautifying projects in the first place:
\n\n\n\n\nPresiding over a series of fenced-off or under-construction\nfestivities ahead of the country’s 250th celebration is President\nTrump, who does not seem to mind that some of the nation’s most\nenduring symbols of liberty and expression are closed off and\nmilitarized.
\n\n“Good Morning from the Pool!” he wrote on social media\nlate last week, posting an image of three soldiers standing guard\nat the pool’s edge, just in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
\n\nIn his drive to “beautify” the nation’s capital, Mr. Trump seems\nto have turned portions of the city into either a construction\nzone or an armed camp as he seeks to prove that he alone can\nimprove a city he interacts with primarily from his armored\nlimousine or presidential helicopter.
\n
There’s no “seems to have” about it. Trump did this. That’s like saying “Trump seems to have demolished the East Wing of the White House.” He did it. He did not beautify Washington DC for the nation’s 250th birthday this weekend. He trashed it. But he says he beautified it so that’s all that matters in MAGA Land.
\n\nLink: politicalwire.com/2026/06/19/a-perfect-reflection-of-trumps…
\n" }, { "title" : "Claude Fable and Kayfabe", "date_published" : "2026-07-02T18:29:01Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-02T19:55:39Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/claude-fable-and-kayfabe", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/claude-fable-and-kayfabe", "external_url" : "https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nAnthropic:
\n\n\n\n\nOn Friday, June 12, the US government applied export controls to\nour newest models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5. This\nrequired us to restrict access to foreign nationals, whether\ninside or outside the United States. Because the order took effect\nimmediately and we had no reliable way to verify nationality in\nreal-time, we suspended access to both models for all users.
\n\nAs of today, June 30, the export controls on Fable 5 and Mythos 5\nhave been\nlifted.
\n
That’s a link to this tweet on Twitter/X from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick:
\n\n\n\n\nOver the past two weeks, we have worked closely with Anthropic to\nanalyze and approve Fable 5 to ensure alignment across the US\nGovernment and strengthen America’s leadership in AI.
\n
I don’t think a goddamn thing happened in the last two weeks, and if anything did happen, it sure as shit wasn’t anything that Lutnick understood. There should be real government oversight regulating frontier AI, but this is just pantomime performative nonsense.
\n\nThe entire Trump 2.0 term (and much of the 1.0 term before it) can be summarized with a single word: kayfabe, “the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc., are genuine”. Trumpism and MAGA is entirely about the belief system that everything is bullshit. Everyone is crooked, every supposed fact is merely an opinion, and everything is ultimately subject to the whims of whoever has power. The fix is not just in, it’s always been in, and always will be in. What Trump says is true is true because he’s the fucking president. Trump himself asserts that “evidence” is what he claims to see — not what he can actually show for others to see. If Trump says we won the war he needlessly started with Iran, then we won it. If Trump says there’s a peace deal 38 times, then there have been 38 peace deals. The FIFA “peace prize” Trump was awarded last year was no more legitimate or earned or meaningful than a WWE championship belt. It’s pro wrestling not just writ large, but (alas for the entire world) writ very large.
\n\nWhen you view Trump and his administration through the prism of kayfabe, it doesn’t make actual sense, but you can see how they think it makes sense.
\n\nI’m not accusing Anthropic of being in cahoots, per se, with the Trump administration on this whole “Fable is so good that it’s too dangerous ... wait two weeks ... OK now everyone can have it” back and forth. But they played along. “The AI model the Trump administration didn’t want you to have” is advertising no money could buy.
\n\nLink: anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5
\n" }, { "title" : "‘Why Is Meta Destroying Its Engineering Organization?’", "date_published" : "2026-07-02T17:09:42Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-02T17:14:07Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/orosz-meta-engineering-culture", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/orosz-meta-engineering-culture", "external_url" : "https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-engineering", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nGergely Orosz, writing at The Pragmatic Engineer (which, sadly, is a Substack blog):
\n\n\n\n\nThe biggest problem: people stop caring about real work and focus\non performative work. Let’s check the four ingredients that\nMeta’s leadership has decided to introduce to their workplace:
\n\n\n
\n\n- Tracking the keyboards and mouse clicks of all engineers, where\nlegally possible
\n- Reassign a good chunk of engineers to full-time data labeling
\n- Let staff know that 10% of them will be laid off
\n- Have a culture where devs optimize for any and all metrics\nmeasured during PSC
\n- Measure token usage as part of PSC
\nShake this mix up well, and what do you get? Two things:
\n\n\n
\n- \n
Everyone overuses AI to boost their personal stats. An\nengineering workforce that pretends to work with as much AI,\nand as little human input, as possible. It’s a strange\nincentive where an outage caused by a failure to review code\nproperly is not grounds for dismissal, but writing code by hand — instead of having an AI agent write it — could cost you\nyour job.
- \n
Every longer-tenured engineer is seeking a new job, or at\nleast considering it. Those who have been around at Meta\nlonger term have seen enough.
PSC is “Performance Summary Cycle”, Meta’s stringent cut-throat performance review system. Orosz’s report is extraordinarily well-sourced by current and recently former Meta engineers. Towards the end of the piece, Orosz addresses the “just ask Meta AI to give you the account” Instagram account hijackings, which he describes, without hyperbole, as “the most embarrassing outage in Meta’s history”. Orosz’s sources report, unsurprisingly, that the breach was the result of AI — AI writing the code, AI reviewing the code, and AI taking over for human technical support.
\n\nAs for who is responsible, it’s Zuckerberg and AI “genius” Alexandr Wang:
\n\n\n\n\nIn June that year, Meta acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI to reboot\nits AI efforts for a whopping $14.8B, and brought in Scale AI’s\nCEO, Alexandr Wang to take over Meta’s AI strategy. [...] Based on\nthe investment made into Scale AI and Wang, it’s pretty clear that\nMeta — and Zuckerberg — is determined to build a\nstate-of-the-art LLM that can be competitive with the latest\nversions of Claude and ChatGPT. But Meta has to start pretty much\nfrom scratch, and it’s up to Alexandr Wang to deliver. [...]
\n\nZuckerberg has full control over the business, and has made the\ndecisions to reallocate a good part of engineering folks to data\nlabeling, to roll out tracking software, and to lay off 10% of\nstaff when Meta achieved record revenue and profits. As the CEO,\nthe buck clearly stops with him.
\n\nBut it’s hard to unsee that — outside of layoffs — everything\nthat Meta is doing is taken from the Scale AI playbook, and that\nsurely comes from Wang.
\n
It sounds like in addition to running Meta’s “AI strategy”, Zuckerberg has effectively put Wang in charge of engineering at Meta, and Wang is trying to replace human engineers with AI. During the transition, the job of engineers at Meta has changed from writing code to training AI systems that Zuckerberg and Wang aren’t even trying to hide are intended to replace the people. What the Oompa Loompas were to Willy Wonka, Zuckerberg wants AI to be for him.
\n\nI’m not sure it’s any more realistic. Meta has always been a bad company. Now it seems like a bad company that’s lost its fucking mind.
\n\nLink: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying…
\n" }, { "title" : "MG Siegler Got Banned From WhatsApp for No Reason", "date_published" : "2026-07-02T16:13:13Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-02T19:25:55Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/mg-siegler-whatsapp-ban", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/mg-siegler-whatsapp-ban", "external_url" : "https://spyglass.org/whatsapp-ban/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nMG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:
\n\n\n\n\nYes, that’s right, for a third time in as many years, I’ve been\nbanned by Meta. What for? Do you really have to ask? Nobody\nknows. My suspicion is that it’s directly tied to the\nclaiming of usernames on WhatsApp, which Meta opened up\nyesterday. After I claimed mine, it seemingly logged me out\nof my other active instances. And when I went to log back in...\nboom. Banned.
\n\nNo explanation. No warning. Just a note that “This account can no\nlonger use WhatsApp.” As with Instagram and Facebook, you can\nsubmit a review of the ban and they say they’ll look at it and let\nyou know within 24 hours — but no promises. When I did this the\nfirst go-around with Instagram, I actually lost the appeal. Why?\nNobody knows. Again, it took a personal plea. And I’m\ninsanely lucky to be able to do that. As my replies then and now\ncan attest, many are not so lucky. Many are just banned and never\nheard from again. At least on those services.
\n\nThis is bullshit. How do I know this is bullshit? Because it\nliterally happened to me! And, in fact, keeps happening to me!\nAnd I’ll get it fixed again because I just so happen to know\npeople, which is arguably worse bullshit!
\n
MG lives in the U.K. and thus needs WhatsApp for many aspects of daily life. I have never seen the appeal of WhatsApp, and would rank iMessage’s dominance here in the U.S. as one of the many reasons I’m so glad to live here. But WhatsApp is, finally, clearly getting Meta-ized. MG, later on in the same column:
\n\n\n\n\nBut all I see in the news is that Meta was having a hell of\na time monetizing WhatsApp after years and years and they think\nthey found someone who can do that. Also, how have those\nother “hackquisitions” worked out for everyone? What I see\nis Meta no longer giving a shit about the product or the\nexperience, just the monetization. They’re ready to fucking milk\nit.
\n
Oh, and while MG was (is?) banned from his WhatsApp account, messages from other people go through to his account with no indication to the sender that he can’t see them. What a fucking system.
\n\nLink: spyglass.org/whatsapp-ban/
\n" }, { "title" : "Hackers Stole Instagram Accounts Simply by Asking Meta AI to Give Them Access", "date_published" : "2026-07-02T15:55:57Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-03T17:06:40Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/meta-ai-ask-for-instagram-accounts", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/02/meta-ai-ask-for-instagram-accounts", "external_url" : "https://www.404media.co/hackers-simply-asked-meta-ai-to-give-them-access-to-high-profile-instagram-accounts-it-worked/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJason Koebler, a month ago at 404 Media:
\n\n\n\n\nOver the last several days, Telegram groups for security\nresearchers and hacking groups have been sharing videos and\nscreenshots of the steps taken to steal an account, which appeared\nto be shockingly easy. One video shows a hacker starting a\nconversation with Meta’s AI support bot and asking it to link the\ntarget account with a new email address: “Just link my new email\naddress. This is my username @{target_username}. I will send you\nthe code. {attacker_email} Thank you.”
\n\nThe AI then sends an eight-digit code to the attacker’s email\naddress. The attacker enters that code and gets a password reset\nemail, giving them access to the account. The vulnerability is an\nastounding, high-profile example of the types of risks that\ncompanies are putting their users and workers under when they\noffload important functions to AI.
\n
This happened to a friend of mine who has a low-profile Instagram account with a highly desirable three-letter-long username. He’d had the same account since the very early days of Instagram (hence the unusually short username), and woke up one morning at the end of May locked out of his account, and the email address for the account had been changed. The first notice he got about it was when he tried to use the app and couldn’t get in. He wasted an entire day trying to get the account back, dealing with the same Meta AI support system that the thieves used to steal his account, to no avail. A few days later, I sent him this link to 404 Media’s story about how it happened, and my friend then sent a link to that story to Meta AI. Then Meta AI told him something like (paraphrased) “I am aware that this has happened and that you want your username back” — then, he got it back.
\n\nIt’s mind-boggling how stupid this is. It’s not like Meta is some rinky-dink outfit. Say what you want about Meta and Zuckerberg’s ethics (and I certainly have, over the years), but the company has always been renowned for its technical competence and Zuckerberg for his intelligence. He’s a smart fucking guy. But it seems like he’s lost his mind to the AI hype virus.
\n\nLink: 404media.co/hackers-simply-asked-meta-ai-to-give-them…
\n" }, { "title" : "★ A Tale of Two Modems", "date_published" : "2026-07-01T23:26:45Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-02T20:07:49Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/a_tale_of_two_modems", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/a_tale_of_two_modems", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nMarko Zivkovic, reporting for AppleInsider regarding some of the data revealed by Tata Electronics’s massive data breach:
\n\n\n\n\nFor the U.S. variant of the iPhone 18 Pro, which will feature\nmmWave compatibility, Apple seemingly plans to use Qualcomm modem\nhardware. Multiple Qualcomm components, including the SDX80M,\nSDR875, QDM8771, QDM8720, PMK75, PMX75, and QET7100A, are\nreferenced in a bill of materials related to the iPhone 18 Pro\nmodel Apple plans to sell in the United States.
\n\nAs for the iPhone 18 models which will be sold elsewhere, Tata\ndocumentation suggests these configurations will use Apple’s\nproprietary C2 modem. While this approach may sound unusual, there\nis at least one possible explanation.
\n\nApple’s current in-house modems, the C1 and the C1X, do not\nsupport 5G mmWave, and it looks as though the C2 will continue\nthis trend. Until Apple develops a modem compatible with mmWave,\nit looks as though the company will offer mmWave support to iPhone\n18 Pro users by using Qualcomm hardware.
\n
This immediately raises the question of which modem is “better”, and I suspect the answer requires nuance. Apple’s C1 and C1X modems are, by all accounts, noticeably more power efficient than Qualcomm’s. An iPhone with an Apple C-series modem should get longer battery life than an otherwise identical iPhone with a Qualcomm modem. The obvious advantage to the Qualcomm modems is support for 5G mmWave, the super high-speed 5G bands primarily offered by Verizon.
\n\nPersonally, I don’t care about mmWave speeds. It literally makes no difference in my experience compared to regular 5G speeds. In fact, ever since WWDC a few weeks ago, I’ve had my iPhone 17 Pro set to use LTE instead of 5G. (Settings: Cellular: Cellular Data Options: Voice & Data.) I literally notice no difference in speed and I presume that battery life is improved. Battery life certainly isn’t worse. (I switched to LTE after a friend at WWDC suggested that LTE has better range/penetration in places like airports, especially when you’ve boarded a plane but haven’t taken off yet.)
\n\nJust now I used Ookla’s Speedtest app to test the difference here in my office. I got 80 Mbps down / 15 Mbps up on LTE; 320 Mbps down / 18 Mbps up on 5G. That’s on Verizon’s network (which does offer mmWave throughout center city Philly, but seemingly not here at my house), with my iPhone 17 Pro (which uses a Qualcomm modem). I tested again, minutes later, using an iPhone Air (which uses Apple’s C1X modem) and got 390 Mbps down / 21 Mbps up on 5G (and similar 80 Mbps down / 13 Mbps up on LTE).
\n\nSo 5G is clearly faster than LTE here at home for me, using either iPhone model. But why should I care about that difference? Having a phone that can pull 320 Mbps down over cellular is like having a car that can go 320 MPH — an interesting technical feat, but of no practical value to me whatsoever. I never feel like I’m waiting for anything to load because I’m on LTE. LTE is fast enough, and regular 5G is more than fast enough. 5G mmWave is simply a waste of battery life as far as I’m concerned.
\n\nSo Apple’s C-series modems win on battery life, and Qualcomm’s modems win for high-speed mmWave support. But Qualcomm’s speed edge is theoretical, not practical. Apple’s C1/C1X energy efficiency edge is very much practical. I’ve used both the 17 Pro and iPhone Air in a variety of places over the last year, and I’ve noticed no real difference in being able to get a decent signal in rural areas, either.
\n\nOn the surface it sounds like a tradeoff — that Qualcomm’s modems consume more battery but deliver higher download speeds. But in practice that tradeoff only comes into play if you’re a Verizon user and happen to be within 50 meters or so of a mmWave-equipped cell tower, and that crazy high bandwidth doesn’t really make anything you do with your phone any faster than regular 5G (or LTE, I say). In reality I’d rather have an Apple C-series modem — I’d get better battery efficiency all the time, the same network performance almost all the time, and I don’t care at all about the rare times when I could get the crazy-high-speed mmWave bandwidth that Apple’s C1 and C1X modems don’t support (and perhaps still won’t support with the upcoming C2). Cellular download speed and reception is nearly a solved problem for my needs. Battery life is not.
\n\nSo why wouldn’t Apple just use the C2 everywhere, including the U.S.? I suspect Apple is hoist not with their own, but with Verizon’s petard here. Faster-than-you-practically-need download speeds are a carrier bragging point. Longer battery life and plenty-fast-enough download speeds are an Apple bragging point. Verizon — and to a lesser extent, AT&T — spent a fortune building out mmWave networks. They don’t want to sell flagship phones that don’t support them. Apple’s flagship iPhones have supported those networks since 2020. Remember how many times Tim Cook and Verizon’s CEO uttered “5G” at the Covid era iPhone 12 event? If Zivkovic’s analysis of this stolen data from Tata is correct, and Apple is going to use Qualcomm’s models only in iPhone 18 Pro models sold in the U.S., I think the reason why is Verizon and AT&T bragging points, not any practical user benefit. And the result may be that U.S. iPhone 18 Pro models get somewhat worse battery life than those in the rest of the world.
\n\nPreviously: Nicole Nguyen Tests 5G’s Effect on Battery Life on iPhones and iPads (March 2022).
\n\n " }, { "title" : "PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass Subscriptions", "date_published" : "2026-07-01T19:55:26Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-01T19:55:27Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/01/playstation-plus-and-xbox-game-pass-subscriptions", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/01/playstation-plus-and-xbox-game-pass-subscriptions", "external_url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/01/valve-on-subsidizing-hardware", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nFollowing up on my earlier post on Valve’s righteous objection to selling game console hardware at a loss, I should have noted that PlayStation Plus starts at $11/month (and goes up to $20/month) and Xbox Game Pass starts at $10/month (and goes up to $23/month). One draw of these subscriptions is access to a library of game titles — but another one is that you need one of these subscriptions to play online multiplayer games. Not every game demands online access but many (most?) do. There are very few serious PlayStation and Xbox gamers who don’t pay for a subscription, and within a few years those subscriptions cost more than the (subsidized) hardware. It’s not just about licensing fees for game titles players purchase anymore.
\n\nValve didn’t make any hay over this point, but should have. Because Steam Deck and Steam Machine are fundamentally more like PCs, all you need to play online multiplayer games is a free Steam account.
\n\nLink: daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/01/valve-on-subsidizing…
\n" }, { "title" : "Valve Explains Why It Doesn’t Subsidize Its Hardware Platforms", "date_published" : "2026-07-01T18:04:29Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-01T19:22:56Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/01/valve-on-subsidizing-hardware", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/01/valve-on-subsidizing-hardware", "external_url" : "https://www.theverge.com/games/952004/valve-steam-machine-price-not-subsidizing", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nValve, in a statement to The Verge, explaining why it doesn’t sell its handheld Steam Deck or new Steam Machine gaming devices at a loss (gift link):
\n\n\n\n\nWhile this might seem like an easy solution, it doesn’t align with\nour beliefs about how healthy ecosystems are built. If there’s\nanything we’re religious about at Valve, it’s our belief that open\nsystems are better in the long run, for ourselves and customers.\nThe openness of the PC ecosystem in particular has enabled it to\nbe the primary driver of hardware and software innovation, because\nanyone with an idea for a way to do something better was able to\ntake a shot at it. When companies sell their hardware under cost\nfor competitive advantage, or buy exclusive content for it,\nthey’re doing that to build a more closed system, one where you\ndon’t get to choose what software you want to use.
\n\nWe don’t want that for PC hardware, and we don’t think you should\nwant it either. You shouldn’t feel like you have to buy Valve\nhardware; you should be able to view it as just one option\nalongside all the devices for playing games, and select the one\nthat makes sense for you. This means you get to decide which\ndevice fits your personal tradeoffs around things like price,\nperformance, form factor, peripheral support, and everything else\nyou care about. That’s the strength of the open PC platform, and\nsubsidizing hardware runs counter to it.
\n
Valve published a shorter version of this on their own Steam Machine launch post, but the statement to The Verge articulates their stance more fully.
\n\nI’ve long been frustrated by the arguments that subsidized hardware is definitional to gaming console platforms. Microsoft, in particular, has leaned on it as a whiny excuse ever since they launched the first Xbox. Just last week they emphasized the point again when announcing another increase in Xbox prices. It’s a strategic choice, that’s all, and a rather obviously predatory choice at that. So I say kudos to Valve for refusing to play the game, and selling their devices at honest prices. (They just raised the prices for Steam Deck by $250 to $300, due to the rising costs of RAM and storage.)
\n\nIt’s worth noting that the mobile phone market is sort of subsidized — but by carriers, not Apple (or Samsung or the other lesser Android makers). Apple sells iPhones directly, unsubsidized, so we know the actual cost of each model. And even when sold by the carriers at a subsidy, it’s the carriers, not Apple, who are taking the point-of-sale loss with the intention of making it up over time through monthly service bills that customers agree to pay by contract. I’d be very curious to know what percentage of new iPhone sales are sold at the full one-time payment retail price.
\n\nThat’s a very different type of subsidy than Sony and Microsoft strategically selling each PlayStation and Xbox unit at a loss. When you buy a PlayStation, you don’t sign a contract to buy a certain number of games to make sure Sony turns a profit on your purchase in the long run. They’re gambling, effectively — and they make more money from a customer who buys more games than a customer who buys fewer games. When a phone carrier promotes something like “Get an iPhone 17 Pro for $0”, they know exactly how much money they’re going to make if you agree to the deal.
\n\nLink: theverge.com/games/952004/valve-steam-machine-price-not…
\n" }, { "title" : "The Talk Show: ‘Taking Drugs to Get Fat’", "date_published" : "2026-07-01T15:48:09Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-01T15:48:09Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/01/the-talk-show-451", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/01/the-talk-show-451", "external_url" : "https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/06/30/ep-451", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nThe great John Moltz returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s hardware price hikes in response to the global RAM/SSD shortage, and some spitballing on what we like about the UI changes in the MacOS 27 Golden Gate beta.
\n\nSponsored by:
\n\nLink: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/06/30/ep-451
\n" }, { "title" : "404 Media: Vulnerability in iCloud’s ‘Hide My Email’ Reveals Peoples’ Real Email Addresses", "date_published" : "2026-07-01T14:42:02Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-02T16:14:33Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/01/hide-my-email-not-so-hidden", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/01/hide-my-email-not-so-hidden", "external_url" : "https://www.404media.co/apple-hide-my-email-vulnerability-reveals-peoples-real-email-addresses/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJoseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media:
\n\n\n\n\n404 Media is not revealing the exact details of the vulnerability\nbecause it can still be exploited as of Monday, when 404 Media\nverified the issue with one of our own hidden email addresses.
\n\n“Apple Hide My Email is leaking email addresses that are supposed\nto be hidden. We reported the issue and replication instructions\nto Apple over a year ago. We don’t know why it hasn’t been fixed,\nbut we don’t feel comfortable waiting any longer. Hide My Email\nusers deserve to know that it may be possible for attackers to\ndiscover their hidden email addresses,” Tyler Murphy, the\nco-founder of EasyOptOuts, which discovered and reported the issue\nto Apple, told 404 Media. [...]
\n\nTo test the issue I generated a new Hide My Email address and\nprovided it to Murphy. Around five minutes later, he replied with\nmy real email address linked to my Apple account which was\nsupposed to be hidden.
\n\n“We don’t know the full scope of the issue, but in our limited\ntests with volunteers, 100% of Hide My Email addresses were\nexploitable,” Murphy said.
\n
Not good. Especially the “We reported the issue and replication instructions to Apple over a year ago” part.
\n\n(Is this possibly related to the WWDC news that Apple is merging the domain names used for Sign In With Apple and Hide My Email? I can’t see how, but who knows? I suspect the motivation behind the SIWA and HME domain merger is merely convenience, but without an explanation from Apple we’re left to conjecture.)
\n\nUpdate: The original report from the founders of EasyOptOuts.
\n\nLink: 404media.co/apple-hide-my-email-vulnerability-reveals…
\n" }, { "title" : "Gnome", "date_published" : "2026-06-30T20:54:32Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-30T20:54:33Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/30/gnome", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/30/gnome", "external_url" : "https://lexfriedman.com/gnome/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nGnome is a deceptively clever animated GIF app by Lex Friedman:
\n\n\n\n\nThe truest thing about animated GIFs is that they are a critical\npillar of modern human communication, and yet getting one into a\nSlack message or an iMessage thread or an email reply usually\nrequires opening a browser, navigating to a website, searching,\nright-clicking, copying, switching back, pasting, and apologizing\nfor the delay. By then the moment has passed, and the joke is\ndead, and what was the point of any of this, really?
\n\nGnome lives in your Mac’s menubar. You hit a keyboard shortcut. A\nlittle search window appears. You type what you’re looking for — weird al, shrug, nailed it, that’s a paddlin’ — and a\ngrid of GIFs appears. Click the one you want. It’s now on your\nclipboard. Paste it wherever you were typing. Joke saved. World\nimproved.
\n\nThat’s really the whole app. It does exactly that, and it gets\nout of the way. No account. No sign-in. No newsletter. Just\nGIFs, faster.
\n
When Friedman launched Gnome last month, it was Mac-only. Since then he’s already added an iOS version, and they sync/coordinate nicely. And if you have a local folder of GIFs, you can connect that to Gnome and it’ll show results from your personal curated library before those from Gnome’s online partner Klipy. You share the same local library on Mac and iOS, provided you choose a folder in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or similar. The iOS version of Gnome offers an extension for Apple’s Messages app and an optional system-wide keyboard. On the Mac, you can disable the menu bar icon and just run Gnome like a regular app (if, like me, the last thing you need is another status icon in your menu bar).
\n\nIt’s a really simple app with a deceptive amount of craft and attention to detail. I can’t say I send all that many animated GIFs, but Gnome is so nice it makes me want to send more. I dig it. $7 one-time payment on the web, or $8 in the App Store, and if you buy it on the web you can unlock it on iOS, and vice-versa.
\n\nLink: lexfriedman.com/gnome/
\n" }, { "title" : "Supreme Court Agrees to Review Apple’s Petition Regarding Civil Contempt Finding in ‘Apple v. Epic Games’", "date_published" : "2026-06-30T20:12:08Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-30T21:06:59Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/30/scotus-apple-epic", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/30/scotus-apple-epic", "external_url" : "https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/063026zor_3f14.pdf", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nSpeaking of the Supreme Court’s end-of-term rulings, they today agreed to grant certiorari to Apple’s petition from last month, ordering:
\n\n\n\n\nAPPLE INC. V. EPIC GAMES, INC.
\n
\nThe petition for a writ of certiorari is granted limited to\nQuestion 1 presented by the petition.
Question 1 regarded the civil contempt finding — basically, whether Apple could be held in contempt for violating the spirit of the injunction by charging a commission on external payments when the letter of the injunction said nothing forbidding commissions on payments. Question 2 raised by Apple regarded the scope of the injunction — arguing that even if the contempt finding were upheld, that it should apply only to Epic, not to all developers in the U.S. App Store.
\n\n(I decided against mentioning it in my article last month, “The Fonts of the U.S. Federal Courts”, but in stark contrast to the handsomeness and dignity with which their decisions are typeset (in Century Schoolbook), the Court’s daily orders are, inexplicably, set in Lucida Sans Typewriter.)
\n\nLink: supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/063026zor_3f14.pdf
\n" }, { "title" : "Supreme Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship in 6-3 Decision", "date_published" : "2026-06-30T19:40:38Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-30T19:54:06Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/30/supreme-court-upholds-birthright-citizenship", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/30/supreme-court-upholds-birthright-citizenship", "external_url" : "https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-birthright-citizenship-decision-is-more-evidence-for-court-reform/sharetoken/e2bf9547-fa9b-468c-8af3-aa09e72ca698", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJosh Marshall, writing at TPM (gift link):
\n\n\n\n\nAs you’ve seen, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of\nbirthright citizenship by a 6 — or perhaps 5½ — vote margin.\nSee Kate Riga’s report on the majority decision and Josh\nKovensky’s piece on the dissenters’ goal of doing away\nwith birthright citizenship. I repeat my point from\nyesterday which is that the occasional non-corrupt\ndecision doesn’t make the Court any less corrupt or in need of\nreform. In this case, in a sane world, the dissents from Neil\nGorsuch, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas would on their own be\nsufficient basis for impeachment and removal from office. One\nmight as well believe or pretend to believe that the federal\nsenate is unconstitutional despite its being unambiguously\nwritten into the structure of the document itself. The level of\nabuse of power that is the basis of these dissents can only be\nseen as criminal in nature and grows from the culture of\ncorruption and impunity that now reigns on the Court.
\n
The 14th Amendment starts:
\n\n\n\n\nAll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject\nto the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and\nof the State wherein they reside.
\n
The idea that the plain meaning of the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was even debatable would have been laughable just 15 years ago. And, hopefully, soon, will be laughable again. It’s like arguing that the clear language of the 19th Amendment doesn’t guarantee women the right to vote. It’s a farce that this case even went to the Supreme Court, let alone that these three mooks dissented. (Alito and Thomas are lost causes; they’d vote for a Fourth Reich. Gorsuch I’m a little surprised by.) Needless to say, it’s rather unnerving that the majority required two — or one-and-a-half, depending on how you view Kavanaugh’s odd partial concurrence — votes from justices Trump put on the Court.
\n\nMarshall wrote a great explainer about this back in April (also a gift link):
\n\n\n\n\nBirthright citizenship is the unambiguous and certain law of the\nland. It is also good policy. What is less appreciated is that it\nundergirds the entire citizenship system in the United States, a\ncountry that keeps very, very little record of who is and isn’t a\ncitizen in the first place. The only people who really have any\nclear record of their citizenship are naturalized citizens. You or\nI who were born in the U.S. might appear to have those. We have a\npassport or maybe some other document that you can only have as a\ncitizen. But that is almost always because we said we were a\ncitizen or we provided some document that only had any\nsignificance on the basis of birthright citizenship. Usually, of\ncourse, that’s a birth certificate. That’s where the factual\nconversation ends. It is the lynchpin that makes the entire U.S.\ncitizenship system work in the absence of really any record\nkeeping. [...]
\n\nQuite apart from the constitutional and civic merits, the whole\nfabric of U.S. citizenship falls apart without the anchor of\nbirthright citizenship.
\n
The only proof that I’m a U.S. citizen is that I was born here. My birth certificate names my parents but doesn’t say anything about their citizenship. Likewise with their birth certificates. That’s how citizenship in this most remarkable of nations works.
\n\nLink: talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-birthright-citizenship…
\n" }, { "title" : "★ The Supreme Court Rules That Law Enforcement’s Use of ‘Geofence Warrant’ Was a ‘Search’ (But May Be Moot, Technically, Since 2024)", "date_published" : "2026-06-30T18:52:47Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-30T19:35:44Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/06/scotus_geofence_warrant_search", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/06/scotus_geofence_warrant_search", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nAmy Howe, writing at the ever-excellent SCOTUSblog:
\n\n\n\n\nThe Supreme Court on Monday ruled that when law enforcement\nofficials used a “geofence warrant” — a warrant that instructed\nGoogle to provide location data for cellphone users who were near\na particular place during a specific time period — to obtain\nevidence used to convict a Virginia man of a 2019 bank robbery,\nthey conducted a “search” for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. By\na vote of 6-3, the justices sent Okello Chatrie’s case back to the\nlower court for it to consider whether, as the Fourth Amendment\nrequires, the search was “reasonable.”
\n\nWriting for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan emphasized that\n“[a]n individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in\nrecords about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on\nthat constitutionally protected interest when they demand the\ninformation — even though for only a limited time, and from a\nthird-party tech company.” [...]
\n\nThe issue at the center of Chatrie v. United States arose\nafter a man armed with a gun entered a federal credit union\noutside Richmond, Virginia, and gave the teller a note demanding\nmoney. He made off with nearly $200,000, but law enforcement\nofficials did not have any leads until they served Google with a\ngeofence warrant, which directed the tech company to provide\nlocation data for cellphone users who were near the bank at the\ntime of the robbery.
\n
I agree, wholeheartedly, with the decision. Howe’s coverage, being at SCOTUSblog, is unsurprisingly concerned with the legal aspects. But I’m also fascinated by the technical aspects. It’s remarkable — and regrettable — that Google had this geofence information in the first place. The data was part of a grossly invasive and ill-conceived feature Google called “Location History”, and was used to power a feature called “Timeline” in Google Maps. The data was stored unencrypted by Google in the cloud, tied to your Google account, thus making it available to these geofence warrants.
\n\nBack in December 2023 Google announced that it was changing the way it stored this data, defaulting instead to on-device storage and using end-to-end encryption (that Google itself cannot decrypt) for location data it holds online. This change had long been advocated by the EFF, which celebrated Google’s policy change. (Notably, Chatrie robbed that credit union in 2019.)
\n\nMost people have an unshakeable belief in the widely-held misconception that “everything” we do — everywhere we go, even everything we say — in the presence of our phones is tracked and recorded, and traceable back to us individually. It’s not at all ridiculous that this belief is so common, given that it is technically feasible. Our phones are precise GPS devices, they do have good microphones, and they are (almost) always connected to cellular and/or Wi-Fi networks. And the surveillance advertising industrial complex — primarily Meta and Google — is so uncannily good at serving ads based on our recent personal interests that the most obvious explanation for how they do it is “they listen to us and track us and record everything we do”. That’s not how they do it. But “they listen to us and track us and record everything we do” is an explanation that everyone can easily understand. If that were how Meta and Google served targeted ads to us, everyone could understand how the ads are so often so uncannily and creepily accurate. The way it actually works is complex and complicated, and thus in the realm of Arthur C. Clarke’s maxim that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Incorrect explanations that people understand resonate and take hold and become entrenched beliefs; correct explanations that people don’t understand are dismissed and are not believed. (Exhibit A: evolution.) This is why it is such a precious gift to be able to explain complex technical and scientific subject matter in ways that many people can understand.1
\n\nAnd lo, now here’s a Supreme Court case showing that when the police asked for a list of people whose phones were near a particular bank at a particular time on a particular day, Google had that information and handed it over. Chatrie v. United States is not a particularly celebrated case, but this will only contribute to the entrenching of superstitious incorrect conspiracy theories about the data that “they” — big tech companies — collect about us.
\n\nBut Google no longer collects this information in a way that is susceptible to geofence warrants, and, more importantly, Apple never did. From my own December 2023 post on Google’s decision to change how it collects this data to ensure privacy:
\n\n\n\n\nThe reason these overly broad geofence warrants “almost always”\nwere specific to Google is that Apple never collected location\ndata that could be collected in the aggregate like this. From\nApple’s most recent government transparency report\n(PDF), covering the first half of 2022:
\n\n\n\n\nApple may also receive requests from government agencies seeking\ncustomer data related to specific latitude and longitudes\ncoordinates (geofence) for a specified time period. Apple does\nnot have any data to provide in response to geofence requests.
\nI checked with a source at Apple, and they believe they have never\ncollected or stored geolocation data in a manner that can be\nlinked to groups of individuals in a certain area or areas.
\n
So the whole question of geofence-warrant fishing expeditions may have been obviated two years ago by Google for Android users, and was never an issue for iPhone users. Unless, perhaps, they used the Google Maps app on their iPhones and granted it the “always on” location access that it asks for. I suspect, but do not know, that iPhone users who granted “always on” location access to Google Maps (or any other Google iOS app that asked for it? — all of their iOS apps seem to ask for location permissions, but I don’t know how many other than Google Maps ask for always-on access) were just as susceptible to these geofence warrants as Android users.
\n\nThis decision should still serve as good precedent for location data held by other companies, and I hope the decision serves as good precedent for any searchable Personally Identifiable Information susceptible to fishing-expedition warrants in general.
\n\nBut the bottom line is: Apple has never held data tracking your location, and while Google did, they no longer do.
\n\nIt’s good for the expert, too, to prove that they can explain complex subject matter at the level of a freshman lecture — which is the only way to prove that they truly understand it themselves. ↩︎
\nI know there’s been a lot of exciting World Cup action this week, but this 2018 clip from Japan is the best soccer video I’ve seen in a long while.
\n\nLink: x.com/BallStreet/status/950382135969566720
\n" }, { "title" : "CMA Consultation on Mobile App Steering and NFC Access", "date_published" : "2026-06-30T16:33:55Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-30T16:34:23Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/30/cma-consultation", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/30/cma-consultation", "external_url" : "https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-consults-on-new-requirements-for-apple-and-googles-mobile-platforms", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nThe UK Competition and Markets Authority:
\n\n\n\n\n‘Steering’ — the ability for developers to engage with customers\nabout off‑platform options — is currently banned by Apple and\nrestricted by Google in the UK. Lifting these constraints would\nallow developers to bypass mandatory fees set by platforms.
\n\nThe CMA’s consultation includes principles to ensure that the fees\nApple and Google charge for steering are fair and reasonable.\nUsing an evidence-based framework, the CMA would expect steering\nfees to be lower than current app store charges, with savings\npassed onto UK customers or invested back into the developers’\nbusinesses to support future innovation.
\n
Japan’s MSCA is a good model for this.
\n\nLink: gov.uk/government/news/cma-consults-on-new-requirements-for…
\n" }, { "title" : "U.K. Regulator Considers Requiring App Store to Allow Steering to the Web, and iOS NFC to Be Open", "date_published" : "2026-06-30T15:44:49Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-30T17:23:42Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/30/uk-cma-regulations-app-store-nfc", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/30/uk-cma-regulations-app-store-nfc", "external_url" : "https://www.reuters.com/world/uk-regulator-proposes-easing-apple-google-app-store-payment-rules-2026-06-30/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nSam Tabahriti, reporting for Reuters:
\n\n\n\n\nBritain’s competition regulator on Tuesday proposed allowing app\ndevelopers to steer users to alternative payment options outside\nApple and Alphabet’s Google app stores to cut fees and boost\ncompetition. The Competition and Markets Authority said the proposals would\nremove restrictions that currently prevent UK developers from\ndirecting users to off-platform payment options, which are banned\nby Apple and restricted by Google.
\n\nThe watchdog said any fees charged by two of the world’s largest\ntechnology companies for allowing such “steering” would need to\nbe fair and reasonable, and should be lower than current app store\ncommissions, with savings passed on to consumers or reinvested in\ninnovation.
\n
How does one mandate that the savings be passed on to consumers? You may recall that last year Apple published a study — that it commissioned itself — suggesting otherwise. I wrote in December:
\n\n\n\n\nThis all comes back to the argument that Apple’s App Store\ncommission inflates prices. A recent Apple-funded (and\nApple-promoted) study suggests this is not true — that\nwith lower commissions mandated by the DMA, prices paid by\nconsumers stayed the same and the difference went to the\ndevelopers. That’s good if you’re a developer, but it’s\nnot the argument being made by these consumer advocate groups.
\n\nThat said, I pointed out just the other day that Tiimo, a\nto-do app that Apple just named as the iPhone app of the year in\nthe 2025 App Awards, charges about 20 percent less for\nsubscriptions on its website compared to its in-app subscriptions.\nAn Apple-funded, Apple-promoted study showing that the App Store’s\ncommissions don’t raise prices ought to be taken with a few grains\nof salt.
\n
Requiring Apple to allow apps to steer users to the web to make payments is, I’ve long argued, sensible regulation. I’ve also long argued that Apple has been obstinate in disallowing it. If in-app payments — through Apple’s system — can’t compete with out-of-app payments on the web, something is wrong with IAP. But it’s wrong to assume that payments outside IAP will result in lower prices and better policies for users. IAP subscriptions are easy to cancel and listed all in one place. Web subscriptions are often notoriously difficult to cancel and manage.
\n\nBack to Reuters:
\n\n\n\n\nThe CMA said it was also considering requiring Apple to open up\naccess to its near-field communication technology, which is used\nfor contactless payments, potentially allowing developers to offer\npayment services within their own iOS apps. This could enable UK\nfintech companies to build alternatives to Apple’s wallet,\nincluding account-to-account payments and emerging technologies\nsuch as digital currencies, the CMA said.
\n
Even more so than opening up third-party in-app payment processing, this seems like something only “fintech” companies are asking for. For users I think the only result will be a loss of interoperability and increase in confusion. Users get one Wallet app today, with all their credit, debit, and loyalty cards, and all their tickets for things like events and travel. A scenario where each credit card company, airline, and event/ticketing company can mandate the installation of their own app, with access to the iPhone’s NFC, does not strike me as a good outcome.
\n\nLink: reuters.com/world/uk-regulator-proposes-easing-apple-google…
\n" }, { "title" : "Data Breach at Indian Supplier Tata Electronics Exposes iPhone 18 Pro Details and Photos", "date_published" : "2026-06-30T00:59:08Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-30T00:59:08Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/29/tata-electronics-breach", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/29/tata-electronics-breach", "external_url" : "https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/apple-iphone-18-pro-supplier-list-parts-photos-exposed-tata-data-leak-2026-06-29/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nMunsif Vengattil, Aditya Kalra, and Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters:
\n\n\n\n\nSensitive lists of components and suppliers, and photos of\nApple’s upcoming iPhone 18 Pro models are part of files\nposted on the dark web by the ransomware group that stole data\nfrom the U.S. firm’s Indian supplier Tata Electronics, according\nto documents and a source.
\n\nThe exposure threatens the carefully negotiated business of\nbuilding the iPhone, which Apple assembles from a thicket of\nsuppliers worldwide. It could also upset Apple and its\nrelationship with Tata given most of the supplier\narrangements are fiercely protected by Apple, and could also\nhand rivals, counterfeiters and its own vendors a view of\nwho makes what. [...]
\n\nApple considers this detail sensitive and is concerned about\nthe documents being shared on the dark web as they relate to\nunreleased models, according to the person familiar with the\nmatter. The data maps suppliers to iPhone parts, which Apple\ndoes not disclose in its public database of suppliers, the\nperson added.
\n\nIn all, the documents detail hundreds of parts to be on the\nupcoming iPhone 18 Pro models. The records also show where Apple\ndraws a part from several suppliers and where it relies on just a\nfew, laying bare both its bargaining leverage and its\nvulnerabilities.
\n
I’m going to say that describing Apple as “concerned” about this data breach might be the biggest euphemism I’ve heard this year. I’m sure they’re furious. Someone at Apple is responsible for putting this trust in Tata, and executives at Tata are surely panicked that they’ve lost future business with Apple.
\n\nLink: reuters.com/business/media-telecom/apple-iphone-18-pro…
\n" }, { "title" : "[Sponsor] Day One Journal", "date_published" : "2026-06-29T23:17:38Z", "date_modified" : "2026-07-04T21:02:18Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/2026/06/day_one_journal", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/2026/06/day_one_journal", "external_url" : "https://dayoneapp.com/blog/introducing-daily-chat/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "Daring Fireball Department of Commerce" } ], "content_html" : "\nDay One recognizes that many people struggle with journaling not because they can’t write, but because they don’t know how to begin or what a “good” journal entry about their day looks like. That’s why we built Daily Chat, a guided reflection experience that helps you talk through your day, organize your thoughts, and shape them into a journal entry.
\n\nEarly testers commented: “Day One’s new Daily Chat is a true game changer for my daily journaling. The AI-powered chat makes capturing thoughts effortless and inspires creativity like never before. Writing my diary has never been this intuitive and fun!”
\n\nTry it for yourself, it will change the way you think about journaling.
\n\nLink: dayoneapp.com/blog/introducing-daily-chat/
\n" }, { "title" : "Auth.md — an Open Protocol for Agent Registration From WorkOS", "date_published" : "2026-06-29T01:32:24Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-29T01:33:02Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/28/workos-auth-md", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/28/workos-auth-md", "external_url" : "https://workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q22026", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nMy thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week to promote Auth.md, their new open protocol for AI agent registration. (Who’d have thunk that I’d be getting paid to promote new uses for Markdown 22 years after releasing it?)
\n\nSign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services? That’s the question Auth.md aims to answer. It’s a single Markdown file you host at your domain that tells agents how to register your users, which flows you support, what scopes you expose, and how credentials get issued. It’s like robots.txt but for agent registration.
\n\nCloudflare, Firecrawl, and Resend have already adopted it.
\n\nAn open protocol authored by WorkOS. Read the spec.
\n\nLink: workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…
\n" }, { "title" : "Daniel Agee: ‘Remembering Om’", "date_published" : "2026-06-29T01:21:49Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-29T01:21:49Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/28/agee-om-glass", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/28/agee-om-glass", "external_url" : "https://glass.photo/highlights/remembering-om", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nDaniel Agee, an early member of the team at Glass, writing on the Glass blog:
\n\n\n\n\nIt’s not lost on us that Om’s photography, often taken in frozen\nlands in or around the arctic circle, was the polar opposite of\nhis personality. While he focused on subtle shapes and hidden\nlandscapes, he was the sun of any group he was in. Folks just\nnaturally fell into his orbit.
\n
Agee’s lovely piece is replete with photos by Om.
\n\n\n\n\nA veteran of the internet publishing space, he was one of the\nfirst to take the now well-worn path of technology writing into\nventure capital. When we briefly explored raising a small round of\nVC funding after our launch to support our growth, Om was our\nfirst call. He answered and immediately said, “I love you guys,\nI’ll invest the money if you want it, but don’t fucking do it.\nWhat you have is special. Don’t fucking ruin it.”
\n\nThat’s Om. Simple and to the point. That simplicity showed up in\nhis photography practice. Strip away everything from a photograph,\ndown to the bare minimum of contrast or shadow. What do you focus\non? What do you see? How can something so simple be so fulfilling?
\n
That is exactly how Om spoke. Always. To the point. Why waste time? Why mince words? Why make someone guess what you really think? Our instincts say otherwise, but it’s not rude to be blunt. Unmoderated honesty is a profound courtesy.
\n\nLink: glass.photo/highlights/remembering-om
\n" }, { "title" : "Matt Mullenweg: ‘All Roads Lead to Om’", "date_published" : "2026-06-29T01:08:13Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-29T01:08:13Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/28/matt-om", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/28/matt-om", "external_url" : "https://ma.tt/2026/06/om-forever/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nMatt Mullenweg:
\n\n\n\n\nFundamentally, Om was a lover of humanity. He became a fast\n“regular” everywhere he went. He wouldn’t just buy coffee, he\nwould also learn the name and story of every barista, the dogs and\npeople in South Park. His deep curiosity and respect weren’t just\nfor the fine and famous. It extended to every soul that crossed\nhis path. His encyclopedic knowledge and photographic memory\ncreated connections not just in San Francisco, but all around the\nworld wherever we traveled. (I need to pull the stats, but we went\nto five continents together, including Antarctica.)
\n\nHe loved people and their stories.
\n
And:
\n\n\n\n\nOne of the biggest lessons I learned from Om is the deep\nappreciation of craft. When he took an interest in photography or\npens, he would somehow find his way to the most obscure,\nhighest-quality expression of that form. “What Would Om Want?” is\na question I will always ponder. I want to craft products that\nwould make Om proud.
\n
If you’re going to get into something, you ought to pursue it to its full extent. If you’re not interested enough to do that, don’t bother getting into it. Find the few things you love; don’t waste your time on the many things you merely like.
\n\nMatt is keeping a wonderful list of links to other remembrances and tributes to Om.
\n\nLink: ma.tt/2026/06/om-forever/
\n" }, { "title" : "The New York Times: ‘Om Malik, Whose Blog Shaped How Silicon Valley Saw Itself, Dies at 59’", "date_published" : "2026-06-29T00:25:37Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-29T15:46:34Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/28/nyt-om-obit", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/28/nyt-om-obit", "external_url" : "https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/technology/om-malik-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.t1A.AyPT.p7GhDrDcJSfa", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nClay Risen, writing for The New York Times (gift link):
\n\n\n\n\nMr. Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst,\nleading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism\nstart-ups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and\nInside.com. He was among the most prominent of the writers who\nquickly filled the gap, covering Silicon Valley with a mixture of\nhot scoops and sharp opinions that quickly made Gigaom a\nmust-read.
\n\n“The Android OS leaves me feeling like one feels three hours after\nhaving Chinese food: a tad empty,” he wrote in a 2010 post\nthat neatly summarized Google’s struggles to move beyond its roots\nas a search platform. “Google has to learn the art of engagement — something particularly challenging.”
\n
Lovely, warm, accurate and fair obituary. This pulled snippet is a great one. Early Android as Chinese takeout is such a deft analogy, and the piece really isn’t about Android specifically but Google institutionally. Not speeds and feeds, but can they make products with a soul? With heart? Om’s pessimism was obvious, and I’d say, prescient.
\n\n\n\n\nHe had a rare ability to see around corners, and to pick out from\nthe horde of new companies the ones that were going to make real\nchange. He was an early champion of Slack, the workplace messaging\nservice, and in 2006 he was the first blogger to write extensively\nabout Twitter. He was not a fan.
\n
Back in the day Letterman had a recurring bit called “Is This Anything?” They’d bring someone or something on stage and then Dave and Paul would render their up/down judgment: was that anything? The answer, more often than not, was no. The Letterman bit was a gag. But that’s basically what tech journalism is — especially back in the heyday of startups. Every startup believes it’s something and wants the press to think it’s something. Most of the time, it’s not something. Once in a while it is. Om was so goddamn good at identifying the somethings.
\n\n\n\n\nLong before Facebook came in for attacks from both the political\nleft and right, he called out, during a 2013 interview with\nBloomberg TV, what he said was “absolutely an air of amorality” on\nthe part of its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. In\nthe same interview, he criticized the venture capitalist John\nDoerr for “patently trying to hijack the political process.”
\n
He was right early, and right often. You can say now that everyone knows there’s “an air of amorality” at Facebook institutionally and with Zuckerberg personally. In 2013 that was not a common refrain. Just a year earlier, Apple had added Facebook account integration at the system level in iOS 6.
\n\nLink: nytimes.com/2026/06/26/technology/om-malik-dead.html…
\n" }, { "title" : "PuffPal, an App for Accessing Cannabis Clubs, Leaked 1 Million Users’ Passports", "date_published" : "2026-06-28T17:21:42Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-29T23:00:58Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/28/puffpal-passport-leak", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/28/puffpal-passport-leak", "external_url" : "https://www.theverge.com/tech/947157/passports-data-breach-cannabis-club-systems-nefos-puffpal?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6IjdjV0Y5TTBuM0ciLCJwIjoiL3RlY2gvOTQ3MTU3L3Bhc3Nwb3J0cy1kYXRhLWJyZWFjaC1jYW5uYWJpcy1jbHViLXN5c3RlbXMtbmVmb3MtcHVmZnBhbCIsImV4cCI6MTc4MzA5NDY0NiwiaWF0IjoxNzgyNjYyNjQ2fQ.7SjX6B8AAGhzsdrtD5asJWBwzQvTDUD31hWte7K1oec", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nSean Hollister, writing for The Verge (gift link):
\n\n\n\n\nIf you’ve visited a cannabis club in Spain, [Sammy] Azdoufal says, chances\nare your photo ID was among them — and possibly your phone\nnumber, address, your favorite strains of cannabis, and how much\nyou consumed each month while there. Azdoufal says celebrities are\nin the database, too, and visitors from all over the world,\nincluding 30,000 from the United States. “They have famous\npeople,” says Azdoufal. “People who don’t want everyone to know\nthey smoke weed.”
\n\nBut when Azdoufal decompiled that PuffPal app, he explains in his\nreport, he discovered that Nefos had no meaningful level of\nsecurity. He discovered a secret key for the Stripe payments\nplatform sitting inside the app in plain text. He discovered he\ncould pull up any member’s profile just by changing one number. If\nthose profiles included their phone number, home address,\npassport, and weed preferences, he now had access to them too.
\n\nAnd then, he discovered that those passports, drivers licenses,\nand photo IDs were stored at public URLs as simple as this:\n
\n\nhttps://ccsnubev2.com/v8/images/_{club}/ID/{user_id}-front.jpgThose clubs were uploading 5,000 new photo IDs with these insecure\nURLs every day, Azdoufal tells me.
\n
Azdoufal’s full report on the leak, including the ease with which he discovered it, is worth reading.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNote what happened. A high-value credential — a passport — was\nused in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID\nverification for cannabis dispensaries. And it’s the low-value\nsystem that got hacked, putting the high-value credential at risk.
\n
Access to cannabis clubs has to be age verified. The security ought not be shit, but age verification is part of the industry. But now think about the legislation being proposed and passed around the world requiring age verification for just doing anything online. This sort of identity leaks is the inevitable result. And for a lot of these use cases for age verification, the security expertise is going to be even lower.
\n\nLink: theverge.com/tech/947157/passports-data-breach-cannabis…
\n" }, { "title" : "★ Bernie Sanders: Ideologue and Economic Ignoramus", "date_published" : "2026-06-27T23:35:00Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-27T23:45:40Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/06/bernie_sanders_ideologue", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/06/bernie_sanders_ideologue", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nBernie Sanders, posting on Twitter/X Thursday (don’t complain to me that he doesn’t use his Bluesky account):
\n\n\n\n\nCorporate greed is Tim Cook, the billionaire Apple CEO, claiming\nthat hiking prices on Apple products by over $200 is “unavoidable”\nafter it made $112 billion in profits last year & spent $310\nbillion on stock buybacks.
\n\nThese price hikes aren’t unavoidable. They’re unacceptable.
\n
It boggles the mind how anyone could post this and not question the common sense napkin math of a company spending 3× its annual profit on stock buybacks. That’s theoretically possible, I suppose, but obviously unsustainable. A company would have to burn through a cash hoard or incur massive amounts of debt to spend 3× its profit on anything. It makes no sense. Someone who doesn’t consider the common sense of those numbers probably shouldn’t be spouting off on anything related to economics. And of course Apple files an annual report with the SEC, easily searchable via the web, which plainly shows that the company spent $89 billion on stock repurchases last year, and paid shareholders $15 billion in dividends. Those numbers make sense for a company that earned $112 billion in profit.
\n\nI suspect Sanders is so ignorant of basic economics that he sees the ampersand in his tweet as additive — that Apple made $112 billion in profit and spent $310 billion in buybacks and thus had something like $420 billion of money “in the black” with which they could eat the cost of rising RAM and SSD components. But they’re not additive. Stock repurchases are purchases. If Apple actually had spent $310 billion on stock buybacks last year — which, to repeat, they most certainly did not — even Karl Marx might excuse them for raising prices on their products this year, because they’d be in a $200 billion hole they needed to dig out of.
\n\nBut such concerns, obvious to anyone who’s taken an Econ 101 course in college, seldom stop ideologues.
\n\nPutting aside Sanders’s factually incorrect and nonsensical $310 billion figure, let’s just consider this general scenario: A company makes a product that consists of essential components they must purchase from suppliers. Something happens — outside the company’s control — that causes those essential components to rise in price significantly. Therefore the cost of goods for the company’s product increases significantly. What should the company do? Raise prices and pass those increased costs on to their customers, maintaining the same level of profit for themselves? Or hold prices steady and eat those costs, accepting lower profits or even negative margins, so that customers remain unaffected?
\n\nOne can hold logically consistent views at both extremes. At one end, the belief that business is business and higher costs naturally result in higher prices passed along to customers. At the other end, the belief that companies should put the welfare of their customers ahead of their own profit seeking. Perhaps you think the answer is somewhere in-between: somewhat higher prices and somewhat lower profit margins.\nWhat you cannot do is hold a philosophically consistent logically coherent view where your answer to how a company should respond in such a scenario is contingent on what the “something happens” is that caused component prices to rise.
\n\nWhen the “something happens” is a global RAM and SSD shortage resulting from the AI datacenter capex spending spree, Sanders’s tweet makes clear that he’s of the opinion that Apple should eat these costs.
\n\nBut when the “something happens” was Trump’s tariffs, Sanders argued that (emphasis added) “Trump’s across-the-board tariffs are not the way to do it. We do not need a blanket and arbitrary sales tax on imported goods which will raise prices on products that the American people desperately need.” And again: “Trump’s blanket tariffs will just raise prices for American consumers and hurt our relationships with allies, undermining our global position.” Not “might” raise prices. “Will” raise prices.
\n\nSanders arguing today that Apple should eat the entire cost of rising RAM and SSD components makes no more sense than this tweet from Donald Trump a year ago:
\n\n\n\n\nWalmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for\nraising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF\nDOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and\nChina they should, as is said, “EAT THE TARIFFS,” and not charge\nvalued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your\ncustomers!!!
\n
Sanders’s tweet is better punctuated and capitalized, but it’s the same illogic. Zero economic sense, 100 percent ideological wishful thinking. Yelling angrily doesn’t make your argument any more compelling or coherent.
\n\n " }, { "title" : "Micron Executive Sumit Sadana Tells Tim Cook to Stop Hitting Himself", "date_published" : "2026-06-27T23:30:00Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-27T23:36:17Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/micron-sadana-cook-hitting-himself", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/micron-sadana-cook-hitting-himself", "external_url" : "https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-raises-prices-on-macs-ipads-by-200-or-more-on-some-models-a7463f99?st=B1aQCP&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nFrom the bottom of Rolfe Winkler’s report for The Wall Street Journal Thursday, on Apple’s unprecedented price increases (gift link):
\n\n\n\n\nApple’s price hikes arrived the day after Micron Technology, the\nbig American maker of memory and storage, reported blowout\nquarterly earnings, touting gross profit margins that topped 80%.\nShares jumped 16% after the close and appeared likely to power a\nThursday rally among semiconductor stocks. [...]
\n\nIn an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer\nSumit Sadana said the company couldn’t make investments during the\nmemory market’s last downturn, when Micron’s gross profits went\nnegative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay\nrock-bottom prices.
\n\n“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive\nwith pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said,\nwithout naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital\ninvestments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in\n2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”
\n
I overlooked this segment when I read (and linked to) Winkler’s report Thursday. It really does seem clear that Sadana is blaming Apple for not cutting Micron any slack when the supply/demand curve for RAM had a different look in 2023. I’m sure Micron’s current 80 percent margins are here to stay this time, so getting a few jabs in at Apple will never come back to bite Micron and Sadana.
\n\nLink: wsj.com/tech/apple-raises-prices-on-macs-ipads-by-200-or…
\n" }, { "title" : "Apple Faced Bipartisan Opposition When It Last Lobbied to Buy Chinese RAM in 2022", "date_published" : "2026-06-27T22:39:51Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-27T22:39:52Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/apple-faced-bipartisan-opposition-to-chinese-ram", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/apple-faced-bipartisan-opposition-to-chinese-ram", "external_url" : "https://www.warner.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warner-rubio-urge-dni-to-review-risk-chinese-chipmaker-ymtc-presents-to-national-security/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nFrom a September 2022 letter to then-Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, co-signed by Marco Rubio (then a Republican senator from Florida, currently secretary of state) and Mark Warner (Democratic senator from Virginia):
\n\n\n\n\nWe write to convey our extreme concern about the possibility that\nApple Inc. will soon procure 3D NAND memory chips from the\nPeople’s Republic of China (PRC) state-owned manufacturer Yangtze\nMemory Technologies Co. (YMTC). Such a decision would introduce\nsignificant privacy and security vulnerabilities to the global\ndigital supply chain that Apple helps shape given YMTC’s\nextensive, but often opaque, ties to the Chinese Communist Party\n(CCP) and concerning PRC-backed entities. In addition, we write to\nconvey that any decision to partner with YMTC, no matter the\nintended market of the product offerings developed by such a\npartnership, would affirm and reward the PRC’s distortive and\nunfair trade practices, which undermine U.S. companies globally by\ncreating significant advantages to Chinese firms at the expense of\nforeign competitors. Last year, the Biden Administration described\nYMTC as China’s “national champion memory chip producer,” which\nsupports the CCP’s efforts to counter U.S. innovation and\nleadership in this space.
\n
The “no matter the intended market of the product offerings” bit was a reference to Apple’s plan only to use Chinese RAM chips for iPhones sold in the Chinese market. I wouldn’t want Chinese RAM in my iPhone any more than I’d want to buy a “Chinese DSLR” as my camera.
\n\nAnyway, Apple’s 2022 attempt to get an OK for this went over like a lead balloon, meeting sharp bipartisan opposition. Rubio is today the most influential man in the Trump administration in foreign affairs.
\n\nLink: warner.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warner-rubio-urge…
\n" }, { "title" : "Microsoft Raises Xbox Prices, Drops High-End Storage Model From Lineup", "date_published" : "2026-06-27T22:15:28Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-27T22:15:50Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/microsoft-raises-xbox-prices", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/microsoft-raises-xbox-prices", "external_url" : "https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/06/25/xbox-console-price-update/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nMicrosoft’s Xbox blog:
\n\n\n\n\nEffective August 1, 2026, we will be updating prices worldwide.\nThe price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB\nmodels and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our\n2 TB model.
\n\nLast October, we increased XBOX console price by $20-$70 in the\nU.S. We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and\nwe have spent the last several months working with suppliers on\noptions. Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have\nincreased by more than 2.5× and we expect another doubling by the\nfall of 2027. The entire consumer electronics industry is\nstruggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are\nparticularly hard on consoles. Unlike phones, computers, speakers,\nand other consumer devices, consoles are typically not sold at a\nprofit, but instead for less than they cost to make.
\n
I’m not offended they’re increasing prices. I’m offended only that they want people to style “Xbox” in all caps. And cry me a river regarding that “typically not sold at a profit” line they love to pull out.
\n\nWhat’s most telling is that Microsoft is sunsetting the high-end Xbox model with 2 TB of storage, not the low-end 512 GB one. High-end configurations typically have the highest profit margins. Not in this crisis, however. That’s similar to the way that Mac Studios with the M3 Ultra are now only available with the base RAM configuration: 96 GB. When the M3 Ultra chip debuted in March 2025, Apple offered upgrades to 256 and 512 GB of RAM for $1,600 and $4,000 respectively. Now they don’t offer those tiers of RAM at any price. The only way to buy a Mac Studio with more than 96 GB of RAM is to buy a used one — which eBay sellers are offering for $25,000 to $30,000.
\n\nLink: news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/06/25/xbox-console-price-update/
\n" }, { "title" : "FT Reports That Apple Is Lobbying to Buy Memory Chips From Blacklisted Chinese Company CXMT", "date_published" : "2026-06-27T20:24:18Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-27T20:24:18Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/ft-apple-cxmt", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/ft-apple-cxmt", "external_url" : "https://www.ft.com/content/d72a25e2-7bde-4aa9-bd8d-0c4f3d6cb2cb", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nDemetri Sevastopulo and Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times (paywalled, alas):
\n\n\n\n\nApple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to buy\nmemory chips from CXMT, a Chinese company that the Pentagon has\nput on a blacklist because of alleged connections to the People’s\nLiberation Army, according to six people familiar with the\nmatter. [...]
\n\nApple is not barred from buying chips from CXMT, or YMTC, another\nChinese memory chipmaker. But the Pentagon has put both companies\non its Chinese Military Company blacklist. The so-called 1260H\nlist contains dozens of Chinese groups with alleged ties to the\nPLA that undermine US national security. [...]
\n\nCongress would probably object strongly if the administration\nblessed Apple purchases from CXMT, which is the Chinese national\nchampion. “Apple choosing to partner with a Chinese military\ncompany would be a grave mistake,” John Moolenaar, the Republican\nchair of the House China committee, told the FT. “Helping the\n[Chinese Communist Party] succeed in its plans to dominate\ncritical supply chains will make our country’s tech industry and\neconomy more dependent on China at a time when we must build\nsecure tech supply chains with our allies,” Moolenaar said. [...]
\n\nOne former official warned the US risked losing another industry\nby letting Apple buy memory from a group that receives Chinese\nsubsidies.
\n\n“Trump can show the courage to keep American memory alive for our\nsecurity and our competitiveness or pour it down the drain so\n[Apple chief executive] Tim Cook can squeeze out a few more points\nof margin.”
\n
In Apple’s announcement of the company’s imminent leadership transition, they said that in his new role as executive chairman, “Cook will assist with certain aspects\nof the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.” It occurs to me, more and more, that Cook might be no less busy than he was as CEO.
\n\nLink: ft.com/content/d72a25e2-7bde-4aa9-bd8d-0c4f3d6cb2cb
\n" }, { "title" : "Grok Is a Generative Porno App", "date_published" : "2026-06-27T19:57:52Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-27T21:53:41Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/grok-is-a-generative-porno-app", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/grok-is-a-generative-porno-app", "external_url" : "https://www.theinformation.com/articles/xai-bets-groks-racy-side?rc=jfy0lk", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nGrace Kay and Theo Wayt, writing for the paywalled-with-no-gift-links The Information:
\n\n\n\n\nxAI launched an upgraded video model last week, highlighting how\nit’s pushing ahead with its own visual efforts even as it brings\nin outside help to compete with rivals in areas like coding.\nSpaceX also touted the popularity of its AI video tools ahead of\nits blockbuster IPO. What SpaceX didn’t mention, however, is that\nmuch of the consumer demand stems from Grok’s looser content\nrules, which have made it a major destination for generating\npornography and other racy content.
\n\nIndeed, two recent xAI employees estimated that well over half of\nGrok’s overall traffic was driven by pornographic images and\nvideos, adult role-play chats or other NSFW activity. On forums\nfor Grok users, many of the most popular posts are porn. Users can\ngenerate visuals in several ways, including picking the video\nmodels through the consumer app or tapping them through other Grok\nproducts.
\n
Maybe that’s a sustainable business model. But I don’t think it’s what SpaceX hype investors think they’re putting their money into. If they renamed the companies to SpaceXXX and xxxAI it might dampen enthusiasm for the stock, but make more clear what they’re selling.
\n\nLink: theinformation.com/articles/xai-bets-groks-racy-side?rc…
\n" }, { "title" : "OpenAI Announces, But Is Blocked From Releasing, New GPT-5.6 Models", "date_published" : "2026-06-27T19:49:41Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-27T19:53:30Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/openai-gpt-5-6-models", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/openai-gpt-5-6-models", "external_url" : "https://openai.com/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nOpenAI yesterday:
\n\n\n\n\nWe’re beginning a limited preview of the GPT‑5.6 series: Sol, our\nflagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and\nLuna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive\nperformance to GPT‑5.5 while being 2× cheaper and Luna brings\nstrong capability at our lowest cost.
\n\nGPT‑5.6 Sol launches with our most robust safety stack to date. We\nstrengthened protections for higher-risk activity, sensitive cyber\nrequests, and repeated misuse, and spent multiple weeks finding\nweaknesses, pressure-testing our system, and hardening it against\nreal-world attacks.
\n\nWe believe in broad access, and we plan to make GPT‑5.6 Sol,\nTerra, and Luna generally available in the coming weeks. As part\nof our ongoing engagement with the U.S. government, we previewed\nour plans and the models’ capabilities ahead of today’s launch. At\ntheir request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small\ngroup of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with\nthe government, before releasing more broadly.
\n
Stephanie Palazzolo, reporting for The Information (and posted to X) regarding an internal Q&A hosted by CEO Sam Altman:
\n\n\n\n\nThe reason for the staggered release, Altman explained: The\nfederal government asked it to do so. Altman said that this was\nthe best path for widely releasing the model as soon as possible,\nsaid one of the people. In a Thursday memo, Altman told staff that\nthe government would be “approving access customer by customer\nduring this preview period” for GPT 5.6. He added that he hoped\nthere would be a more general release a “couple of weeks later” if\nall went well. [...]
\n\nEven so, after OpenAI had shared its plans for the limited release\nwith top government officials earlier this week, Altman still\nreceived a call from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick cautioning\nthe company against launching without receiving approvals from\nother agencies, according to a person familiar with the call.
\n
It is perfectly reasonable to believe that the U.S. government should have regulatory approval over frontier AI models. It’s absurd to think this should be run by an apparatchik with zero AI expertise like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
\n\nAI regulation should be thoughtful, measured, consistent, objective, and deeply informed. It should not be impulsive, impetuous, petty, uninformed, subjective, inconsistent, and transactional. The latter, however, is what we’re getting.
\n\nLink: openai.com/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol/
\n" }, { "title" : "White House Grants Access to Anthropic’s Mythos Model to 100+ U.S. Institutions; Fable Still Shut Down", "date_published" : "2026-06-27T19:37:58Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-27T19:43:04Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/white-house-mythos-access", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/white-house-mythos-access", "external_url" : "https://www.semafor.com/article/06/27/2026/us-releases-powerful-anthropic-model-mythos-to-some-us-companies", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nReed Albergotti and Ben Smith, reporting last night for Semaphor:
\n\n\n\n\nThe decision, in a letter sent Friday afternoon to Anthropic, is a\nmajor de-escalation in the confrontation between the Trump\nAdministration and one of the world’s most valuable private\ncompanies. Two weeks ago the administration imposed export\ncontrols on Mythos, leading to a shut down of the model and its\ncousin Fable 5 after warnings from Amazon and other companies that\nthey could be “jailbroken” for malicious purposes.
\n\nThe letter is silent on Fable 5, a weaker version of Mythos that\nwas briefly the most powerful AI model widely available to\nconsumers. People close to the talks said they are moving toward\nreleasing Fable as well, though that timeline is unclear. [...]
\n\nLutnick’s letter marks the beginnings of a new regulatory regime\nthat gives the US government control over the release of frontier\nAI models.
\n
A completely ad hoc policy of “Whatever the White House says, goes” is the makings of a terrible regulatory framework for AI. This would be true no matter who was president at the moment. But it’s particularly disastrous for this administration, which is both utterly transactional and staffed from top to bottom with anti-science know-nothings confident that their “ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.
\n\nHoward Lutnick is making these determinations? I mean come on.
\n\nLink: semafor.com/article/06/27/2026/us-releases-powerful…
\n" }, { "title" : "The Steam Machine", "date_published" : "2026-06-27T19:14:16Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-29T23:21:45Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/the-steam-machine", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/27/the-steam-machine", "external_url" : "https://www.theverge.com/games/952765/steam-machine-review?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6Illsb3pPdVlCSmQiLCJwIjoiL2dhbWVzLzk1Mjc2NS9zdGVhbS1tYWNoaW5lLXJldmlldyIsImV4cCI6MTc4MzAxOTM4OCwiaWF0IjoxNzgyNTg3Mzg4fQ.ksUd5qynurLxKTvjnCTD3mj4xzH9gdFgqAzFJ577ZcE&utm_medium=gift-link", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nSean Hollister, writing for The Verge (gift link):
\n\n\n\n\nSince the Magnavox Odyssey came out in 1972, game consoles have\nbeen built with the same basic goal: to effortlessly play\nproprietary games on a TV screen. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft\nhave spent decades essentially selling the same product. A few\nconsoles could do more, but the formula you know and love remains\nbuy box, plug into TV, insert game, play.
\n\nThe Steam Machine aims to be something bigger. It’s a vision of a\nbox with fewer restrictions and an almost endless catalog of games — for those willing to spend nearly twice the price of a\nPlayStation 5.
\n\nThat’s right. Today, Valve has announced the Steam Machine will\nstart at $1,049 without a gamepad or $1,128 bundled with one, but\nyou aren’t getting a significant boost in performance over the\n5.5-year-old Sony PS5 you can still buy today. Even after three\nprice hikes, a vanilla $650 PS5 offers sharper images in\nCyberpunk 2077 and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered in my tests.\nSo how can Valve possibly charge over a grand, you might ask?
\n\nIt’s because the Steam Machine is, let’s say, a PC-plus. It’s a PC\nthat acts more like a console than any you’ve used before. It’s\nincredibly cool and quiet, so much smaller than a PS5,\nsurprisingly smooth, and completely navigable with any modern\ngamepad you own. You don’t need a mouse, keyboard, or even Valve’s\nown touchpad-equipped Steam Controller to download, launch,\nor play games. Joysticks do the job.
\n
The price is eye-opening, but that’s the theme across all consumer hardware this year. It’s hard not to root for Valve with its expanding hardware ambitions, but Hollister’s review shows just how far they have to go to achieve “plug it in, insert game, play” simplicity.
\n\nLink: theverge.com/games/952765/steam-machine-review?view_token…
\n" }, { "title" : "★ Om", "date_published" : "2026-06-26T23:22:50Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-27T15:24:19Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/06/om", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/06/om", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\n\n\nOm died two days ago, after a long battle against a bum heart.
\n\nOm and I often sat next to each other at Apple keynotes. This was not at all surprising or odd, insofar as we’d been friends for 20 years. Folks at Apple PR knew that we were close, and would often pair us together in post-keynote media briefings. I always enjoyed being paired with him. He asked keen questions. He saw through bullshit. He found holes in arguments. He took everything in. When I felt overwhelmed, he seemed serene. Om always seemed serene, period. His own photography reflects his presence.
\n\nAlso, he was funny and fun. Profoundly generous. A good person to be around. A great person to know and be known by. He knew everyone and everyone knew Om. A lot of the people I know in this racket, I know through Om. Every time he’d introduce me to someone, he’d embarrass me with praise for my work. He greeted everyone with a compliment and whatever he said, he meant it. He had kind words to offer everyone because he had a gift for recognizing good things about everyone. He didn’t have an insincere bone in his body, which made him intensely lovable as a friend, and fiercely acerbic and accurate as a critic of technology. “He did not mince words” and “Everyone loved him” do not usually apply to the same person. They did with Om.
\n\nHe was, of course, a Yankees fan.
\n\nSo, no, it was not odd that he and I gravitated toward each other at Apple events. But the fact that Om continued to be invited to these events, with a media badge, was in fact unusual. He had stepped away from day-to-day journalism and became an investor back in 2014. A decade later, he was still on the short list of top invitees to events at Apple. His reputation warranted that respect. His ongoing writing and analysis — right up until the very end — continued to earn it. So of course Om continued to be invited to, and attend, these events. He was Om Fucking Malik. His presence improved any room, and lifted everyone’s mood. He made grumps smile. You couldn’t help it.
\n\n\n\nWhen he stepped aside from his namesake website GigaOm in 2014, Om wrote:
\n\n\n\n\n“Now it is time for the next chapter,” wrote Derek Jeter,\nthe New York Yankees shortstop and my 2nd favorite Yankee (behind\nBernie Williams), sharing his intention to retire at the end of\n2014. “I have new dreams and aspirations and new challenges. And I\nwant the ability to move at my own pace, see the world and finally\nhave a summer vacation.”
\n\nI relate to Jeter’s desire to find life outside of work. Living a\n24-hour news life has come at a personal cost. I still wake in\nmiddle of the night to check the stream to see if something is\nbreaking, worrying whether I missed some news.
\n\nIt is a unique type of addiction that only a few can understand,\nand it is time for me to opt out of this non-stop news life. After\nfive years as a “venture partner,” I am joining True Ventures as\na partner, and thus bringing an end to my life as a\nprofessional journalist.
\n
Om, somehow, went straight from new-media wunderkind to éminence grise of tech journalism. Back when he was blogging, he blogged hard — multiple breaking-news posts per day, every day, while he was working as an acclaimed reporter for Business 2.0, Forbes, and Red Herring. That’s not what he did for the latter half of his career at all. He began changing his pace and perspective after suffering a heart attack in 2008, at the age of 42. He knew what he wanted to change, he told us he was going to change it, and then he did it. Thinking about his career transformation brings to mind the great Donald Knuth’s remarks regarding email:
\n\n\n\n\nEmail is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be\non top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom\nof things. What I do takes long hours of studying and\nuninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of\ncomputer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge\ninto a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for\nsuch study.
\n
What email is to Knuth, the 24-hour news cycle was to Om. He’d had enough, and recognized it. He no longer wanted to be on top of things. He wanted to be on the bottom of things. He transformed himself from the bloggiest of quick-trigger bloggers into the most thoughtful of essayists. He went from documenting what was happening, as it happened, to explaining why. He was very, very good at that — he saw things through a singular perspective and expressed his thoughts with a singular voice.
\n\nOm was never impressed by who someone was, what they’d previously accomplished, what grand wealth they’d garnered, or stature they’d achieved. It’s human nature to be overwhelmed by awe in the presence of great people. Om was not. To impress Om, you needed to deliver impressive new work. He was impervious to riptides of hype. Those are superpowers in this racket.
\n\n\n\nI texted him on June 1 to coordinate meeting up at WWDC the next week. That’s when he filled me in that he’d been hospitalized in the ICU at Stanford since mid-April, and the situation was dire. He needed a heart transplant or he wouldn’t live. I knew he’d been dealing with health issues in recent years, but I had no idea it had become so acute. We’d been chatting regularly for weeks — largely because he’d been so prolific of late, on topics exactly aligned with my own recent attention. He’d been doing some of the best writing and analysis of his career this year — but for the last few weeks, unbeknownst to me, and most of the world, that writing was from a bed in the ICU.1 This is going to sound cornier than a bucket of Jiffy-Pop, but it is a profound irony that a man with such a big and beautiful figurative heart could have such a lousy literal one.
\n\nI apologized for calling out his website in my “What Is a Dickover?” interactive essay, which I hadn’t warned him about, and had posted just three days before he told me of his medical plight. He told me not to worry, I was right, it was annoying, and he’d fix it. I didn’t think he’d get to that. But I checked today, and it’s gone.
\n\nOm didn’t keep his health crisis secret, per se. He kept it private. That was very Om. He was generous and effusive, often ebullient, always intense. But he was, in many ways, inscrutable. Private. Contemplative. Comfortable with himself, and by himself. I’ve never met anyone like Om Malik. They broke that mold after minting one.
\n\nI seldom ask anyone for professional advice, but when I did, I often asked Om. We did not do exactly the same thing, he and I, but we did close to the same thing. He understood what I do — or at least, what I try to do here — in a way that few others could. Among those of us who came of age in the first decade of blogging, who aspired to make it a career, the common route was to go from independent blogging to a salaried byline at an established big-name publication with roots in print as a magazine or newspaper. Om went the other way — from acclaimed reporter in top-shelf print magazines to turning GigaOm into a phenomenon. I never saw Daring Fireball as a stepping stone to greater things. I wanted only to make Daring Fireball a great thing. Om recognized that. In one of my earliest memories of meeting him — I think when I was working at Joyent, circa 2006 — we discussed publishing and new media and my own ambitions. He told me I should just keep doing what I was doing. Establishment media was a bloated slow-moving mess, he said. The future, he was absolutely certain, would be controlled by creators building their own brands and reputations, not subserving a legacy media publication. I told him I had no such plan. He said, “Good. You don’t need them. They need you.”
\n\n\n\nOm loved good coffee, nice watches, exotic pens, Apple products, the media industry, photography (both the art and the gadgetry), and the New York Yankees. So, yeah — he and I always had more to talk about than time to talk when we were together. Always. But it was the Yankees we talked about most. He loved about the Yankees what I love about the Yankees — that they embody the pursuit of excellence. Not just winning, but winning the right way. The Yankees play in Yankee Stadium, not Shitco Cellular Service & Financial Bank Park. He got angry about the Yankees by what gets me angry about them. Not when they merely lose. That’s baseball. But when they get cheap, or stupid, or both. (You did not want to get Om started on Hal Steinbrenner, who is definitely cheap and possibly stupid.)
\n\nWe attended a handful of games together at the Stadium. One time, he told me the most amazing story. When he first immigrated to New York in 1993, and was hustling to make a career in journalism in the U.S., he supported himself with a job selling luggage across the street from (old) Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. If you’ve ever been to New York, you know those stores. He worked at one. He didn’t know anyone in New York, let alone anyone in the U.S. business or technology news media. And he didn’t know a damn thing about baseball. So, on many days, he’d work all day and into the early evening, and then go across the street and buy a cheap seat in the upper deck and watch the Yankees. You’re never alone in a stadium. He learned baseball, and he fell in love with the Yankees on the cusp of the remarkable Jeter-Rivera-Pettitte-Posada dynasty. Om’s favorite player of that era was the serene Bernie Williams, of course. (Mine was Paul O’Neill, the hothead. Of course.)
\n\nI said, “I’ve always wondered about those stores. There’s so many of them. Does anyone actually buy luggage at those places?”
\n\n“John, you would be surprised. But they do not sell themselves. You have to sell them. It is hard work. The people who buy suitcases in those stores buy them there because they want to argue about prices. It is a fight every day.”
\n\nIn Om’s telling, the threads were all infused. His lonesome isolation as a young immigrant, 7,000 miles from his birthplace. Falling in love with baseball (in general) and the Yankees (in particular) at just the right time — a crash course in American culture and an antidote to loneliness, rolled into one pinstriped package. His burning ambition to break into major U.S. journalism. And the daily humbling grind of selling suitcases on the hot summer sidewalks of the Bronx.
\n\n\n\nOm didn’t sell suitcases for long. But I’ll bet while he did, he was pretty fucking good at it. He didn’t wait for his future to arrive. He made it happen. Careers — hell, our entire lives — are like those suitcases. They don’t sell themselves.
\n\nHe not busy being born is busy dying, wrote Dylan. Om Malik wasn’t busy dying even when he was dying.
\n\nI will forever be thankful that, somehow, I had the inkling to tell Om how good his recent writing was, before he told me his health was in such dire straits. Don’t hold back on telling people they made something you love or admire. Om himself was remarkably generous in that regard. ↩︎
\nApple, in a statement issues to the press yesterday, quoted fully by MacRumors:
\n\n\n\n\nThe consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented\nchallenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an\nextraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have\nnever seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We\nhave shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we\nhave now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on\na number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and\nMac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working\ntirelessly to find solutions.
\n
I saw a few other publications quote a sentence or two from the statement, but I like to see the whole thing. It’s not long.
\n\nLink: macrumors.com/2026/06/25/apple-explains-why-it-raised…
\n" }, { "title" : "The Price-Hiked Apple TV 4K Is 4 Years Old", "date_published" : "2026-06-26T15:39:38Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-26T15:39:38Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/26/price-hiked-apple-tv-4k-is-4-years-old", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/26/price-hiked-apple-tv-4k-is-4-years-old", "external_url" : "https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Apple_TV", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nVia MacRumors’s Buyer Guide, the current third-gen Apple TV 4K models were introduced in October 2022, and sport the A15 Bionic chip that debuted with the iPhones 13 in 2021. It’s widely believed that new hardware models are coming this fall. I mentioned yesterday that the steep price increases ($130 → $200 for the 64 GB base model; $150 → $250 for the 128 GB model with Ethernet and Thread networking) move Apple TV further out of line compared to the discount set-top boxes and sticks from companies like Roku and Amazon. But even setting aside the prices of competing devices, it just feels wrong to hike prices this much for four-year-old hardware running five-year-old pre-AI silicon. The higher-end model’s price went up 67 percent!
\n\nThe only way this makes sense is if these prices are really meant for the upcoming new hardware, and those new models are more ambitious home hubs that warrant $200–250 prices. This makes the current models a really bad deal for the next few months, but come September or October, Apple can introduce next-gen Apple Intelligence-ready Apple TV hardware and the prices can remain $200/250. It’s Apple, so maybe the new hardware will have prices that are even higher, and these increases are just stop-gaps to ease the eventual sticker shock upon the new hardware’s reveal.
\n\nBut as things stand today, no platform in Apple’s portfolio came out of these price increases looking worse than Apple TV. It’s especially painful to think about people buying one now, at these prices, only to have their purchase obsoleted in September or October.
\n\nLink: buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Apple_TV
\n" }, { "title" : "★ Spensive Thoughts", "date_published" : "2026-06-25T22:36:09Z", "date_modified" : "2026-06-26T17:10:47Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/06/spensive_thoughts", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/06/spensive_thoughts", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nSome quick thoughts on the hardware prices Apple increased — and didn’t increase — today. Here’s a table with most of the base models whose prices increased:
\n\n| Original | New | Change | \n\n\n|
|---|---|---|---|
| Vision Pro | $3500 | $3700 | 6% | \n
| HomePod | $300 | $350 | 17% | \n
| HomePod Mini | $100 | $130 | 30% | \n
| Apple TV 64 GB | $130 | $200 | 54% | \n
| Apple TV 128 GB | $150 | $250 | 67% | \n
| \n | |||
| iPad | $350 | $450 | 29% | \n
| iPad Mini | $500 | $600 | 20% | \n
| iPad Air | $600 | $750 | 25% | \n
| iPad Pro | $1000 | $1200 | 20% | \n
| \n | |||
| MacBook Neo | $600 | $700 | 17% | \n
| MacBook Air | $1100 | $1300 | 18% | \n
| MacBook Pro | $1700 | $2000 | 18% | \n
| iMac | $1300 | $1500 | 15% | \n
| \n | |||
| Mac Mini | $600 | $800 | 33% | \n
| Mac Studio M4 Max | $2000 | $2500 | 25% | \n
| Mac Studio M3 Ultra | $4000 | $5300 | 33% | \n
Apple TV 4K was hit particularly hard on a percentage basis, with the 64 GB base model going up 54% and the 128 GB model (which also includes a Thread radio and Ethernet) rising 67%. These increases especially hurt for a product that was already perceived — fairly or unfairly — as being too expensive compared to its competition. A Roku Ultra costs $100 and Roku Streaming Sticks start at $30, as do Amazon’s Fire TV Sticks. A replacement Siri Remote for Apple TV alone costs $60. It’s clearly the SSD storage in the Apple TV 4K that prompted this, but because people use them to “stream”, consumers don’t even think of Apple TV as having “storage”.
\n\nPoor Vision Pro’s meager 6% price increase feels more like a pep talk than a meaningful change. A signifier that Apple has not forgotten it exists. “Don’t worry, buddy, you’re getting a price increase too, just like everyone else. We’ll bump you up ... I don’t know ... how about $200? There you go. Here’s a pat on the head too. Keep your chin up, kid.”
\n\niPad prices mostly went up 20–25%, but the hardest hit was the no-adjective base model, which rose almost 30%, from $350 to $450. That’s a big increase for a product meant to appeal to buyers for whom price is obviously their biggest concern.
\n\nMacBook and iMac prices went up 15–20%, but Mac Minis and Mac Studios went up almost twice as much on a percentage basis.
\n\nApple did not raise prices on three of its most popular product lines: iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods. With iPhone and Apple Watch, I guess they think they can hold the line until September, when new models will be announced. But the rumor mill strongly suggests that the only new iPhones coming in September are the iPhone 18 Pro and the new foldable “Ultra”.1 I can’t help but wonder whether, alongside the introduction of new iPhones, the existing ones slated to be updated in early 2027 (iPhone Air, iPhone 17, iPhone 17e) will go up in price. In normal years, those of us in the know generally discourage friends and family from buying new iPhones or Apple Watches in the summer, encouraging them to wait until September. This year, it might make sense to encourage people to buy now, if they’re price conscious. Based on these other products, surely iPhones and Apple Watches will soon rise in price 15–25 percent. Whether “soon” means “next week” or “September”, I don’t know. But at this moment, iPhones and Apple Watches are selling for bargain prices relative to iPads and Macs, and the iPhone 18 Pro is going to cost a lot more than the 17 Pros. Plus, orange?
\n\nPerhaps it’s unsurprising that AirPods did not go up in price. They don’t use SSD storage and they don’t use RAM like other products do.
\n\nBecause these price increases were driven entirely by RAM and SSD component pricing, the hardest-hit products are the professional tier models, with the most RAM and largest SSDs. Here’s a table I put together in Apple Notes, which (forgive me) I’m going to paste as a screenshot.
\n\nNotes:
\n\nThe base model prices for these M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros only went up 13–15%. But RAM and SSD upgrades increased, in most configurations, by a whopping 50–67%. The 64 and 128 GB RAM upgrades for the M5 Max doubled in price.
\n\nExample configurations:
\n\nAdd $300 to those prices if you prefer 16-inch — which brings the maxed-out configuration to $10,150, and still hits an even $10K if you omit the nano-texture option.
\n\nThat second one is the configuration I personally would want to buy to replace my beloved but aging M1 Max MacBook Pro (64 GB RAM, 4 TB SSD) from 2021. I knew prices would go up if I waited another year, but I hadn’t really considered that they’d go up by 40%. For that $2,800 price increase, one used to be able to purchase 16 spare wheels for the late great Mac Pro.
\n\nI’m still holding out hope they call it “iPhone Duo”. ↩︎
\nWhen an AI agent tries to complete a task that requires a new account, it hits a wall: the sign-up form. There’s no standard for how an agent registers a user with an app on their behalf.
\n\nauth.md is a file you host at your domain that tells agents how to register your users, which flows you support, what scopes you expose, and how credentials get issued. Think robots.txt, but for agent registration. It composes existing OAuth standards.
\n\nCloudflare, Firecrawl, and Resend have already adopted it.
\n\nAn open protocol authored by WorkOS. Read the spec.
\n\nLink: workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…
\n" } ] }![Claude’s answer](\"https://daringfireball.net/misc/2024/10/claude-mac-why.png\"){kind=link}
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