In August 2007, Apple held a Mac event in the Infinite Loop Town Hall auditorium. New iMacs, iLife ’08 (major updates to iPhoto and iMovie), and iWork ’08 (including the debut of Numbers 1.0). Back then, believe it or not, at the end of these Town Hall events, Apple executives would sit on stools and take questions from the media. For this one, Steve Jobs was flanked by Tim Cook and Phil Schiller. Molly Wood, then at CNet, asked, “And so, I guess once and for all, is it your goal to overtake the PC in market share?”
\n\nThe audience — along with Cook, Jobs, and Schiller — chuckled. And then Jobs answered. You should watch the video — it’s just two minutes — but here’s what he said:
\n\n\n\n\nI can tell you what our goal is. Our goal is to make the best\npersonal computers in the world and to make products we are proud\nto sell and would recommend to our family and friends. And we want\nto do that at the lowest prices we can. But I have to tell you,\nthere’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to\nship, that we wouldn’t be proud to recommend to our family and\nfriends. And we can’t do it. We just can’t ship junk.
\n\nSo there are thresholds that we can’t cross because of who\nwe are. But we want to make the best personal computers in the\nindustry. And we think there’s a very significant slice of the\nindustry that wants that too. And what you’ll find is our products\nare usually not premium priced. You go and price out our\ncompetitors’ products, and you add the features that you have to\nadd to make them useful, and you’ll find in some cases they are\nmore expensive than our products. The difference is we don’t offer\nstripped-down lousy products. We just don’t offer\ncategories of products like that. But if you move those aside and\ncompare us with our competitors, I think we compare pretty\nfavorably. And a lot of people have been doing that, and\nsaying that now, for the last 18 months.
\n
Steve Jobs would have loved the MacBook Neo. Everything about it, right down to the fact that Apple is responsible for the silicon.
\n\nLink: youtube.com/watch?v=U37Ds3RvyoM
\n" }, { "title" : "★ Thoughts and Observations on the MacBook Neo", "date_published" : "2026-03-04T20:40:11Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-05T19:21:10Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_macbook_neo", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_macbook_neo", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\n$599. Not a piece of junk.
\n\nThat’s not a marketing slogan from Apple for the new MacBook Neo. But it could be. And it is the underlying message of the product. For a few years now, Apple has quietly dabbled with the sub-$1,000 laptop market, by selling the base configuration of the M1 MacBook Air — a machine that debuted in November 2020 — at retailers like Walmart for under $700. But dabbling is the right word. Apple has never ventured under the magic $999 price point for a MacBook available in its own stores.
\n\nAs of today, they’re not just in the sub-$1,000 laptop market, they’re going in hard. The MacBook Neo is a very compelling $600 laptop, and for just $100 more, you get a configuration with Touch ID and double the storage (512 GB instead of 256).
\n\nYou can argue that all MacBooks should have Touch ID. My first answer to that is “$599”. My second answer is “education”. Touch ID doesn’t really make sense for laptops shared by kids in a school. And with Apple’s $100 education pricing discount, the base MacBook Neo, at $499, is half the price of the base M5 MacBook Air ($1099 retail, $999 education). Half the price.
\n\nI’m writing this from Apple’s hands-on “experience” in New York, amongst what I’d estimate as a few hundred members of the media. It’s a pretty big event, and a very big space inside some sort of empty warehouse on the western edge of Chelsea. Before playing the four-minute Neo introduction video (which you should watch — it’s embedded in Apple’s Newsroom post), John Ternus took the stage to address the audience. He emphasized that the Mac user base continues to grow, because “nearly half of Mac buyers are new to the platform”. Ternus didn’t say the following aloud, but Apple clearly knows what has kept a lot of would-be switchers from switching, and it’s the price. The Mac Mini is great, but normal people only buy laptops, and aside from the aforementioned dabbling with the five-year-old M1 MacBook Air, Apple just hasn’t ventured under $999. “We just can’t ship junk,” Steve Jobs said back in 2007. It’s not that Apple never noticed the demand for laptops in the $500–700 range. It’s that they didn’t see how to make one that wasn’t junk.
\n\nNow they have. And the PC world should take note. One of my briefings today included a side-by-side comparison between a MacBook Neo and an HP 14-inch laptop “in the same price category”. It was something like this one, with an Intel Core 5 chip, which costs $550. The HP’s screen sucks (very dim, way lower resolution), the speakers suck, the keyboard sucks, and the trackpad sucks. It’s a thick, heavy, plasticky piece of junk. I didn’t put my nose to it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it smells bad.
\n\nThe MacBook Neo looks and feels every bit like a MacBook. Solid aluminum. Good keyboard (no backlighting, but supposedly the same mechanism as in other post-2019 MacBooks — felt great in my quick testing). Good trackpad (no Force Touch — it actually physically clicks, but you can click anywhere, not just the bottom). Good bright display (500 nits max, same as the MacBook Air). Surprisingly good speakers, in a new side-firing configuration. Without even turning either laptop on, you can just see and feel that the MacBook Neo is a vastly superior device.
\n\nAnd when you do turn them on, you see the vast difference in display quality and hear the vast difference in speaker quality. And you get MacOS, not Windows, which, even with Tahoe, remains the quintessential glass of ice water in hell for the computer industry.
\n\nI came into today’s event experience expecting a starting price of $799 for the Neo — $300 less than the new $1,099 price for the base M5 MacBook Air (which, in defense of that price, starts with 512 GB storage). $599 is a fucking statement. Apple is coming after this market. I think they’re going to sell a zillion of these things, and “almost half” of new Mac buyers being new to the platform is going to become “more than half”. The MacBook Neo is not a footnote or hobby, or a pricing stunt to get people in the door before upselling them to a MacBook Air. It’s the first major new Mac aimed at the consumer market in the Apple Silicon era. It’s meant to make a dent — perhaps a minuscule dent in the universe, but a big dent in the Mac’s share of the overall PC market.
It’s worth noting that the Neo is aptly named. It really is altogether new. In that way it’s the opposite of the five-year-old M1 MacBook Air that Apple had been selling through retailers like Walmart and Amazon. Rather than selling something old for a lower price, they’ve designed and engineered something new from the ground up to launch at a lower price. It’s an all-new trackpad. It’s a good but different display than the Air’s — slightly smaller (13.0 inches vs. 13.6) and supporting only the sRGB color gamut, not P3. If you know the difference between sRGB and P3, the Neo is not the MacBook you want. What Neo buyers are going to notice is that the display looks good and is just as bright as the Air’s — and it looks way better, way sharper, and way brighter than the criminally ugly displays on PC laptops in this price range.
\n\nEven the Apple logo on the back of the display lid is different. Rather than make it polished and shiny, it’s simply embossed. Save a few bucks here, a few bucks there, and you eventually grind your way to a new MacBook that deserves the name “MacBook” but starts at just $600.
\n\nBut of course there are trade-offs. You can use Apple’s Compare page to see the differences between the Neo and Air (and, for kicks, the 2020 M1 Air that until now was still being sold at Walmart). Even better, over at 512 Pixels Stephen Hackett has assembled a concise list of the differences between the MacBook Neo and MacBook Air. All of these things matter, but none of these things are dealbreakers for a $500-700 MacBook. These trade-offs are extremely well-considered on Apple’s part.
\n\nI’ll call out one item from Hackett’s 17-item list in particular:
\n\n\n\n\nOne of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just\n480 Mb/s.
\n
On the one hand, this stinks. It just does. The two ports look exactly the same — and neither is labeled in any way — but they’re different. But on the other hand, the Neo is the first product with an A-series chip that Apple has ever made that supports two USB ports.1 It was, I am reliably informed by Apple product marketing folks, a significant engineering achievement to get a second USB port at all on the MacBook Neo while basing it on the A18 Pro SoC. And while the ports aren’t labeled, if you plug an external display into the “wrong” port, you’ll get an on-screen notification suggesting you plug it into the other port. That this second USB-C port is USB 2.0 is not great, but it is fine.
\n\nOther notes:
\n\nI think the “fun-ness” of the Neo colors was overstated in the rumor mill. But the “blush” color is definitely pink, “citrus” is definitely yellow, and “indigo” is definitely blue. No confusing any of them with shades of gray.
The keyboards are color-matched. At a glance it’s easy to think the keyboards are all white, but only on the silver Neo are the key caps actually white. The others are all slightly tinted to match the color of the case. Nice!
8 GB of RAM is not a lot, but with Apple Silicon it really is enough for typical consumer productivity apps. (If they update the Neo annually and next year’s model gets the A19 Pro, it will move not to 16 GB of RAM but 12 GB.)
It’s an interesting coincidence that the base models for the Neo and iPhone 17e both cost $600. For $1,200 you can buy a new iPhone and a new MacBook for just $100 more than the price of the base model M5 MacBook Air. (And the iPhone 17e is the one with the faster CPU.)
With the Neo only offered in two configurations — $600 or $700 — and the M5 Air now starting at $1,100, Apple has no MacBooks in the range between $700 and $1,100.
To consider the spread of Apple’s market segmentation, and how the Neo expands it, think about the fact that on the premium side, the 13-inch iPad Pro Magic Keyboard costs $350. That’s a keyboard with a trackpad and a hinge. You can now buy a whole damn 13-inch MacBook Neo — which includes a keyboard, trackpad, and hinge, along with a display and speakers and a whole Macintosh computer — for just $250 more.
Perhaps the closest Apple had ever come to an A-series-chip product with two ports was the original iPad from 2010, which in late prototypes had two 30-pin connectors — one on the long side and another on the short side — so that you could orient it either way in the original iPad keyboard dock. ↩︎
\nNot sure if this page was there yesterday, but the main “Displays” page at Apple’s website is a spec-by-spec comparison between the regular and XDR models. Nice.
\n\nLink: apple.com/displays/
\n" }, { "title" : "Compatibility Notes on the New Studio Displays", "date_published" : "2026-03-04T16:10:32Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-04T16:10:33Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/04/compatibility-notes-on-the-new-studio-displays", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/04/compatibility-notes-on-the-new-studio-displays", "external_url" : "https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/03/apple-studio-display-no-intel-mac-support/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJuli Clover, at MacRumors, notes that neither the new Studio Display nor the Studio Display XDR are compatible with Intel-based Macs. (I’m curious why.) Also, in a separate report, she notes that Macs with any M1 chip, or the base M2 or M3, are only able to drive the Studio Display XDR at 60 Hz. You need a Pro or better M2/M3, or any M4 or M5 chip, to drive it at 120 Hz.
\n\nLink: macrumors.com/2026/03/03/apple-studio-display-no-intel-mac…
\n" }, { "title" : "‘In Other Words, Batman Has Become Superman and Robin Has Become Batman’", "date_published" : "2026-03-04T13:42:46Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-04T13:42:47Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/04/snell-batman-superman", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/04/snell-batman-superman", "external_url" : "https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/03/apple-gives-in-to-temptation-and-renames-its-cpu-cores/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJason Snell, Six Colors:
\n\n\n\n\nHere’s the backstory: With every new generation of Apple’s\nMac-series processors, I’ve gotten the impression from Apple execs\nthat they’ve been a little frustrated with the perception that\ntheir “lesser” efficiency cores were weak sauce. I’ve lost count\nof the number of briefings and conversations I’ve had where\nthey’ve had to go out of their way to point out that, actually,\nthe lesser cores on an M-series chip are quite fast on their own,\nin addition to being very good at saving power!
\n\nClearly they’ve had enough of that, so they’re changing how those\ncores are marketed to emphasize their performance, rather than\ntheir efficiency.
\n
Link: sixcolors.com/post/2026/03/apple-gives-in-to-temptation-and…
\n" }, { "title" : "Apple Announces Updated Studio Display and All-New Studio Display XDR", "date_published" : "2026-03-03T21:25:07Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-04T18:02:49Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/03/updated-studio-display-and-all-new-studio-display-xdr", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/03/updated-studio-display-and-all-new-studio-display-xdr", "external_url" : "https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-unveils-new-studio-display-and-all-new-studio-display-xdr/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nApple Newsroom:
\n\n\n\n\nApple today announced a new family of displays engineered to pair\nbeautifully with Mac and meet the needs of everyone, from everyday\nusers to the world’s top pros. The new Studio Display\nfeatures a 12MP Center Stage camera, now with improved image\nquality and support for Desk View; a studio-quality\nthree-microphone array; and an immersive six-speaker sound system\nwith Spatial Audio. It also now includes powerful Thunderbolt 5\nconnectivity, providing more downstream connectivity for\nhigh-speed accessories or daisy-chaining displays. The all-new\nStudio Display XDR takes the pro display experience to the\nnext level. Its 27-inch 5K Retina XDR display features an advanced\nmini-LED backlight with over 2,000 local dimming zones, up to 1000\nnits of SDR brightness, and 2000 nits of peak HDR brightness, in\naddition to a wider color gamut, so content jumps off the screen\nwith breathtaking contrast, vibrancy, and accuracy. With its 120Hz\nrefresh rate, Studio Display XDR is even more responsive to\ncontent in motion, and Adaptive Sync dynamically adjusts frame\nrates for content like video playback or graphically intense\ngames. Studio Display XDR offers the same advanced camera and\naudio system as Studio Display, as well as Thunderbolt 5\nconnectivity to simplify pro workflow setups. The new Studio\nDisplay with a tilt-adjustable stand starts at $1,599, and Studio\nDisplay XDR with a tilt- and height-adjustable stand starts at\n$3,299. Both are available in standard or nano-texture glass\noptions, and can be pre-ordered starting tomorrow, March 4, with\navailability beginning Wednesday, March 11.
\n
Compared to the first-generation Studio Display (March 2022), the updated model really just has a better camera. (Wouldn’t take much to improve upon the old camera.) The Studio Display XDR is the interesting new one. Apple doesn’t seem to have a “Compare” page for its displays, so the Studio Display Tech Specs and Studio Display XDR Tech Specs pages will have to suffice. Update: The main “Displays” page at Apple’s website serves as a comparison page between the new Studio Display and Studio Display XDR.
\n\nThe regular Studio Display maxes out at 600 nits, and only supports a refresh rate of 60 Hz. The Studio Display XDR maxes out at 1,000 nits for SDR content and 2,000 nits for HDR, with up to 120 Hz refresh rate. Nice, but not enough to tempt me to upgrade from my current Studio Display with nano-texture, which I never seem to run at maximum brightness. I guess it would be nice to see HDR content, but not nice enough to spend $3,600 to get one with nano-texture. And I don’t think I care about 120 Hz on my Mac?
\n\nUnresolved is what this means for the Pro Display XDR, which remains unchanged since its debut in 2019. Update: Whoops, apparently this has been resolved. A small-print note on the Newsroom announcement states:
\n\n\nStudio Display XDR replaces Pro Display XDR and starts at $3,299\n(U.S.) and $3,199 (U.S.) for education.
\n
Link: apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-unveils-new-studio-display…
\n" }, { "title" : "New MacBook Air With M5", "date_published" : "2026-03-03T21:08:42Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-03T21:09:56Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/03/new-macbook-air-with-m5", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/03/new-macbook-air-with-m5", "external_url" : "https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-the-new-macbook-air-with-m5/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nApple Newsroom:
\n\n\n\n\nMacBook Air now comes standard with double the starting storage at\n512GB with faster SSD technology, and is configurable up to 4TB,\nso customers can keep their most important work on hand. Apple’s\nN1 wireless chip delivers Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 for seamless\nconnectivity on the go. MacBook Air features a beautifully thin,\nlight, and durable aluminum design, stunning Liquid Retina\ndisplay, 12MP Center Stage camera, up to 18 hours of battery life,\nan immersive sound system with Spatial Audio, and two Thunderbolt\n4 ports with support for up to two external displays.
\n
Base storage went from 256 to 512 GB, but the base price went from the magic $999 to $1,100 ($1,099, technically, which doesn’t make the 99 seem magic). Presumably, those in the market for a $999 MacBook will buy the new about-to-be-announced-tomorrow lower-priced MacBook “Neo”, which I’m guessing will start at $800 ($799), maybe as low as $700 ($699), but will surely have higher-priced configurations for additional storage. Today’s new M5 MacBook Airs have storage upgrades of:
\n\nColors remain unchanged (and in my opinion, boring): midnight, starlight, silver, sky blue (almost black, gold-ish gray, gray, blue-ish gray). RAM options remain unchanged too: 16, 24, or 32 GB.
\n\nA comparison page showing the new M5 Air, old M4 Air, and base M5 MacBook Pro suggests not much else is new year-over-year, other than the Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support from the N1 chip.
\n\nLink: apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-the-new-macbook…
\n" }, { "title" : "Apple Might Have Prematurely Leaked the Name ‘MacBook Neo’", "date_published" : "2026-03-03T20:59:43Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-03T20:59:44Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/03/macbook-neo-name-leak", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/03/macbook-neo-name-leak", "external_url" : "https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/03/apple-accidentally-leaks-macbook-neo/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJoe Rossignol, MacRumors:
\n\n\n\n\nA regulatory document for a “MacBook Neo” (Model A3404) has\nappeared on Apple’s website. Unfortunately, there are no further\ndetails or images available yet. While the PDF file does not\ncontain the “MacBook Neo” name, it briefly appeared in a link on\nApple’s regulatory website for EU compliance purposes.
\n
My money was on just plain “MacBook”, but I like “MacBook Neo”.
\n\nLink: macrumors.com/2026/03/03/apple-accidentally-leaks-macbook…
\n" }, { "title" : "Apple Introduces MacBook Pro Models With M5 Pro and M5 Max Chips", "date_published" : "2026-03-03T20:01:28Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-04T22:55:07Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/03/apple-introduces-macbook-pro-models-with-m5-pro-and-m5-max-chips", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/03/apple-introduces-macbook-pro-models-with-m5-pro-and-m5-max-chips", "external_url" : "https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-macbook-pro-with-all-new-m5-pro-and-m5-max/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nApple Newsroom:
\n\n\n\n\nApple today announced the latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook\nPro with the all-new M5 Pro and M5 Max, bringing\ngame-changing performance and AI capabilities to the world’s best\npro laptop. With M5 Pro and M5 Max, MacBook Pro features a new CPU\nwith the world’s fastest CPU core, a next-generation GPU with a\nNeural Accelerator in each core, and higher unified memory\nbandwidth, altogether delivering up to 4× AI performance compared\nto the previous generation, and up to 8× AI performance compared\nto M1 models. This allows developers, researchers, business\nprofessionals, and creatives to unlock new AI-enabled workflows\nright on MacBook Pro. It now comes with up to 2× faster SSD\nperformance and starts at 1TB of storage for M5 Pro and 2TB for M5\nMax. The new MacBook Pro includes N1, an Apple-designed wireless\nnetworking chip that enables Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, bringing\nimproved performance and reliability to wireless connections. It\nalso offers up to 24 hours of battery life; a gorgeous Liquid\nRetina XDR display with a nano-texture option; a wide array of\nconnectivity, including Thunderbolt 5; a 12MP Center Stage camera;\nstudio-quality mics; an immersive six-speaker sound system; Apple\nIntelligence features; and the power of macOS Tahoe. The new\nMacBook Pro comes in space black and silver, and is available to\npre-order starting tomorrow, March 4, with availability beginning\nWednesday, March 11.
\n
The MacBook Pro Tech Specs page is a good place to start to compare the entire M5 MacBook Pro lineup. One noteworthy change is that last year’s M4 Pro models only supported 24 or 48 GB of RAM; the new M5 Pro models support 24, 48, and 64 GB. Memory configurations for the M5 Max are unchanged from the M4 Max: 36, 48, 64, and 128 GB. (You could get an M4 Pro chip with 64 GB, but only on the Mac Mini.)
\n\nAlso worth noting — Apple’s RAM pricing remains unchanged, despite the spike in memory prices industry-wide. With the “full” M5 Max chip (18-core CPU, 40-core GPU — there’s a lesser configuration with “only” 32 GPU cores for -$300), base memory is 48 GB. Upgrading to 64 GB costs $200, and upgrading to 128 GB costs $1,000. Same prices as last year. This means the price for a MacBook Pro with 64 GB of RAM — if that’s your main concern — dropped by $800 year over year. Last year you needed to buy one with the high-end M4 Max chip to get 64 GB; now you can configure a MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro with 64 GB. Nice!
\n\nBen Thompson and I wagered a steak dinner on this on Dithering. Ben bet on Apple’s memory prices going up; I bet on them staying the same. My thinking was that this industry-wide spike in RAM prices is exactly why Apple has always charged more for memory — “just in case”. I’m going to enjoy that steak.
\n\nLink: apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-macbook-pro…
\n" }, { "title" : "Apple Debuts M5 Pro and M5 Max, and Renames Its M-Series CPU Cores", "date_published" : "2026-03-03T18:11:32Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-04T18:15:07Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/03/apple-debuts-m5-pro-and-m5-max", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/03/apple-debuts-m5-pro-and-m5-max", "external_url" : "https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-debuts-m5-pro-and-m5-max-to-supercharge-the-most-demanding-pro-workflows/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nApple Newsroom:
\n\n\n\n\nApple today announced M5 Pro and M5 Max, the world’s most advanced\nchips for pro laptops, powering the new MacBook Pro. The chips are\nbuilt using a new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture. This\ninnovative design combines two dies into a single system on a chip\n(SoC), which includes a powerful CPU, scalable GPU, Media Engine,\nunified memory controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5\ncapabilities. M5 Pro and M5 Max feature a new 18-core CPU\narchitecture. It includes six of the highest-performing core\ndesign, now called super cores, that are the world’s fastest CPU\ncore. Alongside these cores are 12 all-new performance cores,\noptimized for power-efficient, multithreaded workloads. [...]
\n\nThe industry-leading super core was first introduced as\nperformance cores in M5, which also adopts the super core name for\nall M5-based products — MacBook Air, the 14-inch MacBook Pro,\niPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro. This core is the\nhighest-performance core design with the world’s fastest\nsingle-threaded performance, driven in part by increased front-end\nbandwidth, a new cache hierarchy, and enhanced branch prediction.
\n\nM5 Pro and M5 Max also introduce an all-new performance core that\nis optimized to deliver greater power-efficient, multithreaded\nperformance for pro workloads. Together with the super cores, the\nchips deliver up to 2.5× higher multithreaded performance than M1\nPro and M1 Max. The super cores and performance cores give\nMacBook Pro a huge performance boost to handle the most\nCPU-intensive pro workloads, like analyzing complex data or\nrunning demanding simulations with unparalleled ease.
\n
This is a bit confusing, but I think — after a media briefing with Apple reps this morning — I’ve got it straight. From the M1 through M4, there were two CPU core types: efficiency and performance. When the regular M5 chip debuted in October, Apple continued using those same names, efficiency and performance, for its two core types. But as of today, they’re renaming them, and introducing a third core type that they’re calling “performance”. They’re reusing the old performance name for an altogether new CPU core type. So you can see what I mean about it being confusing.
\n\nThere are now three core types in M5-series CPUs. Efficiency cores are still “efficiency”, but they’re only in the base M5. What used to be called “performance” cores are now called “super” cores, and they’re present in all M5 chips. The new core type — more power-efficient than super cores, more performant than efficiency cores — are taking the old name “performance”. Here are the core counts in table form, with separate rows for the 15- and 18-core M5 Pro variants:
\n\n\n\n| \n | Efficiency | \nPerformance | \nSuper | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| M5 | \n6 | \n— | \n4 | \n
| M5 Pro | \n— | \n10 | \n5 | \n
| M5 Pro | \n— | \n12 | \n6 | \n
| M5 Max | \n— | \n12 | \n6 | \n
Another way to think about it is that there are regular efficiency cores in the plain M5, and new higher-performing efficiency cores called “performance” in the M5 Pro and M5 Max. The problem is that the old M1–M4 names were clear — one CPU core type was fast but optimized for efficiency so they called it “efficiency”, and the other core type was efficient but optimized for performance so they called it “performance”. Now, the new “performance” core types are the optimized-for-efficiency CPU cores in the Pro and Max chips, and despite their name, they’re not the most performant cores.
\n\nLink: apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-debuts-m5-pro-and-m5-max…
\n" }, { "title" : "[Sponsor] npx workos: An AI Agent That Writes Auth Directly Into Your Codebase", "date_published" : "2026-03-03T00:20:21Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-03T00:20:22Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/2026/03/npx_workos_an_ai_agent_that_wr", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/2026/03/npx_workos_an_ai_agent_that_wr", "external_url" : "https://workos.com/docs/authkit/cli-installer?utm_source=tldrdev&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q12026", "authors" : [ { "name" : "Daring Fireball Department of Commerce" } ], "content_html" : "\nnpx workos launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration directly into your existing codebase. It’s not a template generator. It reads your code, understands your stack, and writes an integration that fits.
\n\nThe WorkOS agent then typechecks and builds, feeding any errors back to itself to fix.
\n\n\n\nLink: workos.com/docs/authkit/cli-installer?utm_source=tldrdev…
\n" }, { "title" : "★ HazeOver — Mac Utility for Highlighting the Frontmost Window", "date_published" : "2026-03-02T23:41:11Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-03T18:38:32Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/hazeover", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/hazeover", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nBack in December I linked to a sort-of stunt project from Tyler Hall called Alan.app — a simple Mac utility that draws a bold rectangle around the current active window. Alan.app lets you set the thickness and color of the frame. I used it for an hour or so before calling it quits. It really does solve the severe (and worsening) problem of being able to instantly identify the active window in recent versions of MacOS, but the crudeness of Alan.app’s implementation makes it one of those cases where the cure is worse than the disease. Ultimately I’d rather suffer from barely distinguishable active window state than look at Alan.app’s crude active-window frame all day every day. What makes Alan.app interesting to me is its effectiveness as a protest app. The absurdity of Alan.app’s crude solution highlights the absurdity of the underlying problem — that anyone would even consider running Alan.app (or the fact that Hall was motivated to create and release it) shows just how bad windowing UI is in recent MacOS versions.
\n\nTurns out there exists an app that attempts to solve this problem in an elegant way that you might want to actually live with. It’s called HazeOver, and developer Maxim Ananov first released it a decade ago. It’s in the Mac App Store for $5, is included in the SetApp subscription service, and has a free trial available from the website.
\n\nWhat HazeOver does is highlight the active window by dimming all background windows. That’s it. But it does this simple task with aplomb, and it makes a significant difference in the day-to-day usability of MacOS. Not just MacOS 26 Tahoe — all recent versions of MacOS suffer from a design that makes it difficult to distinguish, instantly, the frontmost (a.k.a. key) window from background windows.1 Making all background windows a little dimmer makes a notable difference.
\n\nLongtime DF reader Faisal Jawdat sent me a note suggesting I try HazeOver back in early December, after I linked to Alan.app. I didn’t get around to trying HazeOver until December 30, and I’ve been using it ever since. One thing I did, at first, was not set HazeOver to launch automatically at login. That way, each time I restarted or logged out, I’d go back to the default MacOS 15 Sequoia interface, where background windows aren’t dimmed. I wanted to see if I’d miss HazeOver when it wasn’t running. Each time, I did notice, and I missed it. I now have it set to launch automatically when I log in.
\n\nHazeOver’s default settings are a bit strong for my taste. By default, it dims background windows by 35 percent. I’ve dialed that back to just 10 percent, and that’s more than noticeable enough for me. I understand why HazeOver’s default dimming is so strong — it emphasizes just what HazeOver is doing. (Also, some people choose to use HazeOver to avoid being distracted by background window content — in which case you might want to increase, not decrease, the dimming from the default setting.) But after you get used to it, you might find, as I did, that a little bit goes a long way. (Jawdat told me he’s dropped down to 12 percent on his machine.) I’ve also diddled with HazeOver’s animation settings, changing from the default (Ease Out, 0.3 seconds) to Ease In & Out, 0.1 seconds — I want switching windows to feel fast fast fast.
\n\nHighly recommended, and a veritable bargain at just $5.
\n\nThe HazeOver website also has a link to a beta version with updates specific to MacOS 26 Tahoe. To be clear, the current release version, available in the App Store, works just fine on Tahoe. But the beta version has a Liquid Glass-style Settings window, and addresses an edge case where, on Tahoe, the menu bar sometimes appears too dim. ↩︎
\nMarcin Wichary, writing at Unsung (which is just an incredibly good and fun weblog):
\n\n\n\n\nHalf of my education in URLs as user interface came from Flickr in\nthe late 2000s. Its URLs looked like this:
\n\n\n\nflickr.com/photos/mwichary/favorites\nflickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets\nflickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904\nflickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834\nflickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834/in/set-72177720330077904\nThis was incredible and a breath of fresh air. No redundant
\n\nwww.\nin front or awkward.phpat the end. No parameters with their\nunpleasant?&=syntax. No%signs partying with hex codes.\nWhen you shared these URLs with others, you didn’t have to retouch\nor delete anything. When Chrome’s address bar started\nautocompleting them, you knew exactly where you were going.This might seem silly. The user interface of URLs? Who types\nin or edits URLs by hand? But keyboards are still the most\nefficient entry device. If a place you’re going is where you’ve\nalready been, typing a few letters might get you there much faster\nthan waiting for pages to load, clicking, and so on.
\n
In general, URLs at Daring Fireball try to work like this.
\n\n![it’s simply embossed](\"https://daringfireball.net/misc/2026/03/macbook-neo-apple-logo.jpeg\"){kind=link}
/linked/2026/03/02/wichary-flickr-urls/linked/2026/03/02/wichary-flickr-urls.text/linked/2026/03/02//linked/2026/03/I say “in general” because the DF URLs could be better. There should be one unified URLs space for all posts on DF, not separate ones for feature articles and Linked List posts. Someday.
\n\nWichary subsequently posted this fine follow-up, chock full of links regarding URL design.
\n\nLink: unsung.aresluna.org/unsung-heroes-flickrs-urls-scheme/
\n" }, { "title" : "ChangeTheHeaders", "date_published" : "2026-03-02T21:10:50Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-02T21:21:15Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/changetheheaders", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/changetheheaders", "external_url" : "https://underpassapp.com/news/2025/3/4.html", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nDuring the most recent episode of The Talk Show, Jason Snell brought up a weird issue that I started running into last year. On my Mac, sometimes I’d drag an image out of a web page in Safari, and I’d get an image in WebP format. Sometimes I wouldn’t care. But usually when I download an image like that, it’s because I want to publish (or merely host my own copy of) that image on Daring Fireball. And I don’t publish WebP images — I prefer PNG and JPEG for compatibility.
\n\nWhat made it weird is when I’d view source on the original webpage, the original image was usually in PNG or JPEG format. If I opened the image in a new tab — just the image — I’d get it in PNG or JPEG format. But when I’d download it by dragging out of the original webpage, I’d get a WebP. This was a total WTF for me.
\n\nI turned to my friend Jeff Johnson, author of, among other things, the excellent Safari extension StopTheMadness. Not only was Johnson able to explain what was going on, he actually made a new Safari extension called ChangeTheHeaders that fixed the problem for me. Johnson, announcing ChangeTheHeaders last year:
\n\n\n\n\nAfter some investigation, I discovered that the difference was the\nAccept HTTP request header, which specifies what types of\nresponse the web browser will accept. Safari’s default Accept\nheader for images is this:
\n\n\n\n
Accept:\nimage/webp,image/avif,image/jxl,image/heic,image/heic-sequence,video/*;q=0.8,image/png,image/svg+xml,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5Although
\nimage/webpappears first in the list, the order\nactually doesn’t matter. The quality value, specified by\nthe;q=suffix, determines the ranking of types. The range of\nvalues is 0 to 1, with 1 as the default value if none is\nspecified. Thus,image/webpandimage/pnghave equal\nprecedence, equal quality value 1, leaving it up to the web site\nto decide which image type to serve. In this case, the web site\ndecided to serve a WebP image, despite the fact that the image\nURL has a.pngsuffix. In a URL, unlike in a file path, the\n“file extension”, if one exists, is largely meaningless. A very\nsimple web server will directly match a URL with a local file\npath, but a more complex web server can do almost anything it\nwants with a URL.
This was driving me nuts. Thanks to Johnson, I now understand why it was happening, and I had a simple set-it-and-forget-it tool to fix it. Johnson writes:
\n\n\n\n\nWhat can you do with ChangeTheHeaders? I suspect the biggest\nselling point will be to spoof the User-Agent. The extension\nallows you to customize your User-Agent by URL domain. For\nexample, you can make Safari pretend that it’s Chrome on Google\nweb apps that give special treatment to Chrome. You can also\ncustomize the Accept-Language header if you don’t like the\ndefault language handling of some website, such as YouTube.
\n
Here’s the custom rule I applied a year ago, when I first installed ChangeTheHeaders (screenshot):
\n\nHeader: Accept
\nValue: image/avif,image/jxl,image/heic,image/heic-sequence,video/*;q=0.8,image/png,image/svg+xml,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5
\nURL Domains: «leave blank for all domains»
\nURL Filter: «leave blank for all URLs»
\nResource Types: image
I haven’t seen a single WebP since.
\n\nChangeTheHeaders works everywhere Safari does — Mac, iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro — and you can get it for just $7 on the App Store.
\n\nLink: underpassapp.com/news/2025/3/4.html
\n" }, { "title" : "Welcome (Back) to Macintosh", "date_published" : "2026-03-02T20:27:52Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-02T20:27:53Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/welcome-back-to-macintosh", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/welcome-back-to-macintosh", "external_url" : "https://take.surf/2026/03/01/welcome-back-to-macintosh", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJesper, writing at Take:
\n\n\n\n\nMy hope is that Macintosh is not just one of these empires that\nwas at the height of its power and then disintegrated because of\nwarring factions, satiated and uncurious rulers, and droughts for\nwhich no one was prepared, ruining crops no one realized were\nessential for survival.
\n\nMy hope is that there remains a primordial spark, a glimpse of\ngenius, to rediscover, to reconnect to — to serve not annual\ntrends or constant phonification, but the needs of the user to use\nthe computer as a tool to get something done.
\n
Link: take.surf/2026/03/01/welcome-back-to-macintosh
\n" }, { "title" : "SerpApi Filed Motion to Dismiss Google’s Lawsuit", "date_published" : "2026-03-02T20:03:02Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-02T20:03:02Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/serpapi-motion-to-dismiss", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/serpapi-motion-to-dismiss", "external_url" : "https://serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-motion-to-dismiss-why-were-in-the-right/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJulien Khaleghy, CEO of SerpApi:
\n\n\n\n\nGoogle thinks it owns the internet. That’s the subtext of its\nlawsuit against SerpApi, the quiet part that it’s suddenly decided\nto shout out loud. The problem is, no one owns the internet. And\nthe law makes that clear.
\n\nIn January, we promised that we would fight this lawsuit to\nprotect our business model and the researchers and innovators who\ndepend on our technology. Today, Friday, February 20, 2026, we’re\nfollowing through with a motion to dismiss Google’s complaint.\nWhile this is just one step in what could be a long and costly\nlegal process, I want to explain why we’re confident in our\nposition.
\n\nIs Google hurting itself in its confusion? Google is the largest\nscraper in the world. Google’s entire business began with a web\ncrawler that visited every publicly accessible page on the\ninternet, copied the content, indexed it, and served it back to\nusers. It did this without distinguishing between copyrighted and\nnon-copyrighted material, and it did this without asking\npermission. Now Google is in federal court claiming that our\nscraping is illegal.
\n
I’ve come around on SerpApi in the last few months. My initial take was that it surely must be illegal for a company to scrape Google’s search results and offer access to that data as an API. But I’ve come around to the argument that what SerpApi is doing to obtain Google search results is, well, exactly how Google scrapes the rest of the entire web to build its search index. It’s all just scraping publicly accessible web pages.
\n\nThis December piece by Mike Masnick at Techdirt is what began to change my mind:
\n\n\n\n\nLook, SerpApi’s behavior is sketchy. Spoofing user agents,\nrotating IPs to look like legitimate users, solving CAPTCHAs\nprogrammatically — Google’s complaint paints a picture of a\ncompany actively working to evade detection. But the legal theory\nGoogle is deploying to stop them threatens something far bigger\nthan one shady scraper.
\n\nGoogle’s entire business is built on scraping as much of the web\nas possible without first asking permission. The fact that they\nnow want to invoke DMCA 1201 — one of the most consistently\nabused provisions in copyright law — to stop others from scraping\nthem exposes the underlying problem with these licensing-era\narguments: they’re attempts to pull up the ladder after you’ve\nclimbed it.
\n\nJust from a straight up perception standpoint, it looks bad.
\n
Link: serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-motion-to-dismiss-why…
\n" }, { "title" : "‘Anthropic and Alignment’", "date_published" : "2026-03-02T18:20:13Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-02T22:31:28Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/anthropic-and-alignment", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/anthropic-and-alignment", "external_url" : "https://stratechery.com/2026/anthropic-and-alignment/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nBen Thompson, writing at Stratechery:
\n\n\n\n\nIn fact, Amodei already answered the question: if nuclear weapons\nwere developed by a private company, and that private company\nsought to dictate terms to the U.S. military, the U.S. would\nabsolutely be incentivized to destroy that company. The reason\ngoes back to the question of international law, North Korea, and\nthe rest:
\n\n\n
\n\n- International law is ultimately a function of power; might makes\nright.
\n- There are some categories of capabilities — like nuclear\nweapons — that are sufficiently powerful to fundamentally\naffect the U.S.’s freedom of action; we can bomb Iran, but we\ncan’t North Korea.
\n- To the extent that AI is on the level of nuclear weapons — or\nbeyond — is the extent that Amodei and Anthropic are building a\npower base that potentially rivals the U.S. military.
\nAnthropic talks a lot about alignment; this insistence on\ncontrolling the U.S. military, however, is fundamentally\nmisaligned with reality. Current AI models are obviously not yet\nso powerful that they rival the U.S. military; if that is the\ntrajectory, however — and no one has been more vocal in arguing\nfor that trajectory than Amodei — then it seems to me the choice\nfacing the U.S. is actually quite binary:
\n\n\n
\n- Option 1 is that Anthropic accepts a subservient position\nrelative to the U.S. government, and does not seek to retain\nultimate decision-making power about how its models are used,\ninstead leaving that to Congress and the President.
\n- Option 2 is that the U.S. government either destroys Anthropic\nor removes Amodei.
\n
It’s Congress that is absent in — looks around — all of this. Right down to the name of the Department of Defense. The whole Trump administration has taken to calling it the Department of War, but only Congress can change the legal name. (Anthropic, despite its very public spat with the administration, refers to it as the “Department of War” as well. But serious publications like the Journal and New York Times continue to call it the Department of Defense.)
\n\nNilay Patel, quoting the same section of Thompson’s column I quoted above, sees it as “Ben Thompson making a full-throated case for fascism”. I see it as the case against corporatocracy. Who sets our defense policies? Our democratically elected leaders, or the CEOs of corporate defense contractors?
\n\nLink: stratechery.com/2026/anthropic-and-alignment/
\n" }, { "title" : "WSJ: ‘Trump Administration Shuns Anthropic, Embraces OpenAI in Clash Over Guardrails’", "date_published" : "2026-03-02T17:56:51Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-02T18:33:08Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/wsj-dod-anthropic", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/wsj-dod-anthropic", "external_url" : "https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/trump-will-end-government-use-of-anthropics-ai-models-ff3550d9", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nAmrith Ramkumar, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
\n\n\n\n\nTrump’s announcement came shortly before the Pentagon’s Friday\nafternoon deadline for Anthropic to agree to let the military use\nits models in all lawful-use cases, a concession the company had\nrefused to make. “We cannot in good conscience accede to their\nrequest,” Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said on Thursday.
\n\nThe company’s red lines had been domestic mass surveillance and\nautonomous weapons, areas the Pentagon said Anthropic didn’t need\nto worry about because the military would never break the law with\nAI. Defense Department officials said Anthropic needed to fully\ntrust the Pentagon to use the technology responsibly and\nrelinquish control.
\n\nOpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said the company’s deal with the\nDefense Department includes those same prohibitions on mass\nsurveillance and autonomous weapons, as well as technical\nsafeguards to make sure the models behave as they should. “We have\nexpressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from\nlegal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements,”\nhe said, adding that OpenAI asked that all companies be given the\nchance to accept the same deal. [...]
\n\nShortly after the deadline, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on\nX that he is designating the company a supply-chain risk,\nimpairing its ability to work with other government contractors.
\n
My short take is that both of these are true:
\n\nSee also: Anthropic’s official response.
\n\nLink: wsj.com/tech/ai/trump-will-end-government-use-of-anthropics…
\n" }, { "title" : "Seasonal Color Updates to Apple’s iPhone Cases and Apple Watch Bands", "date_published" : "2026-03-02T17:52:59Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-02T17:53:00Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/seasonal-color-updates-apple-cases-and-bands", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/seasonal-color-updates-apple-cases-and-bands", "external_url" : "https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/02/iphone-cases-apple-accessories-new-colors/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJoe Rossignol, MacRumors:
\n\n\n\n\nA seasonal color refresh arrived today for a variety of Apple\naccessories, including iPhone cases, Apple Watch bands, and the\nCrossbody Strap. All of the accessories in the latest colors are\navailable to order on Apple.com starting today.
\n
Link: macrumors.com/2026/03/02/iphone-cases-apple-accessories-new…
\n" }, { "title" : "Apple Introduces New iPad Air With M4", "date_published" : "2026-03-02T17:40:30Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-02T17:40:31Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/apple-introduces-new-ipad-air-with-m4", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/apple-introduces-new-ipad-air-with-m4", "external_url" : "https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-the-new-ipad-air-powered-by-m4/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nApple Newsroom:
\n\n\n\n\nApple today announced the new iPad Air featuring M4 and more\nmemory, giving users a big jump in performance at the same\nstarting price. With a faster CPU and GPU, iPad Air boosts tasks\nlike editing and gaming, and is a powerful device for AI with a\nfaster Neural Engine, higher memory bandwidth, and 50 percent more\nunified system memory than the previous generation. With M4, iPad\nAir is up to 30 percent faster than iPad Air with M3, and up to\n2.3× faster than iPad Air with M1. The new iPad Air also features\nthe latest in Apple silicon connectivity chips, N1 and C1X,\ndelivering fast wireless and cellular connections — and support\nfor Wi-Fi 7 — that empower users to work and be creative\nanywhere. [...]
\n\nWith the same starting price of just $599 for the 11-inch model\nand $799 for the 13-inch model, the new iPad Air is an incredible\nvalue. And for education, the 11-inch iPad Air starts at $549, and\nthe 13-inch model starts at $749. Customers can pre-order iPad Air\nstarting Wednesday, March 4, with availability beginning\nWednesday, March 11.
\n
So much for my theory that Apple would separate its announcements this week with separate days for each product family (e.g. iPhone 17e on Monday, iPads on Tuesday, MacBooks on Wednesday.) Maybe an update to the no-adjective iPad isn’t coming this week?
\n\nAside from the M3 to M4 speed bump, there are very few differences between this generation iPad Air and the last. Same colors even (space gray, blue, purple, and starlight). Here’s a link to Apple’s iPad Compare page, preset to show the current M5 iPad Pro, new M4 iPad Air, and old M3 iPad Air side-by-side.
\n\nOne interesting tech spec: the new M4 iPad Air models come with 12 GB of RAM, up from 8 GB in last year’s M3 models. With the M5 iPad Pro models, RAM is tied to storage: the 256/512 GB iPad Pros come with 12 GB RAM; the 1/2 TB models come with 16 GB RAM.
\n\nLink: apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-the-new-ipad…
\n" }, { "title" : "Apple Introduces the iPhone 17e", "date_published" : "2026-03-02T15:03:16Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-02T17:40:48Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/apple-introduces-iphone-17e", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/02/apple-introduces-iphone-17e", "external_url" : "https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-iphone-17e/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nApple Newsroom:
\n\n\n\n\nApple today announced iPhone 17e, a powerful and more affordable\naddition to the iPhone 17 lineup. At the heart of iPhone 17e is\nthe latest-generation A19, which delivers exceptional performance\nfor everything users do. iPhone 17e also features C1X, the\nlatest-generation cellular modem designed by Apple, which is up to\n2× faster than C1 in iPhone 16e. The 48MP Fusion camera captures\nstunning photos, including next-generation portraits, and 4K Dolby\nVision video. It also enables an optical-quality 2× Telephoto — like having two cameras in one. The 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR\ndisplay features Ceramic Shield 2, offering 3× better scratch\nresistance than the previous generation and reduced glare. With\nMagSafe, users can enjoy fast wireless charging and access to a\nvast ecosystem of accessories like chargers and cases. And when\niPhone 17e users are outside of cellular and Wi-Fi coverage,\nApple’s groundbreaking satellite features — including Emergency\nSOS, Roadside Assistance, Messages, and Find My via satellite — help them stay connected when it matters most.
\n\nAvailable in three elegant colors with a premium matte finish — black, white, and a beautiful new soft pink — iPhone 17e will be\navailable for pre-order beginning Wednesday, March 4, with\navailability starting Wednesday, March 11. iPhone 17e will start\nat 256GB of storage for $599 — 2× the entry storage from the\nprevious generation at the same starting price, and 4× more than\niPhone 12 — giving users more space for high-resolution photos,\n4K videos, apps, games, and more.
\n
The main year-over-year changes from the 16e:
\n\nThat’s about it. Here’s a preset version of Apple’s iPhone Compare page with the iPhone 17, 17e, and 16e.
\n\nLink: apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-iphone-17e/
\n" }, { "title" : "Sentry", "date_published" : "2026-03-01T15:44:23Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-01T15:44:23Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/01/sentry", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/01/sentry", "external_url" : "https://sentry.io/resources/ios-workshop-jan-2026/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=paid-display&utm_campaign=general-fy27q1-evergreen&utm_content=static-ad-mobilerss-trysentry", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nMy thanks to Sentry for sponsoring last week at DF. Sentry is running a hands-on workshop: “Crash Reporting, Tracing, and Logs for iOS in Sentry”. You can watch it on demand. You’ll learn how to connect the dots between slowdowns, crashes, and the user experience in your iOS app. It’ll show you how to:
\n\nI know so many developers using Sentry. It’s a terrific product. If you’re a developer and haven’t checked them out, you should.
\n\nLink: sentry.io/resources/ios-workshop-jan-2026/?utm_source…
\n" }, { "title" : "The Talk Show: ‘Bad Dates’", "date_published" : "2026-03-01T15:43:02Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-01T15:43:22Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/01/the-talk-show-442", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/01/the-talk-show-442", "external_url" : "https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/02/28/ep-442", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJason Snell returns to the show to discuss the 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card, MacOS 26 Tahoe, Apple Creator Studio, along with what we expect/hope for in next week’s Apple product announcements.
\n\nSponsored by:
\n\nLink: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/02/28/ep-442
\n" }, { "title" : "Trump’s Enormous Gamble on Regime Change in Iran", "date_published" : "2026-02-28T16:04:41Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-28T16:06:30Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/28/nichols-trump-iran", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/28/nichols-trump-iran", "external_url" : "https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/trumps-iran-regime-change-attack-gamble/686190/?gift=aQyUJR7AIw1mJWdQ6Ed6yOWB4bfod1kQqCyz2RXbHaY", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nTom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic:
\n\n\n\n\nWhen the 2003 war with Iraq ended, U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine said that when American diplomats embarked on reconstruction, they ruefully joked that “there were 500 ways to do it wrong and two or three ways to do it right. And what we didn’t understand is that we were going to go through all 500.”
\n
Link: theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/trumps-iran-regime-change…
\n" }, { "title" : "West Virginia’s Anti-Apple CSAM Lawsuit Would Help Child Predators Walk Free", "date_published" : "2026-02-27T19:28:44Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-27T19:28:44Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/27/west-virginia-apple-csam", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/27/west-virginia-apple-csam", "external_url" : "https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/25/west-virginias-anti-apple-csam-lawsuit-would-help-child-predators-walk-free/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nMike Masnick, writing for Techdirt:
\n\n\n\n\nRead that again. If West Virginia wins — if an actual court\norders Apple to start scanning iCloud for CSAM — then every\nimage flagged by those mandated scans becomes evidence obtained\nthrough a warrantless government search conducted without\nprobable cause. The Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule means\ndefense attorneys get to walk into court and demand that evidence\nbe thrown out. And they’ll win that motion. It’s not even a\nparticularly hard case to make.
\n
Link: techdirt.com/2026/02/25/west-virginias-anti-apple-csam…
\n" }, { "title" : "How to Block the ‘Upgrade to Tahoe’ Alerts and System Settings Indicator", "date_published" : "2026-02-27T18:45:16Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-27T19:20:14Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/27/how-to-block-the-upgrade-to-tahoe-alerts-and-system-settings-indicator", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/27/how-to-block-the-upgrade-to-tahoe-alerts-and-system-settings-indicator", "external_url" : "https://robservatory.com/block-the-upgrade-to-tahoe-alerts-and-system-settings-indicator/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nRob Griffiths, writing at The Robservatory:
\n\n\n\n\nSo I have macOS Tahoe on my laptop, but I’m keeping my desktop\nMac on macOS Sequoia for now. Which means I have the joy of\nseeing things like this wonderful notification on a regular\nbasis. Or I did, until I found a way to block them, at least in\n90 day chunks. [...]
\n\nThe secret? Using device management profiles, which let you\nenforce policies on Macs in your organization, even if that\n“organization” is one Mac on your desk. One of the available\npolicies is the ability to block activities related to major macOS\nupdates for up to 90 days at a time (the max the policy allows),\nwhich seems like exactly what I needed.
\n
I followed Griffiths’s instructions about a week or so ago, and I’ve been enjoying a no-red-badge System Settings icon ever since. And the Tahoe upgrade doesn’t even show up in General → Software Update. With this profile installed, the confusing interface presented after clicking the “ⓘ” button next to any available update cannot result in your upgrading to 26 Tahoe accidentally.
\n\nI waited to link to Griffiths’s post until I saw the pending update from Sequoia 15.7.3 to 15.7.4, just to make sure that was still working. And here it is. My Software Update panels makes it look like Tahoe doesn’t even exist. A delicious glass of ice water, without the visit to hell.
\n\nI have one small clarification to Griffiths’s instructions though. He writes:
\n\n\n\n\n4/. Optional step: I didn’t want to defer normal updates, just\n the major OS update, so I changed the Optional (set to your\n taste) section to look like this:
\n\n\n
\n\nforceDelayedSoftwareUpdates This way, I’ll still get notifications for updates other than the\nmajor OS update, in case Apple releases anything further for macOS\nSequoia. Remember to save your changes, then quit the editor.
\n
I was confused by this step, initially, and only edited the first line after <!-- Optional (set to your taste) -->, to change <true/> to <false/> in the next line. But what Griffiths means, and is necessary to get the behavior I wanted, requires deleting the other two lines in that section of the plist file. I don’t want to defer updates like going from 15.7.3 to 15.7.4.
Before editing:
\n\n![screenshot](\"https://daringfireball.net/misc/2026/02/changetheheaders-no-webp.png\"){kind=link}
![And here it is](\"https://daringfireball.net/misc/2026/02/no-tahoe-software-update-via-profile.png\"){kind=link}
<!-- Optional (set to your taste) -->\n<key>forceDelayedSoftwareUpdates</key><true/>\n<key>enforcedSoftwareUpdateMinorOSDeferredInstallDelay</key><integer>30</integer>\n<key>enforcedSoftwareUpdateNonOSDeferredInstallDelay</key><integer>30</integer>\nAfter:
\n\n<!-- Optional (set to your taste) -->\n<key>forceDelayedSoftwareUpdates</key><false/>\nI’ll bet that’s the behavior most of my fellow MacOS 15 Sequoia holdouts want too.
\n\nLink: robservatory.com/block-the-upgrade-to-tahoe-alerts-and…
\n" }, { "title" : "★ A Sometimes-Hidden Setting Controls What Happens When You Tap a Call in the iOS 26 Phone App", "date_published" : "2026-02-27T18:12:53Z", "date_modified" : "2026-03-02T15:12:20Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/02/sometimes_hidden_setting_phone_app", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/02/sometimes_hidden_setting_phone_app", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nBack in December, Adam Engst wrote this interesting follow-up to his feature story at TidBITS a few weeks prior exploring the differences between the new Unified and old Classic interface modes for the Phone app in iOS 26. It’s also a good follow-up to my month-ago link to Engst’s original feature, as well as a continuation of my recent theme on the fundamentals of good UI design.
\n\nThe gist of Engst’s follow-up is that one of the big differences between Unified and Classic modes is what happens when you tap on a row in the list of recent calls. In Classic, tapping on a row in the list will initiate a new phone call to that number. There’s a small “ⓘ” button on the right side of each row that you can tap to show the contact info for that caller. That’s the way the Phone app has always worked. In the new iOS 26 Unified mode, this behavior is reversed: tapping on the row shows the contact info for that caller, and you need to tap a small button with a phone icon on the right side of the row to immediately initiate a call.
\n\nEngst really likes this aspect of the Unified view, because the old behavior made it too easy to initiate a call accidentally, just by tapping on a row in the list. I’ve made many of those accidental calls the same way, and so I prefer the new Unified behavior for the same reason. Classic’s tap-almost-anywhere-in-the-row-to-start-a-call behavior is a vestige of some decisions with the original iPhone that haven’t held up over the intervening 20 years. With the original iPhone, Apple was still stuck — correctly, probably! — in the mindset that the iPhone was first and foremost a cellular telephone, and initiating phone calls should be a primary one-tap action. No one thinks of the iPhone as primarily a telephone these days, and it just isn’t iOS-y to have an action initiate just by tapping anywhere in a row in a scrolling list. You don’t tap on an email message to reply to it. You tap a Reply button. Inadvertent phone calls are particularly pernicious in this regard because the recipient is interrupted too — it’s not just an inconvenience to you, it’s an interruption to someone else, and thus also an embarrassment to you.
\n\nHere’s where it gets weird.
\n\nThere’s a preference setting in Settings → Apps → Phone for “Tap Recents to Call”. If you turn this option on, you then get the “tap anywhere in the row to call the person” behavior while using the new Unified view. But this option only appears in the Settings app when you’re using Unified view in the Phone app. If you switch to the Classic view in the Phone app, this option just completely disappears from the Settings app. It’s not grayed out. It’s just gone. Go read Engst’s article describing this, if you haven’t already — he has screenshots illustrating the sometimes-hidden state of this setting.
\n\nI’ll wait.
\n\nEngst and I discussed this at length during his appearance on The Talk Show earlier this week. Especially after talking it through with him on the show, I think I understand both what Apple was thinking, and also why their solution feels so wrong.
\n\nAt first, I thought the solution was just to keep this option available all the time, whether you’re using Classic or Unified as your layout in the Phone app. Why not let users who prefer the Classic layout turn off the old “tap anywhere in the row to call the person” behavior? But on further thought, there’s a problem with this. If you just want your Phone app to keep working the way it always had, you want Classic to default to the old tap-in-row behavior too. What Apple wants to promote to users is both a new layout and a new tap-in-row behavior. So when you switch to Unified in the Phone app, Apple wants you to experience the new tap-in-row behavior too, where you need to specifically tap the small phone-icon button in the row to call the person, and tapping anywhere else in the row opens a contact details view.
\n\nThere’s a conflict here. You can’t have the two views default to different row-tapping behavior if one single switch applies to both views.
\n\nApple’s solution to this dilemma — to show the “Tap Recents to Call” in Settings if, and only if, Unified is the current view option in the Phone app — is lazy. And as a result, it’s quite confusing. No one expects an option like this to only appear sometimes in Settings. You pretty much need to understand everything I’ve written about in this article to understand why and when this option is visible. Which means almost no one who uses an iPhone is ever going to understand it. No one expects a toggle in one app (Phone) to control the visibility of a switch in another app (Settings).
\n\nMy best take at a proper solution to this problem would be for the choice between Classic and Unified views to be mirrored in Settings → Apps → Phone. Show this same bit of UI, that currently is only available in the Filter menu in the Phone app, in both the Phone app and in Settings → Apps → Phone:
\n\nIf you change it in one place, the change should be reflected, immediately, in the other. It’s fine to have the same setting available both in-app and inside the Settings app.
\n\nThen, in the Settings app, the “Tap Recents to Call” option could appear underneath the Classic/Unified switcher only when “Unified” is selected. Switch from Classic to Unified and the “Tap Recents to Call” switch would appear underneath. Switch from Unified to Classic and it would disappear. (Or instead of disappearing, it could gray out to indicate the option isn’t available when Classic is selected.) The descriptive text describing the option could even state that it’s an option only available with Unified.1
\n\nThe confusion would be eliminated if the Classic/Unified toggle were mirrored in Settings. That would make it clear why “Tap Recents to Call” only appears when you’re using Unified — because your choice to use Unified (or Classic) would be right there.
\n\nOr, Apple could offer separate “Tap Recents to Call” options for both Classic and Unified. With Classic, it would default to On (the default behavior since 2007), and with Unified, default to Off (the idiomatically correct behavior for modern iOS). In that case, the descriptive text for the option would *need* to explain that it’s a separate setting for each layout, or perhaps the toggle labels could be “Tap Recents to Call in Classic” and “Tap Recents to Call in Unified”. But somehow it would need to be made clear that they’re separate switches. But this is already getting more complicated. I think it’d be simpler to just keep the classic tap-in-row behavior with the Classic layout, and offer this setting only when using the Unified view. ↩︎
\nMG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:
\n\n\n\n\nOf course, Netflix could have absorbed such a cost. It’s a $400B\ncompany (well, before this deal, anyway) — double Disney!\nParamount Skydance? They’re worth $11B. Yes, they’re paying almost\nexactly $100B more than they’re worth for WBD. Yes, it’s looney.\nBut really, it’s leverage.
\n\nTo be clear, Netflix was going to pay for the deal with debt too,\nbut they have a clear path to repay such debts. They have a great,\ngrowing business. They don’t require the backstop of one of the\nworld’s richest men, who just so happens to be the father of the\nCEO. How on Earth is Paramount going to pay down this debt? I’m\ntempted to turn to another bit of Paramount IP for the\nanswer:
\n\n\n
\n- Step one
\n- Step two
\n- ????
\n- PROFIT!!!
\n
Link: spyglass.org/netflix-warner-bros-paramount-deal/
\n" }, { "title" : "Block Lays Off 4,000 (of 10,000) Employees", "date_published" : "2026-02-27T15:33:15Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-27T15:33:15Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/27/block-layoffs", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/27/block-layoffs", "external_url" : "https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/26/block-laying-off-about-4000-employees-nearly-half-of-its-workforce.html", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nCNBC:
\n\n\n\n\nBlock said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or\nabout half of its head count. The stock skyrocketed as much as 24%\nin extended trading.
\n\n“Today we shared a difficult decision with our team,” Jack\nDorsey, Block’s co-founder and CEO, wrote in a letter to\nshareholders. “We’re reducing Block by nearly half, from\nover 10,000 people to just under 6,000, which means that over\n4,000 people are being asked to leave or entering into\nconsultation.” [...]
\n\nOther companies like Pinterest, CrowdStrike and Chegg have\nrecently announced job cuts and directly attributed the\nlayoffs to AI reshaping their workforces.
\n\nIn an X post, Dorsey said he was faced with the choice of\nlaying off staffers over several months or years “as this shift\nplays out,” or to “act on it now.”
\n
Dorsey’s letter to shareholders was properly upper-and-lowercased; his memo to employees, which he posted on Twitter/X, was entirely lowercase. That’s a telling sign about who he respects. Dorsey, in that memo to employees:
\n\n\n\n\nwe’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our\nbusiness is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to\nserve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but\nsomething has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence\ntools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter\nteams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally\nchanges what it means to build and run a company. and that’s\naccelerating rapidly.
\n\ni had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this\nshift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it\nnow. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive\nto morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and\nshareholders place in our ability to lead. i’d rather take a hard,\nclear action now and build from a position we believe in than\nmanage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.
\n
AI is going to obviate a lot of jobs, in a lot of industries. So it goes. But in the case of these tech companies — exemplified by Block — it’s just a convenient cover story to excuse absurd over-hiring in the last 5–10 years. Say what you want about Elon Musk, but he was absolutely correct that Twitter was carrying a ton of needless employees. This reckoning was coming, and “AI” is just a convenient scapegoat.
\n\nLink: cnbc.com/2026/02/26/block-laying-off-about-4000-employees…
\n" }, { "title" : "Apple Announces F1 Broadcast Details, and a Surprising Netflix Partnership", "date_published" : "2026-02-27T01:30:25Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-27T01:30:26Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/apple-f1-netflix", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/apple-f1-netflix", "external_url" : "https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/02/apple-announces-f1-details-and-a-surprising-netflix-partnership/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJason Snell, writing at Six Colors:
\n\n\n\n\nPerhaps the most surprising announcement on Thursday was that\nApple and Netflix, which have had a rather stand-offish\nrelationship when it comes to video programming, have struck a\ndeal to swap some Formula One-related content. Formula One’s\ngrowing popularity in the United States is due, perhaps in large\npart, to the high-profile success of the Netflix docuseries “Drive\nto Survive.” The latest season of that series, debuting Friday,\nwill premiere simultaneously on both Netflix and Apple TV.\nPresumably, in exchange for that non-exclusive, Apple will also\nnon-exclusively allow Netflix to broadcast the Canadian Grand Prix\nin May. (Insert obligatory wish that Apple and Netflix would bury\nthe hatchet and enable Watch Now support in the TV app for Netflix\ncontent.)
\n
What a crazy cool partnership.
\n\nLink: sixcolors.com/post/2026/02/apple-announces-f1-details-and-a…
\n" }, { "title" : "Energym", "date_published" : "2026-02-27T00:37:25Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-27T00:55:50Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/energym", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/energym", "external_url" : "https://www.aicandy.be/giorgio-1", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\n“An interview from 2036 with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman.” This is what AI video generation was meant for.
\n\nLink: aicandy.be/giorgio-1
\n" }, { "title" : "Netflix Backs Out of Bid for Warner Bros., Paving Way for Paramount Takeover", "date_published" : "2026-02-27T00:17:31Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-27T00:20:48Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/netflix-backs-out-of-warner-bros-acquisition", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/netflix-backs-out-of-warner-bros-acquisition", "external_url" : "https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/business/warner-bros-discovery-paramount-deal-netflix.html?unlocked_article_code=1.PVA.3639.2yWKES49z8Os", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nThe New York Times:
\n\n\n\n\nNetflix said on Thursday that it had backed away from its deal to\nacquire Warner Bros. Discovery, a stunning development that paves\nthe way for the storied Hollywood media giant to end up under the\ncontrol of a rival bidder, the technology heir David Ellison.
\n\nNetflix said that it would not raise its offer to counter a higher\nbid made earlier this week by Mr. Ellison’s company, Paramount\nSkydance, adding in a statement that “the deal is no longer\nfinancially attractive.”
\n\n“This transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price,\nnot a ‘must have’ at any price,” the Netflix co-chief executives,\nTed Sarandos and Greg Peters, said in a statement.
\n
Netflix’s stock is up 9 percent in after-hours trading. This is like when you have a friend (Netflix) dating a good-looking-but-crazy person (Warner Bros.), and the good-looking-but-crazy person does something to give your friend second thoughts. You tell your friend to run away.
\n\nLink: nytimes.com/2026/02/26/business/warner-bros-discovery…
\n" }, { "title" : "iPhone and iPad Approved to Handle Classified NATO Information", "date_published" : "2026-02-26T21:42:15Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-26T21:42:16Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/iphone-ipad-nato-classified-info", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/iphone-ipad-nato-classified-info", "external_url" : "https://nr.apple.com/Do0I6B8WX0", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nApple Newsroom:
\n\n\n\n\nToday, Apple announced iPhone and iPad are the first and only\nconsumer devices in compliance with the information assurance\nrequirements of NATO nations. This enables iPhone and iPad to be\nused with classified information up to the NATO restricted level\nwithout requiring special software or settings — a level of\ngovernment certification no other consumer mobile device has met.
\n
That’s nice, but the iPhone is only the second phone to be approved for handling classified information for the Board of Peace. The first, of course, was the T1.
\n\nLink: nr.apple.com/Do0I6B8WX0
\n" }, { "title" : "‘Steve Jobs in Exile’", "date_published" : "2026-02-26T18:04:33Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-26T18:04:34Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/steve-jobs-in-exile", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/steve-jobs-in-exile", "external_url" : "https://geoffreycain.net/steve-jobs-in-exile/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nNew book, shipping May 19, from author Geoffrey Cain:
\n\n\n\n\nFor twelve years, from 1985 to 1997, Jobs wandered the business\nwilderness with his new venture, NeXT. It was a period of\nspectacular failures, near-bankruptcy, and brutal humiliation. But\nout of this crucible of defeat emerged the visionary leader who\nwould go on to create the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, transforming\nApple into the most valuable company on earth.
\n\nDrawing on previously unpublished materials and new interviews\nwith the key players, Geoffrey Cain reveals the untold story of\nSteve Jobs’s “lost decade” — the formative years that shaped the\nicon we thought we knew.
\n
Afterword by Ed Catmull, who was obviously intimately familiar with Jobs in that era. And via Cain’s post on LinkedIn announcing the book, the foreword is by NeXT cofounder Dan’l Lewin.
\n\nLink: geoffreycain.net/steve-jobs-in-exile/
\n" }, { "title" : "Microsoft Adds Additional Markdown Features to Windows Notepad", "date_published" : "2026-02-26T17:50:08Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-26T17:50:09Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/additional-markdown-features-added-to-windows-notepad", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/additional-markdown-features-added-to-windows-notepad", "external_url" : "https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/01/21/notepad-and-paint-updates-begin-rolling-out-to-windows-insiders/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nStill feels a bit ridiculous to me that Markdown is now an editing mode in Notepad.
\n\nLink: blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/01/21/notepad-and…
\n" }, { "title" : "Prediction ‘Market’ Kalshi Accuses MrBeast Editor of Insider Trading", "date_published" : "2026-02-26T17:36:26Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-26T18:45:09Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/kalshi-mrbeast-editor-inside-trading", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/kalshi-mrbeast-editor-inside-trading", "external_url" : "https://www.npr.org/2026/02/25/nx-s1-5726050/kalshi-insider-trading-enforcement-actions", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nBobby Allyn, reporting for NPR:
\n\n\n\n\nAn editor who works for YouTube’s biggest creator, MrBeast, has\nbeen suspended from the prediction market platform Kalshi and\nreported to federal regulators for insider trading, Kalshi\nofficials said on Wednesday. It’s the first time the company has\npublicly revealed the results of an investigation into market\nmanipulation on the popular app.
\n\nThe MrBeast employee, who Kalshi identified as Artem\nKaptur in regulatory filings, traded around $4,000 on\nmarkets related to the streamer, the company said. Kalshi\ninvestigators discovered that Kaptur had “near-perfect trading\nsuccess” on bets about the YouTuber’s videos with low odds, making\nthe wagers appear suspicious, according to company officials.
\n
Call these things what they are — prediction casinos, not prediction markets — and the problems come into focus.
\n\nLink: npr.org/2026/02/25/nx-s1-5726050/kalshi-insider-trading…
\n" }, { "title" : "Research Firm Says Podcasts Have Passed AM/FM Talk Radio in Spoken-Word Listening Time", "date_published" : "2026-02-26T17:27:04Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-26T17:27:14Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/podcasts-pass-talk-radio", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/podcasts-pass-talk-radio", "external_url" : "https://www.edisonresearch.com/podcasts-lead-am-fm-in-spoken-word-listening-marking-a-first/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nEdison Research:
\n\n\n\n\nIn 2015, AM/FM radio accounted for 75% of the time Americans spent\nwith spoken-word audio sources. AM/FM radio was not only the most\ndominant spoken-word audio listening platform, but it was fully\nsixty-five percentage points higher than podcasts, which accounted\nfor 10% of listening time back then. Quarter by quarter and year\nover year, time spent using AM/FM radio to listen to spoken-word\naudio has declined significantly and shifted to time spent with\npodcasts. As of Q4 2025, 40% of time spent listening to\nspoken-word is now spent with podcasts and 39% of time is spent\nwith AM/FM radio. Not only does radio not beat podcasts by a\nsignificant margin, it now trails the on-demand platform for\nspoken-word audio listening.
\n
Most of you reading this on Daring Fireball are surely thinking what I thought when I saw this (via TechCrunch): This only happened in 2025? But it goes to show just how long it takes for media consumption habits, in the aggregate, to change.
\n\nLink: edisonresearch.com/podcasts-lead-am-fm-in-spoken-word…
\n" }, { "title" : "New York Sues Valve, Says Its ‘Loot Boxes’ Are Gambling", "date_published" : "2026-02-26T17:14:58Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-26T17:14:59Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/new-york-sues-valve", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/26/new-york-sues-valve", "external_url" : "https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/new-york-sues-video-game-developer-valve-says-its-loot-boxes-are-gambling-2026-02-25/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nReuters:
\n\n\n\n\nNew York’s attorney general sued Valve, a video game developer\nwhose franchises include Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and Dota,\naccusing it of promoting illegal gambling and threatening to\naddict children through its use of “loot boxes.” In a complaint\nfiled on Wednesday in a state court in Manhattan, Attorney General\nLetitia James said Valve’s loot boxes amounted to “quintessential\ngambling,” violating the state’s constitution and penal law, with\nvaluable items often hard to win and many items worth pennies.
\n
Link: reuters.com/legal/government/new-york-sues-video-game…
\n" }, { "title" : "‘H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery’", "date_published" : "2026-02-25T23:53:00Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-25T23:53:08Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/25/h-bomb-wright", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/25/h-bomb-wright", "external_url" : "https://www.inconspicuous.info/p/h-bomb-a-frank-lloyd-wright-typographic", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nWhen re-hanging signage, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” ought to be “Mind your H’s and S’s”.
\n\nLink: inconspicuous.info/p/h-bomb-a-frank-lloyd-wright…
\n" }, { "title" : "Terry Godier: ‘Phantom Obligation’", "date_published" : "2026-02-25T23:52:42Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-26T17:46:37Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/25/godier-phantom-obligation", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/25/godier-phantom-obligation", "external_url" : "https://www.terrygodier.com/phantom-obligation", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nTerry Godier, in a thoughtful essay on the design of RSS feed readers:
\n\n\n\n\nThere’s a particular kind of guilt that visits me when I open my\nfeed reader after a few days away. It’s not the guilt of having\ndone something wrong, exactly. It’s more like the feeling of\nwalking into a room where people have been waiting for you, except\nwhen you look around, the room is empty. There’s no one there.\nThere never was.
\n\nI’ve been thinking about this feeling for a long time. Longer\nthan I probably should, given that it concerns something as\nmundane as reading articles on the internet. But I’ve come to\nbelieve that these small, repeated experiences shape us more than\nwe like to admit.
\n\nSo let me start with a question that’s been nagging at me: why do\nRSS readers look like email clients?
\n
There are good answers to that question, and for 20-some years I’ve used a feed reader — NetNewsWire — that looks like an email client. (To be honest, I wish my email client looked and worked more like NetNewsWire.) But the bigger question Godier is asking is why don’t more feed readers try something fundamentally different?
\n\nHe’s answered his own question with Current, a new feed reader for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
\n\nLink: terrygodier.com/phantom-obligation
\n" }, { "title" : "Bill Gates Apologizes to Foundation Staff Over Epstein Ties", "date_published" : "2026-02-25T23:38:45Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-25T23:38:46Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/25/gates-apologizes", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/25/gates-apologizes", "external_url" : "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-apologizes-to-foundation-staff-over-epstein-ties-67f39ef5", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nEmily Glazer, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
\n\n\n\n\nThe billionaire said he met with Epstein starting in 2011, years\nafter Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for\nprostitution. Gates said he was aware of some “18-month thing”\nthat had limited Epstein’s travel but said he didn’t properly\ncheck his background. Gates said he continued meeting with Epstein\neven after his then-wife Melinda French Gates expressed concerns\nin 2013.
\n\n“Knowing what I know now makes it, you know, a hundred times worse\nin terms of not only his crimes in the past, but now it’s clear\nthere was ongoing bad behavior,” Gates told staff. Speaking of his\nex-wife, he added: “To give her credit, she was always kind of\nskeptical about the Epstein thing.”
\n
“Kind of” is doing a lot of work there.
\n\nLink: wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-apologizes-to-foundation-staff…
\n" }, { "title" : "Greg Knauss: ‘Lose Myself’", "date_published" : "2026-02-25T22:53:08Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-25T22:53:09Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/25/knauss-lose-myself", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/25/knauss-lose-myself", "external_url" : "https://www.eod.com/blog/2026/02/lose-myself/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nGreg Knauss:
\n\n\n\n\nPeople will argue that speaking English to LLMs is just another\nlevel of abstraction away from the physics of how the machine\nactually works. And while that’s technically true — the worst\nkind of true — it also misses the point. Industrialization\nfundamentally changes things, by quantum degrees. A Ding Dong from\na factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et crème\nchantilly from a baker which is not the same thing as cramming\nchunks of chocolate and scoops of whipped cream directly into your\nmouth while standing in front of the fridge at 2:00am. The level\nof care, of personalization, of intimacy — both given and taken — changes its nature. Digging a trench is a very different thing\nthan telling someone to dig a trench. Assembling a clock is a very\ndifferent thing than asking Siri for the time.
\n
Splendid little essay.
\n\nLink: eod.com/blog/2026/02/lose-myself/
\n" }, { "title" : "The Talk Show: ‘Serious Opinionators’", "date_published" : "2026-02-25T22:17:57Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-25T22:17:57Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/25/the-talk-show-441", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/25/the-talk-show-441", "external_url" : "https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/02/25/ep-441", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nAdam Engst returns to the show to talk, in detail, about certain of the UI changes in iOS 26 and Apple’s version 26 OSes overall. In particular, the new Unified view in the Phone app, and the Filter pop-up menu in both the Phone and Messages apps. Also: a shoutout to Balloon Help.
\n\nSponsored by:
\n\nLink: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/02/25/ep-441
\n" }, { "title" : "Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra’s Privacy Display", "date_published" : "2026-02-25T20:59:30Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-26T16:31:27Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/25/samsung-galaxy-s26-ultras-privacy-display", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/25/samsung-galaxy-s26-ultras-privacy-display", "external_url" : "https://9to5google.com/2026/02/25/samsung-galaxy-s26-ultra-privacy-display-demo-hands-on/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nBen Schoon, writing for 9to5 Google:
\n\n\n\n\nWhen activated, Privacy Display changes how the pixels in your\ndisplay emit light, making it harder or near-impossible to view\nthe display at an off-angle. At its default setting, it definitely\nworks, but the contents of the display are visible at less-sharp\nangles. Samsung has a “maximum” setting that takes this up a\nnotch, and that setting makes it even harder to see the contents\nand narrows the field-of-view even further. [...]
\n\nA bigger deal, though, is that Samsung has built Privacy Display\nwith the ability to only apply to small portions of the Galaxy S26\nUltra’s display. Specifically, it can hide your notification\npop-ups. This part really impressed me, as Privacy Display is able\nto specifically hide only that singular portion of the display,\nand it does so nearly perfectly. The masking around the\nnotification ensures the content behind isn’t affected, and the\neffect works incredibly well.
\n
Neat feature, especially the way you can toggle it when needed, set it to auto-enable for specific apps, and/or work only for notifications.
\n\nSee also: Allison Johnson at The Verge. Also worth noting that the Galaxy S26 Ultra starts at $1,300; the iPhone 17 Max starts at $1,200.
\n\nLink: 9to5google.com/2026/02/25/samsung-galaxy-s26-ultra-privacy…
\n" }, { "title" : "★ My 2025 Apple Report Card", "date_published" : "2026-02-25T16:49:10Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-27T22:04:41Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/02/my_2025_apple_report_card", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/02/my_2025_apple_report_card", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nThis week Jason Snell published his annual Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2025. As I’ve done in the past — for the report-card years 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 — I’m publishing my full remarks and grades here. On Snell’s report card, voters give per-category scores ranging from 5 to 1; I’ve translated these to letter grades, A to F, which is how I consider them. (See footnote 1 from last year’s report if you’re curious why it’s not A to E.)
\n\nAs I noted last year, “Siri/Apple Intelligence” is not a standalone category on the report card. I know Snell is very much trying to keep the number of different categories from inflating, but AI has been the biggest thing in tech for several years running. If it were a standalone category, last year I said I’d have given Apple a D for 2024. This year, I’d have given them an F — an utter, very public failure. (Their AI efforts in 2025 did end on a mildly optimistic note — they cleaned house.)
\n\nIf there were separate categories for Mac hardware and MacOS, I’d give the hardware an A and MacOS 26 Tahoe a D. The hardware continues to be great — fast, solid, reliable — and Apple Silicon continues to improve year-over-year with such predictability that Apple is making something very difficult look like it must be easy.
\n\nTahoe, though, is the worst regression in the entire history of MacOS. There are many reasons to prefer MacOS to any of its competition — Windows or Linux — but the one that has been the most consistent since System 1 in 1984 is the superiority of its user interface. There is nothing about Tahoe’s new UI — the Mac’s implementation of the Liquid Glass concept Apple has applied across all its OSes — that is better than its predecessor, MacOS 15 Sequoia. Nothing. And there is much that is worse. Some of it much worse. Fundamental principles of human-computer interaction — principles that Apple itself forged over decades — have been completely ignored. And a lot of it just looks sloppy and amateur. Simple things like resizing windows, and having application icons that look like they were designed by talented artists.
\n\niPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are, technically, the best iPhones Apple has ever made. They’re very well designed too. The change to make the camera plateau span the entire width of the phone is a good one. It looks better, allows a naked iPhone 17 Pro to sit more steadily on a flat surface, and lets one in a case sit on a surface without any wobble at all. Apple even finally added a really fun, bold color — “cosmic orange” — that, surprising no one, seems to be incredibly popular with customers.
\n\nThe iPhone Air is, from a design perspective, the most amazing iPhone Apple has ever made. It’s a marvel to hold and carry. One rear-facing camera lens is limiting, but it’s an excellent camera. Not 17 Pro-quality, no, but excellent quality, yes. Battery life is amazing given the physical constraints of the iPhone Air’s thin and lightweight design. The main two dings against the iPhone Air are that (a) Apple didn’t offer it in a fun bold color like the 17 Pro’s orange, and (b) Apple, bafflingly, hasn’t advertised the Air. I’ve seen so little promotion of the Air that I’d wager most iPhone users in the market for a new phone don’t even know it exists until they walk into a store and see it there.
\n\nThe no-adjective iPhone 17 is the best iPhone for most people, which is exactly what the no-adjective iPhone ought to be. Back in March, the iPhone 16e introduced both a terrific lowest-price new iPhone — including the then-current-generation A18 chip — and a significant shift in strategy from the SE models of yore. The SE iPhone models were only updated sporadically, going 2–4 years between revisions. The “16” in “16e” is a pretty strong hint that Apple now intends to update the e models annually, just like the rest of the iPhone lineup. People complain about the $600 starting price for the 16e, but that’s $200 lower than the no-adjective iPhone 17. If you’re in the market for a lower price than that, you’re in the market for a refurbished older iPhone.
\n\niOS 26 is Apple’s best implementation of the Liquid Glass concept, by far. I prefer it, in just about every way, to iOS 18. There are some individual apps from Apple in iOS 26 that have poor implementations of Liquid Glass (Music, I’m looking in your direction) but most of them are decided improvements, with more consistency system-wide (like the placement of search fields).
\n\niPad hardware continues to be fine, and “fine”, by iPad standards, means “the best tablets in the industry by far”. The lineup is well-differentiated and spans a larger than ever gamut, ranging from “totally casual user” to “actual pro usage”.
\n\niPadOS 26 is the most exciting release of iPadOS ever. I don’t love all of it. I think the biggest problem is that too much complexity is exposed to very casual users, for whom the main appeal of using an iPad as their main “computer” is its rigorous simplicity. But the course reversal Apple has made for advanced users, from eschewing (often to the point of frustration, sometimes to the point of absurdity) the desktop GUI concept of overlapping windows, to embracing regular old-fashioned GUI windows, was the right call, and a welcome sign of humility.
\n\nIt’s a new start for iPadOS, and I look forward to seeing where it goes. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought that about iPadOS.
\n\nAirPods Pro 3 are frigging amazing. AirPods, overall, continue to exemplify Apple at its best.
\n\nApple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3 are solid year-over-year improvements from the Department of If the Design Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It. Battery life improvements, in particular, are impressive. No one comes close to Apple at making very small, powerful computers that don’t really seem like computers at all. And the best Apple Watch news of the year, by far in my opinion, is the SE 3. The SE 3 is simply an outstanding Apple Watch at very low prices ($249 for 40mm, $279 for 44mm). That’s the price range a lot of people are looking at if they’re thinking about getting themselves “a nice watch”, smart or not.
\n\nAn M5 speed-bump update to the Vision Pro was nice to see, but only as a sign that Apple is still committed to this new platform. And they’re actually starting to build a nice little library of immersive content that is extremely compelling — including baby steps toward immersive live sports with a limited slate of games, albeit just from one single NBA team (the Lakers). The new Personas in VisionOS 26 — effectively a version 2.0 of the feature — are amazing, and strikingly improved from the first implementation. That’s another sign that Apple is continuing to achieve groundbreaking things with this new platform, and the concept of spatial computing. But in terms of VisionOS being a productivity platform in its own right (not counting the excellent Mac Virtual Display app), I didn’t see any progress at all. Nor any outreach at all to third-party developers to make VisionOS into a serious productivity platform. Frankly, it’s weird — perhaps even alarming — that some of Apple’s own core apps like Calendar and Reminders are still iPad apps running in compatibility mode, not native VisionOS apps.
\n\nWhy isn’t this platform improving, in drastic groundbreaking ways, with any urgency? I really thought 2025 might be the year, but nope. I can’t think of any area where Apple’s attitude more clearly seems to be that “good enough” is good enough.
\n\nSame grade, same comment as last year (just replacing the specific year with “[this year]”):
\n\n\n\n\nI’m a very happy daily (well, nightly) Apple TV user. But what\nexactly improved or changed [this year]? Anything? It may well be fair\nto say the current hardware — Apple TV 4K 3rd-gen, which shipped\nin November 2022 — is fine, and this is a hardware platform that\nonly needs updates every 3 or 4 years, but we’re grading what\nhappened [this year].
\n\nAlso: I feel like Apple has never yet made a truly great remote\ncontrol for this platform. The current one is their best yet, but\nit has obvious flaws.
\n
I fear complacency has set in. Apple TV 4K really is so much better than any competing set-top box (or built-in smart TV system), but it also still falls so far short of “insanely great”.
\n\nQuality is high, value is fair (except, still, for iCloud storage), and it’s getting to the point where it’s hard to keep up with all the great series on Apple TV.
\n\nNo news remains great news in this category.
\n\nFor two straight years, I’ve written the same comment for this category: “I have concerns and complaints about aspects of the direction Apple’s software design is headed (or in some ways, has been now for years), but their software reliability has been very good for me.”
\n\nThe reliability and technical quality remains excellent. While writing this report card, I checked, and my uptime on MacOS 15.7.2 got to 91 days before I got around to restarting, which I only did to upgrade to 15.7.3. At one point I literally had over 1,000 tabs open in Safari, spread across over 50 windows. (I have a problem with tab hoarding.) That is technical excellence.
\n\nBut years-long growing concerns over the direction of Apple’s software design reached a breaking point with MacOS 26 Tahoe. It’s so bad — or at least, so much worse than MacOS 15 Sequoia — that I’m refusing to install it. That makes it hard to assign a single grade for “OS Quality”.
\n\nFifth year in a row with basically the same comment: Resentment over App Store policies continues to build. Frustrations with the App Store review process seem unresolved. Apple’s goal should be for developer relations to be so good that developers look for excuses to create software exclusively for Apple’s platforms. The opposite is happening.
\n\nTim Cook is in an excruciatingly difficult position regarding the Trump 2.0 administration. But that’s his job. He’s clearly attempting to take the same tack he took with the Trump 1.0 administration from 2017–2020, which, in hindsight, he navigated with aplomb. To wit: staying above the fray, keeping Apple true to its institutional values while keeping it out of President Trump’s wrath.
\n\nBut the Trump 2.0 administration isn’t anything like the 1.0 administration. Cook, addressing employee concerns back in 2016 regarding his participation in then-President-elect Trump’s “tech summit”, said, “There’s a large number of those issues, and the way that you advance them is to engage. Personally, I’ve never found being on the sideline a successful place to be.”
\n\n“Awarding” Donald Trump a 24-karat gold trophy emblazoned with the Apple logo in August 2025 — after seeing eight months of Trump 2.0 in action — wasn’t “engagement” or “getting off the sideline”. It was obsequious complicity with a regime that is clearly destined for historical infamy. Cook’s continued strategy of “engagement” risks not only his personal legacy, but the reputation of the company itself.
\n\n\n\n " }, { "title" : "[Sponsor] Hands-On Workshop: Fix It Faster — Crash Reporting, Tracing, and Logs for iOS in Sentry", "date_published" : "2026-02-25T01:00:30Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-25T01:00:30Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/2026/02/hands-on_workshop_fix_it_faste_1", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/2026/02/hands-on_workshop_fix_it_faste_1", "external_url" : "https://sentry.io/resources/ios-workshop-jan-2026/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=paid-display&utm_campaign=general-fy27q1-evergreen&utm_content=static-ad-mobilerss-trysentry", "authors" : [ { "name" : "Daring Fireball Department of Commerce" } ], "content_html" : "\nLearn how to connect the dots between slowdowns, crashes, and the user experience in your iOS app. This on-demand session covers how to:
\n\nLink: sentry.io/resources/ios-workshop-jan-2026/?utm_source…
\n" }, { "title" : "★ Apple Releases iOS 26 Adoption Rates, and They’re Pretty Much in Line With the Last Few Years", "date_published" : "2026-02-17T18:49:55Z", "date_modified" : "2026-02-18T13:41:02Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/02/apple_releases_ios_26_adoption_rates", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/02/apple_releases_ios_26_adoption_rates", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nSpeaking of iOS 26, here’s Joe Rossignol reporting for MacRumors:
\n\n\n\n\nApple has shared updated iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 adoption\nfigures, revealing how many iPhones and iPads are running\nthose software versions. These adoption numbers are based on\niPhones and iPads that transacted on the App Store on February 12,\n2026, according to Apple. The statistics are as follows:
\n\n\n
\n\n- 74% of all iPhones introduced in the last four years are running\niOS 26.
\n- 66% of all iPhones are running iOS 26.
\n- 66% of all iPads introduced in the last four years are running\niPadOS 26.
\n- 57% of all iPads are running iPadOS 26.
\nHere is how that compares to the iOS 18 adoption figures that\nApple shared based on iPhones and iPads that transacted on the App\nStore on January 21, 2025:
\n\n\n
\n- 76% of all iPhones introduced in the last four years were\nrunning iOS 18.
\n- 68% of all iPhones were running iOS 18.
\n- 63% of all iPads introduced in the last four years were running\niPadOS 18.
\n- 53% of all iPads were running iPadOS 18.
\n
Via the Internet Archive (seriously, what would we do without them?), here are the numbers Apple released for iOS 17 two years ago, with data collected on 4 February 2024:1
\n\nThese are the numbers I was waiting for when I followed up three weeks ago about the silly stories, based on obviously bogus data from StatCounter, that iOS 26’s adoption rate was absurdly low. I wrote then:
\n\n\n\n\nWhat’s going on, quite obviously, is that Apple itself is\nslow-rolling the automatic updates to iOS 26. For years now\nApple has steered users, via default suggestions during device\nsetup, to adopt settings to allow OS updates to happen\nautomatically, including updates to major new versions. Apple\ntends not to push these automatic updates to major new versions\nof iOS until two months after the .0 release in September. This\nyear that second wave was delayed by about two weeks, and\nthere’s now a third wave starting midway through January. It’s a\ndifferent pattern from previous years — but it’s a pattern\nApple controls. A large majority of users of all Apple devices\nget major OS updates when, and only when, their devices\nautomatically update. Apple has been slower to push those\nupdates to iOS 26 than they have been for previous iOS updates\nin recent years. With good reason! iOS 26 is a more significant — and buggier — update than iOS 18 and 17 were.
\n
At least according to Apple’s own numbers from the App Store, iOS 26 adoption is pretty much exactly in line with the rates for iOS 18 and 17. There’s no conclusion that should be drawn from this about the general opinion of the Liquid Glass UI design or iOS 26 overall. People may love it, hate it, be ambivalent about it, or not even notice — but most of them let their iPhones (and iPads) update via automatic upgrades pushed by Apple. Their opinions about iOS 26 form after they install it.
\n\nLooking at these last three years, the only real trend has nothing to do with the iPhone. It’s that the adoption rate for iPads — in both categories, recent models and all models — is trending upward. ↩︎
\nPatrick McGee (author of last year’s bestseller, Apple in China, and guest on The Talk Show in May), commenting on Twitter/X re: Tim Cook’s company-wide memo regarding the “events in Minneapolis”:
\n\n\n\n\nThis literally says nothing, via intention and cowardice.
\n\nIt’s the kind of language Orwell attributed to politicians, when\nready-made phrases assemble themselves and prevent any real\nthought from breaking through.
\n
I have previously linked to George Orwell’s seminal 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language”. This time I’ll quote a different passage:
\n\n\n\n\nIn our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad\nwriting. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the\nwriter is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and\nnot a “party line”. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand\na lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in\npamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the\nspeeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to\nparty, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in\nthem a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches\nsome tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the\nfamiliar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained\ntyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live\nhuman being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly\nbecomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s\nspectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no\neyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker\nwho uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward\nturning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming\nout of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be\nif he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is\nmaking is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again,\nhe may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when\none utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of\nconsciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to\npolitical conformity.
\n\nIn our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence\nof the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule\nin India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the\natom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments\nwhich are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not\nsquare with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus\npolitical language has to consist largely of euphemism,\nquestion-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages\nare bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the\ncountryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with\nincendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of\npeasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the\nroads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer\nof population or rectification of frontiers. People are\nimprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the\nneck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is\ncalled elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is\nneeded if one wants to name things without calling up mental\npictures of them.
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Now consider Cook’s memo. Cook avoids most of the sins Orwell describes. He uses short, common words. He eschews hackneyed metaphors. He uses the active, not passive, voice — for the most part. His prayers and sympathies are “with everyone that’s been affected.” Who, exactly, has been affected? Affected how? By whom? Numerous examples come to mind, but not from Cook’s memo. Two Minneapolitans were affected, quite adversely, by being shot in the head and back at point blank range, in broad daylight, by unhinged ICE goons. A five-year-old boy — himself a U.S.-born citizen — was affected when ICE agents apprehended his father, used the boy as bait to lure other family members, and is now being held in a notorious detention center in Texas, a thousand miles away.
\n\nThe list is long, the stories searing. But Cook mentions nothing more specific than “everyone that’s been affected”. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them, indeed.
\n\n“This is a time for deescalation,” Cook wrote. But by whom? The masked federal agents laying siege to Minneapolis, brutalizing its citizenry? Or the thousands of law-abiding citizens protesting the occupation of their neighborhoods, who are, in the words of Seth Meyers, “deploying the most hurtful weapon of all, the bird”? Cook’s call for “deescalation” is meaningless without specifying which side he’s calling upon to change course, and there’s no weaker sauce than the weak sauce of “both sides”. Using words, not to make a point, but to avoid making a point while creating the illusion of having made one, is the true sin. From Orwell’s closing paragraph:
\n\n\n\n\nPolitical language — and with variations this is true of all\npolitical parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed\nto make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an\nappearance of solidity to pure wind.
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It’s colder in Minnesota, but the wind is gusting in Cupertino.
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