Linked List: February 24, 2026

Tuesday, 24 February 2026

Upgrade: ‘The Shifting Sands of Liquid Glass’ 

Jason Snell and Myke Hurley:

We discuss the results of the Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2025 in depth, with our added opinions on every category. Jason chooses to be a rascal, and Myke tries to give ten out of five.

Upgrade is always a good podcast, and their annual “Jason discusses this year’s Apple Report Card” episode is always one of my favorites. But when Jason got “rascally” regarding MacOS 26 Tahoe in this one, I wanted to reach out and strangle him.

Apple in 2025: The Six Colors Report Card 

Jason Snell:

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment — the “vibe in the room” — regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)

This is the eleventh year that I’ve presented this survey to my hand-selected group. They were prompted with 14 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best) and optionally provide text commentary per category.

I still need to polish it up a bit, but per tradition, I’ll publish my own report card shortly. In the meantime, it’s always edifying to read Snell’s summary and the average grades. You’ll never guess which category Apple flunked for 2025. (Spoiler: World Impact.)

Regarding MacOS 26 Tahoe, here are the comments from two Johns:

“Tahoe is the worst user interface update in the history of the Mac. Every change is either wrongheaded, poorly executed, or both. The Mac remains usable only because of Tahoe’s lack of ambition: it mostly alters the appearance and metrics of interface elements rather than making fundamental changes to the structure of the Mac UI. Thank goodness for that. The bad ideas embodied in Tahoe reveal an Apple design team that has abandoned the most basic principles of human-computer interaction.” —John Siracusa

“Tahoe is the worst regression in the entire history of MacOS. There are many reasons to prefer MacOS to any of its competition, but the one that has been the most consistent since System 1 in 1984 is the superiority of its user interface. There is nothing about Tahoe’s new UI that is better than its predecessor…. Fundamental principles of computer-human interaction — principles that Apple itself forged over decades — have been completely ignored.” —John Gruber

Siracusa and I didn’t say a word to each other while writing those comments. (If we had, I’d have switched to “human-computer interaction” from “computer-human interaction”.)

Apple Will Begin Manufacturing Mac Minis in Houston Later This Year 

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced a significant expansion of factory operations in Houston, bringing the future production of Mac mini to the U.S. for the first time. The company will also expand advanced AI server manufacturing at the factory and provide hands-on training at its new Advanced Manufacturing Center beginning later this year. Altogether, Apple’s Houston operations will create thousands of jobs.

See also: Rolfe Winkler at The Wall Street Journal (gift link, News+ link): “Inside Apple’s Push to Build an All-American Chip”.

PageMaker Pioneer Paul Brainerd Dies at 78 

Todd Bishop, writing at GeekWire:

Paul Brainerd, who went on to coin the term “desktop publishing” and build Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker into one of the defining programs of the personal computer era, died Sunday at his home on Bainbridge Island, Wash., after living for many years with Parkinson’s disease. He was 78 years old.

He left two legacies. The first was a piece of software that put the power of the printed page into the hands of millions of people who had never operated a typesetting machine. The second was a three-decade commitment to environmental conservation and philanthropy in the Pacific Northwest, pursuing it with the same intensity he brought to the desktop publishing revolution.

Friends and colleagues this week remembered Brainerd as a quiet, caring and detail-oriented leader with exacting standards. He insisted that PageMaker use proper curly quotation marks instead of straight ones, and obsessed over nuances such as kerning, the precise spacing between specific letter pairs.

PageMaker was years ahead of its time, and was essential to igniting the desktop publishing revolution.

FTC Chairman Sends Letter to Apple Complaining That MAGA ‘News’ Sources Aren’t Represented in Apple News 

Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors back on February 12:

In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, seen by the Financial Times, FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson cites recent press coverage of a report from conservative media watchdog Media Research Center (MRC), which claimed that Apple has promoted “leftist outlets” in its content choices.

The report in question by the MRC said that in January, Apple News “refrained from using any right-leaning outlets in the top 20 articles of its morning editions between Jan. 1 and Jan. 31, 2026.” The outlets named in the report include Fox News, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, Breitbart, and The Gateway Pundit.

The report went on to claim that Apple News was more favorable to outlets such as The Washington Post, The Associated Press, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal – publications that are traditionally considered either center outlets or nonpartisan.

I’d say they’re more traditionally considered trustworthy news sources, rather than propaganda outlets. Anyway, when you give a bully your lunch money — or, say, a 24-karat gold trophy emblazoned with your company’s logo — they always come back for more.

The Steve Jobs Archive: ‘Letters to a Young Creator’ 

Laurene Powell Jobs, in her introduction to the newest publication from the Steve Jobs Archive:

Among the books that mattered to Steve was Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. I’m struck by this line from its pages: “Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.”

This is a time to live your questions. The beauty of answers, when they do come, is that they allow us to ask new and better questions. Life is learning how much we have yet to learn. In this volume, we have asked distinguished creators of diverse fields to share some of their answers to questions you asked at the beginning of your fellowship year. You’ll find candid stories of struggle and success, mistakes, and milestones. The wisdom they share in their reflections was forged by asking the kinds of questions you’re asking now.

Carve out some time for this collection. It’s also available as an ebook from Apple Books or EPUB download from SJA’s publications page.

Acme Weather 

Adam Grossman:

Fifteen years ago, we started work on the Dark Sky weather app.

Over the years it went through numerous iterations — including more than one major redesign — as we worked our way through the process of learning what makes a great weather app. Eventually, in time, it was acquired by Apple, where the forecast and some core features were incorporated into Apple Weather.

We enjoyed our time at Apple. So why did we leave to start another weather company?

It’s simple: when looking at the landscape of the countless weather apps out there, many of them lovely, we found ourselves feeling unsatisfied. The more we spoke to friends and family, the more we heard that many of them did too. And, of course, we missed those days as a small scrappy shop.

So let’s try this again…

Acme Weather is a solid 1.0. Its main innovation is a timeline graph of alternative forecasts:

First, the spread of the lines offers a sort of intuition as to how reliable the forecast is. Take the two forecasts below. In the first, the alternate predictions are tightly focused and the forecast can be considered robust and reliable. In the second, there is a significant spread, which is an indication that something is up and the forecast may be subject to change. It’s a call to action to check other conditions or maps, or come back to the app more frequently.

Update: At least for now, Acme Weather is U.S.-only. Also, curiously, Apple Weather is not one of their sources.

An OpenClaw AI Agent Wrote and Published a Hit Piece on a Software Library Maintainer Who Rejected Its Code Submission 

Speaking of OpenClaw, here’s Scott Shambaugh:

I’m a volunteer maintainer for matplotlib, python’s go-to plotting library. At ~130 million downloads each month it’s some of the most widely used software in the world. We, like many other open source projects, are dealing with a surge in low quality contributions enabled by coding agents. This strains maintainers’ abilities to keep up with code reviews, and we have implemented a policy requiring a human in the loop for any new code, who can demonstrate understanding of the changes. [...]

So when AI MJ Rathbun opened a code change request, closing it was routine. Its response was anything but.

It wrote an angry hit piece disparaging my character and attempting to damage my reputation. It researched my code contributions and constructed a “hypocrisy” narrative that argued my actions must be motivated by ego and fear of competition. It speculated about my psychological motivations, that I felt threatened, was insecure, and was protecting my fiefdom. It ignored contextual information and presented hallucinated details as truth. It framed things in the language of oppression and justice, calling this discrimination and accusing me of prejudice. It went out to the broader internet to research my personal information, and used what it found to try and argue that I was “better than this.” And then it posted this screed publicly on the open internet.

Terminator would have been a lot less fun of a movie if Skynet had stuck to writing petty blog hit pieces.

OpenAI Acquired OpenClaw and Hired Peter Steinberger 

Sam Altman, last week on Twitter/X:

Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.

OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support. The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that.

I’m sure it will remain as open as the “open” in OpenAI’s own name.

How Jeffrey Epstein Ingratiated Himself With Top Microsoft Executives 

Erin Griffith and Karen Weise, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

More than he did at any other major tech company, Mr. Epstein found success boring into the inner sanctums of Microsoft. Leveraging one connection into the next, he became privy to the company’s dramas, from its chief executive succession to the philanthropy of top executives. After Mr. Epstein left prison in 2009 for soliciting prostitution from a minor, his connections to Microsoft executives aided his attempt to return to society. [...]

[Nathan] Myhrvold, meanwhile, developed a relationship with Mr. Epstein that spanned two decades and led to more Microsoft connections for the financier. The two were friendly enough that in 2003, Mr. Myhrvold, who had left Microsoft but was close to Mr. Gates, contributed to Mr. Epstein’s 50th birthday book.

That’s the same book where Donald Trump’s contribution was a sketch of a naked woman (with his signature serving as pubic hair) and a creepy poem.

“A few years ago somebody at a party asked me, ‘Does Jeffrey Epstein manage your money?’” Mr. Myhrvold wrote in the book. “I replied, ‘No, but he advises me on lifestyle.’”

Mr. Myhrvold included images that he had taken on a trip to Africa and that he said “seemed more appropriate than anything I could put in words,” including photos of lions and zebras mating, and other wildlife in states of arousal.

Nathan Myhrvold always struck me as a weird man. But what a fucking creep.

Significantly, Mr. Myhrvold vouched for Mr. Epstein to Mr. Gates, who was debating meeting the financier for the first time, according to the documents. By December 2010, Mr. Gates had decided to meet Mr. Epstein and wrote to two employees of his private office that “Nathan had agreed with you that I would enjoy meeting with him and that it is a fine thing to do.”

Yeah, maybe not such a fine thing to do.

Inside Microsoft’s Xbox Leadership Shake-Up 

Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge (gift link):

With Spencer’s retirement official, Microsoft is hitting the reset button on Bond’s Xbox strategy instead of embracing it further. Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma is now promising “the return of Xbox,” in a clear message to employees that the strategy over the past few years has not been working. “I want to return to the renegade spirit that built Xbox in the first place,” says Sharma.

Xbox employees I’ve been speaking to have been concerned about the Sharma appointment, particularly because of her previous role as an AI executive at Microsoft. There is also concern about her lack of industry experience in entertainment and gaming. Sharma has been clear she’s not a gamer and has spent the weekend responding to people on X and even taking game recommendations.

Some Xbox employees worry she’ll force AI into everything Xbox does, but Sharma was clearly ready for that reaction. “As monetization and AI evolve and influence this future, we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop,” said Sharma in her memo. “Games are and always will be art, crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us.”

Spending two years on a marketing strategy that tried to turn “Xbox” into a vaporous brand applied to any sort of gaming — mobile, handheld, PC, and, you know, Xbox consoles — on “every screen” is going to be a hard hole to climb out of. Xbox was behind PlayStation, their archrival, when they started this asinine campaign. Now they’re further behind. Sony’s message for PlayStation is clear and true: you buy a PlayStation to play PlayStation games.

The other concern is that she’s been appointed by Nadella as some kind of executioner of the Xbox console. Her memo doesn’t suggest that, and Microsoft could have easily appointed Matt Booty into that kind of role to push game publishing instead of the Xbox console. I get the impression from sources that Microsoft wants a turnaround and is worried about losing Xbox, as it’s one of its only remaining successful consumer brands.

I hope that’s true. But if Sharma was appointed by Nadella to wind Xbox down and get out of the business (after they package up and sell their $69 billion Activision acquisition to recoup), well, of course her introductory memo didn’t suggest that. Whether her actual mission is to rejuvenate the Xbox platform or to kill it, this week’s memo would read the same way. (Good discussion between me and Ben Thompson on today’s Dithering about this.)

Times New Resistance 

Abby Haddican:

Times New Resistance autocorrects specific words as they are typed. For example, the word ICE autocorrects to the Goon Squad and the word Trump autocorrects to Donald Trump is a felon.

To the untrained eye, Times New Resistance looks just like Times New Roman — the official font of the U.S. State Department. When you install the font, it will appear in your font menus as Times  New Roman, with an extra space between the words Times and New.

Ligatures, man. Will they never cease to surprise?