Linked List: August 2026

Tuesday, 11 August 2026

The Talk Show: ‘Getting the Snack Right’ ★

Chance Miller returns to the show. Topics include iOS 27’s progress over summer, live baseball in Vision Pro, the RAM crisis, Apple’s trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI and io, and the EU/DMA situation.

Sponsored by:

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Notion: The collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side, with a Developer Platform teams can build on.

Netflix Has Peaked ★

Andrew Sharp, writing at Sharp Text last month after Netflix’s earnings, asking “Is Netflix Washed Now?”:

I offer this observation as a swirl of heightened anxiety surrounds the company, so let me clarify one thing up front: I’m not predicting imminent doom. Netflix content reaches a staggering 85% of American viewers and has 325 million subscribers globally. Growth is slowing, but that’s the law of large numbers. If practically everyone in America and much of the world is already subscribed to some version of Netflix, and churn rates are still low, then any concern is relative. Going forward: cable is still dying, and even if the biggest premium distribution platform in the world can’t make great content of its own, it can still license movies, TV and sports rights. Netflix can then spread those costs across hundreds of millions of subscribers and a steadily growing ads business, seeing more engagement in a week than Apple TV sees in a year.

So no, the company’s not doomed today or destined for collapse tomorrow. Instead, I think what’s interesting to consider is that Netflix has almost certainly peaked. As a cultural force, as a business success story, and as an entertainment death star destined to swallow Hollywood whole, the arrows are all pointing the wrong direction.

Sometimes the problem with a company isn’t that it isn’t a good business, but merely that it isn’t as good a business as it holds itself up to be. A billion-dollar business ought to be a good thing, but it’s a disaster if the company is valued by investors as a trillion-dollar business. That’s Netflix.

To me it’s backwards that Netflix is valued at $300 billion, roughly the 50th most value company in the world, and Disney is valued at $180 billion, roughly 120th. Netflix has a streaming video service and owns some IP, like Stranger Games and Squid Game. Disney owns two streaming video services (Disney+ and Hulu), and owns some IP. Little stuff like Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, Marvel, the Disney princesses, and everything from Pixar. Netflix has started dabbling in sports; Disney owns ESPN. Disney owns the world’s biggest and best theme parks and an entire cruise ship line.

It’s true that Netflix’s streaming service is by far the biggest in the world, and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future. But Disney+ combined with Hulu is clearly in second place globally.

For the most recent 12 months:

	Disney	Netflix
Revenue	$97 B	$48 B
Net Profit	$11 B	$14 B
Net Margin	11.5%	28%

Netflix is generating slightly more profit on half the revenue. With its theme parks, resorts, and cruise ships, big parts of Disney are effectively hardware, not software — so it’s almost inevitable its margins will be lower than a pure software play like Netflix. But those “hardware” businesses diversify Disney. How confident are you that Netflix will remain the undisputed leader in streaming 10 years from now, or 25? I’d bet good money that Walt Disney World will be the world’s biggest, best, and most profitable theme park 50 years from now. And it’s a joke to compare the value and longevity of the two companies’ IP.

I don’t know that Disney is undervalued by the market, but I sure think Netflix is overvalued. And as for quality, I’ve watched a bit more Netflix original content this summer than I had of late. David Attenborough’s A Gorilla Story was a splendid documentary, but nature documentaries don’t pay the bills. A few other things I watched (or at least watched part of) were absolute dreck. Not high-quality fun trash like Tiger King but amateur-hour I’m-worried-I-lost-a-few-IQ-points-by-watching-it trash.

It feels to me like Mr. Market is getting increasingly skeptical whether Netflix justifies its valuation, and Netflix is getting a little squirrelly and desperate trying to come up with an answer. Simple question: what’s their moat? It sure isn’t content quality.

Anthropic Posts ‘How Claude Marks AI-Generated Content’ Without Explaining How Claude Marks AI-Generated Content ★

Anthropic support page:

Anthropic has signed the EU AI Act’s Article 50(2) Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, as a provider of both generative AI models and generative AI systems. This article describes how we’re planning to put those commitments into practice, how marking works, and what its limitations are. We’ll update this article and publish more detailed technical guidance as it becomes available.

Regarding generated plain text output:

When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response.

Because the watermark is part of the text, it will travel with the text when it’s copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing. Watermarking will be applied at the model level, which means it will be present no matter which Claude product or surface the text comes from. [...]

We’re also working to enable users and other third parties to detect Claude’s embedded watermarks and provenance metadata. Detection checks whether a piece of text or a file carries a supported Claude mark. If a supported mark is found, it indicates that the content may have been processed by Claude.

We’ll share details on detection mechanisms in forthcoming technical documentation.

Anthropic is claiming this is for compliance with an EU law but that “Marking will apply to output from supported models wherever Claude is offered, worldwide.”

This is infuriatingly opaque. I won’t speak to the “signed providence metadata” they say they’ll be embedding in generated files like PDFs, SVGs, PNGs, and JPEGs. That’s important but it’s complex. Plain text is simple. A string of text is just one character followed by another. I presume that Claude is going to start “embedding” invisible characters/byte sequences between visible characters? What they’re claiming to do here seems impossible, frankly, and anything they attempt to embed invisibly is going to cause immediate problems.

Let’s say I have Claude generate the phrase “Hello world”. (Two words is surely too short to bother with “AI generated” detection — I’m using a two-word phrase here for simplicity in the example.) Claude creates the string of characters “Hello«invisible characters that comprise a “watermark” here» world”. I paste this on the web. Humans who look at it will see “Hello world” but the invisible characters are there. Character-count-limited social media platforms will show that the string contains more than the 11 visible characters in “Hello world”. If the “watermark” is not comprised of invisible characters but rather visible ones, how in the world does this jibe with their claim that it’s “imperceptible”? (This Reddit thread claims that’s how it will work — “It’s a form of steganography where the model subtly biases its word choice to create a statistical pattern that can be detected later.” How in the world can that be squared with “it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability”?) And any sort of semantic detection like this is going to cause false-positive problems.

If I ask a tool to generate text or suggest text for me, I expect that tool to generate the best possible word choices it can. Not corrupt its output for the sake of watermarking.

What happens if you copy my text and quote it in something you write, by hand? Now you’ve got a watermark in your prose, invisible characters or something, that implicates that your prose is AI-generated? Even though you didn’t use AI and just copy and pasted text from me? Madness.

They obviously need to explain exactly what they’re embedding in text if anyone is actually going to detect it, but if they explain it, anyone can simply remove it. And what happens, for example, if someone just OCRs Claude-generated text rather than selects and copies it? This is all so stupid. I have never been happier that I’ve never actually used Claude for anything.

Monday, 10 August 2026

What’s New in iOS 27 Beta 5 ★

Zac Hall at 9to5Mac has a good rundown of new features and changes in beta 5. Some app icons got tweaks (the Siri app in particular looks much cooler now), and a bunch of the existing American and British Siri speaking voices now have the Pace and Expressivity adjustment sliders.

Also interesting: the OS 27 releases were stuck at beta 4 for 22 days. That’s a week longer than usual. Will Hains (my Kotoba friend) maintains a wonderful single-page website tracking iOS version release date history. For these summer “next big version” comparisons, it’s best to filter by “*.0” releases. Do that at Hains’s website and you can see a fairly clear pattern: betas 1 through 4 typically last about two weeks each; then starting with beta 5, Apple switches to a roughly weekly schedule until the end of the beta cycle. I wouldn’t read anything into that other than to expect beta 6 next week and beta 7 the week after that.

‘Friday Night Baseball’ Will Start Broadcasting Games Live, in Apple Immersive, on Vision Pro ★

Apple Newsroom:

For the first time, baseball fans can take in all the action of “Friday Night Baseball” live in Apple Immersive on Apple Vision Pro, leveraging 3D video recorded in 8K with a 180-degree field of view. On August 28, viewers with Vision Pro will experience the iconic Red Sox vs. Yankees rivalry from unique camera angles that place viewers right in the game, immersed in the drama of each at-bat, the celebrations in the dugout after a big hit, close plays at the outfield wall, and more.

The experience features bespoke commentary from Paul Severino (play-by-play), Xavier Scruggs (analyst), and Michelle Margaux (sideline reporter); dedicated replays; and an immersive graphics package that includes team lineups and stats floating in the viewer’s space. During breaks in the action, the broadcast remains live, immersing viewers in the stadium experience from all angles as ambisonic microphones capture sounds in Spatial Audio.

Hot damn, they even picked the best rivalry in sports to kick it off.

Michael Tsai on My Retraction of the Astrology/Astronomy App Store Rejection Story ★

Michael Tsai:

I’m really unhappy about this, both for my role in spreading a false story and because I think it will hurt the cause of reforming App Review. I know there are many crazy rejections and have experienced some first-hand. This story was believable because of that well-known history and because Godier didn’t seem like a nobody trying to get attention — he was the developer of another highly regarded app. But now people are going to point to true developer stories and accuse them of being fakes, too.

Same.

‘The Problem With Vibe-Coded Flattery’ ★

Ernie Smith at Tedium:

I’m seeing email after email suggesting these users built a thing they’re truly passionate about. But if we can’t trust that this passion is real, legit, and from the heart, we’re in trouble.

Take a step back. Is this thing you built a reflection of you?

I think it’s fun and exciting that I’m getting a lot more emails about a lot more new apps. But a fair chunk of those emails are themselves clearly written by an AI chatbot. It’s so obvious. Those go straight in the trash.

The NYT and WSJ on Apple, China, and the RAM Crisis ★

Kalley Huang, reporting from San Francisco, and Ana Swanson, from Washington, for The New York Times (gift link):

Apple, which has cited the memory chip shortage for recent price increases, is working with other consumer electronics companies to push for permission to buy memory chips from China, which faces certain restrictions, seven people said.

Apple was in talks in 2022 to buy memory chips from Yangtze Memory Technologies Corporation, or YMTC, but those efforts fizzled under pressure from U.S. lawmakers.

Many officials appear unsympathetic to Apple’s desire to buy Chinese chips, because the company has promised for years to move more of its supply chain to the United States but has made only small steps toward that goal, four people said. Other critics of the plan said that China was also experiencing a similar chip crunch, and had proved itself to be a risky supplier when it restricted its mineral exports last year.

Raffaele Huang and Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (also a gift link):

Apple has been testing memory chips from China’s CXMT across product lines including iPhones and MacBooks, according to people familiar with the matter, as the U.S. company addresses a memory crunch during the artificial-intelligence boom.

Apple has held early talks with CXMT about supplying components with the goal of using them in some devices sold in China, the people said. Apple hopes to win the White House’s blessing to do business with the Chinese company. [...]

Apple often tailors components to its devices to maximize performance. Using standard CXMT memory chips could force Apple to redesign certain parts of its products. Industry analysts also say CXMT’s technology still trails its foreign competitors, in part because the company’s access to the most sophisticated chip-making equipment is restricted.

At present, CXMT wouldn’t be a panacea for Apple. The Chinese company has maxed out its production capacity this year, leaving little room for new international clients, the people familiar with the matter said.

The gist of both reports is that just like in 2022, Apple might not get permission from the U.S. government to use Chinese RAM, even for devices sold in China. And, even if they do secure permission, it might not actually help much with the supply crunch.

Sunday, 9 August 2026

WorkOS: Connect Your Agents to Your API ★

My thanks to WorkOS for, once again, sponsoring DF last week. What’s the best way to connect AI agents to your API? REST is great for human developers; MCP serves the agents. Many teams treat REST and MCP as competing standards, and through choice or necessity, pick one. But they ought not be considered rivals. They’re separate layers. Most MCP servers just call REST internally to do the real work. The best ones don’t convert every endpoint into a tool, they focus on what the agents are actually trying to accomplish.

That layered approach also means shipping OAuth 2.1 with scoped tokens. WorkOS AuthKit already speaks that spec, so you skip building an auth provider on top. Check out WorkOS’s breakdown on MCP vs. REST.

Saturday, 8 August 2026

Corrupt Minds Think Alike ★

Tariq Panja, reporting for The New York Times:

The five men should have been in a celebratory mood. FIFA had just pulled off a World Cup that broke records on a number of fronts. Its spectacular culmination, the final, was a day away from kickoff.

But their mood was anything but jubilant. The men, a group of top directors known as the FIFA bureau of the management board, had been summoned to a hastily organized meeting at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan, according to three people familiar with the discussions speaking on condition of anonymity because the talks were private. The directors had until midnight to sign off on a plan that threatened to change soccer forever and would almost certainly lead to a major schism among the sport’s leaders.

The project purported to sell a 20 percent stake in FIFA to a group of investors led by Joshua Kushner, the brother of President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Such a move would put into private hands a portion of the World Cup, an event that has been run and controlled by FIFA, a nonprofit in Zurich, for 96 years.

I don’t know what’s dumber — this stupid corrupt scheme to privatize the World Cup, or me, for not assuming from the start that the Trump family was involved in it somehow.

Maybe ‘Steal Underpants by Blowing a Fortune on AI Tokens’ Is, in Fact, Not a Good Business Plan ★

Joseph Cox, writing for 404 Media (paywalled, sans gift links, alas):

Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing “soaring token spend,” according to the audio. [...] It also undercuts the narrative that superpowered engineers generating mountains of code are behind the AI boom. In many cases it is non-technical staff burning through tokens for non-specialized tasks. [...]

At one point in the meeting, Kwak and Eduardo Salamanca de Diego, senior manager of product management at the company’s Center for Advanced AI, start presenting about what is described as “token ops.”

Kwak says he knows people aren’t using slides these days, but he has some. As he appears to be preparing to present, Stuart Henderson, Accenture’s client group lead, interrupts. He jokes he hopes Kwak didn’t just convert a PDF into images and then into Markdown files. “I’m learning that’s one of the big token chewers,” Henderson says. “Turning PDFs into Markdown: is that right?”

That’s when Kwak says that’s what Accenture’s own data shows.

My impression of consulting giants like Accenture (McKinsey, Bain, Deloitte, KPMG...) has always been that they are very good at looking smart but in fact very bad at actually being smart. The idea that they’re spending serious money on AI tokens to turn PDFs and PowerPoint decks into Markdown only makes me think I’ve overestimated the median intelligence of the people who work there. I really thought Markdown couldn’t get more successful but this takes the cake. I love it that my little baby is helping burn these companies’ cash. This is so stupid it hurts to think about.

Markdown is something you start with because it’s easy to write and universally readable. You write Markdown and use that to make slides — like, say, with iA Presenter — not the other way around.

(Via Simon Willison.)

Friday, 7 August 2026

Simon Willison on Blogging ★

Simon Willison, with Cynthia Dunlop for her tech blogger interview series (from back in January, but he just got around to linking to it so I just got around to seeing it):

Any lessons learned that you want to share with the community?

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else.

This is excellent advice. Me, I try to get into the mindset of playing live music, not recording a studio album. Except when I’m writing a piece where I really want it to be an album. Those aren’t rare, per se, but they’re occasional. If I tried to make every post a hall-of-famer I’d never get anything out.

I’m aiming for professionalism. I’m performing live in front of an audience — not just jamming in my garage or bedroom, fucking around. So I’m careful and concentrate. I want to hit every note, in time. But at my best I’m moving from song to song.

But that leads to Dunlop’s next question for Willison:

Your advice for people just getting started with blogging?

Just start. It’s so easy to get caught in the trap of obsessing over the design of your blog, and planning for content that you never actually get around to writing. As long as each entry has a date on it and a permanent URL, it counts as a blog. I think adding an Atom or RSS feed is important too, but you can get started without one — don’t treat that as a blocker.

Don’t worry if nobody reads it. People are unlikely to stumble on your blog organically, but what matters is not the quantity but the quality of your readers. If the only person who reads your blog is a hiring manager that you send a link to, and that gets you an interview, your blog has already paid itself off many times over.

That’s the hard part about getting started, or at least it was for me. When you already have an audience it’s easier to take it seriously, to concentrate, to focus, to strive for perfection even though you will fall short. If you’re playing music in an empty room it’s harder to do that, to play the same way you would with an audience of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people in front of you.

But just imagine they’re there. They will be if you keep it up. That’s one of my bits of advice to new bloggers: I firmly believe all blogs eventually get the audience they deserve, if they keep going. Write for the audience you want, not the audience you have.

Google Earth Retracts AI Tool for Making Fake Satellite Images After It Was Immediately Abused Upon Release ★

Jeremy Hsu, Ars Technica:

Google briefly allowed anyone to create AI-modified versions of satellite imagery available in Google Earth — before quickly reversing its decision as people shared examples of AI-generated pictures that illustrated the potential for misinformation and disinformation.

Momentum!

Some New Data Centers Are Necessary ★

A bunch of mine are stored here.

An AI Model From Meta Also Hacked Another Company During Testing ★

Simon Willison:

So that’s Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta. Google Gemini really needs to catch up on accidentally cyberattacking other companies.

I’m surprised Willison hasn’t heard about how much momentum Gemini has.

Meta: Introducing Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2 ★

Meta AI:

We’re excited to release Muse Code (beta), a terminal coding agent powered by Muse Spark 1.2, our newest model. This marks our next step toward the frontier, with larger and much more capable models on the way. [...]

Muse Code takes on complex software engineering tasks across large repositories: planning changes, writing code, and validating the results. It can coordinate multiple persistent subagents for each task, solving difficult problems faster, more accurately, and with less intervention.

Terminal-only (so far), so it avoids the whole native-app-versus-Electron-shit-sandwich debate. They’ve embedded some fun interactive examples of Spark’s output right in the web page.

Simon Willison:

An interesting twist on pricing is that the model is offered as two different model IDs. muse-spark-1.2 is priced at $1.25/million input and $4.25/million output — close to Gemini 3.6 Flash ($1.50/$7.50) — but if you agree to let Meta use your data “to improve our products” you can use muse-spark-1.2-contributor which is $0.10/$0.20 — a huge discount, closer to GPT-5.6 Luna ($0.20/$1.20) and Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite ($0.25/$1.50).

That’s over a 10× discount in exchange for giving your data to Meta. I can see the appeal if you don’t care about the privacy of your data and code, like, say, if you’re using Muse Spark to generate code for a throwaway project, or for something that’s open source anyway. But I wonder if Meta has considered that this offer might spook would-be users who absolutely do not want to grant Meta the rights to their data. One would hope that the two systems have a strong firewall between them. But given Meta’s well-established contempt for the sanctity of user data, it’s not at all unreasonable to suspect that the difference here is like reserving a no-smoking seat in an airplane with a smoking section.

App Store Review Times Are Failing to Meet the AI-Driven Influx of Submissions ★

Joe Fabisevich, on Mastodon:

I submitted Plinky 6.0.4 for review last week. The macOS app was approved in 4 hours, the iOS app is still waiting for review. Sure do love to distribute software this way.

He’s not an outlier; I see comments like this from App Store developers everywhere I look.

(Plinky, by the way, is an intriguing link-bookmarking app that syncs across iOS and MacOS. It’s not for me, but the nature of my work is such that I have very unusual bookmarking needs. Plinky offers a bunch of convenient ways to stash new bookmarks with low friction. It’s a labor of love — it’s totally obvious that Fabisevich himself is the number one user of Plinky, and that’s almost always true of the very best apps.)

Leadership Shake-Up at Google DeepMind ★

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, the company’s artificial intelligence research lab:

We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It’s critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder.

With this backdrop, I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability. I will be taking on a new strategic role as Chair of GDM and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, and I’m excited to announce that Koray will be stepping up to lead GDM as SVP of Google DeepMind, in addition to his role as Chief AI Architect of Google.

Google published Hassabis’s letter alongside a letter from Sundar Pichai, and all of this is happening alongside four longtime Google leaders leaving to form a new AI-focused company. The headline of Google’s dual-memo announcement was “The Next Chapter of Our AI Momentum”, and Pichai uses the same word in 10 percent of his 30 sentences (emphasis added):

And you saw the incredible momentum at earnings across all our businesses, including Search, YouTube, and Cloud. […]

Google DeepMind: We are building strong momentum: Flash is in high demand, our Cyber model is live, and Gemma models have surpassed 900M+ downloads. […]

With today’s changes we’re going to keep driving our momentum. Onwards!

Methinks he doth protest too much. If Google really had the momentum in AI that Pichai is declaring, I suspect Gemini might have suggested he’s overusing the word.

‘Google’s Top AI Brains Are Leaving to Launch Discovery Loop’ ★

Steven Levy, writing for Wired:

Today it’s official: After almost 27 years, Dean is leaving Google, along with Ghemawat and two other top-tier AI scientists, to found a company called Discovery Loop.

Even though Google will take a stake in the new company, it’s a devastating blow to the search giant as it attempts to keep pace in the frantic AI model competition. It’s bad enough that Dean and Ghemawat, who were among the company’s first hires, are leaving — that’s like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ditching the Rolling Stones to start a new band. Worse, the other cofounders are also supernovas in the AI firmament: Oriol Vinyals, VP of research at DeepMind and a technical lead for Gemini, and Quoc Le, a cofounder of Google Brain and the key scientist behind Google’s AutoML-Zero, a project that uses machine learning algorithms to autonomously build AI products.

In an interview I did with the cofounders just before launch, Dean tells me the idea came up only a few weeks ago. He was quickly joined by the other three, who are not only long-time colleagues but friends who vacation together. “We were working on different things, but we were all starting to see the possibility of AI being able to automate scientific and engineering loops,” he says.

I think the Jagger/Richards analogy is strained, to say the least, but the tectonic plates have shifted this week over in Googleland. This might be to Google what io is to Apple — something that ought to have happened within rather than requiring departures of legendary talent.

Meta Ordered to Pay $942 Million in New Mexico Child-Safety Lawsuit ★

Meghan Bobrowsky and Erin Mulvaney, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms to pay more than $900 million and limit the time young people in the state can spend on its apps, significantly increasing the cost of the landmark child safety verdict against the Facebook and Instagram parent.

The judge said Thursday that Meta must create a new $567 million abatement fund in addition to paying $375 million in civil penalties that a jury previously ordered. The company must also enact certain safety features such as limiting the amount of time underage users in the state spend on Facebook and Instagram, hiding by default the number of “likes” on photos for such people and disclosing to users there the risks of its platforms.

The creation of the fund, aimed at rectifying harms caused by the Facebook parent’s social-media apps, was “necessary, due to the wide-ranging impacts of the harm and the complex nature of the remedy,” state Judge Bryan Biedscheid said. The dollar-amount of the abatement fund was slightly smaller than the $779.5 million attorneys for the state sought.

Meta said it disagreed with the ruling and planned to appeal.

You don’t say.

The next trial, brought by four state attorneys general, begins jury selection in Oakland, Calif., next week. Meta said in a court filing that the states in that case are asking for more than $1 trillion in damages.

The case they just lost, with a judgment of about $1 billion, was for New Mexico alone. If this isn’t overturned, and then sets nationwide precedent, we’re talking real money. The tobacco companies survived, but this seems like that. Investors seem unconcerned — Meta’s stock is up 1.5% so far this morning.

Thursday, 6 August 2026

Gurman on OpenAI’s Device: ‘A Doughnut-Shaped Speaker That Costs Over $300’ ★

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (gift link):

OpenAI expects users to rely on the smart speaker throughout the day. It will work similarly to the company’s ChatGPT voice mode on smartphone apps, but with more advanced models for humanlike interactivity. The device is designed to learn more about a user over time, letting it tailor conversations and act more like a real person.

The circle-shaped device will include parts that move on their own, according to the people. That will help show when it’s responding and interacting with the user. The goal is to make the object feel more alive than today’s stationary speaker products. The product will have speaker grills and microphones for fielding commands and conversing with users. The battery-powered item will be designed to work in different positions — in a user’s hand, say, or placed on a nightstand or kitchen counter.

OpenAI is also planning to include lights on the device to demonstrate when it’s listening and make interactions feel more personal. A camera system and other sensors, meanwhile, will perceive the surrounding environment and feed visual information into the AI.

This doesn’t sound like a “smart speaker” with lights, moving parts, cameras, and other sensors. It sounds like a robot companion, and a robot companion obviously needs a speaker, amongst its other essential features. It’s like calling R2-D2 “a smart speaker” — it wouldn’t be wrong but it’s missing the point. (You could technically call the iPhone “a smart speaker”.) What the io device seems to be missing is autonomous movement. So you need to carry it around like a mogwai, rather than it following you around or going places on its own. I couldn’t give two shits about an OpenAI “smart speaker” if the point is just to play music and podcasts, but a handheld cross between R2-D2 and C-3PO, that could be fucking cool.

It’s a pet, it sounds like. A revolutionary pet, if they pull it off. And people love their pets.

OpenAI Files 28-Page Motion to Dismiss Apple’s Lawsuit (PDF Link) ★

This is more like it. No mealymouthing or wishy-washiness here. This is a strident defense. I’ll quote just one line for now:

Apple offers nothing because it has nothing because there is nothing. Its Complaint cannot and does not state a misappropriation claim against Defendant Tan.

I’ll post more thoughts later, but if you’re following this lawsuit, you should read OpenAI’s motion yourself. It’s cogently written, not mired in legalese. Legalese is generally a sign of shitty lawyers. The law is meant to be practiced by lawyers, but understood by everyone. The law is not a priesthood; motions in a lawsuit are not holy texts reserved for the sainted few. What boggles my mind is that almost none of the outlets reporting on this today linked to OpenAI’s actual motion. (Kudos to Jess Weatherbed of The Verge, who did.) Summaries are necessary and commentary is good, but for chrissake link to the source document.

Brendan Leonard: ‘Do It 14,000 Times Slower With This One Trick’ ★

This comic from Brendan Leonard is a fine companion to yesterday’s items (here and here) on pausing to consider if our use of AI is helping us focus our time on what we love to do, or, instead, robbing us of the things that make us human. The bit about making a sandwich hit close enough to home for me to make me laugh aloud.

Add a Shortcut to Control Center to Open the Current App’s Preferences in the Settings App ★

Regarding my earlier complaint about it being a slog to open Safari’s preferences in the Settings app on iOS, a few readers pointed me to this tweet last year from Quinn Nelson, showing how to build (or download from iCloud) a simple Shortcuts shortcut that you can add to Control Center to open the current app’s preferences in Settings. Works great.

Update: Stephen Robles:

I made a few riffs off that one as well:

Jump to current app notification settings

Current app storage

Open current app in App Store

BMW Executive in 2023: No Plans to Sell in-Vehicle Ads ★

Tanya Gazdik, reporting for MediaPost back in December 2023:

Despite the ever-expanding screens in its vehicles, including an available 31-inch backseat theatre screen, BMW has no plans to sell advertising on any of them. Radio commercials are intrusive enough, says Stephan Durach, the brand’s senior vice president, connected company development.

“At the end of the day, I think your car is your last private space,” Durach told a small group of media members last week during a roundtable discussion. “It’s where you can do whatever you want by yourself — you have the right temperature, the music you want. To say I’m selling the screen to play a commercial — I don’t see it. It’s a private space.”

So much for that.

BMW has not been afraid to push the envelope to find new ways to make money. The automaker was the first to charge a fee for heated seats in its vehicles in some overseas markets. But earlier this fall, the automaker dropped the heated seats subscription option after customers expressed discontent for having to pay to unlock existing functions in their cars.

“Discontent” is doing a lot of work there.

I got this MediaPost link from this article in Der Spiegel, regarding the outrage over the Spider-Man ad BMW injected into the dashboards of its vehicles around the world last week. The Der Spiegel article is in German, but according to Safari’s translation to English, a BMW spokesperson had the temerity to claim that the Spider-Man promotion is not an advertisement, but instead “a special surprise for its customers”, and that it is “not intended to advertise the film or serve as a conventional film trailer. In this respect, it is also not classic advertising — and no advertising will continue to be displayed in the vehicle.”

If BMW was paid by Sony for this, it’s by definition an advertisement. If I owned a BMW and this fucking thing showed up on my dashboard I’d feel compelled to take it back to the dealership and drive it right through the window into the showroom, to reciprocate with “a special surprise” for them.

StopTheScript Is a Dickover Killer ★

Back in March I sung the praises of Jeff Johnson’s StopTheScript and StopTheMadness Safari extensions. I want to re-link to StopTheScript in particular. I wrote last week about ad-blocking content blockers, and I’ve gotten a slew of wonderful feedback from readers about that. (My thanks to everyone who whitelisted DF with their ad-blocker of choice, too.)

One of the recurring issues that readers raised are sites that present “It looks like you’re running an ad-blocker...” dickovers. It’s classic whack-a-mole: (1) website shows annoying obtrusive ads; (2) you install a browser extension to hide those ads; (3) website tries to detect that you’re hiding their ads and prevent you from accessing their content until you turn it off. Fuck them. It’s your web browser.

The detectors require JavaScript to do their thing. The entire purpose of StopTheScript is to disable JavaScript on a per-website basis. By itself, Safari only offers a global on/off switch for JavaScript (in the Security tab in its Settings window on Mac, or in Settings → Apps → Safari → Advanced on iOS). For me, and probably for you, it’s unfeasible to browse the entire web with JavaScript disabled. StopTheScript is the solution. When you run into a website where JavaScript is being used against you, just tap the StopTheScript button in Safari’s toolbar and then tap “Always Allow on This Website” — or, what I often do, tap “Allow for One Day” just to see if it helps.

For these ad-blocker-detecting-dickovers, StopTheScript generally works like a charm. I just used it earlier today when I linked to the BMW/Spider-Man ad story at The Hollywood Reporter. Turned off JavaScript on THR’s website, reloaded the web page, and boom, their fucking dickover was gone. Turning off JavaScript on THR does have other side effects — it prevents the loading of thumbnail images in the sidebar list of “Most Popular” articles — screenshot. I see this as a positive side effect, not a negative. StopTheScript also works like a charm to disable the ad-blocker-detecting-dickover at Snopes, which I linked to for my Ulysses S. Grant post this week. And you will definitely want to enable it for Reuters.

If turning off JavaScript breaks a website, you can re-allow it. It’s easier on the Mac: Control-click on the StopTheScript toolbar button and choose “Manage Extension...” — this will jump you to the right place in Safari’s Settings. On iOS, you’ve (alas) got to trek into the Settings app (Settings → Apps → Safari → Extensions → StopTheScript) to revoke it for a particular website.

StopTheScript is a $6 one-time purchase, including Mac, iPhone, and iPad. A veritable bargain.

BMW Has Put a Spider-Man Ad on the Dashboard Display of Owners’ Cars ★

James Hibberd, The Hollywood Reporter:

BMW owners are taking to social media to express outrage that the automaker suddenly started pushing ads for Spider-Man: Brand New Day onto their dashboards.

The ads began appearing last week on newer-model vehicles and some drivers who forked up to $160,000 for a luxury car or SUV aren’t very happy about being spammed when they start their cars. The promotion is scheduled to run through Aug. 10, according to the automaker’s press release, and represents a partnership between the automaker and Sony-Marvel.

Some of the scathing comments on Reddit’s r/BMW forum and other subreddits include: “That’s some absolute bullshit”; “Insanely dystopian”; “This needs to be made illegal before everyone starts doing it”; “$130K to get a Spider-Man commercial”; “sounds like a Black Mirror episode” and simply: “Fuck everything about this.”

A banner touting the film first appears when the car is started, though owners have to click on the ad to see the full video. Still, one owner claimed BMW has been pushing increasingly intrusive videos onto its dashboard space.

This is absolutely insane, especially for cars that people own. If you own a car and an ad is shown in your car, you should get paid for the ad. And you should need to agree to it first. BMW is supposed to be a luxury brand, and one meant for driving enthusiasts. This is so absurd it’s hard to believe it’s real. I asked a family member who just got a new BMW to confirm it. Unbelievable.

Wednesday, 5 August 2026

Shawn Smucker: ‘Please Use AI’ ★

I find most poetry obtuse, dancing around a point rather than making one sharply. Not this one.

Matthew Green on Anthropic’s New Cryptanalysis Results ★

Matthew Green:

If you’re under the impression that these models are “glorified autocomplete” or that progress is slowing down, I need to urge you: stop thinking that. The models are very intelligent and capable, they are getting better at a fast clip. I can cite measurable and impressive progress over just the past five months on specific types of problem I’ve asked them to look at. If there’s a ceiling out there, I don’t yet see evidence of it. The people who think models are dumb are mostly using Google’s free AI search results, and not interacting with the high-end stuff (which only costs $20, so it’s not out of reach.) And they’re mostly not working in new areas.

On the other hand: if you think that models are super-intelligent or that AGI is already here, you should also stop thinking that. Working with these tools is like swimming in a pond where the ground drops off sharply. One minute you’re wading comfortably and there’s support under your feet. Then suddenly you cross a specific line, and you’re back to swimming on your own. This analogy is my best way to explain what it feels like when the model goes from helpful to clueless.

Green is second-to-none in his ability to explain advanced cryptography in easily understood ways, without dumbing it down.

Uh, I’m Pretty Sure People Would Know ★

New York Times Magazine story editor Willy Staley tried Sean O’Mara’s “Living Diet” (nothing but steak and fermented foods like sauerkraut) for a week:

To O’Mara, the diet is not just a temporary means of losing weight but a way to eat for good. He has been doing it for 10 years, and credits it with turning his life around. At one point in our conversation he pulled up the Bristol Stool Chart, which ranges from Type 1 (“separate, hard pellets”) to Type 7 (“watery, no solid pieces”). O’Mara is consistently delivering Type 4 (“smooth, soft, like a snake”), with pointed ends, indicative of healthy rectal function, he told me. “When you start eating healthy, you don’t need toilet paper,” he claimed. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus.” He described a proper bowel movement to me this way: odorless, wipe-free, over in three to seven seconds and “nearly orgasmic.”

“I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room,” he said, “and nobody would know.”

My first thought upon reading this was, What a load of shit. Then I realized, well, yes, literally.

Then I thought about it some more and realized this is the Platonic ideal of a bullshit claim. If I told you that, say, I can eat an entire meal while doing a headstand, you could say, “I don’t believe you, show me.” But who in their right mind would challenge this quack O’Mara on this one? Certainly not the hosts of the dinner party, that’s for sure.

Sam Altman, Definitely Not a Weirdo ★

Sam Altman, on Twitter/X:

cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night:

connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests.

every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.

Katie Notopoulos, at Business Insider:

Talking to your kids about their upcoming soccer game or birthday is one of the enjoyable, pleasurable experiences of parenting. Those nice moments of positive connection, chatting in the car, are something I suspect most parents aren’t looking to give up or outsource.

This is one of the overall challenges with where we are with AI right now: AI might be capable of doing some of the tasks we find pleasurable and enjoyable (like creative writing or drawing), but what many people want is for it to take on the ones we don’t want to do.

I’m starting to think maybe Sam Altman isn’t hooked up right.

David Pogue: ‘Alexa+ Is a Buggy Embarrassment’ ★

David Pogue, at Pogue’s Posts:

Amazon’s “50+ things to try” list mentions that Alexa can “find a home maintenance professional.” So I tried it.

ME: I need a septic-system repair.

ALEXA: That service isn’t currently supported. I can help with plumbing services instead.

ME: Okay, fine. Plumbing services.

ALEXA: What’s your plumbing issue?

ME: I have untreated sewage pouring out of my kitchen faucet.

ALEXA: Is this urgent?

Uh … what do YOU think, dumbass? But OK:

ME: Yes.

ALEXA: When do you need it by?

Displays four responses: ASAP, Within a week, Further out, and I haven’t decided yet.

ME: ASAP.

ALEXA: I’m Alexa, not Shaq.

This could only have been funnier if Alexa had responded “The Aristocrats!”

(Which great film, is, in fact, available to stream on Amazon Prime.)

Apple News Ad of the Week ★

I look forward to this level of class and brand prestige coming to Apple Maps.

Paul Thurrott Reviews the HP OmniBook Ultra 14, With Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 ★

Paul Thurrott:

We didn’t need more evidence that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 compute platform is superior to anything in the x86 world. But here it is, regardless: The HP OmniBook Ultra 14 is yet another nearly-perfect laptop running Windows 11 on Arm, an ideal combination of hardware and software that delivers a superior overall experience.

Thurrott has high praise for the performance, battery life, and silence (it has a fan, but Thurrott says he never heard it engage). Intel and the x86 platform seem well and fully cooked. They completely lost Apple 6 years ago and the Windows world is finally catching up. Maybe they can hold onto the gaming market for a while but for a work laptop it sounds like you’re crazy if you don’t go with Qualcomm’s ARM chips.

Thurrott likes the design too:

In Snapdragon X2 guise, the laptop comes in a unique blue-gray Stone Blue color that’s nicely complemented by the darker gray of the keyboard keycaps. But if you get an Intel model, oh the horror, you can choose between Eclipse Gray and Silk Sand colors instead. Either way, the branding is minimal and classy and premium all the way.

He helpfully includes this photo of the “Snapdragon X2 Elite / Copilot+PC” sticker on the palm rest to prove how minimal and classy and premium all the way” it is.

Coming from the Mac world, I think the irregular shape of the OmniBook case is ungainly and bizarre. And the default display is criminally crude — low-res and only 300 nits. But if you spend to upgrade the display it seems like a nice machine, and 2.8 pounds is lighter than a MacBook Air (3.0 pounds).

Hacker News Thread on OpenAI’s ‘Apple Is Getting This Wrong’ Post ★

There’s an old adage that you should never bring a knife to a gunfight. My take on OpenAI’s response yesterday was expressing incredulity that OpenAI was bringing, like, a box of chocolates to the gunfight. Apple is trying to kill io, and OpenAI’s public response is basically “We love you guys, can’t we just be friends?”

This thread on Hacker News though points out that their response doesn’t even explain what they’re responding to. There’s no context. They just assume the reader is up to date on the lawsuit Apple filed. If you didn’t know anything about the suit and started with this post, it would make no sense at all. I’ve heard from friends there that the OpenAI culture is “too online”, and this might be the best proof of it.

Tuesday, 4 August 2026

Yours Truly on TBPN Yesterday ★

TBPN seems like a show I wouldn’t enjoy guesting on, but I actually enjoy it quite a bit.

Apple Seeks Preliminary Injunction Against OpenAI in Trade Secrets Case ★

Reuters:

Apple on Monday asked a U.S. judge for a preliminary injunction barring two former employees and OpenAI from accessing, acquiring, using or disclosing alleged confidential information as it moves ahead with its trade secrets case. [...]

The iPhone maker also filed a concurrent motion on Monday seeking expedited discovery, including production of documents relating to the defendants’ alleged access of Apple’s proprietary and trade secret information. It asked the judge to order the two former Apple employees named in the lawsuit, Chang Liu and Tang Yew Tan, to sit for depositions, along with OpenAI employee Yu-Ting Peng and an unnamed OpenAI employee who previously worked at Apple.

The request for expedited discovery and the depositions, I understand. Apple wants to move fast, and they want to get depositions (especially, I’m sure, with Tan) now. The preliminary injunction request, though, I think Reuters is underplaying here.

I suggest reading Apple’s actual motion, not the news coverage. From Apple’s motion:

OpenAI, its people, and partners should not be permitted to develop, release, and benefit from products using and developed with the benefit of Apple’s trade secrets.

Bending Spoons to Buy Airtable for $1.3 Billion ★

Ivan Mehta, reporting for TechCrunch:

In its first acquisition since going public last month, Bending Spoons on Tuesday said that it has agreed to buy spreadsheet and database startup Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash.

Founded in 2013, Airtable has so far raised over $1.4 billion over multiple funding rounds. At its peak, during the boom days of 2021, it was valued at over $11 billion, but earlier this year, its shares were said to be trading on the secondary markets at a valuation of $4 billion.

With its current net cash-and-cash-equivalents balance, Airtable is now valued at about $2.25 billion, Bending Spoons said.

The problem isn’t that Airtable isn’t a good product with a good business. According to the announcement, Airtable’s revenue is up to $480 million/year and grew 20 percent year-over-year. That’s good. That’s just not $11-billion-valuation good. In the abstract building a company worth $1 billion is a success; it’s a problem, though, if its financials are such that it needs to justify a valuation an order of magnitude greater than what it’s actually worth.

Monday, 3 August 2026

TerminalWidget 1.0 ★

New app from Brett Terpstra:

TerminalWidget lets you send output from commands, scripts, APIs, and Shortcuts directly to widgets across macOS, iOS, and iPadOS with rich formatting, progress bars, sparklines, and image support. It is available as a universal app on the App Store for $19.99.

I don’t know what I’m going to use this for, but I know I want to use it.

John Ternus Has Rehired Former Hardware VP Laura Legros ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus is rehiring Laura Legros, a former vice president of hardware engineering who retired from Apple in 2022, reports Bloomberg. Legros previously managed product delivery, development schedules, and coordination across engineering teams. Under Ternus, she will work across different parts of the company, and report directly to him.

According to Bloomberg, Legros was one of Ternus’ most trusted deputies before she retired. She has presented at past Apple events, introducing the 2018 MacBook Air and the 2020 iPad Air.

The 2018 introduction of the first retina MacBook Air was an interesting event. I noted at the time that it was conspicuous how seldom Apple mentioned “Intel”, despite the fact that all the products introduced ran on Intel chips. Then you look at the specs of that MacBook Air compared to the then-current iPad Pros (see link above) and you can see why Apple, privately, was seething.

The Information on Apple’s Unusual Use of iCloud for Confidential Work ★

Aaron “Homeboy” Tilley, reporting for The Information (paywalled without gift links, alas, but MacRumors has a summary):

When new employees join Apple, the company often issues them an iPhone and Mac and pays for an iCloud account with a large amount of online storage capacity. Crucially, during the onboarding process, Apple encourages new hires to use their preexisting personal Apple IDs with this iCloud account, through which their co-workers can share internal Apple documents and other files with them.

There’s a practical reason for Apple’s policy. Users of iPhones can only log into a single primary Apple ID that unlocks all iCloud capabilities at a time. Apple employees who want to maintain separate work and personal Apple IDs need to carry two iPhones with them. As a result, most Apple employees opt to use their personal Apple IDs to access their iCloud accounts, former employees said.

When employees leave Apple, the company revokes access to a dedicated iCloud directory for Apple work files, as well as an authentication system for logging into other internal services, such as Slack. But former employees say the company doesn’t do a thorough job during the offboarding process of looking for confidential files that have slipped through the cracks. Because those former employees typically continue to use their personal Apple IDs with their iCloud accounts, any Apple documents stored outside workplace directories remain available to them.

If you use your personal Apple ID, you get a magic “Apple Work” folder in iCloud Drive. When you leave Apple, that “Apple Work” folder disappears. But any other files or folders that were shared with you that were outside that magic folder are still in your iCloud Drive, because it’s still your personal iCloud account.

Another factor that plays into this, I think, but which Tilley doesn’t address, is that your Apple ID is not an email address. Your Apple ID is an account that has one or more email addresses associated with it. Let’s say your personal iCloud account has two email addresses associated with it: [email protected] and [email protected]. Then you take a job at Apple and get the address [email protected]. When you leave Apple, you lose access to the @apple.com address. But anything shared with your Apple ID through iCloud is still shared with you. You still have the same Apple ID account, even though you no longer have an employee @apple.com email account. Overall, this is a humane way of dealing with digital identity. Your Apple ID account is you, the person, not “[email protected]”, one specific unique email address. And you, the person, may well have multiple email addresses — all of which can be associated with your one Apple ID account. That makes Apple IDs more nuanced and complicated than a simple mapping of one email address = one account. And it obviously makes access restrictions more complicated.

Let’s say you delete your Gmail account. Now you can’t access your old [email protected] email address. But your iCloud access to items shared with your Apple ID still works, even for items that were sent to your now-deleted @gmail.com address. That’s just not how “work stuff” is accessed at most companies.

Tilley’s report at The Information is presented as being potentially relevant to Apple’s trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI, but Apple, in a statement to The Information, says it is not:

In a statement, Apple said: “This case is about OpenAI employees wrongfully taking Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. Nothing in the filing relates to documents shared by, or stored in, iCloud.” The company said it doesn’t pursue legal claims against former employees who accidentally hold on to Apple documents in their personal iCloud accounts.

Om Malik’s Final Essay: ‘The Myth, the Mythos and the Man’ ★

Om published this on Monday June 7 — the day of the WWDC keynote. He sent me a note about it, that is too personal to share in full. He described it as his “last shot” — “In case I don’t make it”. He didn’t make it.

I didn’t read it right away because I was busy with WWDC. Then, after he died, I didn’t read it because I couldn’t bring myself to. I did, finally, today. It’s so good. Truly insightful. A taste:

Augustus had the Senate and the priests. Dario had the Oval Office and the Vatican. The structure is the same. Two thousand years apart.

Plato would recognize this immediately. He spent his career distinguishing the philosopher who seeks truth from the sophist who manufactures persuasion. The sophist is not lying exactly. The sophist is selecting, sequencing, and presenting in ways that produce belief without requiring the audience to do the work. Mythos, for Plato, was the domain of poets and myth-makers. Useful for educating the young, dangerous when deployed as a substitute for rigorous argument among adults. He would look at Anthropic’s naming strategy and see sophistry wearing philosophical clothes.

If you haven’t already, set aside some time and give it a read.

Ulysses S. Grant on the Future Dividing Line ★

Ulysses S. Grant, in 1875:

Where the citizen is sovereign and the official the servant, where no power is exercised except by the will of the people, it is important that the sovereign — the people — should possess intelligence.

The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.

Not sure if the 2020s count as “the near future”, but holy hell is that a spot-on synopsis of our current moment.

Truth Social Launches Paid Early Access to Trump Posts ★

Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR:

Trump Media & Technology Group is now shopping to traders and investors a premium version of Truth Social delivering early access to the feeds of high-profile users, including the president. Starting Saturday, for a fee of up to $100,000 a month, trading firms can access “Truth API” to get a glimpse of the president’s often market-moving announcements about economic policy and global affairs before the rest of the world.

Trump’s media company says customers have already started signing up. Such an offering would give institutional investors a leg up in areas of finance like high-frequency trading, where an advantage of a few milliseconds can mean the difference of millions of dollars. But will the service be widely adopted across Wall Street?

“It’s insane,” said one Wall Street executive, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. “I can say for myself and 200 of my friends in finance, we’re not getting anywhere near this. In another administration, this would be considered criminal.”

It is criminal. It’s prima facie insider-trading-as-a-service, or at least it’s intended to be. And in the next administration, there’s no reason to think it won’t be prosecuted as such. It really is astonishing how far the Trump 2.0 administration is willing to take the notion that it’s not corruption if it’s done in the open. There’s an old adage that it’s not the crime but the cover-up that does you in. They’ve taken this to heart and just eschewed the cover-ups.

Sunday, 2 August 2026

Agent Fone ★

My thanks to Agent Fone for sponsoring last week at DF. Agent Fone is a crazily ambitious new smartphone that doesn’t merely ship with a built-in AI assistant. Instead, the entire concept is that it enables you to create custom software, right on the phone itself. Ideas for new apps that you’ve had in your notes for years. Weird little app ideas that only you would want. Describe your idea, answer a few questions, and Agent Fone builds an app, or widget, and it’s on your home screen. They’re looking for 50 people and small teams to sell the first 50 hardware units to. If you’re interested, check out their website for all the information you need, and broader description of the platform.

Boris Cherny on Trying to Get Claude Code to Rewrite the Claude App ★

Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, was interviewed by Diana Hu on stage at Y Combinator’s Startup School 2026 last week. Starting around 20:30 in the video, he briefly discussed directing Claude to perform difficult tasks:

Cherny: I think the skill nowadays is less about prompt engineering and more about figuring out how do you give Claude a hard task that seems a little bit too hard. Then how do you make it possible for Claude to verify its work along the way? The verification is probably the single most important thing that people do not get right, largely.

One example of this is people were — we have this desktop app for Claude and it’s built using Electron. We’ve made it quite fast. Now it’s a pretty awesome experience. Six months ago it was sluggish and it wasn’t very reliable. Now it’s pretty awesome. It’s the thing that most of the team uses. As an experiment, I wanted to see what it would feel like if it was native. So what I did is I started a Claude Tag session. Claude Tag is a new product we have. It’s just Claude running in Slack. My first question was, “Hey Tag, do you have access to a Mac OS runner on GitHub?” It said no. Then I hooked up a runner. So it was able to start a Mac virtual machine using GitHub. My second question was, I created this empty code base that was a Claude desktop app rewritten in Swift.

I asked, “Can you access this code base?” It said no. Then I gave it access and it was like, “Okay, great. Now I have access.” Then I said, “Okay, now what I want you to do is I want you to rewrite the Electron app in Swift. I want you to run the Electron app in the Mac virtual machine, screenshot it, and then look pixel by pixel. Compare it to the Swift version. Don’t stop until you’re done.”

Hu: And that was your prompt basically?

Cherny: That was my prompt.

Hu: And how long did this take to run?

Cherny: It’s still running.

Hu: When did you start it?

Cherny: It’s been a little over two weeks. So it’s like 14 days, 15 days.

I suppose this is interesting, but I don’t think it’s interesting in the way some people sending me links to this interview think it is. I don’t think this is a serious effort to create a truly native Mac client for Claude. And if it is, Cherny is going about it all wrong.

It’s not like the problem with the current Claude Mac client is merely the technical detail that it’s written with a bloated non-native framework. The actual problem is that it’s a poorly designed app written with a bloated non-native framework. The design itself is non-native. And aside from ignoring most Mac UI idioms, it’s just a bad design in the abstract. It’s bad on the web, bad on Windows, and thus of course it’s also bad on the Mac. So pointing Claude Code at the current Electron app and directing it to recreate it in Swift — pixel-by-pixel — could at best solve only the technical problems with the current app, not the design problems. I’d be more likely to use Claude if it were well designed but still written using Electron, than if it were ported to AppKit and/or SwiftUI but with exactly the current design. The current Claude app is like a shitty recipe made with shitty ingredients; what Cherny asked Claude Code to do is to follow the shitty recipe using better ingredients. It’s still going to taste like shit.

And it’s probably no wonder the task failed. AppKit and SwiftUI are made to create Mac-style apps. Trying to use them to recreate the utterly un-Mac-like Claude UI is like trying to brush your hair the wrong way. It’s not the way things are meant to go.

I also can’t let pass Cherny’s aside, re: the current Claude Mac app, that “Six months ago it was sluggish and it wasn’t very reliable. Now it’s pretty awesome.” I just launched the Claude app on my Mac, and it took 30 seconds before it was ready to use. The last 15 seconds of which, it showed the spinning beach ball cursor. When it finally finished it showed me a dickover. Maybe it was worse six months ago but this is not “pretty awesome”.

Saturday, 1 August 2026

The Apple Upgrade Situation ★

Michael Lopp, at Rands in Repose:

I have felt since it was announced that the Apple iPhone Upgrade Program has not just been a deal, but a steal. The specifics:

You apply for a loan for a full-price iPhone at 0%.

If approved, your payments are split over 24 months.

Pay for 24 months, and the phone is yours.

That was just the deal; the steal was that it was low effort every single year to get a new phone. I’d re-up for a new phone, and Apple would forgive the remaining payments of the loan because I’d signed up for another 24 months. Oh, and bonus, AppleCare was included, which was a total steal because I hate iPhone cases (iPhones are designed to be felt) and, uh, also I have been known to drop my phone. [...]

At first glance, the new plan looks cheaper. The original plan: one year of iPhone 17 Pro (256GB, $1,099 sticker) was ~$57/month. 12 payments, trade-in, restart: ~$684 for the year. The new one, same phone: $45.99/month on the 12-month lease: $552 for the year.

But wait! The first and most important change to the new plan is that AppleCare is no longer included. Adding it back to this phone at $13.99/month: $720 for the year.

That’s probably the single best argument for “the catch” in the new plan. The old iPhone Upgrade Program included AppleCare coverage, and the new Apple Upgrade leases do not.

Personally, I haven’t purchased AppleCare for any device, for me or my family, since I got it for my college Macintosh LC in 1991. Apple products come with good warranties. I’ve saved thousands of dollars in the intervening decades by never paying for AppleCare and instead paying for very occasional repairs out of pocket. (I’ve twice cracked my iPhone screen and paid to have it replaced.) But I know that some people wouldn’t even consider buying an iPhone (in particular, as a potentially dropped device) without AppleCare. Update: Lopp’s AppleCare math is for monthly AppleCare; if you pay annually ($139, for a $1,099 iPhone) then the annual cost for the monthly Apple Upgrade payments plus AppleCare is $691 — which is very close to the $684 annual cost for the old iPhone Upgrade Program.

Apple Q3 2026 Results ★

Jason Snell:

On Thursday, Apple announced record third-quarter earnings, with total revenue of $109.4B, up 16 percent from the year-ago quarter. iPhone revenue was up 22%, Mac revenue was up 10.4%, Services revenue was up 12%, and Wearables revenue was up 6%. iPad revenue was down 6%.

Six Colors also has their usual transcript of the analyst call, Tim Cook’s 90th and final one.

Over at MacRumors, Juli Clover wrote a retrospective on Tim Cook’s 15-year run as CEO:

When Cook took over as CEO, Apple’s revenue for all of 2011 was $108 billion. Apple reported $109.4 billion for Q3 2026, earning its 2011 revenue in a single quarter. We don’t have the numbers for fiscal 2026 yet, but in fiscal 2025, revenue was $416 billion. [...]

A day after Cook took over in August 2011, Apple’s stock price was $13.35 (split-adjusted). Today, it opened at $304.81, a roughly 23× increase.

Apple did alright under Cook.