John Gruber of Daring Fireball joins the MacBreak Weekly panel this week! A deep dive into Apple’s new Siri following WWDC. Why Apple Intelligence & the new Siri are not coming to the EU initially later this year. And could the iPhone Ultra’s launch be delayed this year?

It’s fun to be the guest, not the host, of a podcast. I took Jason Snell’s usual panelist spot this week, alongside Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, and Christina Warren. Lots to cover, including a week of real-life experience using the new Siri AI. (It’s really good!)

Also, sometimes you just know what the episode title of a podcast is going to be, the moment a phrase is uttered. This was one of those episodes, with “Intimate Functionalities”.

So where did Markdown come from? It came from John Gruber. John joins the show, along with Anil Dash, to tell the story of where Markdown came from and how it took over the world.

Markdown has been growing steadily for years, but it’s seen a step change in popularity now that it’s been embraced as the lingua franca of LLM agentic systems. I had an interesting all-too-brief chat last week in Cupertino with some people from Apple’s developer tools team about how it feels to see Markdown spread everywhere — including WWDC. In a word, gratifying.

But the biggest reason for Markdown’s continuing success isn’t Markdown itself. It’s the triumph of plain text files, both for system configuration and for the interchange of human-readable (and thus, LLM-readable) prose. Markdown isn’t really a “syntax”. It’s a set of conventions for formatting plain text. If everyone agrees to the same basic conventions, plain text can be significantly more expressive than a string of unformatted characters.

That’s it. So what I find gratifying isn’t that my “language” continues to thrive, because it’s not a language. It’s that the way I like to format plain text when I’m writing, and the way I like to see plain text formatted when I’m reading, has so thoroughly won the world’s mindshare battle. “Ha-ha”, I say, to people who want *this* to mean bold, not italic. (And to Slack and WhatsApp, I say “Fuck you.”)

Meanwhile no one in the EU will get Apple Intelligence or iPhone Mirroring, both of which features are very useful, and, dare I say, quite fun. Should we judge how much fun each side of the continental divide is having by how much fun they theoretically could be having, or by how much fun they are having?

As it stands, the fun side is not the EU. But hope springs eternal.

Here we are two years later and I think the answer is more clear than ever which side of the continental divide is more fun. It’s not the EU. EU users still don’t have iPhone Mirroring and until and unless the European Commission changes its interpretation of the DMA, they likely never will. It’s a great feature.

Apple Intelligence, as we knew it until last week, eventually came to the EU, about six months after it shipped for the rest of us. One can reasonably argue that EU iPhone and iPad users didn’t miss much during those six months. And that there hasn’t been that much to enjoy since Apple Intelligence debuted in the EU in iOS 18.4. That changed last week with the introduction of the first beta release of iOS 27. Siri AI is really good, truly useful, and genuinely fun. And it is not on pace to come to the EU six months after iOS 27 ships this fall. It is currently on pace to come to the EU never.

This week, Apple announced a series of discovery features that will personalize app recommendations based on users’ interests and behavior, providing a new way for developers to have their app discovered.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the iPhone maker introduced Personalized Collections in the App Store, which will showcase recommendations tailored to the individual. These will also include new “App Notes” that explain why the specific apps were recommended to you. Starting this week, you’ll find these new personalized suggestions in various places in the App Store, including the Apps or Games tab or on the Search tab.

Security research critics Mysk, posting on Twitter/X (XCancel link), report that the App Store app seemingly sends analytics usage data to Apple with everything you do in the App Store app, including exactly what you type, character-by-character — and that this isn’t for search suggestions, but for analytics. (Via Michael Tsai.)

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Brussels insists the decision is “Apple’s and Apple’s only” and that nothing in its flagship Digital Markets Act forbids the launch. That’s technically true and wholly beside the point.

The law requires that the moment Siri AI ships in Europe, any rival AI agent must get the same sweeping access to a user’s messages, files and chat history. Apple proposed putting in a software security layer to make that safe and offered a phased rollout to build it. According to Apple, the European Commission rejected the proposal.

The DMA was supposed to open markets. But its legal logic was born in the era of browsers, app stores and messaging apps. These components can be swapped like batteries.

The DMA effectively demands everything to be swappable/interchangeable. So while the European Commission is correct that the DMA does not forbid Apple from launching a version of Siri AI, it clearly forbids Apple from launching the version of Siri AI they actually built.

Behind all this lies the dream that Europe could be a “regulatory superpower.” It wanted to create a market too big to skip that would, by virtue of its heft, end up exporting its rules to the rest of the world. That hasn’t worked out.

When adapting a product for Europe costs more than European market access is worth, companies no longer comply. They simply leave out the feature.

That’s the folly of the DMA, or at least the maximal interpretation of the DMA that the European Commission is pursuing. It only makes sense under the assumption that the EU is too big a market to ignore, and the EU’s market might is such that systems will be designed to meet their compliance standards, regardless of whether the makers of these systems support the regulations or not. (And in the case of Apple with iOS and Google with Android, the two companies are in lockstep in their opposition to the EU’s regulations on system-level AI interoperability.)

First, the EU is big but it isn’t that big. The best estimate I’ve seen is that the EU accounts for about 7% of Apple’s worldwide revenue. Plus, because of the DMA, the cost of doing business in the EU is now significantly higher for Apple and Google, because they need to engineer DMA-compliant versions of various features and systems. Unless, that is, they stop bringing (a long and ever-growing list of) new features to the EU.

Which brings me to my second point. What exactly is the motivation for Apple and Google to engineer entirely separate systems for the EU to bring new features into compliance with the Commission’s broad interpretation of the DMA? Because if Apple doesn’t engineer a DMA-compliant version of Siri AI, iOS users in the EU will ... switch to Android, whose system-level AI was deemed noncompliant by the Commission a few months ago?

This doesn’t directly hurt Apple. It doesn’t force Apple to design, engineer, and ship a compliant EU-exclusive version of Siri AI that supports plug-and-play LLM back ends. It only hurts iPhone users who live in the EU, who are stuck with the old dumb version of Siri for the foreseeable future. The European Commission is either stupid or insane.

European regulators are proposing several broad changes to the way AI tools operate on Android phones. Some of this is straightforward, like allowing third-party AI tools to be invoked system-wide via hot words or button presses. This might also include allowing AI tools to view screen context when the user opens them. Context also extends to allowing alternative AI systems to access local data to generate proactive suggestions and summaries. The report actually describes something that sounds like Google’s Magic Cue, which relies on Gemini to offer suggestions based on your activity.

Google has also started experimenting with allowing AI to control certain apps. As we saw when this feature debuted on the Galaxy S26, Gemini is currently pretty bad at using apps on your behalf. The commission wants to explore allowing other AI services to autonomously control installed apps and system features on Android phones. Maybe someone else could do better?

Maybe! But also maybe it’s a bad idea for complex system architecture design to come from non-technical government bureaucrats. One of these maybes strikes me as a lot more likely than the other.

Many of the Gemini AI features in Android, including Magic Cue, rely on running local models, and Google has been slow to allow third parties the system access to make that work effectively. So the EU is also suggesting a mandate that would ensure developers have the necessary hardware access to run local models “with high levels of performance, availability and responsiveness.”

What could go wrong?

Finally, Google may be required under the DMA to create new APIs and offer technical assistance to other AI makers who want to plug into Android. The commission also specifies that these tools must be made available free of charge.

Of course, it’s not free of charge to provide technical assistance to one’s competitors. It’s actually a great expense.

Here’s the European Commission, announcing these “preliminary findings”:

The proposed measures aim to ensure that competing AI services can effectively interact with applications on users’ Android devices and execute tasks accordingly, such as sending an email using the user’s preferred email app, ordering food or sharing a photo with friends. Currently, Google largely reserves these capabilities for use by its own AI offerings on Android phones and tablets. For example, the measures would allow competing AI services to be easily activated by users, using a custom ‘wake word’, a phrase that the user can speak to activate an AI service.

The proposed measures will also enable competing providers of AI services to innovate and offer deeply integrated AI experiences to users on Android phones and tablets, along with Alphabet’s own AI services, such as Gemini. Opening up access to these capabilities will provide Android users across the EU with a wider choice of AI services.

The difference between Google and Apple on this front is that Google just blazed ahead and shipped Gemini integrated into Android in the EU, and is now facing compliance problems after shipping. (Ask forgiveness.) Apple isn’t shipping Siri AI in the EU in iOS 27, knowing that it’s going to be deemed non-compliant. (Ask permission.)

The EC presumes that these measures “will also enable competing providers of AI services to innovate and offer deeply integrated AI experiences to users on Android phones and tablets”. Again: maybe! But really all they can enforce is that “competing providers of AI services” will have the same level of system-level integration that Google’s AI services have. The easiest way for Google to achieve that is by withdrawing Gemini integration in Android from the EU, not by building APIs and privacy protection mechanisms to enable the capabilities for third-party providers that the EC is demanding.

Google is learning the lesson Apple learned the hard way with all the existing features of iOS that were deemed noncompliant with the DMA when it went into effect. The “ship it first and ask forgiveness / hope it’s deemed compliant” strategy is not a good one in the EU.

Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services? That’s the question Auth.md aims to answer. By exposing a single, machine-readable Markdown file at your service root, AI agents can dynamically discover your OAuth Protected Resource Metadata, parse required scopes, and authenticate seamlessly.

Markdown, baby. Who’d have thunk it?

With native support in WorkOS AuthKit, you can now implement this protocol out of the box, giving AI tools a standardized, secure way to log into your application. Read the Auth.md docs, and watch its on-stage introduction at the MCP Night: Agent Night keynote.

On one hand, I actually don’t begrudge Anthropic not wanting to help its competitors; on the other hand, what should be blisteringly clear is that Anthropic does not think that anyone else other than them should even be making frontier LLMs.

What makes this policy all the more remarkable is the fact that it was enacted only two months after Anthropic had that dispute with the Department of War: the latter wanted to use Claude for any legal use, while the former wanted more stringent controls around surveillance and autonomous weapons. What this degradation represented was both the capability and willingness of Anthropic to silently alter its models to achieve its policy preferences. In other words, Anthropic willfully validated some of its critics’ worst fears in terms of being a supply chain risk.

The broader takeaway from that previous episode, however, is that Anthropic believes that they are the ones who should have final say over how Anthropic is used; given that they think only they should be developing leading edge AI, they by extension think that only they should have final say over AI generally. When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone.

Anthropic is best seen as a religious organization. Their employees are true believers in a cause, and on a mission. Perhaps every successful company has a religious aspect at its core — like, maybe, Apple’s is design quality and user-centricism, Microsoft’s is market share with no regard for technical or design elegance, Google’s is market share with high regard for technical elegance, and Meta’s is strip-mining the world’s social graph for profit. These companies tend to attract employees who believe in the company’s core mission, and the employees who believe tend to be the ones who thrive and rise within the companies’ ranks to positions of influence.

But Anthropic feels more like a real religion, where the core tenets must be taken on faith, and the priests (Anthropic employees) have a conviction about them. A religious fervor. If Apple gets too taken away by its cultural fervor for design, they do something silly like make a $20,000 solid gold Apple Watch. So what? If Microsoft or Google get taken away by their shared fervor for market share at all costs, they face antitrust remedies. A stifled market and abusive behavior from a monopolist isn’t good, but doesn’t end the world.

A religious fervor that believes the company is building god-like “super intelligence” that will dwarf human intelligence — and that only the company’s priesthood can be trusted to define, create, control, and gate access to it — is something else entirely. I tend to think the Anthropic true believers are all wet — that LLMs, amazing though they are, are not a path toward “super intelligence”. But, they used to be clearly behind OpenAI in technical capability, then caught up, and now with Mythos/Fable, they are clearly ahead. I still think they’re wrong about where this is heading, but I don’t think we can say we know they’re wrong.

President Donald Trump’s name is off the Kennedy Center.

Crews at the performing arts venue started removing it from the front of the building around 3 a.m., several hours after the center missed a federal judge’s two-week deadline to do so. The judge had ruled that the decision by the center’s board of trustees to rename it was illegal.

A perfect metaphor for the work ahead of us.

To ensure getting started with a large cloud model is as accessible as possible, developers in the App Store Small Business Program with fewer than two million first time App Store downloads will be able to use Apple Foundation Models running on Private Cloud Compute (PCC) with no cloud API cost. The model provides access to frontier level intelligence with unparalleled privacy protections. This makes it easy for small developers to get started building intelligent app experiences without upfront infrastructure costs.

Eligibility requirements

Access to PCC is available to developers who meet the following criteria:

• Are enrolled in the App Store Small Business Program.
• Have fewer than 2 million first-time app downloads from any of their apps on the App Store.
• Have the Private Cloud Compute entitlement assigned to their account.

Where Apple Intelligence is available, eligible developers can use PCC in their apps distributed on the App Store, and test PCC features via TestFlight or ad hoc distribution. Installs during testing are not counted as first-time app downloads.

If any app subsequently exceeds the 2 million first-time downloads threshold, or the developer is no longer enrolled in the App Store Small Business Program, the developer will be notified and must migrate to an alternative solution within 6 months. Information about first-time downloads is available in Analytics in App Store Connect.

These strict limits don’t seem to be getting as much attention as they should. It’s nice that for small developers who meet the above criteria, access to PCC has no cost. But there’s no way (yet?) to buy your way out of these limits. There are no paid API tiers for larger developers who exceed the above limits, or for developers who qualify now but release a hit app that grows to exceed them. (Users who pay for iCloud+ don’t have any extra quotas for PCC usage in third-party apps either.)

The “fewer than 2 million first-time app downloads from any of their apps” restriction is particularly notable. It’s not 2 million installations for apps that are using PCC, but 2 million downloads for any app the developer has ever released. Developer Gui Rambo writes:

So uhhhh… Apple should really rethink the Private Cloud Compute developer access limitation. I do happen to have an app that’s had more than 2 million downloads. That app is ChibiStudio, an app that’s been in the App Store for over 10 years. It’s not like I’m getting a million new users every year nowadays. And I’m also not making any real money with it 🥲

The bottom line is that — for the OS 27 cycle at least — PCC is primarily a feature for Apple itself to use in Siri AI. Granting access to PCC to any third-party developers at all is better than nothing, but this 2-million-download cap cuts off many developers who are in the Small Business Program. Apple should reconsider that. And I know there are a lot of developers who exceed the eligibility for the Small Business Program who would love to have access to the PCC APIs, even if access was paid. The lack of paid tiers says to me that Apple is worried enough about meeting demand from Siri AI users alone.

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.

We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.

Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were announced on Tuesday — that post has detailed comparisons, from Anthropic, on the models’ capabilities.

Having the access ban extend all the way to “foreign national Anthropic employees” is, to say the least, aggressive. Whether that degree of restriction is truly warranted, I don’t think we, on the outside, can say. The Trump administration lacks credibility, to say the least, when it comes to foreign nationals. But it’s Anthropic itself that repeatedly compares the power of frontier models to nuclear weapons. Here’s CEO Dario Amodei, in an essay published just this month:

There may come a time, perhaps relatively soon, when we need to go beyond this, when the most powerful AI systems look less like airplanes or automobiles and more like weaponizable nuclear materials — a threat to humanity rather than “just” a threat to public safety. If that occurs, we may need more aggressive regulatory measures than those I have laid out.

If that occurs — or if it already has occurred — it’s obviously not the place of Anthropic (or OpenAI or Google) to render that judgment. Ben Thompson wrote about this presciently back in March, and linking to his post, I wrote:

Nilay 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?

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

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

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

Speaking of the State of the Union, the full version runs just over an hour, but Apple cut together a 4.5-minute recap. If you haven’t watched the full thing you should at least watch that recap.

What is the true story behind Apple’s decision not to roll out “Siri AI” in the EU?

This decision is Apple’s and Apple’s only.

Because absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits Apple from rolling out new features in the EU.

Yes, the European Commission and Apple had a few contacts on “Siri AI”.

But instead of offering a compliant solution, Apple asked to be exempted from its interoperability obligations under the DMA — and this for 18 months.

That’s not an option. EU rules are non negotiable.

And it would mean that no AI agent other than “Siri AI” could be chosen by EU consumers.

Apple, like any other gatekeeper, cannot close the market. The DMA is very clear about that.

Our developers have the right to compete. And our consumers the right to choose.

Those who want to keep using Apple products in their current form can of course do it.

But for those who want to use another AI agent, the DMA will give them the possibility to do so.

Why this was posted to LinkedIn and not on the EC’s own press website is as inexplicable as Regnier’s bizarre choice to spread 14 short sentences across 10 paragraphs. I quoted the entirety of the statement nonetheless, to give the EC their full say. I’ll let it speak for itself in this post, but this does not contradict Apple’s position or statements in any way.

According to EU regulators, the DMA requires Apple to give any AI system nearly unlimited access to a user’s device, as well as the ability to act on that access autonomously without a user’s ongoing visibility and control. That includes the ability to read and send messages, make purchases, access files, and execute actions across any app. Security researchers have already shown that AI systems can be hijacked to steal personal data — like passwords and photos — and to permanently alter files and account settings without a user’s consent. As AI systems gain more capabilities, these risks are quickly increasing in frequency and scope.

Given the serious risks to users, Apple designed a solution called Trusted System Agent — an intermediary that would allow virtual assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI for devices in the EU. Apple also shared a plan to launch Siri AI in the EU while gradually rolling out this new solution over an 18-month period. The European Commission said no. In fact, the European Commission did not agree to any of Apple’s proposals.

Apple will continue working to bring these features to the European Union as safely as possible. However, given the clear dangers to EU users and the regulators’ failure to acknowledge these risks, there is currently no timeline for Siri AI’s availability in the EU on iOS and iPadOS.

There’s a lot to unpack here, including more background information — and on-the-record statements — from a briefing Apple held Tuesday that I was invited to at Apple Park. But the bottom line is that Apple’s public statements regarding the DMA and the European Commission have never been this strident before. In its public statements, Apple has always been diplomatic. That’s the word.

Now, they’re a bit more on war footing. There’s a massive gulf between what Apple is willing to do with Siri AI in the EU and what the Commission is demanding from Apple for DMA compliance. As things stand there’s no middle ground. Apple’s offers for compromise have been rejected. Unless one side changes its mind and concedes its current position, Siri AI will never come to the EU, and what Apple is saying here is that they’re unwilling to create the open-access-to-user-data system that the EC is demanding.

And from what I’ve seen so far in a day of testing Siri AI, EU iOS users are going to miss out on something really good.

I approached Cubby Broccoli after Jaws was a big hit. I’d always wanted to make a James Bond film from the day I saw Dr. No, so I called Cubby after Jaws and volunteered. I said, “If you need a director, I would love to direct one.” And he said no. And he moved on.

And then Cubby called me again after Close Encounters came out. And that was a big hit. And Cubby called me a few years after Close Encounters and said, “We’d like to use the five notes in Moonraker.” And I said, “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll give you permission to use the five notes if you let me direct a Bond film.” And he said “Nope.” But I gave him the five notes anyway.

In Moonraker, the iconic Close Encounters notes are the passcode to the locked door of a secret lab that Bond (Roger Moore) needs to enter. Probably not so secure to play the passcode digits audible, but it’s a fun Easter egg. I always presumed that EON used it as fair-use homage, without bothering to ask Spielberg or Columbia Pictures for permission.

Spielberg, in his interview with The Rest Is Entertainment, goes on to explain the oft-repeated story that his disappointment over his rejection by Broccoli led to his collaboration with George Lucas to make Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I put on my short list for best movie ever made. The whole opening sequence of Temple of Doom — where Indiana Jones is wearing a dinner jacket and chaos erupts at a nightclub while Jones chases a vial of poison antidote while the other characters chase a diamond being kicked around the floor — is more Bond-like than most Bond films. (Oh, and that Shanghai nightclub’s name: Club Obi Wan. No need to ask permission for that one.)

Apple’s Siri team, led by Craig Federighi, held a post-WWDC keynote tech talk with members of the press this afternoon to talk through iOS 27 and the new Siri AI. During the talk, Federighi shared more details about Apple’s collaboration with Google. Federighi was joined by Amar Subramanya (vice president of AI), Mike Rockwell (Siri lead), and Sebastien Marineau-Mes (software VP).

On the Google collaboration, Federighi explained:

Of course, we don’t have the Gemini app as our app. In fact, none of that client code is part of how we run on iOS. For these models, we use none of the models that Google deploys to their customers, nor do we use the infrastructure and means by which they deploy models to their customers. And then, when it comes to the knowledge base, we of course don’t use Google Search or anything like that as the foundation of our system. So I hope that’s clear. The amount of the Google Assistant we use is none.

So let’s talk about what we do use, or how our system is built.

This “Tech Talk” was good. It was detailed and technical, and there were live on-stage demos of Siri AI in action from Mike Rockwell. I don’t think Apple is ever going to go back to live on-stage major keynotes, but I do think the company is returning to more live events, including demos. There was a big live Siri AI/Apple Intelligence session for developers Tuesday morning in Steve Jobs Theater, which also had live demos. More like this, please.

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

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

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

This updated advice in the HIG is perfect. Screenshot:

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

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

My favorite Apple updates are not the flashy new features, but the quiet little touches: annoyances fixed, workflows made smoother, rough edges sanded down, and longstanding flaws thoughtfully reworked. To me, they’re the clearest sign of a company that cares about its craft.

Here’s a collection from a WWDC26 screen-grab, organized for easier reading, on improvements coming later this year.

That’s a lot of bullet points.

You can also watch tonight’s show in live stereoscopic immersive in the Theater app from Sandwich Vision on Vision Pro. A purchase of the ticket to the live show, the Theater app for $12.99, is also good for replay forever — with surprise bonus features included. It’s a fun, truly immersive way to experience the show.

Hope to see you there tonight, one way or the other.

But the most telling detail wasn’t what Apple announced. It was how it chose to show some things off. Many of the Apple Intelligence demoes featured someone standing, phone in hand, pressing buttons or using voice commands in real time, while another camera showed off the phone’s response.

These weren’t live onstage, anything-could-go wrong demos; they were pre-taped. But they looked far more like proof of working features than what Apple showed at WWDC 2024, when the company unveiled Apple Intelligence and a new Siri to the world through slickly produced videos that turned out to be more promise than product.

The demos were all shot in single takes, with no editing. In fact, I think most of them were single takes of multiple demos back-to-back. That’s the way it should be, even when they feel a little slow. When a demo feels slow, the solution isn’t to edit the video — it’s to make the feature work faster.

This new version of Siri is built on Apple Intelligence, allowing Siri to draw on personal context understanding and help users find what they need in the moment across messages, emails, photos, and more. For example, users can ask Siri to find a restaurant recommendation a friend messaged them about, surface a hotel confirmation number from an old email, or pull up photos with friends and family from a recent trip. And personal context understanding extends to third-party apps when developers integrate with Spotlight.

With even more systemwide app actions, Siri AI lets users get things done across apps, like drafting an email from scratch, or editing and sharing a set of photos. Using onscreen awareness, Siri AI can answer questions related to the content on a user’s screen. For example, if a user gets a text about a potluck with friends, they can brainstorm with Siri on what to bring and then add a recipe to the Notes app.

In addition, Siri AI can use broad world knowledge to get up-to-date information from the web on virtually any topic and generate a helpful answer, such as when and where to see the next solar eclipse, or when a musician is coming to town. Users can extend almost any response from Siri into a rich conversation and ask follow-up questions.

I like the name “Siri AI”. “New Siri” wouldn’t have legs because eventually this won’t be new. This should be the dividing line between Siri as we know it and Siri as it should be. The demos I’ve seen so far (I still don’t have access on my iOS 27 testing device) are impressive. Well, impressive compared to old Siri. They’re table stakes for generative AI. But Siri AI is the only system that can draw upon your personal data in the apps on your devices, and perform actions based on the app intents supported by the apps on your devices. It is in some ways less capable than ChatGPT or Claude, but in other ways has more potential. It’s a very different approach and I think it’s the right one for Apple.

They need to execute, they need to prove this can scale, and most of all, they need to get third-party apps on board with App Intents and App Schemas. But it seems like they’re doing all of that. This is not a done deal but it is very realistic.

These new capabilities are powered by the next generation of Apple Foundation Models, custom-built in collaboration with Google and its Gemini models for deeply integrated Apple Intelligence experiences. These latest models run on device and on servers using Private Cloud Compute.

Every facet of the new Apple Intelligence architecture is built privacy-first, from the latest Apple Foundation Models to the core operating system technologies that integrate these models deep into Apple’s platforms. Apple Intelligence uses on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute to help protect users’ privacy. Private Cloud Compute gives users access to frontier-level intelligence, while extending the privacy and security of iPhone into the cloud.

What’s confusing about this Apple-Google partnership is that Google pretty much calls all things AI “Gemini”. The models are “Gemini”, the assistant is “Gemini”, and the feature integrations are “Gemini”. So Apple is taking pains to emphasize that they’re building atop the Gemini models, not the Gemini assistant.

One way to think about it is this. Let’s say you’re a Google Gemini app user. That’s the assistant. Now you start using the new Apple Intelligence (that builds atop the Gemini models) and the new Siri AI (that builds atop the new Apple Intelligence). When you go back to the Google Gemini app, nothing you did using Apple Intelligence and Siri AI is visible to the Gemini app. And nothing you continue to do in the Google Gemini app is visible to Apple Intelligence or Siri AI.

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

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

Read the auth.md docs.

Apple Inc. plans to open Siri to outside artificial intelligence assistants, a major move aimed at bolstering the iPhone as an AI platform. The company is preparing to make the change as part of a Siri overhaul in its upcoming iOS 27 operating system update, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The assistant can already tap into ChatGPT through a partnership with OpenAI, but Apple will now allow competing services to do the same.

The company is developing new tools to allow AI chatbot apps installed via the App Store to integrate with the Siri assistant, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven’t been announced. The chatbots will also work with an upcoming Siri app and other features in the Apple Intelligence platform.

That means, for instance, if users have Alphabet Inc.’s Google Gemini or Anthropic PBC’s Claude installed, they’d be able to send queries to those services from within the Siri voice assistant, just like they have been able to with ChatGPT since Apple Intelligence launched in 2024.

Maybe Apple ran out of time today, and will announce this tomorrow? Maybe they forgot to announce it? Maybe they scrapped the next-generation Siri that existed two months ago and in the last month rebuilt another entirely new next-generation Siri? I’ll bet something like that is what happened.

I mean, people had knowledge of the matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI is like religion. Either you believe it changes everything, or you don’t believe at all. There is no moderate position; nobody believes in AGI “more or less,” just like nobody is “casually religious.” If God exists, the only coherent response is to reorganize your entire life around that fact, as priests do. If you pray sometimes, then you are just an atheist who’s also fearful. When tech companies spend hundreds of billions on capital expenditures to add sparkly AI features to Office, Gmail, and Instagram, I only see fearful atheists — guys who don’t believe in AI but pretend just in case.

In 2026, the four largest cloud and AI infrastructure providers — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft — committed to spending $670 billion on CapEx. Apple, in contrast, spent $12.7 billion on capex last fiscal year and projects $14 billion for 2026, 2% of what its peers are spending. The conventional reading in Silicon Valley is, naturally, that Apple is losing. Siri has been a punchline for years — an internal executive called the delays ugly and embarrassing — and critics say that Apple has not been the same without Steve Jobs. It is falling behind, they say, and moving way too slowly for AI.

I disagree with this portrayal: Apple is the most powerful tech company in the world right now because it’s acting according to what it believes.

Some of you, I bet, will object to Romero’s notion that no one is “casually religious”. Almost everyone I know is casually religious, you might be thinking. But read the whole piece. What he’s saying is that if you’re “casually religious” those are just words. You’re not living your life according to your professed beliefs (casual or not). And that’s how most of Apple’s peer companies seem to be approaching AI.

I’m not sure he’s right, but he might be, and I think his take is at least closer to right than wrong. Apple is making an enormous bet on AI — but their bet is that they don’t need to spend hundreds of billions per year on AI infrastructure (most of it fattening Nvidia’s bottom line) to reap the benefits. If Apple’s right we should start seeing it come together tomorrow.

(Arguably we’ve already seen it coming together — demand for Apple’s products and services has gone up, not down, so far in the AI era. Entrenched leaders often grow during the initial stages of extinctive disruptions — BlackBerry’s biggest year for sales (revenue) and investor confidence (market cap) was 2011, four years after the iPhone debuted — but the disruptors are there. There’s not yet a single threat on the market to the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or AirPods — nor to Apple’s services revenue.)

After decades of shooting digital, I returned to analog photography in 2023. I thought it would be challenging, given the limited selection of film stocks, only to be surprised by how freeing it felt. It felt so much better to have a handful of amazing choices rather than photo-editor with thousands of presets. We owe that to film engineers who spent years developing versatile film stocks that work in a variety of situations.

Inspired by “Less, but better,” we partnered with the renowned Hollywood colorist Cullen Kelly to develop a succinct set of gorgeous, physically accurate processes exclusive to Halide. Each look was engineered with a specific intent. We verified every look thousands of times on real-world reference photos.

Put another way: every look is a banger.

Halide has always been a great — maybe the great — iPhone camera app for shooting RAW, with the intention of developing your images by hand in post. It’s a great camera technically and a great app UI-wise. Mark II introduced Process Zero, which, in their own description, “uses zero AI and zero computational photography to produce beautiful, film-like natural photos”. Process Zero was the first step toward the new built-in “looks” in Halide Mark III. I’ve been shooting with Mark III for a few weeks now, and they are, indeed, all bangers. And I really like that there aren’t that many of them. I wanted more looks than just Process Zero (which remains available, of course), but I feel a bit overwhelmed when faced with a dozen (or worse, dozens) of choices for processing. I feel conflicted enough having to choose between a handful of really good third-party camera apps with which to shoot in the first place — it’s worse when I have to make too many choices within the camera app itself.

What I want is to just point and shoot and be able to instantly share images with the look I want already applied. I’m picky but I’m also really lazy, and don’t want to do any editing in post on most of the shots I keep. But I do want to be able to edit in post if I want to, including changing the look losslessly. This mixture of point-and-shoot ease and pro-level control didn’t use to be possible. Now, though, it is, with apps like Not Boring Camera, Analogue, and, now, Halide Mark III.

It’s been a turbulent couple of months for Lux (to say the least), so I’m glad to see Sandofsky and team get Mark III out the door. If you, like me, had previously been impressed by Halide but didn’t use it because it required too much work in post, you should check out Mark III.

We have had a hard time deciding whether to stay at 60 Minutes. We’re still deeply upset by the firings of Tanya and Draggan, strong leaders who everyone respected. As far as we can tell — because no explanation has ever been offered, they were expelled because they fought for our 60 Minutes values and stood up to protect our independence and integrity.

Newsrooms are not supposed to be run like dictatorships. Collaboration and argument are the way we have always worked at 60. Don Hewitt actually encouraged loud passionate advocacy for our pieces. [...]

We feared that our returning might be construed as an endorsement of the existing power structure. That is simply, categorically not the case.

Here’s why we’re are staying:

We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die.

We’ll see how long this lasts.

In a hearing today about the president’s bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House and plans to build a vast ballroom, a judge asked if the president could also bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and be subject to no legal challenge. The DOJ lawyer, Yaakov Roth, said that yes, President Trump could decide tomorrow to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and no one could stop him.

It was a good question from DC Court of Appeals Judge Patricia Millett since it brings the arguments and their implications clearly into the open. Reframe the question and the absurdity of this proposition becomes even more clear. If you hire someone to administer your estate, can they burn down the buildings on your estate or chop it up into parcels and sell it off? Presumably not. You hired them to run it, not to destroy it or sell it. It’s not theirs. They were hired for a specific task. That person is your employee. The president is hired to administer the country and enforce its laws for four years. He doesn’t own the country or its properties.

Pathetic lickspittles, one and all.

I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nine don’t: Al Jazeera English, AP, BBC, Breitbart News, CBS News, Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and Reuters. The last three accounts I looked at — Leading Report, unusual_whales, and Globe Eye News — are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report tweet: “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.” They’re sometimes referred to as engagement-maxing accounts.

These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are.

Musk’s Twitter/X is not an aggregator for news. It’s a walled garden. But the type of garden where you need to keep your eyes open and your hand on your wallet. Sometimes it’s fun to visit a seedy neighborhood. But let’s not pretend it isn’t a seedy neighborhood just because, long ago, it used to be nice.

But what does that remaining traffic consist of? I recently came across a bubble chart depicting the Twitter accounts that had received the most “engagement” in February 2026. It was depressing: most of the top accounts were extremely low-quality and highly partisan. I hadn’t even heard of many of them and only follow a handful of the top accounts. So I tracked down the original data myself and, with help from Claude, made my own improved version of the chart. Here, voilà, are the Twitter accounts with the most engagement so far in 2026:

It’s not hard to notice that Twitter has become extremely right-leaning. But I’d argue there’s an equally important trend: the top accounts are of incredibly low quality. Elon, with the algorithmic boost he built in for himself, is at the eye of the storm, of course. But “Catturd” literally gets far more engagement than the New York Times, for instance.

There’s a common argument from proponents of the Musk-era X that the only problem is that left-leaning people have abandoned the platform. That the X algorithm is a contest and if only right-leaning accounts are playing, of course they’re winning. This is nonsense. The whole thing is rigged. Elon Musk’s outsized prominence as the most-engaged-with account is proof of that. Twitter existed for 16 years before Musk bought it. He wasn’t even close to the biggest account during that era. Then he bought it. Now his account is the biggest.

As Silver’s data analysis shows, Musk’s X is not just dominated by right-wing accounts, it’s dominated by “who the hell is that?” right-wing slop accounts.

The only way not to lose a rigged game is to refuse to play. X is still a thing. A lot of people, companies, and organizations still post there — treat it like their blogs — exclusively. I still wind up linking to posts on X because that’s where they are. That’s a whole separate discussion. But anyone who’s trying to “compete” there with subject matter that is even vaguely political has no chance of success unless what they’re posting is what Elon Musk wants to see promoted. It’s not like his thumb is on the scale, it’s like an anvil is on the scale. The conundrum is that there are still a lot interesting people posting interesting things there.

I can’t see why Apple would want to get involved with a company like this though. Gurman’s report makes it sound like his sources are inside Apple, but man, this “Apple + Perplexity” thing feels more like something Perplexity would be seeding than one that Apple executives would be leaking.

Perplexity is still occasionally in the news (often not in good ways), but it seems to me they’ve slipped into the “afterthought” tier of AI startups — which is exactly why they started leaning into clownish stunts last year. Everyone who previously suggested Apple should — or even might — buy them has gone silent.

And Pelley forgot the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Instead, Pelley convinced himself of his own virtue and torched his own position — and if Bilton’s letter is accurate, in as mean-spirited and conceited a manner as possible. Pelley could have chosen a dignified resignation under protest, but instead pulled a power move in an attempt to intimidate Bilton, Weiss, and Ellison, only to discover that no one feared his absence. In fact, they’re probably happy to cut him loose.

There’s always at least one person in these situations who thinks they’re untouchable. A wise executive knows to start by making an example of that person, and then see how many other people think they’re indispensable. It’s not as if TV news jobs are expanding these days, after all. Pelley’s going to find out the hard way that no one’s paying $5 million a year to emote into a camera from other people’s copy.

It doesn’t even enter this man’s little mind that Pelley wasn’t concerned about his job, wasn’t concerned about his salary, but was concerned only with the integrity of the institution to which he’d committed decades of his career, and that he saw as his duty the need to stand up for his remaining and former colleagues. That Pelley himself has integrity. To the Trump lickspittles, everything is performative. They don’t just lack integrity, they don’t believe integrity is real.

Katie Notopoulos:

The Scott Pelley story to me is a lesson in how if you work hard enough in your career to get Fuck You Money, the real reward is the day you need to say it, you can.

The annual live audience episode of The Talk Show during the week of WWDC. If you can make it, you should come. You’ll even enjoy the prelude, mingling with fellow DF readers and listeners.

What’s going on today is like if — instead of getting shady, threatening, and litigious — the tobacco companies had just purchased CBS, purged the staff at 60 Minutes, and hired a bunch of pro-cigarette stooges to replace them.

This year’s Build had the vibe of a freshly single divorcée posting a thirst trap on Instagram. “It’s always fun to be at developer conferences in times of great change,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said onstage Tuesday, adding that events like this are about “coming to grips with the new opportunity.”

AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, in an interview with The Verge, put it even more bluntly.

“The goal is to prove that we can become one of the top four labs in the world,” Suleyman said. “There’s three labs that matter, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. We are not one of them at the moment, and that’s always been my intention. It’s why I came here. I want to build the very best frontier models in the world, fully multimodal, and in order to do that, we have to prove that we can do everything that we need to from the ground up, and we’re not just going to take from others.”

Refreshingly blunt.

But hasn’t that been Microsoft’s plan for Bing since it was announced in 2009? I mean I guess you can say that Bing is one of the top four search engines in the world. Maybe you can even say it’s one of the top two. But it’s irrelevant and uncompetitive with Google Search.

Lingon makes scheduling apps, scripts, shortcuts, and commands feel simple. Create a task in minutes, run it on a schedule, and stay in control.

Lingon helps you run whatever you want whenever you want without living in Terminal. Schedule apps, scripts, shortcuts, and commands with a clear, friendly UI.

Run tasks at specific times, on intervals or at login. Optional notifications make it easy to keep control.

Two separate apps. Lingon is the simpler Mac App Store version and free to use, while Lingon Pro is the advanced one-time purchase with extra power.

Lingon and Lingon Pro are great apps. I’ve been meaning to recommend them for a while.

Back in 2023 I wrote about a problem I was having with Maestral, the incredible “works like Dropbox in the old days” open-source Dropbox client, where Maestral would just silently crash once in a while and I wouldn’t notice for a while. Then I would notice, manually re-launch Maestral, and have to wait while Maestral synced. Or, worse, I’d put a podcast recording in a shared folder and walk away from my computer, and my editor would never get the file because Maestral wasn’t running. My write-up described how I solved the problem with a Keyboard Maestro macro that runs once an hour — it checks if Maestral is running, and if it isn’t, launches it (and writes to a log, to satisfy my own curiosity). Borg wrote to me after I posted that and — very politely — explained that Lingon would make that much simpler.

In addition to creating your own scripts and rules that run periodically, Lingon is great for inspecting all the login items and background agents on your system — whether they’re from Apple or third parties. Poking around at everything Google Gemini installed is what made me think to recommend Lingon today. At the very least you should install the free regular version. It’s just a great Mac utility from a great Mac developer. There’s nothing else like it.

Short story: Google Chrome installs an updater called Keystone on your computer, which is bizarrely correlated to massive unexplained CPU usage in WindowServer (a system process)[1], and made my whole computer slow even when Chrome wasn’t running. Deleting Chrome and Keystone made my computer way, way faster, all the time.

Long story: I noticed my brand new 16” MacBook Pro started acting sluggishly doing even trivial things like scrolling. Activity Monitor showed nothing from Google using the CPU, but WindowServer was taking ~80%, which is abnormally high (it should use < 10% normally).

Doing all the normal things (quitting apps, logging out other users, restarting, zapping PRAM/SMC, etc) did nothing, then I remembered I had installed Chrome a while back to test a website.

I deleted Chrome, and noticed Keystone while deleting some of Chrome’s other preferences and caches. I deleted everything from Google I could find, restarted the computer, and it was like night-and-day. Everything was instantly and noticeably faster, and WindowServer CPU was well under 10% again.

Not all Mac users, but many, found that just having Chrome installed slowed down their Macs dramatically. Completely uninstalling Chrome — and its pernicious background agents — solved the problem. This years-old “Chrome Is Bad” saga came to mind when I wrote about Google’s Gemini Mac app’s background agents.

It seems as though Google eventually fixed these Chrome bugs — or Apple changed something in a MacOS update that fixed the bugs for them — but I’ve never seen a full explanation of the problem and eventual solution. Does anyone know what happened here?

The main point is it never should have happened in the first place. A third-party app should just be a third-party app — not add components to your system software just so it can update itself when it isn’t running. Background agents and extensions are sometimes necessary to the functionality of a product. Checking for software updates to a browser or AI chatbot, when those apps aren’t running, is not necessary. The golden rule applies: imagine if every app on your system installed its own background agent to check for software updates. Chrome is a popular browser on the Mac, but it’s just a web browser. Other web browsers do just fine checking for updates from the browser itself when they’re running. If the user is actually using an app regularly, it’ll get plenty of chances to check for updates when it’s running. If the user isn’t regularly using an app, why in the world should that seldom-used app have software running all the time in the background?

This sort of chaos is why Apple keeps iOS locked down. There are no third-party login items on iOS that run in the background — let alone ones with no option to disable. No third-party app can do anything that causes the iOS window manager to consume 80 percent of the CPU while ostensibly idle. There are obviously trade-offs here. I rely on a Mac for my workstation because the Mac gives me the power to potentially shoot myself in the foot. But one major reason why iOS is an order of magnitude more popular than MacOS is because you cannot shoot yourself in the foot with it, even though that means you can’t use it to do things that would require that power.

The thing that really turns me off about the Gemini Mac app is Google’s gall. The Gemini app installs a background helper named “GeminiAppLauncher” in your login items. It also installs “GoogleUpdater” as a process with the privilege to launch in the background whenever it wants. Gemini never asks for permission to install either of these, and, most arrogantly, if you, as an informed user, remove either of them, the Gemini app silently adds them back. There is no setting in Gemini to disable this. There’s a mindset from some big companies that your system is theirs to play with at the system software level. Fuck that. Michael Tsai’s post on the Gemini Mac app links to this thread on MacRumors regarding this pernicious auto-installed and auto-reinstalled login item. Here’s another on Reddit.

Google’s approach to its Mac software is disrespectful and entitled.

I’d have been happy to keep the Gemini app installed if it just sat in my Applications folder when I wasn’t using it. But it doesn’t, and Google shows no signs of caring, so I just deleted it and uninstalled its background launch agents (in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/). Feels great, like I took a much needed shower.

(Sidenote: The Gemini Mac app is a native Mac app, but it is ... weird. Gus Mueller poked around at it and found that it’s the product of a Java-to-Objective-C converter that Google made, and much of it was originally written for Android.)

These days, I’m getting emails pitching me for an endless stream of new Mac apps. It’s quite remarkable because there was a period five or ten years ago when it seemed like all app development on Apple’s platforms was focused on iOS. Even more interesting, these are all indie Mac apps that seem to be built using native Mac frameworks, not the product of big corporations that are just rolling their cross-platform development system out everywhere. These apps seem to have a point of view and are focused on the Mac.

Of course, it’s happening because of AI. [...]

Mac users — some of them developers, some of them people who have never written software in their lives — are building apps that fulfill their imaginations.

We now live in an era where, if you can dream an app, you can probably build it. Especially Mac utilities. And who cares more about native Mac software than Mac users? Certainly not those companies that gave up on Mac development and focused all their energies on giant cross-platform code bases to attract venture investment and big payouts.

There are pros and cons to everything, but on the whole, AI-assisted programming has rejuvenated Mac development. It wasn’t moribund, but it was stagnant. And stagnation is the first step toward decline. Now it’s resurgent, and that’s a fun thing to see. And, I think, genuinely important for the future of the platform. I’ve been concerned for years that the biggest problem the Mac faces is that so many new apps for the platform weren’t Mac apps. The Mac has never faced a decline in popularity, but truly native Mac application development (and the skills) did. Now it’s turning around. Mac users are thirsty for Mac apps, and with AI, they can quench their own thirst and tell the dullards promulgating Electron bundles to pound sand.

(And Snell, it turns out, has joined the party.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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