By John Gruber

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‘Boring Is What We Wanted’ ★

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels:

Apple silicon has been nothing but upside for the Mac, and yet some seem bored already. In the days since Apple announced the M5, I’ve seen and heard this sentiment more than I expected:

This is just another boring incremental upgrade.

That 👏 is 👏 the 👏 point.

Back in the PowerPC and Intel days, Macs would sometimes go years between meaningful spec bumps, as Apple waited on its partners to deliver appropriate hardware for various machines. From failing NVIDIA cards in MacBook Pros to 27-inch Intel iMacs that ran so hot the fans were audible at all times, Mac hardware wasn’t always what Apple wanted.

Consider the MacBook Air — by all accounts the most popular Mac Apple sells. There was a March 2015 update, and then a very minor speed bump in June 2017. That June 2017 update was so insignificant that it didn’t even warrant its own press release from Apple. All it got from Apple was, at the very end of a press release touting updates to the iMac, MacBook Pro, and late great 12-inch MacBook, this single sentence: “Apple today also updated the 13-inch MacBook Air with a 1.8 GHz processor.”

It wasn’t until the very end of October 2018 that Apple released a significant MacBook Air update — the first models with retina displays. For the three-and-a-half-year stretch between March 2015 and October 2018, there wasn’t a single notable MacBook Air refresh — at a time when all other Macs had gone retina. Intel’s processor offerings were so unpalatable during that stretch that Apple just didn’t update their most popular Mac model.

WorkOS ★

My thanks to WorkOS for their continuing support of DF with another sponsorship week. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. WorkOS provides a complete user management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and RBAC. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months. WorkOS simplifies MCP authorization with a single API built on five OAuth standards.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including OpenAI, Cursor, and Verbal.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Sora Has a Pervert Problem ★

Katie Notopoulos, writing at Business Insider:

There are really two separate issues at hand: Should users be allowed to make fetish content of any woman who is stupid enough (like me) to allow anyone to make cameos of her? And how do you stop people from making fetish content of purely AI-generated characters that aren’t cameos of real people? Does OpenAI want to stop that? Maybe OpenAI thinks it’s fine for people to make belly-flation or foot-fetish videos as long as they’re not of a real person.

For now, I keep going back to a thought I had early on while scrolling Sora: There’s hardly any women on here, and it’s no wonder why. Women innately understand the risk of letting anyone make videos with their faces — the likelihood of something being creepy is extremely high. These fetish videos are kind of goofy — I have to admit I even cracked up a little at the centaur one — but overall, it’s an icky and somewhat menacing feeling seeing a lot of them.

Friday, 24 October 2025

Meta Announces Ban on Rival AI Chatbots From WhatsApp ★

Eric Hal Schwarz, reporting for TechRadar:

Meta is closing the door on third-party AI assistants inside WhatsApp. Starting January 15, 2026, no general-purpose AI chatbot, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others, will be allowed to operate on the platform. The change is part of an update to WhatsApp’s Business API policy that bans developers of “large language models, generative AI platforms, or general-purpose AI assistants” from accessing the system.

In plain terms, Meta is locking down the world’s largest messaging app to ensure that the only chatbot you’ll find inside it is Meta AI.

Perhaps because I’m only a light user of WhatsApp, I had no idea that rival AI chatbots had accounts there. I just tried it with 1-800-ChatGPT and it seems pointless. It’s noticeably slower and uses an older model than just using the ChatGPT app. (You can also just place a regular phone call to 1-800-ChatGPT, which seems about as useful in today’s world as calling 555-FILM for Moviefone to get movie showtimes.)

OpenAI, on X, has taken the news in stride:

Meta changed its policies so 1-800-ChatGPT won’t work on WhatsApp after Jan 15, 2026.

Luckily we have an app, website, and browser you can use instead to access ChatGPT.

Via Kontra, who quips:

Why hasn’t the EU started an investigation of Apple already?!

Thursday, 23 October 2025

SerpApi’s Public Customer List ★

At the bottom of their “Use Cases” page, SerpApi lists the following companies and organizations as customers (“They trust us. You are in good company. Join them.”):

• Airbnb
• Nvidia
• Meta
• Shopify
• Perplexity
• KPMG
• Ahrefs
• Grubhub
• Samsung
• AI21labs
• United Nations (!)
• Thomson Reuters
• BrightLocal
• Experian

From an August 21, 2025 report in The Information (paywalled up the wazoo, alas), however:

OpenAI also isn’t the only Google rival to use SerpApi data. SerpApi’s website previously listed Apple as a customer. In addition to partnering with Google on search, the iPhone maker develops technology to power searches in Safari — a lucrative deal that the judge overseeing the DOJ case could also nix.

Was Apple removed from the list because they’re no longer (or never were?) a customer, or because they remain a customer but don’t want to be listed?

Reddit Files Lawsuit Accusing ‘Data Scraper’ Companies of Stealing Its Information ★

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times:

Eight years ago, SerpApi, a start-up in Austin, Texas, dived headlong into the byzantine world of using robots to “scrape” Google’s search algorithms, so it could collect information to help customers appear higher in search results.

Then OpenAI’s ChatGPT came along, kicking off an artificial intelligence revolution. As more tech companies began building A.I. chatbots to keep up, they needed large amounts of data to train their A.I. models — data that SerpApi had already gathered.

Practically overnight, a class of companies like SerpApi — known as “data scrapers” — found a new business selling data scraped from Google to companies looking to train their A.I. chatbots.

On Wednesday, the internet message board Reddit decided to fight the data scrapers. It filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York claiming that four companies had illegally stolen its data by scraping Google search results in which Reddit content appeared.

I’d never heard of — or at least never noticed — SerpApi until a few weeks ago, when a good friend asked me if I’d ever looked into them. The entire premise of their business is crazy. SerpApi prints the crime right on the tin, describing their service as a “Google Search API” and “Scrape Google and other search engines from our fast, easy, and complete API.” What makes this so crazy is that Google doesn’t offer a search API. SerpApi is offering the Google search API that Google itself doesn’t offer, and charging companies money for it. Everyone, upon hearing the premise and nature of SerpApi, asks the same question: How is this legal? The answer is, it probably isn’t. But right on SerpApi’s home page they claim to offer customers a “U.S. Legal Shield”:

The crawling and parsing of public data is protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. We value freedom of speech tremendously. We assume scraping and parsing liabilities for both domestic and foreign companies unless your usage is otherwise illegal. (Including but are not limited to: acts of cyber criminality, terrorism, pedopornography, denial of service attacks, and war crimes.)

My only surprise here is that it’s Reddit taking SerpApi (along with two similar companies, one from Lithuania and the other from Russia — the former Soviet states respect intellectual property about as much as China does) to court, not Google. Why Google hasn’t sued them yet, I don’t understand. Anyway, back to Isaac’s report for the Times:

Perplexity was one of those buyers, according to Reddit’s lawsuit. Perplexity had scraped Reddit data in the past without payment but agreed to stop after Reddit sent it a cease-and-desist order. Even so, citations to Reddit data in Perplexity search results jumped “fortyfold,” the lawsuit said. Reddit has spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-scraping systems over several years.

“Perplexity’s business model is effectively to take Reddit’s content from Google search results,” then feed it into an A.I. model and “call it a new product,” the lawsuit said.

Reddit said it had set a trap for Perplexity by creating a “test post” on its site that could “only be crawled by Google’s search engine and was not otherwise accessible anywhere on the internet.” Within hours, Perplexity search results had surfaced the content of that test post, the lawsuit said.

Google, which is not a plaintiff in Reddit’s lawsuit, has tried and failed to stop SerpApi and other data scrapers, according to the lawsuit and previous reporting from The Information.

The people leading Perplexity aren’t just shifty — they’re stupid. That whole company just reeks of being a scam.

See also: Reddit’s PDF of their lawsuit, Reddit v. SerpApi.

The Hollywood Reporter: ‘Is Jessica Chastain’s “The Savant” Ever Going to Be Released?’ ★

Tony Maglio, The Hollywood Reporter:

The Savant, which originally had a Sept. 26 premiere date, was yanked in the weeks following the Sept. 10 assassination of conservative political pundit Charlie Kirk. Language on the landing page for the series has since vacillated from “Coming Soon” to “At a Later Date” to simply “2025.” As of this writing, the wording again reads, “At a Later Date.” (Lower down the same page it says, “Released: 2025” — likely an oversight.)

It’s odd the language has been tweaked several times over the course of the month. Altering wording on the app is a manual process, and since each new iterative phrase basically means the same as the last, why do it? Yes, “Soon” means soon and “Later” means later and “2025” literally means this calendar year, but it’s all close enough considering the shifting language was first noticed as summer turned to fall. To not premiere in 2025 feels like a death sentence for the series.

A spokesperson for Apple TV did not respond to The Hollywood Reporter’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for The Savant’s studio, Fifth Season, also declined comment.

Ominous vibe.

Wednesday, 22 October 2025

GM Plans to Soon Ditch CarPlay and Android Auto on All Its Vehicles, Not Just EVs ★

Nick Statt, The Verge:

GM plans to drop support for phone projection on all new vehicles in the near future, and not just its electric car lineup, according to GM CEO Mary Barra.

In a Decoder interview with The Verge’s Nilay Patel, published Wednesday, Barra confirmed GM will eventually end support of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto on both gas-powered and electric cars. The timing is unclear, but Barra pointed to a major rollout of what the company is calling a new centralized computing platform, set to launch in 2028, that will involve eventually transitioning its entire lineup to a unified in-car experience.

Someone should investigate whether Mary Barra is a mole planted at GM by Ford. (Previously.)

New M5 Vision Pro and Dual Knit Headband Are Assembled in Vietnam, Not China ★

MacRumors:

Apple’s upcoming wave of new smart home devices, including a smart home display, indoor security camera, and tabletop robot, will also be made in Vietnam, according to Bloomberg.

Signal Moves Ahead on Post-Quantum Computing, But Still Sucks Ass When You Switch Phones ★

Graeme Connell and Rolfe Schmidt, writing earlier this month on the Signal blog:

We are excited to announce a significant advancement in the security of the Signal Protocol: the introduction of the Sparse Post Quantum Ratchet (SPQR). This new ratchet enhances the Signal Protocol’s resilience against future quantum computing threats while maintaining our existing security guarantees of forward secrecy and post-compromise security. [...]

What does this mean for you as a Signal user? First, when it comes to your experience using the app, nothing changes. Second, because of how we’re rolling this out and mixing it in with our existing encryption, eventually all of your conversations will move to this new protocol without you needing to take any action. Third, and most importantly, this protects your communications both now and in the event that cryptographically relevant quantum computers eventually become a reality, and it allows us to maintain our existing security guarantees of forward secrecy and post-compromise security as we proactively prepare for that new world.

It is impressive that Signal is ahead of the curve on post-quantum computing. But speaking as someone who is currently switching between multiple phones regularly, they need to get their shit together on basic stuff like using more than one phone with the same Signal account, and making it take just a minute or less to switch your primary Signal phone from one device to another. Right now it takes me over 30 minutes to switch Signal from one phone to another, and I’m not a particularly heavy user of the app. Normal people don’t use Signal because it offers, by far, the worst and most limited user experience of any major messaging app. Signal is never going to get most people to even give the app a fair chance when the user experience is so much worse than Apple Messages and WhatsApp.

Again, I don’t mean to disparage the technical ingenuity of their post-quantum ratchet achievement. But they’re bragging about defenses against hypothetical threats from the future when, right now today, you still can’t use the same Signal account from two different phones.

Apple Pulls Dating Apps Tea and TeaOnHer From the App Store ★

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Reached for comment, Apple confirmed the apps’ removal, saying it removed Tea Dating Advice and TeaOnHer from the App Store because they failed to meet Apple’s requirements around content moderation and user privacy. The company also said it saw an excessive number of user complaints and negative reviews, which included complaints of minors’ personal information being posted in these apps. Apple communicated the issues to the developers of the apps, a representative said, but the complaints were not addressed. (Request for comment from the app developers has not yet been returned.)

Specifically, Apple cited violations of its App Review Guidelines 1.2, 5.1.2, and 5.6. Rule 1.2 says apps with user-generated content should offer reporting and blocking features and should remove objectionable content. Rule 5.1.2 says apps can’t use or share someone’s personal information without permission, and Rule 5.6 says excessive customer reports and negative reviews violate Apple’s Developer Code of Conduct. [...]

After going viral and generating controversy, Tea suffered a data breach over the summer, with hackers gaining access to 72,000 images, including 3,000 selfies and photo IDs submitted for account verification, as well as 59,000 images from posts, comments, and direct messages.

Later, a rival app called TeaOnHer launched to offer men the ability to dish on women in the same way, but it was beset by security issues that exposed users’ personal information, including government IDs and selfies, TechCrunch discovered in August.

Seems odd to me that Apple only pulled Tea from the App Store now, three months after multiple disastrous security breaches revealed their amateur hour approach to security. See previous coverage here at DF: July 26, July 28, and July 30.

Adam Driver Says Bob Iger Nixed a Kylo Ren ‘Star Wars’ Film He Pitched With Steven Soderbergh ★

Jake Coyle, reporting for the AP:

Driver says he took a concept to Soderbergh for a film that would take place after 2019’s “The Rise of Skywalker.” That movie culminated in Ren’s redemption and apparent death. Driver had undertaken the trilogy with an arc in mind for Ren that inverted the journey of Darth Vader. As the trilogy evolved, it didn’t play out that way. Driver felt there was unfinished business for Kylo Ren, or as he was known before turning to the Dark Side, Ben Solo.

Soderbergh and Rebecca Blunt outlined a story that the group then pitched to Kennedy, Lucasfilm vice president Cary Beck and Lucasfilm chief creative officer Dave Filoni. They were interested, so the filmmakers then pulled in Scott Z. Burns to write a script. Driver calls the result “one of the coolest (expletive) scripts I had ever been a part of.”

“We presented the script to Lucasfilm. They loved the idea. They totally understood our angle and why we were doing it,” Driver says. “We took it to Bob Iger and Alan Bergman and they said no. They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that.”

“It was called ‘The Hunt for Ben Solo’ and it was really cool,” adds Driver. “But it is no more, so I can finally talk about it.”

Soderbergh, in a statement, said: “I really enjoyed making the movie in my head. I’m just sorry the fans won’t get to see it.”

So an entire trilogy based on the dumb idea that Emperor Palpatine somehow survived Darth Vader tossing him down a 50-mile deep shaft into a hyper-matter reactor, that was fine. But a Steven-Fucking-Soderbergh-helmed Star Wars movie that maybe would’ve required a little bit of a shrug to accept the premise, nope.

Ke Yang, Apple’s Head of ChatGPT-Like AI Search Effort, Was Poached by Meta ★

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg last week:

The executive, Ke Yang, is leaving for Meta Platforms Inc., according to people with knowledge of the matter. Just weeks ago, he was appointed head of a team called Answers, Knowledge and Information, or AKI. The group is developing features to make the Siri voice assistant more ChatGPT-like by adding the ability to pull information from the web. [...]

The new Siri is being developed as a joint effort between Apple’s artificial intelligence and machine learning group, known as AIML, and the Siri engineering team now overseen by Craig Federighi’s software organization. Within AIML, Yang was regarded as the most prominent executive working on the new Siri initiative. His exit ranks among the biggest departures from Apple’s AI organization this year — a period marked by a steady exodus of top researchers building the company’s AI core models.

Roughly a dozen members of that team — known internally as Apple Foundation Models — have departed, including its founder and lead scientist, Ruoming Pang. He and a number of others also joined Meta, which is building a new group called Superintelligence Labs.

I am reminded of a piece Guy English wrote back in 2012, “Three Things That Should Trouble Apple”, and that I’ve long thought his third item, “People”, ought to have been the first:

Ultimately, the retention of talent will be Apple’s Achilles’ heel.

The smartest people will always want to be working on the smartest thing. Sometimes that comes together in one amazing project. iOS has been that project for this decade.

If there’s a problem for Apple it’s that they’ve already invented the future. It’s a done deal. The best and brightest engineers and product managers may move on to other ventures. Less likely to succeed, of course, but that’s less of an issue for them given the rainfall of AAPL gains. We’ll have to see what happens.

Nikkei Asia: ‘Apple Slashes iPhone Air Production Plans, Boosts Other 17 Models’ ★

Lauly Li and Cheng Ting-Fang, reporting for Nikkei Asia:

Production orders for the iPhone Air have been cut nearly to “end of production” levels, despite it only becoming available in China last week, due to weak demand in other markets, multiple sources briefed on the matter said.

Under the initial production plan, the iPhone Air accounted for roughly 10% to 15% of overall new iPhone production this year, said two sources familiar with the plan. The model is seen as strategically paving the way for the first foldable iPhone, expected to debut in 2026, three people with knowledge of the matter said. Nikkei Asia earlier reported that Apple has high hopes for the launch of such a phone next year.

Apple has told multiple suppliers to largely reduce component and electronics module orders for the iPhone Air, two people with direct knowledge of the situation said. One supply chain manager said production orders for the iPhone Air from November onward will be less than 10% of the volume compared with September. Another supplier executive said they received a similar notice from Apple. [...]

By contrast, demand for the iPhone 17 model and iPhone 17 Pro has exceeded expectations. Apple has increased production orders for the baseline iPhone 17 by about 5 million units and also added orders for the high-end iPhone 17 Pro, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

I don’t understand the argument that the iPhone Air “paves the way” for a foldable iPhone next year. Either the iPhone Air is a desirable iPhone that can stand on its own or it isn’t. I firmly believe it is. Apple obviously did too. If they didn’t they wouldn’t have shipped it. There was no reason to ship the iPhone Air “in preparation” for a foldable iPhone next year if they didn’t think the Air would be a success on its own. They could have just started with the foldable next year.

One thing that’s weird about these reports of low sales numbers for the iPhone Air is that it doesn’t seem like Apple is advertising it at all. If I were Joz, I’d be advertising the hell out of it. I’ve been watching a lot of sports on commercial TV since September, and I haven’t seen a single ad for the Air. Tons of commercials for the orange iPhone 17 Pro, but zip for the Air.

Also, as I just wrote Monday and have repeated oft before, take these numbers with huge grains of salt. Whether the numbers are from “research firms” or supply chain sources, they’re not from Apple, and sales numbers that aren’t from Apple have often proved to be way wrong.

Don Mattingly Finally Headed to the World Series ★

Reason enough to be rooting for the Blue Jays. Put this man in the Hall of Fame already. For chrissake his name is Donnie Baseball.

Tuesday, 21 October 2025

Trump Said to Demand Justice Department Pay Him $230 Million for Past Cases ★

Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager, reporting for The New York Times:

President Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that any settlement might ultimately be approved by senior department officials who defended him or those in his orbit.

The situation has no parallel in American history, as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims. It is also the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president’s former lawyers atop the Justice Department.

Subject only to the approval of his own lickspittle cronies.

Jim Ray:

In the world where Antonin Scalia dies six months earlier and RBG retires at some point before the third cancer diagnosis, a bankrupt Trump sits in a maximum security prison and costs us a single Secret Service patrol.

1.5 Miles of Aluminum Foil Is, in Fact, No Big Whoop ★

Here’s an update I just posted to yesterday’s piece on organized phone theft rings in London:

I forgot to apply one of the core tenets of Brian Kernighan’s wonderful book Millions, Billions, Zillions ($19 in hardcover from Amazon; BookShop.org link to indie booksellers): always do some back-of-the-envelope double-checking of the math in news stories. 1.5 miles of aluminum (or even aluminium) foil from Costco is just 12 rolls at 200 meters each. I wouldn’t blink my eyes at someone with a dozen rolls of foil in the cart at Costco.

Consumer Confusion Regarding USB Power Adapters ★

Yours truly, yesterday:

The problem I see with the MacBook power adapter situation in Europe is that while power users — like the sort of people who read Daring Fireball and Pixel Envy — will have no problem buying exactly the sort of power adapter they want, or simply re-using a good one they already own, normal users have no idea what makes a “good” power adapter. I suspect there are going to be a lot of Europeans who buy a new M5 MacBook Pro and wind up charging it with inexpensive low-watt power adapters meant for things like phones, and wind up with a shitty, slow charging experience.

Actual email, from actual reader D.B. today:

Anecdotes to support your point about normal customers not knowing which power adapter to pick, I’ve had both my mother and a mid-level IT director at my work complain that their Macs no longer hold a battery. In both cases, they were using a 5 watt USB-A charger.

It’s hard for people to understand that not all USB chargers are the same.

And from actual reader D.K.:

My mother in law called me to ask why her MacBook Air no longer turned on. She had called AppleCare and they told her to bring the computer to a store for repairs. Turns out she was using a very old 5 watt USB-A iPhone charger.

And of course, the real danger isn’t using an underpowered charger. It’s thinking you can save a few bucks by buying a cheap high-watt third-party charger and then burning your house down.

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Tuesday, 21 October 2025

‘Apocryphal Inventions’ ★

Jonathan Hoefler:

The objects in the Apocryphal Inventions series are technical chimeras, intentional misdirections coaxed from the generative AI platform Midjourney. Instead of iterating on the system’s early drafts to create ever more accurate renderings of real-world objects, creator Jonathan Hoefler subverted the system to refine and intensify its most intriguing misunderstandings, pushing the software to create beguiling, aestheticized nonsense. Some images have been retouched to make them more plausible; others have been left intact, appearing exactly as generated by the software. The accompanying descriptions, written by the author, offer fictitious backstories rooted in historical fact, which suggest how each of these inventions might have come to be.

These images represent some of AI’s most intriguing answers to confounding questions — an inversion of the more urgent debate, in which it is humanity that must confront the difficult and existential questions posed by artificial intelligence.

This project is art.

iOS 26.1 Beta 4 Adds New Toggle for Liquid Glass: Clear or Tinted ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Not a fan of that design? Well, iOS 26.1 beta 4 is now available, and it introduces a new option to choose a more opaque look for Liquid Glass. The same option is also available on Mac and iPad.

You can find the new option on iPhone and iPad by going to the Settings app and navigating to the Display & Brightness menu. On the Mac, it’s available in the “Appearance” menu in System Settings. Here, you’ll see a new Liquid Glass menu with “Clear” and “Tinted” options. [...]

It’s a binary option, so there’s no toggle or slider of any sort. You have a choice between Liquid Glass as we’ve known it since iOS 26 was released, or a new tinted option that increases opacity and adds more contrast. When enabled, the design applies to Liquid Glass in Apple’s apps and elsewhere on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. For the iPhone and iPad specifically, it also increases opaqueness in notifications on the Lock Screen.

This new toggle isn’t squirreled away in the Accessibility section of Settings. On iOS, it’s in Settings → Display & Brightness, and on MacOS it’s in System Settings → Appearance. I’m trying it out on iPhone, but for the most part, I really haven’t minded the Clear appearance. Clear feels more fun. But I’m glad Apple added this setting.

Monday, 20 October 2025

Electron Apps Causing System-Wide Lag on MacOS 26 Tahoe ★

Michael Tsai, back on September 30, compiled a roundup of links regarding Electron apps causing systemwide lag on MacOS 26 Tahoe. The reason, seemingly, is that the Electron framework was overriding a private AppKit API. Of course.

Tomas Kafka wrote a shell script to find un-updated Electron apps on your system. Craig Hockenberry took Kafka’s shell script and turned it into an easy-to-use AppleScript application.

So, yes, Theo Browne, “software dev nerd”, Electron really is “that bad”. It’s actually, if anything, worse.

Eavesdropping on Internal Networks via Unencrypted Satellites ★

SATCOM Security — a team of researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Maryland:

We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate and government communications, private citizens’ voice calls and SMS, and consumer Internet traffic from in-flight Wi-Fi and mobile networks. This data can be passively observed by anyone with a few hundred dollars of consumer-grade hardware. There are thousands of geostationary satellite transponders globally, and data from a single transponder may be visible from an area as large as 40% of the surface of the earth.

The researchers don’t mention RCS by name, only SMS, but this is a perfect example of why I thought Apple’s original stance on RCS was correct, and their change of heart to support it last year was unfortunate. No new protocol for messaging should be adopted unless the protocol exclusively works using end-to-end encryption.

Via Wired: “Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data” (News+ link).

When Design Drives Behavior ★

Jason Fried:

So what’s the net effect of this tiny little design detail that the owner may not even understand? Well, it looks like the watch is already half-way out of power after the first day, so it encourages the owner to wind the watch more frequently. To keep it closer to topped off, even when it’s not necessary. This helps prevent the watch from running out of power, losing time, and, ultimately, stopping. A stopped watch may be right twice a day, but it’s rarely at the times you want.

Small detail, material behavior change. Well considered, well executed, well done.

Apple Lowered the Price of the New MacBook Pro for Most of the European Countries Where It No Longer Ships With an Included Power Adapter ★

Nick Heer, at Pixel Envy:

First of all, the dollar is not the currency in any of these countries. Second, the charger in European countries is €65, which is more like $76 right now. Third, Apple is allowed to bundle an A.C. adapter, it just needs to offer an option to not include it.

Practically speaking, though, the EU directive regarding included chargers means Apple won’t include one, and likely no other laptop maker will either. They’d have to create, and stock, double the SKUs for every standard configuration. (If you buy a build-to-order configuration of the M5 MacBook Pro in Europe, you get a choice to include an adapter in the build-to-order workflow for an upcharge. If you buy a standard configuration model, you get the option to purchase a power adapter as a separate accessory.)

Fourth, and most important, is that the new MacBook Pro is less expensive in nearly every region in which the A.C. adapter is now a configure-to-order option — even after adding the adapter. [...]

Countries with a charger in the box, on the other hand, see no such price adjustment, at least for the ones I have checked. The new M5 model starts at the same price as the M4 it replaces in Canada, Japan, Singapore, and the United States. [...]

Maybe Apple was already planning a €100 price cut for these new models. The M4 was €100 less expensive than the M3 it replaced, for example, so it is plausible. That is something we simply cannot know. What we do know for certain is that these new MacBook Pros might not come with an A.C. adapter, but even if someone adds one at checkout, it still costs less in most places with this option.

The fact that the new M5 MacBook Pro costs less than the M4 models, even when paying extra to include a new power adapter, leads me to suspect that Apple was planning price cuts in these countries regardless. As Heer points out, Apple cut the price by €100 when the base MacBook Pro went from the M3 to M4 a year ago. (MacBook Air prices have been getting lower worldwide, too.)

Anyway, the reason this regulation is subject to ridicule was never that European MacBook buyers were, effectively, paying for a charger that was no longer included. It’s that this is a silly law, and likely causes more harm than good. If Apple thought it was a good idea to no longer include power adapters in the box with MacBooks, they’d just stop including chargers in the box, worldwide. That’s what Apple started doing with iPhones with the iPhone 12 lineup five years ago. That wasn’t because of a law. It was because Apple thought it was a good idea.

The problem I see with the MacBook power adapter situation in Europe is that while power users — like the sort of people who read Daring Fireball and Pixel Envy — will have no problem buying exactly the sort of power adapter they want, or simply re-using a good one they already own, normal users have no idea what makes a “good” power adapter. I suspect there are going to be a lot of Europeans who buy a new M5 MacBook Pro and wind up charging it with inexpensive low-watt power adapters meant for things like phones, and wind up with a shitty, slow charging experience.

More on the Lack of an Included Charger With New M5 MacBooks in Europe, Including the U.K. and Norway ★

While poking fun at EU regulations leading Apple not to include a power adapter with the new M5 MacBook Pro across Europe, I wondered why the U.K. — which left the EU five years ago — was affected. DF reader C.A. wrote, via email:

We did indeed leave the EU, but remain aligned to some of their standards like food and consumer goods through a thing called the Windsor Framework. Because the UK includes Northern Ireland, which has an open border with the Republic of Ireland, and the RoI is part of the EU, and the border MUST remain open for historical reasons, there has to be a way of ensuring UK goods that don’t meet EU standards don’t enter the EU via Northern Ireland. Hence, we agreed to align to a selection of their standards to ensure the border can stay open.

That’s why everything has to be USB-C and power supplies aren’t in the M5 MacBook Pro boxes, but we aren’t affected by the DMA shenanigans — those don’t apply to physical goods, only the configuration of the software.

Something similar (the EEA) is the reason why the power adapter isn’t in the box for Norway, either — a country that has never been part of the EU. Here’s Wikipedia’s entry on the Windsor Framework, and here’s a UK government “Call for Evidence” from a year ago regarding a requirement to follow the EU’s Common Charger Directive.

Kickstarter Campaign for Ben Zotto’s ‘Go Computer Now!’, a Book on Sphere, the Nearly Forgotten Personal Computer Company ★

Ben Zotto:

Name every pioneering personal computer you can think of from the 1970s. The MITS Altair 8800. The Apple-1. The IMSAI 8080. You may even know about the SWTPC 6800 or Processor Technology Sol-20.

There’s a computer missing from that list, and it’s an important one: Sphere Corporation’s Sphere 1. While far ahead of its competitors in 1975 in what it delivered as an all-in-one PC, Sphere’s manufacturing operations and cash flow lagged immediately behind. The company collapsed so quickly that it was nearly erased from the collective memory of that period.

But I know about Sphere. So does Bill Gates! And it just might have sparked a few ideas in Steve Wozniak — though not as many as Sphere’s founder later claimed.

I have a story to tell about this remarkable Utah-based company, one that fills in the gaps in other histories of the era, and puts Sphere in the context of the computers we have heard about again and again for a half century. I want to tell you why Sphere was important and worth remembering — and explain why they were forgotten. While first to market with some important technologies, “firsts” are not as interesting as how their visionary, imperfect founder could see around corners. His reach far exceeded his grasp, leading to his early exit and the company’s quick downfall.

I’ll admit that before I encountered this Kickstarter campaign (via Glenn Fleishman, who edited the book), I can’t recall ever even hearing about Sphere. Count me in as a backer.

How London Became a Global Hub for Phone Theft ★

Lizzie Dearden and Amelia Nierenberg, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

For years, London’s police assumed most of the phone thefts were the work of small-time thieves looking to make some quick cash. But last December, they got an intriguing lead from a woman who had used “Find My iPhone” to track her device to a warehouse near Heathrow Airport. Arriving there on Christmas Eve, officers found boxes bound for Hong Kong. They were labeled as batteries but contained almost 1,000 stolen iPhones. [...]

The police are now using that information to map where stolen phones are transported by street thieves. After the Heathrow seizure, a team of specialist investigators who normally deal with firearms and drug smuggling was assigned to the case. They identified further shipments and used forensics to identify two men in their 30s who are suspected of being ringleaders of a group that sent up to 40,000 stolen phones to China.

When the men were arrested on Sept. 23, the car they were traveling in contained several phones, some wrapped in aluminum foil in an attempt to prevent them from transmitting tracking signals. At one point, the police said at a news conference, they observed the men buying almost 1.5 miles’ worth of foil in Costco.

There’s shopping in bulk at Costco, and then there’s shopping in bulk.

Update: I forgot to apply one of the core tenets of Brian Kernighan’s wonderful book Millions, Billions, Zillions ($19 in hardcover from Amazon; BookShop.org link to indie booksellers): always do some back-of-the-envelope double-checking of the math in news stories. 1.5 miles of aluminum (or even aluminium) foil from Costco is just 12 rolls at 200 meters each. I wouldn’t blink my eyes at someone with a dozen rolls of foil in the cart at Costco.

Apple and NBCUniversal Introduce the Apple TV and Peacock Bundle ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple and NBCUniversal today announced the launch of the Apple TV and Peacock Bundle, available beginning October 20. The first-of-its-kind bundle offers the services’ complementary array of award-winning originals, marquee live events and sports, beloved franchises, and blockbuster movies, including Ted Lasso, Severance, The Paper, The Traitors, How to Train Your Dragon, the NBA (tipping off October 21 on Peacock), F1 The Movie (coming later this year), and much more, all through one convenient monthly subscription.

Customers in the U.S. can save over 30 percent by subscribing to the Apple TV and Peacock Premium bundle for $14.99 per month, or Apple TV and Peacock Premium Plus for $19.99 per month, through either app or website. Apple One subscribers on the Family and Premier plans can subscribe to Peacock Premium Plus and receive a 35 percent discount — the first benefit of its kind for Apple’s all-in-one subscription bundle.

Counterpoint Research Claims iPhone 17 Sales Are Up Year-Over-Year in the U.S. and China ★

CNBC:

Apple shares rose 4% on Monday as a new report showed iPhone 17 sales off to a strong start in the U.S. and China.

The iPhone 17 series, which dropped in September, has outsold the iPhone 16 series by 14% in the U.S. and China within its first 10 days of availability, according to data from Counterpoint Research.

Just because a research firm claims iPhone 17 sales are up 14 percent doesn’t mean they are up 14 percent. These are estimates, not hard numbers from Apple — and Apple doesn’t share actual sales numbers with anyone. Some headlines get this right, but most don’t.

David Hockney’s Xerox Prints ★

Erin-Atlanta Argun:

While Hockney is perhaps best known for his larger-than-life swimming pool paintings, bold coloured acrylics are certainly not his only forte. Contrary to the old saying, Hockney is a jack of all trades and a master of all he has worked with: from paint to iPads. In the late 1980s, his fascination with technology and new ways of creating art led him to the Xerox photocopying machine. The copy machine offered Hockney his speediest technique of printing yet, allowing the artist to build layers, textures and colours like never before. However, it was not only a swift and spontaneous way for Hockney to produce his prints. The tech-savvy artist said that he had a more “philosophical” interest in the Xerox machine as a new iteration of the camera.

My post last week arguing that AI is a legitimate tool to create art has, as I expected, generated polarized feedback. One argument several readers have made is that AI generates nothing but plagiarism, copyright infringement, and slop. That’s just not true. If a painter as renowned as David Hockney can use a literal photocopier as an artistic tool, AI can be one too.

Photos From Saturday’s ‘No Kings’ Protests Across the U.S. ★

Picking up steam, these protests are.

Major AWS Outage ★

Jess Weatherbed, The Verge:

A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage took down multiple online services for around four hours this morning, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, and more.

As of 6:35AM ET, the AWS status checker is reporting that “most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now,” and some of the impacted platforms, including Fortnite, Epic Games Store, and Perplexity have announced that they are fully recovered and back online.

However, as of 9:50AM ET, Amazon says that multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region are still “impacted” by operational issues, and that it is working towards a full resolution. The AWS dashboard first reported issues affecting the US-EAST-1 Region at 3:11AM ET, with global services in other regions also taken offline. The cause of the outage hasn’t been confirmed, and it’s unclear when regular service will be fully restored.

I bet it was this AWS outage that explains why I couldn’t sign in to my NYT account to play Wordle this morning. (Got it in 4 today.)

Update: Amazon claims the issues were resolved at the end of the day. I still couldn’t order food for delivery from a few local restaurants, including any that depended on Doordash or Toast, at 7pm ET though.

Sunday, 19 October 2025

Mux: Video API for Developers ★

My thanks to Mux for sponsoring last week at DF. Modern video should be simple to ship and scale. Mux makes it easy to build live and on-demand video into anything from websites to platforms to AI workflows.

Upload a video, get back a playback URL. No transcoding headaches. No CDN setup. Go further with the building blocks of your video: thumbnails, transcripts, and storyboards. Use them to create exactly what you want.

Future-proof your video stack with infrastructure trusted by Patreon, Substack, and Synthesia. Get started free, no credit card required. Use the code FIREBALL for an extra $50 usage credit, when you need it.

Friday, 17 October 2025

The Base M5 MacBook Pro vs. the M4 MacBook Air ★

A few readers took exception to this bit from my post Wednesday regarding the new M5 MacBook Pro:

The base 14-inch model, with the no-adjective M-series chip, is for people who probably would be better served with a MacBook Air but who wrongly believe they “need” a laptop with “Pro” in its name.

E.g., Brian Stucki, who wrote on Bluesky:

A rare disagree with @gruber.foo here. I’m a cognizant MacBook Pro no-adjective user because the CPU/GPU is more than enough for me. I buy over Air for

• XDR display
• Battery life
• much better speakers
• SD/HDMI ports

I’m glad to have the option without an adjective markup.

The main link on this post is to Apple’s ever-excellent Compare page for MacBooks, comparing the $1,000 M4 MacBook Air to the new $1,600 M5 MacBook Pro and, because there’s a third slot, the $2,000 M4 MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro chip. Stucki’s short list nails the actual advantages of the base MacBook Pro compared to the MacBook Air: much better display (1,000 nits vs. 500 nits, with the MBP supporting up to 1,600 nits for HDR content), better speakers, longer battery life, and SD/HDMI ports. Unmentioned by Stucki is that only the MacBook Pro offers the option for a nano-texture matte display for $150.

In my defense, I did say “probably” in my post. My understanding is that the base MacBook Pro is a huge seller for Apple. So of course some very well-informed users are buying them for good reasons. But I really do think an awful lot of base MacBook Pro buyers are spending an extra $600 and carrying 0.7 pounds of extra weight for features they don’t actually notice or care about. They just think they need a “pro” laptop, and underestimate just how incredibly capable MacBook Airs are.

United States Mint to Release Commemorative $1 Steve Jobs Coin ★

I’m not really into commemorative coins, and I have to say I suspect Steve Jobs wasn’t either, but it’s a nice little recognition. No mention of it from the Mint, but the $1 value of the coin is the same as the salary Jobs drew from Apple.

Matthew Belloni Interviews Eddy Cue on ‘The Town’ ★

Speaking of Eddy Cue, he was the guest on Matthew Belloni’s excellent podcast, The Town, this week. (Overcast link.) Just a great interview in general. Cue doesn’t do many interviews but he’s my favorite Apple executive to hear speak, because he’s the least rehearsed and most straightforward. If he doesn’t want to answer a question (Belloni tried, mightily, to press him on subscriber and viewership numbers), Cue just says he’s not going to answer that question, rather than dance around it with a non-answer answer.

My two big takeaways:

• Everyone in Hollywood is spooked about what Apple’s intentions “really are” regarding original movies and series. They’re worried it’s some sort of play to polish Apple’s brand, and that Apple is going to get bored or tired of losing money, and pick up stakes and leave the game. Cue emphasized that the answer is simple: Apple thinks it’s a great business to be in (and he also made the point that Apple’s brand needed no polishing) and they’re in this business for that reason, and for the long haul.

• Apple is serious about sports rights, but they don’t want to dabble. They want to own the rights to entire sports. Friday Night Baseball was, effectively, a learning experiment. Apple TV’s MLS deal — and the F1 US deal announced today — are the sort of deals Apple wants. (That’s going to make it hard for Apple to get involved with the NFL, because the NFL strategically wants to spread its games across all the major TV networks and streaming services.) Cue is a huge sports fan (as is Tim Cook), and Apple wants to deliver sports on Apple TV that cater to fans.

Apple Is the Exclusive New Broadcast Partner for Formula 1 in the U.S. ★

Blockbuster sports streaming news from Apple Newsroom:

Apple and Formula 1 today announced a five-year partnership that will bring all F1 races exclusively to Apple TV in the United States beginning next year. [...]

Apple TV will deliver comprehensive coverage of Formula 1, with all practice, qualifying, Sprint sessions, and Grands Prix available to Apple TV subscribers. Select races and all practice sessions will also be available for free in the Apple TV app throughout the course of the season. In addition to broadcasting Formula 1 on Apple TV, Apple will amplify the sport across Apple News, Apple Maps, Apple Music, and Apple Fitness+. Apple Sports — the free app for iPhone — will feature live updates for every qualifying, Sprint, and race for each Grand Prix across the season, with real-time leaderboards, season driver and constructor standings, Live Activities to follow on the Lock Screen, and a designated widget for the iPhone Home Screen.

F1 TV Premium, F1’s own premier content offering, will continue to be available in the U.S. via an Apple TV subscription only and will be free for those who subscribe.

If I’m reading this right, all you need to get access to everything F1-related is an Apple TV subscription (the service formerly known as TV+) and to be in the US. This even includes F1 TV Premium — normally $130/year — which Jason Snell wrote about in a piece I linked to earlier this week.

Basically, this sounds like the sort of sports broadcasting deal that Eddy Cue has been talking about as Apple’s goal for years — the rights to the entire sport, free of charge if you’re an Apple TV subscriber.

Thursday, 16 October 2025

M5 MacBook Pro Does Not Include a Charger in the Box in Europe ★

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 chip does not include a charger in the box in European countries, including the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, and others, according to Apple’s online store. In the U.S. and all other countries outside of Europe, the new MacBook Pro comes with Apple’s 70W USB-C Power Adapter, but European customers miss out.

Apple has gradually stopped including chargers with many products over the years — a decision it has attributed to its environmental goals.

In this case, an Apple spokesperson told French website Numerama’s Nicolas Lellouche that the decision to not include a charger with this particular MacBook Pro was made in anticipation of a European regulation that will require Apple to provide customers with the option to purchase certain devices without a charger in the box, starting in April.

I’m not sure why there’s no power adapter in the box in the UK (I double-checked). The cited regulation is for the EU, and the UK, rather famously, left the EU in 2020.

But, still, amazing stuff continues to happen in Europe.

Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal: ‘A Cartoonist’s Review of AI Art’ ★

Good and thoughtful graphic essay by Matthew Inman, expressing why he dislikes AI-generated art. It’s been widely linked to, largely approvingly. I fundamentally disagree with the premise. Near the start, Inman writes:

When I consume AI art, it also evokes a feeling. Good, bad, neutral — whatever.

Until I find out that it’s AI art.

Then I feel deflated, grossed out, and maybe a little bit bored. This feeling isn’t a choice.

I think it very much is a choice. If your opinion about a work of art changes after you find out which tools were used to make it, or who the artist is or what they’ve done, you’re no longer judging the art. You’re making a choice not to form your opinion based on the work itself, but rather on something else. If you refuse to watch Woody Allen movies because of his personal life, that’s a choice, but you’re choosing not to watch some of the best movies that have ever been made.

Stanley Kubrick said, “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.” If an image, a song, a poem, or video evokes affection in your heart, and then that affection dissipates when you learn what tools were used to create it, that’s not a test of the work of art itself. To me it’s no different than losing affection for a movie only upon learning that special effects were created digitally, not practically. Or whether a movie — or a photograph — was shot using a digital camera or on film. Or whether a novel was written using a computer or with pen and paper.

I think most “AI art” today completely sucks. But not because it was made using AI generation tools. It just sucks period. Good art is being made with AI tools, though, and more — much more — is coming.

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Wednesday, 15 October 2025

TiVo Stops Selling DVRs ★

Luke Bouma, writing for Cord Cutters:

In a seismic shift for the television industry, TiVo Corporation has quietly pulled the plug on its storied digital video recorder line, effectively ending an era that redefined how consumers interacted with broadcast content. As of early October 2025, the company’s official website has scrubbed all references to its hardware DVR products, including the once-revered TiVo Edge models designed for cable subscribers and over-the-air antenna users. Visitors searching for these devices now encounter a streamlined catalog that omits any mention of physical recording hardware, signaling a complete withdrawal from the retail DVR market.

This move culminates decades of gradual decline for TiVo’s hardware ambitions, which peaked in the early 2000s when the brand became synonymous with effortless time-shifting of television programming. Launched in 1999, TiVo’s DVRs introduced features like one-touch recording, commercial skipping, and intuitive search capabilities that made traditional TV schedules feel obsolete. At its zenith, the company boasted millions of subscribers, forcing cable providers and networks to adapt to empowered viewers who could pause live broadcasts or binge-watch at will. The TiVo Edge, introduced in 2021 as a hybrid device supporting both cable cards and streaming, represented the final evolution of this hardware legacy, blending OTA tuners with 4K support and expanded storage options. Yet, even as it garnered praise for superior interface design and reliability, sales dwindled amid the cord-cutting revolution.

The writing has been on the wall for years. We’ve been a TiVo house for 25 years, but their hardware has gotten worse over the years. I forget what our second-to-last TiVo model was, but it died in 2021, and we bought a TiVo Edge. The Edge was often unreliable, and sometimes needed weekly reboots to keep working. (System software updates eventually fixed that.) But the hardware failed this summer. We’d only had it four years.

And, the Edge system software UI was a disaster, and a huge regression from the old TiVo interface. Almost everything was worse in the new “modern” TiVo interface from the old one: navigating shows you’d already recorded, the live-right-now TV guide, the interface for setting up a show to record — all of that went from really good and intuitive to clunky and confusing and slow. The one and only thing our TiVo Edge remained excellent at was playback. Fast-forwarding, rewinding, pausing — nothing else compares to TiVo for that. Even Apple’s own TV app on an Apple TV box doesn’t fast-forward or rewind with anything close to the precision and low latency TiVo’s devices have always offered. My first TiVo from 25 years ago had better fast-forward and rewind than anything on Apple TV (let alone other, lesser streaming boxes) today.

But the overall TiVo experience has been so bad — and getting worse — for so long that I’m not sad at all that they’re getting out of the game. TiVo’s one job was to provide a best-of-breed experience and they lost the plot on that a decade ago. Fuck ’em.

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