Linked List: June 25, 2026

Thursday, 25 June 2026

Apple Journal’s Atrocious Undo Bug Has Been Fixed (and SwiftUI, Per Se, Is Not to Blame) ★

On the eve of WWDC, in a post arguing that “SwiftUI Only Makes It Easy to Develop Bad Apps”, I wrote about an atrocious bug in Apple’s Journal app:

If you’re running MacOS 26 Tahoe, open Journal and make a new dummy entry. Type something like “The quick brown fox.” Then double-click on the word “brown” and delete it. Now invoke Undo.

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

Marcin Wichary, linking to my post from his remarkably good, remarkably prolific blog Unsung, wrote:

Software engineering typically has some categories of bugs and failures that result in immediate action — a night shift, a war room, “sevs,” and so on. Those are, in my experience, things like:

the app crashes,

the site doesn’t load,

there is data loss.

Depending on what you work on, this list will also likely include security problems, regulatory considerations, privacy-leaking bugs, and so on. In a more mature organization, these are all well documented, but even in early startups there is some shared understanding that some bugs are bigger than life and they take immense priority over pretty much anything else.

At any company, a version of this list needs to exist for front-end and user-experience problems, and undo should be on top of that list. If you break undo, you drop what you’re doing to fix it.

This seems to be what exactly happened. I don’t understand how Journal’s data-destroying Undo bug persisted as long as it did, but after I wrote about it two weeks ago, I heard from Apple PR that:

The text editing component in Journal is in fact UIKit, not SwiftUI, so I was wrong to blame SwiftUI just because Journal is largely SwiftUI-based.
The bug had been identified and fixed for a future update.

Well, the future is already here, because the buggy Undo behavior in Journal is fixed in developer beta 2 on both MacOS and iOS 27. Nice. I hope it gets fixed for the 26.6 releases too, but at the moment it’s still broken in the current developer beta of 26.6 (and, of course, still broken in all the v26.5 OSes). So be careful while writing in Journal.

Om Malik, 1966-2026 ★

Heartbreaking news, shared by Om’s family:

Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends.

We invite you to share your remembrances of Om in the comments below or by posting and tagging his accounts on X/Twitter, Instagram, Threads, or LinkedIn.

Om kept this battle very private, so this news comes as a terrible surprise for many, and an incomprehensible gut punch for everyone who knew and loved him. Rest in peace, my friend.

So it goes.

Apple Raises Prices on Most Products by 15–25 Percent, but Not iPhones, Watches, or AirPods ★

Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

The company briefly took down its Apple Online Store early this morning as it typically does when announcing new products. When it came back online, the price tags for Mac computers rose roughly 15% to 20% and iPad prices rose 15% to 25%.

Among the price increases, the base MacBook Air rose $200 to $1,299; the base MacBook Pro increased $300 to $1,999; the entry-level MacBook Neo increased $100 to $699. The iPad Air increased $150 to $749 and the iPad Pro increased $200 to $1,199.

iPhone prices were unchanged, though the company hinted at more increases in a statement.

“We have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices,” it said in the statement. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”

MacRumors has a list of before/after prices. Christ, they even raised the price of the poor Vision Pro by 6 percent, from $3,500 to $3,700.

Anyone who purchased a MacBook Neo for $600 (or $500 with education discount) between March and this morning purchased the lowest-price MacBook Apple has ever sold — and perhaps the lowest-price MacBook they ever will sell.