Linked List: October 2025

Friday, 31 October 2025

Special guest Brian Mueller, developer of Carrot Weather, joins the show to commemorate the 10th anniversary of his utterly ridiculous but totally serious weather app.

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Tim Bray on Grokipedia ★

Tim Bray:

Last night I had a very strange experience: About two thirds of the way through reading a Web page about myself, Tim Bray, I succumbed to boredom and killed the tab. Thus my introduction to Grokipedia. Here are early impressions.

My Grokipedia entry has over seven thousand words, compared to a mere 1,300 in my Wikipedia article. It’s pretty clear how it was generated; an LLM, trained on who-knows-what but definitely including that Wikipedia article and this blog, was told to go nuts.

Putting aside the political slant of Grokipedia, a 1,300-word article being better than a 7,000-word one exemplifies the current shortcomings of LLMs as creative engines (as opposed to serving as mere tools in the arsenal of human creators).

The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously quipped: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” No encyclopedia in history has been written with less time or effort than Musk’s LLM-generated vanity project. Verbosity is not the worst of Grokipedia’s deficiencies, but it’s one of them. The more its entries stray from simply regurgitating the equivalent entry in Wikipedia, the more they suffer from verbal diarrhea.

(My own Grokipedia entry is just a clone of my Wikipedia entry, with a few mistakes added, including one in the first sentence regarding the creation of Markdown.)

‘Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human’ ★

Jason Koebler, writing at 404 Media:

Wednesday, as part of his ongoing war against Wikipedia because he does not like his page, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, a fully AI-generated “encyclopedia” that serves no one and nothing other than the ego of the world’s richest man. As others have already pointed out, Grokipedia seeks to be a right wing, anti-woke Wikipedia competitor. But to even call it a Wikipedia competitor is to give the half-assed project too much credit. It is not a Wikipedia “competitor” at all. It is a fully robotic, heartless regurgitation machine that cynically and indiscriminately sucks up the work of humanity to serve the interests, protect the ego, amplify the viewpoints, and further enrich the world’s wealthiest man. It is a totem of what Wikipedia could and would become if you were to strip all the humans out and hand it over to a robot; in that sense, Grokipedia is a useful warning because of the constant pressure and attacks by AI slop purveyors to push AI-generated content into Wikipedia. And it is only getting attention, of course, because Elon Musk does represent an actual threat to Wikipedia through his political power, wealth, and obsession with the website, as well as the fact that he owns a huge social media platform.

In season 10 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David gets into an argument with Mocha Joe, the owner of an eponymous coffee shop. David leases the space next door and opens Latte Larry’s, a copycat “spite store” cafe. Grokipedia reminds me of this, except that Larry David is genuinely funny and (in real life, as opposed to his Curb alter ego) at least somewhat self-aware.

Denmark Backs Away From ‘Chat Control’ That Would Have Rendered E2EE Illegal in the E.U. ★

Claudie Moreau, reporting for Euractiv:

Earlier in their presidency, Denmark had revived a controversial provision in the draft law that would mean online platforms — such as messaging apps — could be served with mandatory CSAM detection orders, including services protected by end-to-end encryption. However opposition from several other EU countries derailed any agreement in the Council.

Today, Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard told local press that the Council presidency would move away from mandatory detection orders — and instead support CSAM detections remaining voluntary.

Sanity prevails.

What’s New in Shortcuts for the Apple OS 26 Releases ★

Apple Support:

This update includes enhancements to the Shortcuts app across all platforms, including new intelligent actions and an improved editing experience. Shortcuts on macOS now supports personal automations that can be triggered based on events such as time of day or when you take actions like saving a file to a folder, as well as new integrations with Control Center and Spotlight.

Via Matthew Cassinelli.

Loss of Trust in U.S. Prompts International Criminal Court to Ditch Microsoft 365 for Open Source Alternative ★

TechRadar, summarizing this German-language report from Handelsblatt:

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is looking to replace its internal work environments to move away from US-made software in fear of retaliation from the US administration.

The Microsoft software currently used in the Hague-based ICC is likely to be replaced with Open Desk, a German collaboration software alternative which is open source, meaning developers have chosen to release the source code — opening it up to scrutiny and often meaning that bugs and vulnerabilities are picked up quickly by the community. [...]

Early in 2025, Chief Prosecutor for the ICC Kamrin Khan, after being hit with sanctions from the Trump administration, was disconnected from his email service. This action was thought to be from Microsoft supporting US sanctions — although the firm denied this, with a spokesperson stating; “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”

This sparked fears that US tech firms could flip a ‘kill switch’ and cut digital services on orders of Trump — outlining the need to become less dependent on US technology, with firms like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon dominating Europe’s digital services and cloud markets.

This is what makes US technology firms’ support for Trump so confounding. It’s easy to see the short-term benefits (e.g. tariff exemptions), but just as easy to see the long-term reputational harm. The US was long seen as the most trustworthy powerful nation in the world. Now it’s one of the least trustworthy. Why would companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon tie their own reputations to Trump’s? Trump’s reign of abject corruption, ignorance, and personality-driven retribution — and these companies’ support for all of it — will be remembered long after Trump himself is gone.

I’m not calling on these companies to outright oppose the Trump administration. But there’s a lot of space between outright opposition and helping to fund Trump’s illegal vanity ballroom on the White House grounds.

Tim Cook Says Next-Gen Siri Still on Pace for ‘Next Year’, Along With Additional AI Partners ★

Kif Leswing at CNBC interviewed Tim Cook ahead of yesterday’s Apple earnings report:

Cook said that the company still plans to release an updated version of Siri next year, and said that there were more forthcoming partnerships like the company’s agreement to integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence.

“Our intention is to integrate with more people over time,” Cook said.

And from Cook’s prepared remarks at the start of yesterday’s analyst call:

“We’re also excited for a more personalized Siri. We’re making good progress on it, and as we’ve shared, we expect to release it next year.”

No news here, but worth noting that Cook claims both the next-gen “more personalized” Siri and deals with AI partners other than OpenAI are still on track. But Craig Federighi hinted at adding Google Gemini as an option alongside ChatGPT for Siri all the way back at WWDC 2024, within a few hours of Apple Intelligence being announced. Still nothing. 16 months later and ChatGPT remains the one and only Apple Intelligence partner.

Kennedy Center Ticket Sales Have Plummeted Since Trump Takeover ★

Travis M. Andrews, Jeremy B. Merrill, and Shelly Tan, reporting for The Washington Post (News+ link:)

“We had spent way too much on programming that doesn’t bring in any revenue,” Richard Grenell, a Trump ally and former ambassador to Germany, told the Washington Reporter, a conservative media outlet, in late March. According to Grenell, the center hadn’t been making money. It was too woke and niche. The new team was, in Trump’s words, going to make it “hot” again.

Nearly nine months after Trump became chair of the center and more than a month into its main season, ticket sales for the Kennedy Center’s three largest performance venues are the worst they’ve been in years, according to a Washington Post analysis of ticketing data from dozens of recent shows as well as past seasons. Tens of thousands of seats have been left empty.

Since early September, 43 percent of tickets remained unsold for the typical production. That means that, at most, 57 percent of tickets were sold for the typical production — and some tickets may have been “comps,” which are given away, often to staff members or the press. That compares with 93 percent sold or comped in fall 2024 and 80 percent in fall 2023.

Crickets chirping.

October Is Over and, Shockingly, the Gold Trump Phone Still Hasn’t Shipped ★

Speaking of vaporware, Dominic Preston at The Verge on the T1 Trump phone, which was announced back in June:

In fairness, for months now, the store page has only promised an arrival “later this year,” a change made at the same time Trump Mobile stopped claiming the T1 would be made in America. That gives the company two more months to release it and still pretend it’s on time.

Trump Mobile never responded to my request last month for an update on the phone’s release date, and it hasn’t replied to my latest email either. People of lesser faith might worry that this phone is no more than vaporware, but I refuse to give up. Place your bets now on whether I’ll be back here in another month’s time, still asking: where is the Trump phone?

Joanna Stern on the 1X Neo, a Humanoid ‘Robot’ Housekeeper That Is Actually Remote-Controlled by Humans ★

Joanna Stern, writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

It was wild to watch. Sure, Neo nearly toppled over while closing the dishwasher, took two minutes to fold the shirt and twisted its arm attempting to dance the Macarena. But shhh. Remember the rule. Oh, did I mention Neo had a human puppet master, controlling it with a VR headset?

Neo’s creator, 1X Technologies, is making the Rosie-the-Robot dream: some of the first humanoid housekeepers. Starting Tuesday, you can apply to its early adopter program and preorder one for $20,000, with delivery expected in 2026. The company will also offer a $499 monthly rental plan with a six-month minimum commitment.

Just one hidden cost: your privacy. For now, you’ll need to be cool with a company representative potentially peering through the robot’s camera eyes to get chores done. There are guardrails, including controls over when and what the operator can do.

As usual, Stern made a delightful short film to accompany her article, which is also available on YouTube.

The argument from CEO Bernt Børnich is that they’re using the videos from the current state of Neo, where its actions are entirely remote-controlled by employees of 1X Technologies, to train its autonomy. I call bullshit. This looks to me like nothing but a scam. It’s not autonomous at all, I don’t believe this company is going to achieve any practical degree of autonomy with this product, and even while it’s remote-controlled by human operators, it’s slow and clumsy.

See also: Marques Brownlee, who smells vaporware as clearly as I do: “There seems to be a bit of a lost art in waiting for a tech product to be actually finished before announcing and unveiling it.”

Thursday, 30 October 2025

Jason Snell on Apple’s Quarterly Results ★

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

In the post-results call with financial analysts, Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America asked Cook for a little more detail about Apple’s search revenue, given its lucrative deal with Google, and whether that revenue growth might decelerate if Google’s search traffic were to be impacted by the growth of AI. Cook’s response was, if I do say so myself, an all-timer for these calls:

Cook: This is Tim. The advertising category, which is a combination of third-party and first-party, did set a record during the quarter.

Mohan: Okay, and sorry, just to be clear, both Apple’s own internal advertising and within the licensing individually set records?

Cook: I actually I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that the combination of the two set a record. We don’t divulge — I’m dodging the question intentionally because we don’t split it at that level.

Look, these calls are almost entirely Apple execs dodging the questions of fiscal analysts. At least Tim Cook admitted it this time. You want to know how much Google is paying us and if that’s growing or shrinking? Well, I’m not gonna tell you!

If Apple’s quarterly analyst calls were a podcast, “Dodging the Question Intentionally” would be a great episode title for this one.

Microsoft Earnings Suggest OpenAI Lost $11.5 Billion Last Quarter ★

Matt Rosoff, writing for The Register:

If Microsoft owns 27 percent of OpenAI, it stands to reason under equity accounting that it bears 27 percent of OpenAI’s losses. Microsoft’s admission that it shaved $3.1 billion off its net income to account for its share of OpenAI losses therefore suggests OpenAI lost about $11.5 billion during the quarter. Microsoft declined to comment beyond confirming that the $3.1 billion loss “this year” referred to Microsoft’s current fiscal year, which started July 1, not the calendar year. So that’s a quarterly loss, not a nine-month loss.

That’s a humongous number for OpenAI given it reportedly generated only $4.3 billion in revenue for the first half of the year, but a sum that won’t hurt Big Daddy Redmond too much given it earned $27.7 billion in net income in the last quarter alone.

A pre-IPO startup is a different animal from an established publicly-held corporation, but an $11.5 billion quarterly loss is quite different from the $20–30-ish billion quarterly profits booked by the big six.

Apple Reports Strong Q4 2025 Results ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2025 fourth quarter ended September 27, 2025. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $102.5 billion, up 8 percent year over year. Diluted earnings per share was $1.85, up 13 percent year over year on an adjusted basis.

“Today, Apple is very proud to report a September quarter revenue record of $102.5 billion, including a September quarter revenue record for iPhone and an all-time revenue record for Services,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.

Looking at Apple’s Consolidated Statement (PDF), the numbers look great across the board year-over-year: iPhone up 6%, Mac up 13%, iPad even, Wearables/Home even, and Services up 15%. Services now generates more revenue ($28.8 billion) than Mac, iPad, and Wearables/Home combined ($24.7 billion).

Six Colors, as usual, has Apple’s quarter illustrated in charts.

Here’s a comparison of net income (profit) from Apple’s peers for their most recent quarters:

Google (a.k.a. Alphabet): $35B (!)
Microsoft: $27.7B
Apple: $27.5B
Nvidia: $26.4B
Amazon: $21.5B
Meta: $2.7B, but would have been $18.6B if not for a one-time income tax charge of nearly $16B.

CarPlay Seems Essential for Rental Fleets ★

Joe Rosensteel:

I have no plan to purchase a GM vehicle, but I do rent cars. GM makes up a sizable portion of rental car fleets. At some point in the future those cars will no longer support CarPlay. I’m not going to sign up for a GM federated ID that stores my login credentials in their cloud. I’m not going to individually sign into apps in the car like Google Maps with my Google ID that I use for way more than just navigation. There’s no chain of trust with me and this random car from GM. No convenience that is achieved in exchange for increased exposure risk for storing my sensitive data in a car I don’t own.

If GM goes through with this abandonment of CarPlay, I don’t see how they’ll continue to sell any vehicles to rental agencies. I would never rent a car without CarPlay, and I would never consider signing up for a GM cloud service just to drive a rental car. Complete dealbreakers.

‘Hi, It’s Me, Wikipedia, and I Am Ready for Your Apology’ ★

Tom Ellison, at McSweeney’s:

How are my competitors doing, the ones you all insisted students use instead of me? That’s right, they were supposed to go to the American Journal of Social Sciences, Powered by OpenAI. Or museums, like the Smithsonian’s Charlie Kirk Shrine to American Greatness. I guess they can still count on credible journalism, once they get past the paywall for Palantir Presents: The Washington Post, so they read the Pulitzer-Bezos Prize–winning work of coeditors-in-chief Bari Weiss and Grok.

Wednesday, 29 October 2025

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Launches With AI-Cloned Pages From Wikipedia ★

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

However, despite Elon Musk promising that Grokipedia would be a “massive improvement” over Wikipedia, some articles appear to be cribbing information from Wikipedia. At the bottom of the page for the MacBook Air, for example, you can see this message: “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.” In some cases, the cribbing goes farther than a rewrite: I’ve also seen that message on pages for the PlayStation 5 and the Lincoln Mark VIII, and both of those pages are almost identical — word-for-word, line-for-line — to their Wikipedia counterparts.

“Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” Lauren Dickinson, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia tells The Verge. You can read Dickinson’s full statement in full at the end of this article.

At launch, Grokipedia is to Wikipedia as a chewed piece of gum is to a fresh piece of gum still in its wrapper. And imagine that the gum was chewed by someone with a dipping tobacco habit.

Local Note: WMMR’s Pierre Robert Found Dead at 70 ★

Nick Vadala, reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Longtime WMMR-FM host Pierre Robert was found dead in his home Wednesday. He was 70.

Robert’s surname, I must point out, rhymes with Pierre (and with Colbert).

A native of Northern California, Robert joined WMMR as an on-air host in 1981. He arrived in the city after his previous station, San Francisco’s KSAN, switched to an Urban Cowboy format, prompting him to make the cross-country drive to Philadelphia in a Volkswagen van. “I came because of a relationship,” he told The Inquirer last year. “I was in love. The love part didn’t work out, but the job part did.”

As a newly minted Philadelphian, Robert began working at a local health food store as he interviewed for radio jobs around town, but found little luck initially. One day, while dining at Astral Plane, a long-closed restaurant formerly on Lombard Street, he introduced himself to WMMR program director Joe Bonnadonna and announcer Charlie Kendall, and despite getting on well with the pair, he learned there were no openings at the station.

But weeks later, he received a letter from Bonnadonna, and interviewed for a job at the station during a concert from Philly rock band The Hooters at the Chestnut Cabaret. He soon started working in the station’s music library and office making $3.50 an hour, and later began appearing on the air.

There’s no more Philadelphia a Philadelphia origin story than a radio host interviewing for his job during a Hooters concert at the Chestnut Cabaret — and then going on to stay at the same station for 44 years. Impossible for me to overstate just how much Robert’s voice was the voice of music for me and my entire friend group growing up and even through college. You tuned the dial to 93.3 FM and left it there.

My favorite bit of his was an obscure one, a character named Reginald the Butler. Robert always had Reginald on during the holidays, while spinning Christmas rock songs. But here’s a classic segment from 1988 with Robert and Reginald interviewing David Lee Roth, who was then on a solo tour and about to play the Spectrum.

Rest in peace, my fellow citizen.

PCalc 4.11.1 for Mac ★

James Thomson:

I’ve released a small PCalc 4.11.1 update that’s out now for the Mac.

There was a bug with the theme getting reset, which I could have fixed in five minutes, but I ended up doing what I should have done over three decades ago, and added a dedicated section to the settings that puts all the visual customisation in one place.

No more having to search for all this stuff in a submenu somewhere!

After the glum news this week regarding Nisus Writer, it feels good to link to a similarly-aged Mac app that’s still thriving. If you’ve never tried PCalc, you’re missing out.

Toyota BEVs Gain Support for Apple Maps EV Routing ★

Tim Hardwick, writing for MacRumors:

The Apple Maps EV Routing option will allow Toyota BEV users to plan travel routes that include stops for charging. Without it, drivers would have had to exit out of CarPlay in order to create a route that included charging stops.

Apple Maps’ EV Routing feature uses real-time data from the vehicle to guide drivers to their destinations more efficiently, automatically suggesting charging stops when needed. The system takes into account elevation changes and other driving conditions to decide when a recharge is necessary. If the vehicle’s battery level becomes too low, Apple Maps will automatically direct the driver to the nearest compatible charging station.

Meanwhile GM CEO Mary Barra is spending her lunch hour eating another jar of paste.

Samsung Shows Off Tri-Fold Smartphone at APEC Forum in Korea ★

The Onion, in February 2004: “Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades”.

Trump Is Deeply Unpopular ★

The Economist:

Presidents’ popularity tends to wane. In his second term Donald Trump’s has fallen faster than that of his recent predecessors.

Since modern polling began most presidents have started their terms with positive net approval ratings (the share of voters who approve of their job performance minus the share who disapprove). Both of Mr Trump’s terms began with public opinion split nearly evenly. In both cases his net approval rating quickly turned negative. Now it is -18, the lowest it has been since his inauguration — and three percentage-points lower than at any point in his first term.

State-by-state, Trump is only above water in nine states: Idaho, Wyoming, West Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, Utah, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama.

Reuters, with its own poll:

Donald Trump’s presidential approval rating fell in recent days, tying the lowest level of his term, as more Americans frowned on his handling of the cost of living, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.

The three-day poll, which concluded on Sunday, showed 40% of Americans approve of the Republican leader’s job performance, compared to 42% in an October 15-20 Reuters/Ipsos poll. Trump’s popularity has been within a percentage point or two of its current level in every Reuters/Ipsos poll since mid-May. The share of people who say they disapprove of his performance has grown, from 52% in a May 16-18 poll to 57% in the latest survey.

So the Economist has him at -18, Reuters at -17.

Tuesday, 28 October 2025

OpenAI Acquires Sky, a Still-in-Beta System-Wide AI Automation Tool for the Mac ★

Other Mac-related news from OpenAI last week:

Sky is a powerful natural language interface for the Mac. With Sky, AI works alongside you, whether you’re writing, planning, coding, or managing your day. Sky understands what’s on your screen and can take action using your apps.

We will bring Sky’s deep macOS integration and product craft into ChatGPT, and all members of the team will join OpenAI.

Two of the founders of Software Applications Incorporated, the company behind Sky, are Ari Weinstein and Conrad Kramer, who a decade ago co-created Workflow, which Apple acquired in 2017 and turned into Shortcuts.

Federico Viticci got an advanced look at Sky and wrote a glowing preview back in May.

Nisus Writer: Schrödinger’s Word Processor ★

Joe Kissell, writing at TidBITS:

For more than a year, we’ve heard scattered complaints: problems with Nisus Software’s website, particularly the user discussion forum; slow or absent responses to support requests; assorted bugs; and other issues. But earlier this week, on 22 October 2025, the reports changed to: “Did you know the Nisus website is completely down, and that Nisus Writer is no longer in the Mac App Store? Does this mean Nisus is out of business?”

On the one hand: The site is back online as I write this. The app still works. I’m writing the first draft of this article in Nisus Writer Pro on a Mac running macOS 26 Tahoe, and it’s fine. You can still download it and buy a license. At least one person is actively involved in the company, to some extent. It’s (mostly) alive!

On the other hand: All available evidence suggests that development and support for Nisus Writer have ceased, and barring some new information, its future is doubtful. It’s (mostly) dead!

I’m going to tell you what I know. (Well, most of what I know.) I’m also going to speculate a bit, because despite my best efforts, I have been unable to obtain verifiable information about certain topics, though I have a pretty good idea of what’s likely the case.

Seems like an ignominious demise for a once-great app. Nisus Writer has been an acclaimed Mac-only (and Mac-assed) word processor since 1989. I never got into it, but I could always see the appeal. Nisus had a macro language for automation and regex-style advanced search and replace. But when I wanted features like those, I wanted them in a plain text editor, not a word processor, so I got into BBEdit.

Monday, 27 October 2025

App Store IDs Hint at Possible iPad Versions of Pixelmator Pro, Compressor, Motion, and MainStage ★

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple might be preparing iPad apps for Pixelmator Pro, Compressor, Motion, and MainStage, according to new App Store IDs uncovered by MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris. All four of the apps are currently available on the Mac only. A quick overview of each app:

Pixelmator Pro: Professional image editing app acquired by Apple earlier this year

Compressor: Final Cut Pro companion app for compressing audio and video files

Motion: Final Cut Pro companion app for creating 2D/3D titles, transitions, and effects

MainStage: Logic Pro companion app for live performances

There is already a less-capable Pixelmator app available for the iPad and iPhone.

Interesting though that — just like Final Cut and Logic — these new pro apps are reportedly iPad-only, with no support for iPhone.

Also: still no Xcode, even for iPad.

Gurman Reports That Apple Is Preparing to Sell Ads in Maps Starting in 2026 ★

Mark Gurman, in his weekly paywalled Power On column for Bloomberg:

I reported a few years ago that Apple was working to bring more advertising to iOS. Well, now that effort is gaining traction — with a plan to start the ads as early as next year. The company is focusing on Apple Maps, which will allow restaurants and other businesses to pay to have their details featured more prominently within the app’s searches.

The concept is quite similar to Search Ads inside of the App Store, where developers can pay for their software to appear in a promoted slot based on user queries. I’m told the Maps version will have a better interface than what Google and other companies offer inside of mapping services. The Apple approach also will leverage AI to ensure that results are relevant and useful.

The big risk Apple faces here is a potential consumer backlash.

I don’t love the ads in the App Store, but I don’t hate them. They’re restrained, and clearly labeled. I do, however, despise the ads in Apple News. They’re low-quality, distracting, highly repetitive, and appear far too frequently within articles.

Joe Rosensteel: ‘Creative Neglect: What About the Apps in Apple?’ ★

Joe Rosensteel, writing at Six Colors, regarding the demise of Apple’s Clips app:

It’s not that it was completely inept, but it was an aimless showcase to demonstrate what Apple could do. It withered over the course of eight years before it was quietly killed.

At no point did it supplant iMovie for iOS as the fun, easy-breezy video editor, which is also in a similarly stagnant state. The only updates iMovie has received in the past year were onboarding screens for permissions settings.

Why is it that Apple can make what is widely regarded as the best video recording experience on any smartphone, but it can’t make a good video editor for a smartphone? Is it partly because these apps don’t have direct payments, so they can only ever be demos for hardware and services that do earn money?

Rosensteel is concerned about the radio silence from Apple regarding Pixelmator and Photomator, the apps (and team) that Apple acquired a year ago:

Of course, Apple may be assembling its own mirror of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite so that it can charge one bundle price for access to a suite of pro apps, and maybe that’s why pricing for everything is frozen in place, and the iPad Pro apps aren’t in step with the Mac ones.

That’s what I hope: that Apple is somewhere near the cusp of announcing some sort of “pro apps” subscription.

Inside the Math That Detects Cheating on Sports Bets ★

Dian Zhang and Ignacio Calderon, reporting for USA Today:

Even before Terry Rozier dropped out of the 2023 NBA game in which he’s accused of rigging his statistics, computers at an “integrity monitor” firm flagged a flood of bets that did not match a mathematical model of how this game should go. The company, now called IC360, alerted the NBA and sportsbooks about the unusual bets coming in on Rozier’s performance.

The investigation that led to the arrest of the Miami Heat point guard and dozens of others for illegal gambling started with math. It ended Oct. 23 with Rozier charged with manipulating his performance in that 2023 game so that gamblers in the know could win tens of thousands of dollars.

Beep. Boop. Busted.

Federal authorities allege more than $200,000 poured in betting that Rozier would turn in a below-average performance in that game after Rozier told another defendant he would drop out of the game early with an injury. Rozier played 9 minutes, 34 seconds for the Charlotte Hornets in the game against the New Orleans Pelicans before leaving with an injury and finished under his usual totals for points, assists and 3-pointers.

A lot of these stories about cheating on sports betting involve characters who aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. Makes me wonder how many inside-info cheaters are getting away with it, because they’re not doing anything conspicuous like placing very large wagers on very obscure games or prop bets.

Behind the Design: Adobe Premiere on iOS ★

Adobe Design profiles Adobe’s new Premiere app for iOS, and interviews Christopher Azar, group design manager for Adobe Video, regarding the thinking behind the app and its design:

What was the primary goal when you set out to design Premiere on iOS?

Christopher Azar: Our goal was to design a professional-grade product that carried the powerful, precise spirit of Premiere while feeling modern, approachable, and even fun. We call our vision “intuitive precision”: a high-performance, intelligent tool powered by cutting-edge AI that enables creators to work how and where they want — in the field, experimenting, and honing their storytelling craft.

That meant making this editing power available to a broader creative community. Desktop software has traditionally been built for professionals with large budgets. Our goal was not only to make a professional tool easier to use, but to make it available to more people than ever before. I would have wanted to use this app when I was coming up as a creative, so I’m excited we’re providing high-quality software for everyone who wants it — without a big investment in time or money.

It really does seem like a breakthrough app for the platform. An Android version is in the works, Adobe says, but for now, Premiere is an iOS exclusive. Kind of weird that Apple itself makes Final Cut Pro for both the Mac and iPad, but still hasn’t made a serious video editing app for the iPhone.

Sunday, 26 October 2025

The Talk Show: ‘You and Frank Sinatra’ ★

For your weekend listening enjoyment, a new episode of America’s favorite 3-star podcast, with special guest Dan Moren. Topics include Atlas, ChatGPT’s new web browser (or anti-web browser) for the Mac; Apple’s loss in a “landmark” regulatory lawsuit in the UK regarding App Store commission rates; multiple reports of poor sales for the iPhone Air; and Apple’s M5 product announcements: MacBook Pro, iPads Pro, and Vision Pro.

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The Sad State of Macintosh Hardware Back in 2018, at the Tail End of the Intel Era ★

Worth a re-link, following up on my post yesterday linking to Stephen Hackett’s “Boring Is What We Wanted”, here’s Rogue Amoeba co-founder Quentin Carnicelli, writing back in 2018:

At the time of the writing, with the exception of the $5,000 iMac Pro, no Macintosh has been updated at all in the past year. Here are the last updates to the entire line of Macs:

iMac Pro: 182 days ago

iMac: 374 days ago

MacBook: 374 days ago

MacBook Air: 374 days ago

MacBook Pro: 374 days ago

Mac Pro: 436 days ago

Mac Mini: 1,337 days ago

Worse, most of these counts are misleading, with many machines not seeing a true update in quite a bit longer. While the Mac Mini hasn’t seen an update of any kind in almost 4 years (nor, for that matter, a price drop), even that 2014 update was lackluster. [...]

Rather than attempting to wow the world with “innovative” new designs like the failed Mac Pro, Apple could and should simply provide updates and speed bumps to the entire lineup on a much more frequent basis. The much smaller Apple of the mid-2000s managed this with ease. Their current failure to keep the Mac lineup fresh, even as they approach a trillion dollar market cap, is both baffling and frightening to anyone who depends on the platform for their livelihood.

Five years into the Apple Silicon era, and Apple is doing exactly that. The situation has completely reversed. Apple Silicon has been an utter triumph for the Mac platform.

The Scenario Where ChatGPT’s WhatsApp Gateway Was Useful: Airplane Wi-Fi ★

Yours truly on Friday, regarding the news that Meta is going to ban rival AI chatbots from WhatsApp:

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.

A few readers have pointed to one good use case for this gateway: airplane Wi-Fi, particularly on airlines that offer “free” Wi-Fi for messaging apps like Apple Messages (iMessage) and WhatsApp. The ChatGPT app won’t work unless you pay for full Wi-Fi access on a flight, but WhatsApp does, and through January, you can interact with ChatGPT through that loophole. Clever.

Update: Similarly, these WhatsApp bot gateways are also useful in third-world countries with spotty Wi-Fi networking, but where Meta’s apps — including WhatsApp — are zero-rated against cellular network bandwidth caps. India is one prominent example. In some parts of the world, the only reliable networks are cellular, and the only “free Internet” is Meta’s suite of apps and services that are zero-rated on those cell networks.

Saturday, 25 October 2025

‘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 Vercel.

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.

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 and billboards 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.

‘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.

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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.

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.

‘Halo Fund Announces Strategic Secondary Investment in 1Password’ ★

Halo Fund:

Halo Fund, a new $1 billion growth fund founded by Ryan Smith and Ryan Sweeney, today announced a strategic secondary investment in 1Password, a leader in identity security and pioneer of Extended Access Management. Halo Fund is joined in this investment by legendary technology leaders, including Flume Ventures with Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy and former Zscaler Chief Strategy Officer Manoj Apte. This transaction underscores strong demand from innovators and investors to join 1Password’s journey.

Well I’m sure this will halt 1Password’s descent into enterprise/cross-platform shittiness.

Tuesday, 14 October 2025

‘How to Turn Liquid Glass Into a Solid Interface’ ★

Adam Engst, at TidBITS:

Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface design brings transparency and blur effects to all Apple operating systems, but many users find it distracting or difficult to read. Here’s how to control its effects and make your interface more usable. Although the relevant Accessibility settings are quite similar across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, I separate them because they offer different levels of utility in each.

Comprehensive, illustrated overview of the various Accessibility settings (and, on MacOS 26 Tahoe, hidden command-line defaults settings) that let you adjust the transparency and contrast of Liquid Glass across the various Apple OS 26 interfaces. A useful guide for today — and, I bet, a useful look back at the first versions of Liquid Glass for the future.

‘Looking for the Red Flags in Apple’s Formula 1 TV Deal’ ★

Jason Snell, at Six Colors:

The entire point of a streaming-only product is that once you’re off traditional TV, you can go beyond the single stream and provide interactive options. The whole point of streaming TV, especially sports, should be that you can leave the flat video stream behind and build something cool using software.

That is, by the way, what F1 TV Pro is: A sophisticated bit of software that merges track data with multiple cameras to let viewers choose how they want to watch races. It’s absolutely the product that Apple should aspire to build, or co-opt, in this deal.

I understand that Formula 1 owner Liberty Media is reluctant to lose a profit center, but if Apple’s paying them an extra $50 million, isn’t that the proper trade-off? Also, working with Apple in the U.S. could be part of a longer-term tech partnership between F1 and Apple that could extend worldwide.

I don’t really care about Apple obtaining sports streaming rights if all they’re going to do is stream a traditional linear broadcast of the games/events/races. I want to see Apple do the Apple thing and think deeply about what a software-based broadcast can be and offer — and then create it. So, to me, Apple’s Friday Night Baseball has been a wash. It’s a good broadcast (that, rumors suggest, may be coming to an end), but it’s just a good traditional baseball broadcast. It could be on any streaming service. The only Apple-y aspects are the designs and typography of the on-screen graphics and scorebug. I want something like F1 TV Pro, but for baseball — and eventually, for all sports.

Monday, 13 October 2025

Apple Renames ‘Apple TV+’ to ‘Apple TV’ ★

At the bottom of Apple’s press release announcing that F1 The Movie will be available for streaming on December 12:

Apple TV+ is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity. Ahead of its global streaming debut on Apple TV, the film continues to be available for purchase on participating digital platforms, including the Apple TV app, Amazon Prime Video, Fandango at Home and more.

About Apple TV

Apple TV is available on the Apple TV app in over 100 countries and regions, on over 1 billion screens, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Vision Pro, Mac, popular smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, VIZIO, TCL and others, Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles, and at tv.apple.com, for $12.99 per month with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers.

In some ways, I get it. Like, if you’re telling someone how much you enjoy Slow Horses and they ask how to watch it, it’s more natural and conversational to just say “It’s on Apple TV”. That’s what most people say. That’s what I say — and as part of my job, I completely understand the difference between Apple TV the device, Apple TV the (free) app, and Apple TV+ the (paid) streaming service.

But right there in Apple’s own “About Apple TV” description, you see just how overused “Apple TV” now is. You can watch Apple TV in Apple TV on Apple TV — the paid service in the free app on the set-top box. But you can watch any streaming service you want on the box, in that service’s own app. But many of those services are also available in the Apple TV app. And the Apple TV streaming service is also available on just about all other popular set-top hardware platforms. So you don’t need an Apple TV to watch Apple TV. It’s a bit like Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s on First” routine.

Apple Announces the End-of-Life for Clips ★

Apple Support:

The Clips app is no longer being updated, and will no longer be available for download for new users as of October 10, 2025. You can continue to use Clips on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 or earlier.

Clips is such an interesting story. It really was a great app. Back in 2017, when version 2.0 arrived (just six months after 1.0), I described it as “the single best example of a productivity app designed for iOS”. I stand by that. Clips was a very ambitious app that really pushed the state of the art in iOS UI design forward in so many ways. The general knock on iOS has always been that it’s a platform for content consumption, not creation. Clips was all about creation.

But, for as many great ideas as Clips contained (and debuted), it clearly never clicked with the public. Most people — even just only counting people who create and share edited videos to social media — probably have never even heard of Clips. There was something essential missing: a use case. Edits, Meta’s new-this-year video editing app for mobile, has a clear use case: it’s meant for editing videos destined for Meta’s popular social media networks. Clips had no clear target destination. It could have, but never did.

The World’s Largest, Most Disruptive Botnet Is Exploiting Compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) Devices ★

Brian Krebs:

The world’s largest and most disruptive botnet is now drawing a majority of its firepower from compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices hosted on U.S. Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, new evidence suggests. Experts say the heavy concentration of infected devices at U.S. providers is complicating efforts to limit collateral damage from the botnet’s attacks, which shattered previous records this week with a brief traffic flood that clocked in at nearly 30 trillion bits of data per second.

Since its debut more than a year ago, the Aisuru botnet has steadily outcompeted virtually all other IoT-based botnets in the wild, with recent attacks siphoning Internet bandwidth from an estimated 300,000 compromised hosts worldwide.

I guess those people who were declaring a decade ago that the Internet of Things would change the world were right.

Before Taking the Guns Out of the Bond Posters, Amazon Prime Bowdlerized the Poster for ‘Full Metal Jacket’ ★

I missed this story back in 2024, but it’s the same infuriating impulse toward infantilization as with the Bond posters this month. Amazon restored the correct poster art for Full Metal Jacket, but they didn’t learn the lesson: don’t fuck with art.

Let’s Check in on the Mad King’s Spiral Into Dementia ★

The president of the United States, yesterday on his blog:

THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6. If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies. What a SCAM - DO SOMETHING!!! President DJT

No president, of course, can be expected to remember everything that happened during his four-year term. But Trump, of course, was still president on January 6, and the events that day were — to say the least — historically significant. The entire point of the January 6 insurrection — for his role in which, Trump was impeached — was to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president on January 20.

The man is obviously unwell.

Saturday, 11 October 2025

Drata ★

My thanks to Drata for once again sponsoring DF. Their message is short and sweet: Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.

Apple Has Indefinitely Postponed Jessica Chastain’s Apple TV+ Thriller ‘The Savant’, for Political Reasons ★

Nellie Andreeva, reporting for Deadline back on September 23:

The release of Apple TV+’s The Savant has been put on hold. The decision comes three days before the thriller starring Jessica Chastain was slated to premiere on the streamer Sept. 26. No new date has been set.

“After careful consideration, we have made the decision to postpone The Savant,” an Apple TV+ spokesperson said in a statement to Deadline. “We appreciate your understanding and look forward to releasing the series at a future date.”

The streamer would not elaborate on the reasons for the last-minute change but The Savant’s subject matter is believed to be behind it, with the storyline about preventing extremist attacks and some of the imagery considered possibly triggering following the Sept. 10 assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk. The series includes a sniper in action and the bombing of a government building among other acts of violence.

Jessica Chastain, in a post on Instagram later that same day:

I want to say how much I value my partnership with Apple. They’ve been incredible collaborators and I deeply respect their team. That said, I wanted to reach out and let you know that we’re not aligned on the decision to pause the release of The Savant. [...]

I’ve never shied away from difficult subjects, and while I wish this show wasn’t so relevant, unfortunately it is. The Savant is about the heroes who work every day to stop violence before it happens, and honoring their courage feels more urgent than ever. While I respect Apple’s decision to pause the release for now, I remain hopeful the show will reach audiences soon. Until then, I’m wishing safety and strength for everyone, and I’ll let you know if and when The Savant is released.

Here we are nearly three weeks later, and it’s still a question of if, not when — Apple TV’s page for The Savant still has it labeled “Coming: At a Later Date”.

Saul Zabar, Smoked Fish Czar of Upper West Side, Dies at 97 ★

Clyde Haberman, The New York Times:

Saul Zabar, who across more than seven decades as a principal owner of the Upper West Side food emporium bearing his family name kept New Yorkers amply fortified with smoked fish, earthy bread and tangy cheese, not to mention pungent coffee, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 97. [...]

What did he look for in a fish? His response to The New York Sun in 2007 was worthy of a cryptic Zen master: “It’s got to have taste. Not too this, not too that.”

But he was clear about his store’s iconic status. “There’s a romance about what we do,” he said in 2012. “We have a modern appearance, but we really do things the way they were done 40, 50, 75, even 200 years ago.” [...]

“We get asked often why we don’t franchise, because we have a lot of branded products,” he told the magazine Edible Manhattan in 2022.

“Money is not why we do this, not why we’re here seven days a week,” he said. “It’s a way of life for us. It’s kind of old-fashioned.”

Many people claim that they’re not in it for the money. Only some of them mean it. And those are the most interesting, and often most beloved, people in the world.

Amazon Hamfistedly Removed the Guns From Prime’s James Bond Movie Posters ★

Garth Franklin, writing at Dark Horizons:

Amazon has quietly walked back new James Bond thumbnail artwork on its Prime Video service following controversy over digital alterations to the original art. As reported here yesterday, the art was unveiled on the weekend to coincide with James Bond Day celebrations on Sunday.

Bond fans quickly noticed that the artwork had undergone some amateur photoshopping, which either cropped or airbrushed out his signature Walther PPK gun from the original image in a variety of ways.

The results were widely derided on social media; films like Dr. No and Goldeneye appeared to have Bond making a rude gesture, while others like A View to a Kill elongated Roger Moore’s arms well past the point of any human.

The updated ones just kinda suck. Amazon’s original “new” posters were downright hilariously bad. This bodes poorly for the Bond franchise’s future.

Friday, 10 October 2025

Apple Newsroom on the Immersive Vision Pro Lakers Broadcasts ★

Apple Newsroom:

In addition to live games for fans in the Lakers’ regional broadcast territory — which covers Southern California, Hawaii, and parts of southern Nevada, including Las Vegas — full game replays and highlights will be available to Apple Vision Pro users in select countries and regions from both the SportsNet and NBA apps. These live games will be captured using the new URSA Cine Immersive Live camera from Blackmagic Design, a version of the camera that launched earlier this year to capture Apple Immersive for Vision Pro, and will be available for purchase next year.

I didn’t catch yesterday that these immersive broadcasts would only be available live within the Lakers’ local broadcast territory, which stinks, but alas, makes sense given how sports broadcasting rights work.

Thursday, 9 October 2025

Some Lakers Games This Season Will Be Broadcast Live in Immersive Video for Vision Pro ★

Jacob Krol, writing for Techradar:

We’ve seen a broad range of content, but I’ve been waiting for something live — specifically, live sports. Seeing that Apple TV+’s Friday Night Baseball is capturing games with the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max gave me some hope, and now we have a confirmed release. In what might be the start of something new, select Los Angeles Lakers games will be live-streamed in Apple Immersive for the Vision Pro this coming season.

It’s not every game, but for those that are streaming — exclusive to the $3,500 Spatial Computer — you’ll get access to views that put you right in the middle of the action. Special cameras that support the format will be set courtside and under each basket to give you perspectives that amp up the immersion. The Lakers’ games will be shot using a special version of Blackmagic Design’s URSA Cine Immersive Live camera.

Kind of weird, to me, that it wasn’t Apple’s own Friday Night Baseball broadcasts first, but I can’t wait to try this.

Apple’s Justification for Removing DeICER From the App Store ★

Pablo Manríquez, reporting for Migrant Insider:

Apple has quietly removed DeICER, a civic-reporting app used to log immigration enforcement activity, from its App Store after a law enforcement complaint — invoking a rule normally reserved for protecting marginalized groups from hate speech.

According to internal correspondence reviewed by Migrant Insider, Apple told developer Rafael Concepcion that the app violated Guideline 1.1.1, which prohibits “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content” directed at “religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups.”

But Apple’s justification went further. “Information provided to Apple by law enforcement shows that your app violates Guideline 1.1.1 because its purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group,” the company wrote in its removal notice.

The decision effectively treats federal immigration agents as a protected class — a novel interpretation of Apple’s hate-speech policy that shields one of the most powerful arms of government from public scrutiny.

Delicate flowers, these ICE agents are. And it’s a lie, anyway. There’s not one story about any of these apps being used to harm ICE agents. And even if such an attack happened, that wouldn’t imply it’s the purpose of these apps. The purpose of these apps is to protect people — citizens and non-citizens alike — from ICE.

Alas, there’s no more courage, conviction, or honesty from Google on the Android side of the fence either.

It’d be both interesting and honest if either Apple or Google justified these app bannings by simply saying the Trump administration demanded them and that they — Apple and Google — fear reprisal from Trump if they don’t comply.

Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses ★

Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media:

Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.

The news shows that Apple and Google’s crackdown on ICE-spotting apps, which started after pressure from the Department of Justice against Apple, is broader in scope than apps that report sightings of ICE officials. It has also impacted at least one app that was more about creating a historical record of ICE’s activity during its mass deportation effort.

“Our goal is government accountability, we aren’t even doing real-time tracking,” the administrator of Eyes Up, who said their name was Mark, told 404 Media. Mark asked 404 Media to only use his first name to protect him from retaliation. “I think the [Trump] admin is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have.”

Sometimes consistency is a bad thing.

Wednesday, 8 October 2025

Apple Faces French Investigation Over Opt-In Siri Voice Recordings ★

Benoit Berthelot and Gaspard Sebag, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. faces an investigation in France over the use of voice recordings made with its assistant Siri. The probe has been referred to the Office for Combating Cybercrime, the Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement on Monday. An Apple spokesperson referred to a blog post the company published in January about its use of voice recordings, and declined to comment further.

Politico earlier reported the investigation.

The investigation concerns Apple’s collection of user recordings through Siri, the digital assistant available on most of its devices. Apple can record and retain audio interactions through Siri to help improve its services, a feature the company says is opt-in. Some of that data can be retained for up to two years and reviewed by “graders”, or subcontractors, according to Apple.

Sending recorded Siri voice interactions to Apple is opt-in, and the opt-in screen is very clear and cogent. It’s not just something Apple claims.

Amazing stuff continues to happen in the EU.

Katie Notopoulos on the Difference Between Sora and Meta Vibes ★

Katie Notopoulos, on Threads:

Me looking at Vibes feed: this is screensaver. So boring. Why would anyone want it?

Me looking at videos I made of my own face in Sora 2: heheh I love this it’s funny it’s ME.

My feelings exactly.

I even like staring at screensavers sometimes. But the screensavers I like watching are Apple’s aerial (and occasionally, underwater) screensavers on Apple TV. They’re slow, peaceful, and real. Vibes is chaotic, fast, and phony.

‘Sora’s Slop Hits Different’ ★

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:

I think that’s the real revelation here. It’s less about consumption and more about creation. I previously wrote about how I was an early investor in Vine in part because it felt like it could be analogous to Instagram. Thanks in large part to filters, that app made it easy for anyone to think they were good enough to be a photographer. It didn’t matter if they were or not, they thought they were — I was one of them — so everyone posted their photos. Vine felt like it could have been that for video thanks to its clever tap-to-record mechanism. But actually, it became a network for a lot of really talented amateurs to figure out a new format for funny videos on the internet. When Twitter acquired the company and dropped the ball, TikTok took that idea and scaled it (thanks to ByteDance paying um, Meta billions of dollars for distribution, and their own very smart algorithms).

In a way, Sora feels like enabling everyone to be a TikTok creator.

I don’t want to predict if Sora is a fad or has staying power, but so far I enjoy it in a way that I haven’t enjoyed a new social network in years. It’s just fun to dash off a stupid video with no more work than a quick text prompt, and the friends I’m following are making some damn funny clips every day.

Nobel Prize in Physics Is Awarded for Work in Quantum Mechanics ★

The New York Times:

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday in Sweden for showing that two properties of quantum mechanics, the physical laws that rule the subatomic realm, could be observed in a system large enough to see with the naked eye.

“There is no advanced technology today that does not rely on quantum mechanics,” Olle Eriksson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said during the announcement of the award. The laureates’ discoveries, he added, paved the way for technologies like the cellphone, cameras and fiber optic cables. It also helped lay the groundwork for current attempts to build a quantum computer, a device that could compute and process information at speeds that would not be possible with classical computers.

Can you believe these woke dopes gave this award to three people, and not one of them is Donald Trump?

Tuesday, 7 October 2025

What’s New or Changed in iOS 26.1 Beta 2 ★

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

Alarms and timers are now harder to dismiss thanks to a new ‘Slide to stop’ gesture. Both alarms and timers were updated in iOS 26 to utilize a new design with much larger on-screen buttons than before. Now in iOS 26.1 beta 2, Apple has replaced the ‘Stop’ button with a new sliding gesture that requires a little more intentionality. This should make accidental alarm dismissals more rare.

That’s one of several changes that caught my eye. Seems like a great idea. Another notable change: Slide Over returns to iPadOS.

AltStore State of the Union ★

Riley Testut, co-founder of AltStore:

By far our number one request, we’re planning to launch AltStore PAL in more countries later this year in response to various regulatory changes around the world. Specifically, we plan to launch in Japan, Brazil, and Australia before the end of the year, with the UK to follow in 2026. This is great news for the fight to open app distribution, as it will give consumers more options to install apps they otherwise couldn’t from the App Store — such as my clipboard manager Clip.

While we wait to hear more from Apple on exact timing, if you’re a developer interested in distributing your app through AltStore PAL in one of these countries feel free to check out our documentation now to get a head start. Overall though, we couldn’t be more excited to make AltStore PAL available to millions of more people; we truly believe it’s a matter of time before alternative app marketplaces are available worldwide, and each new country brings us one step closer to that goal.

Apple’s cowardly abandonment of ICEBlock in the face of the first whiff of pressure from the Trump administration is perhaps the best evidence yet that Apple’s arguments in favor of their App Store being the single source for third-party software do not hold water. I’m not going to argue that ICEBlock is an essential app, or super duper popular, but it is a very serious app that aims to address a very serious situation. In Apple’s email to developer Joshua Aaron informing him of their decision to pull ICEBlock from the App Store, they justified the decision on the spurious basis that the app contained “objectionable content”. The only content ICEBlock contains is the location of law enforcement activity. Waze — and more notably, Apple’s own Maps app — do the exact same thing for highway speed traps.

Apple’s decision shows that developers cannot trust the App Store to distribute apps that anyone in the Trump administration might “object to”. ICEBlock is an iOS exclusive app and service for serious privacy reasons that are grounded in technical merit. But, exactly as many critics of the App-Store-as-exclusive-distribution-point-for-native-software model have long warned, it’s proven to be a choke point that Apple was unwilling to defend. Apple frequently invokes the word trust as a reason for the App Store model. But their treatment of ICEBlock indicates they are untrustworthy when it comes to showing any sort of backbone regarding Trump’s mad-king slide into authoritarianism, and thus, so too is the entire iOS platform in jurisdictions like the US, where the App Store remains the exclusive distribution source. What good is building the most privacy-focused, user-friendly platform in the world when Apple will disallow an app for which airtight privacy is essential? What happens when Trump lickspittles go after women’s healthcare apps like Planned Parenthood?

If there were a way to distribute apps outside the App Store in the US (TestFlight doesn’t count, as it has hard limits on how many users can get the app — and it’s not clear that Apple hasn’t blocked ICEBlock from TestFlight too), US iPhone users would still have access to ICEBlock. If that were the case, perhaps the Trump administration would then “demand” that Apple revoke Aaron’s developer account. But if that happened, at least we’d know just how pants-wettingly terrified Apple is of the president, in our purported liberal democracy.

There’s lots of other interesting news in Testut’s AltStore status report, including the news that they’re adding Fediverse support to AltStore to distribute app updates and news (and more); converting to a public benefit corporation; have raised $6 million in funding; and are donating $500,000 of that money to help fund indie iOS Fediverse apps like Tapbots’s Ivory (Mastodon) and Phoenix (Bluesky) clients and The Iconfactory’s Tapestry feed aggregator.

Wiley Hodges’s Open Letter to Tim Cook Regarding ICEBlock ★

Wiley Hodges, a 22-year veteran of Apple product marketing, who retired in 2022, in an open letter he sent to Tim Cook:

I don’t know where this leaves me as an Apple customer, but I do know that it upsets me as an Apple shareholder. I am asking you and your team to more clearly explain the basis on which you made the decision to remove ICEBlock — and how the government showed good faith and strong evidence in making its demand of Apple, or that you reinstate the app in the App Store.

I hope that as a man of integrity and principle you can understand how outrageous this situation is. Even more, I hope you recognize how every inch you voluntarily give to an authoritarian regime adds to their illegitimately derived power. We are at a critical juncture in our country’s history where we face the imminent threat of the loss of our constitutional republic. It is up to all of us to demand that the rule of law rather than the whims of a handful of people — even elected ones — govern our collective enterprise. Apple and you are better than this. You represent the best of what America can be, and I pray that you will find it in your heart to continue to demonstrate that you are true to the values you have so long and so admirably espoused.

When you give a bully your lunch money, they always come back for more.

Disney learned this. Last December, Disney settled a lawsuit Trump had filed against ABC News and host George Stephanopoulos for $15 million. The lawsuit was bullshit; nearly all experts agreed that if Disney/ABC had taken the case to court, they’d have won. Disney settled — with both the $15 million and “a note of regret” — thinking, surely, that this would get Trump off their back. Put them on Trump’s good side. Then came the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco, when they finally stood up and said, effectively, “Fuck you, make me.”

Hodges, earlier in his letter, makes reference to Apple’s 2016 standoff with the FBI over a locked iPhone belonging to the mass shooter in San Bernardino, California. The FBI and Justice Department pressured Apple to create a version of iOS that would allow them to backdoor the iPhone’s passcode lock. Apple adamantly refused.

The message Trump and his lickspittles surely took from Apple acceding to their “demand” regarding ICEBlock — a demand made without an iota of legal justification, nor any factual justification that the app was being used to put ICE law enforcements agents in harm’s way — is that when they make a demand to Apple, Apple will respond not with the four words “Fuck you, make me” (as they did in the 2016 San Bernardino case), but instead “Whatever you say goes”. It was, obviously, easier for Apple to stand on principle in 2016, when Barack Obama, a man who deeply respected the Constitution and the principle of rule of law, was president. But it’s more important to stand on those same principles with Trump — a would-be mad king with no respect nor even understanding of the Constitution or rule of law — in office.

If not now, when? Apple will, I believe, find out.

Monday, 6 October 2025

OpenAI Looks to Take 10 Percent Stake in AMD Through AI Chip Deal ★

MacKenzie Sigalos, CNBC:

OpenAI and Advanced Micro Devices have reached a deal that could see Sam Altman’s company take a 10% stake in the chipmaker. AMD stock skyrocketed more than 30% on Monday following the news.

OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years and across multiple generations of hardware, the companies said Monday. It will kick off with an initial 1-gigawatt rollout of chips in the second half of 2026.

It only happens once a decade or so, but the most exciting times in tech occur when there’s a breakthrough that’s severely hardware constrained. That includes hardware like infrastructure — bandwidth was a massive constraint during the dot-com boom. It wasn’t even feasible to download audio, like podcasts, for the first decade of the consumer internet boom, let alone video. But it was inevitable that we’d get there.

Right now we’re severely constrained on compute for AI. In a few years, we’ll look back on today’s state of affairs the way we look back on dial-up modems.

Sunday, 5 October 2025

S&P Global ★: My thanks to S&P Global for sponsoring this last week at DF. S&P Global believes that the future of information delivery is AI — and AI thrives on clean, trustworthy metadata. That’s why they’re embracing open web standards to make data more accessible and machine-readable. Explore their open data at dunl.org, their open data portal, and discover rich metadata at S&P’s Metadata Marketplace.

Saturday, 4 October 2025

Cheap Batteries Are Dangerous ★

Andrew Liszewski, The Verge:

Lumafield has released the results of a new study of lithium-ion batteries that “reveals an enormous gap in quality between brand-name batteries and low-cost cells” that are readily available through online stores including Amazon and Temu. The company used its computed tomography (CT) scanners, capable of peering inside objects in 3D using X-rays, to analyze over 1,000 lithium-ion batteries. It found dangerous manufacturing defects in low-cost and counterfeit batteries that could potentially lead to fires and explosions.

My gut feeling has long been that cheap battery packs and cheap products with integrated batteries (like all the junk Temu sells) are dangerous. This analysis basically proves it. (I’d have linked directly to Lumafield’s report, but it’s only available by submitting your name and email address, so Liszewski’s summary at The Verge is a better quick read.)

Friday, 3 October 2025

‘Fuck You, Make Me’ ★

John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, uh, last week, regarding Disney’s initial (but brief) caving to Trump’s demands that they suspend or even fire Jimmy Kimmel for his having the temerity to mock the mad king for being a sociopathic ghoul sliding into the depths of dementia:

Look, at some point you’re going to have to draw a line. So I’d argue, why not draw it right here? And when they come to you with stupid, ridiculous demands, picking fights that you know you could win in court, instead of rolling over, why not stand up and use four key words they don’t tend to teach you in business school? Not, “OK, you’re the boss.” Not, “Whatever you say goes.” But instead, the only phrase that can genuinely make a weak bully go away. And that is, “Fuck you. Make me.”

“Fuck you, make me” is, to me, the founding principle of this nation. That was our message to King George III, a tyrant descending into madness (who even suffered from swollen legs and feet, which rings yet another bell with our current wannabe mad king). And it needs to be our response to Trump.

Thursday, 2 October 2025

MLB Average Game Time Under Three Hours for Third Straight Year ★

Jason Foster, reporting for MLB.com:

Nine-inning games during the 2025 season have, on average, clocked in at 2 hours, 38 minutes through Thursday, marking the third straight season in which the average game time was 2:40 or shorter.

Regular Season nine-inning @MLB games of three hours and thirty minutes (3:30) or longer:

2021: 391

2022: 232

2023: 9

2024: 7

2025: 3 (through 9/25)

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) September 26, 2025

The trend marks the first time since 1983-85 that the average nine-inning game time was 2:40 or shorter in three consecutive seasons. The average nine-inning game time was 2:36 last season and 2:40 in 2023.

I disagree with many of MLB’s recent rules changes (e.g. the 10th-inning “Manfred Man” ghost runners), but the pitch clock and limit on mound visits have been unambiguous changes for the better. They don’t make the game feel hurried at all, but prior to the pitch clock, the game often felt ponderous.

Folder Quick Look ★

New Mac app from Martin Lexow, the developer behind App Ahead (which offers a slew of good and intriguing Mac apps):

Preview folder and archive contents (ZIP, RAR, and more) instantly in macOS Quick Look. Just select a folder and press the Space bar.

It’s just that simple. Install it from the Mac App Store — free of charge — and you can Quick Look inside archives and folders. Looks, feels, and works like a feature that ought to be built into the Finder itself. Cool.

Adobe Premiere Ships for iPhone and iPad ★

Adobe:

Today, Adobe announced that the company is bringing its industry leading Adobe Premiere video editor to mobile in a powerful new iPhone app that empowers creators to make pro-quality video on the go. The Adobe Premiere mobile app makes it fast, free and intuitive for creators to edit their videos with precision editing on a lightning-fast multi-track timeline, produce studio-quality audio with crystal clear voiceovers and perfectly timed AI sound effects, generate unique content and access millions of free multimedia assets, and send work directly to Premiere desktop for fine tuning further on a larger screen. The new mobile app offers all the video editing essentials for free, with upgrades available for additional generative credits and storage.

It’s a little thing, but from Adobe’s press release, you’d think this new mobile version of Premiere is only available for iOS, but, as you’d hope, it’s in fact a universal app that properly supports iPadOS too. The word “iPad” doesn’t appear in Adobe’s press release.

(Via Michael Tsai.)

U.K. Makes New Attempt to Access Apple Cloud Data – This Time, iCloud Backups of U.K. Citizens ★

Anna Gross and Tim Bradshaw, reporting for the Financial Times (updated link to a syndicated version at Ars Technica, outside the FT’s parsimonious paywall):

The UK government has ordered Apple to allow access to encrypted cloud backups of British users, after a previous attempt to issue a broader demand that included US customers drew a furious backlash from the Trump administration.

The UK Home Office demanded in early September that Apple create a backdoor into users’ cloud storage service, but stipulated that the order applied only to British citizens’ data, according to people briefed on the matter. [...]

In February, Apple withdrew its most secure cloud storage service, iCloud Advanced Data Protection, from the UK.

“Apple is still unable to offer Advanced Data Protection in the United Kingdom to new users,” Apple said on Wednesday. “We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP are not available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy.” It added: “As we have said many times before, we have never built a back door or master key to any of our products or services and we never will.”

This is, as I understand it, a demand from the UK government to allow warrantless access to all UK citizens’ iCloud backups. And your iCloud backups, once decrypted, contain just about everything on your device. With Apple unable to offer Advanced Data Protection in the UK, if Apple complies, there’s no way around it. And, to make it even worse, the perversity of the UK Investigatory Powers Act is such that it’s a crime for Apple to even say they’ve been issued such a demand, to warn their UK users about it. Just brutal. The UK government could not be more wrong about this stance.

OpenAI Launches Sora, a Social Feed App for AI-Generated Short Videos ★

Hayden Field, The Verge:

OpenAI has a new version of the Sora AI video generator that it launched at the end of last year, and it’s arriving today alongside a new social video app, also called Sora, for iPhones. The currently invite-only app resembles TikTok with a feed of videos you can shuffle through. But instead of encouraging people to stitch together duets, it asks you to record short videos that anyone can spin into new AI-generated deepfakes — with your consent.

In a briefing with reporters on Monday, employees called it the potential “ChatGPT moment for video generation.” The Sora app is currently only available to US and Canada users, with other countries set to follow, and when someone receives access, they also get four additional invites to share with friends. There’s no word on when an Android version might be released.

Sora, though invitation-only at the moment, is currently #3 in the U.S. App Store. Meta’s Meta AI app, which contains, in a tab, their Vibes AI-generated video feed, is #97.

Also, I’m sure Sora will eventually come to Android. But, to play with it now, you need an iPhone. So tell me again how Apple is behind on AI? If you have an Android phone, you’re behind on everything except what Google itself offers (which, admittedly, is some great stuff). If you have an iPhone, you’re ahead on everything except what’s baked into iOS. Including the fact that the #1 app on the App Store today is ... Google Gemini.

Wednesday, 1 October 2025

America’s Pants: A Special Investigation Into the Dallas Cowboys’ Pants ★: This exemplary deep dive from Don Patterson at Uni Watch is a nice capper to the Cowboys’ 40-40 victory over the Green Bay Packers Sunday night.