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Michael Tsai

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Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Advertising Cognitive Dissonance

John Gruber (Mastodon): This to me is proof that Apple leadership is suffering from cognitive dissonance over their slide into advertising. They’re conflating cause and effect. The Apple brand stands for high-quality superior user experiences because the devices and software Apple makes traditionally deliver high-quality superior user experiences. The work Apple ships is what makes […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Golden Gate Application Support Protection

Wojciech Reguła: Looks like moving the user’s TCC db to /private/var/containers/Data/ProtectedSystem/[UUID]/Data/Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC/ was not the only change in the whole privacy castle of macOS 27. (What btw was a great move as now attackers with full disk access permissions can’t modify your privacy settings)macOS 27 quietly ships a new privacy mechanism I hadn’t seen documented […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

How to Hide an Update in the Mac App Store

Jeff Johnson: Although you can hide and unhide apps in your App Store purchase list, it turns out that hiding an app in the App Store purchase list does not hide the app in the updates list! I honestly can’t figure out the benefit of hiding an app in the App Store. The list of […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Recording the iPhone Screen With a Mac

Marcin Wichary: This instruction is a fever dream of three weird things in sequence: What on earth is “QuickTime”? I am recording with a player? Why can’t I choose the option [“New Screen Recording”] that describes exactly what I want to do? […] It’s noticing this kind of complexity, places where an easy way was […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Anthropic Book Training Settlement

AP (Hacker News): A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after using pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot. […] Bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz first brought the suit with two other authors in […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

EU Antitrust Fines for Google Search and Play Store

Tim Hardwick (Wired): Google was today fined €890 million ($1 billion) by the European Union for breaching antitrust rules with regard to its search and Google Play store services. The European Commission found that Google had broken the Digital Markets Act (DMA) by using its dominant position in the search market to favour its own […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Google Loses Final EU Antitrust Appeal

Ryan Whitwam (PDF, Reddit): Back in 2018, Google was handed a record-setting 4.34 billion-euro ($4.9 billion) fine in Europe for abusing its monopoly on Android. The company has spent the intervening years challenging that decision, but the continent’s highest court has put a stop to that. The Court of Justice of the European Union has […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Apple Loses Masimo Appeal

Marcus Mendes: Apple’s requests to overturn a $634 million patent verdict and secure a new trial in its long-running legal battle with Masimo were denied. Wesley Hilliard: There doesn’t appear to be any other path for appeal or recourse, as the judge rejected both requests for either a new judgement or trial. […] In the […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Whisper and SpeechAnalyzer

Om Malik (2023): One of the key advantages of MacWhisper, as it utilizes the Whisper technology, is its superior accuracy in transcriptions compared to other services I have used. I was an early adopter of Rev.com and eventually switched to Otter.ai, for which I paid approximately $100/year. However, I have since canceled my subscription. […] […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

CrashStealer

Thijs Xhaflaire (via Ric Ford): Jamf Threat Labs discovers and investigates CrashStealer, a C++ macOS infostealer that impersonates Apple's crash-reporting framework to harvest browser credentials, cryptocurrency wallets and keychain data, encrypting stolen files with AES-GCM before exfiltrating them to a remote command-and-control server. […] Unlike the payload it eventually installs, the dropper is properly code […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Sunsetting Google Earth for Mac

The Google Earth Team: We’re continuing to make Google Earth on web and mobile (Android | iOS) the best place for people to get helpful geospatial insights. While you can continue using the legacy Google Earth Pro desktop app, it will no longer be available for new downloads beginning on June 25, 2027. We encourage […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Apple Park: Designed to Isolate

Malcolm Crawford (Mastodon): The open-plan floors make it hard to concentrate. The building is so large that getting from one meeting to the next eats real time out of the day. It’s common for people to run meetings with colleagues over Webex — colleagues on the same campus, sometimes no more than two hundred yards […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

The EnshAIttification of Day One

Aleem Shaun: I’ve used Day One for more than a decade. It was an excellent journalling app. Private, minimal, easy to use, with excellent features such as geolocation, weather, ‘On this Day’, and book printing. Features that got out of the way and either worked quietly in the background or appeared only when you summoned […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Apple Services Price Hikes 2026

Chance Miller: Here are the new monthly prices for Apple Music and Apple One as of today: Apple Music Individual: $11.99 (up from $10.99) Family: $19.99 (up from $16.99) Student: $6.99 (up from $5.99) Apple One Individual: $19.95 (unchanged) Family: $27.95 (up from $25.95) Premier: $39.95 (up from $37.95) The price increases for Apple Music […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Apple Financial Statements: Products vs. Services

John Gruber (Mastodon, 2): Some of [Cook’s letter] remains true, but has lost some truthiness — and truthiness matters. But some of it is no longer true, period. It’s no longer just “one small part” of Apple’s business that serves advertisers. Here in 2026, search results in the App Store not only show paid ads — frequently for casinos — but […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Licensing a Mac App With RevenueCat

Jared Sorge: I know there are options out there like Paddle, FastSpring, and Lemon Squeezy that have worked for many apps like mine over the years. But I also wanted something simple for my users. Not to mention Apple Pay was a must-have. I believe all the services he mentions do support Apple Pay. RevenueCat […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Git Tower 17

Bruno Brito (release notes): In Tower 15, we introduced the “Fully Merged” badge and Automatic Branch Management to help you keep your repository tidy. With Tower 17, we’re taking the detection behind that badge to a whole new level. […] Tower now matches your local branches against merged pull requests from your hosting service, such […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Siri AI Beta

Federico Viticci (Mastodon): The AI frontier from the two big labs (and – we have to be honest with the numbers here – probably SpaceXAI and Meta now, too) is in a completely different league at the moment. I spent my first couple of weeks with Siri AI trying to convince myself that I could […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

notarytool Can’t Handle Zip64 Files

Wade Tregaskis: In short: if you have any file in your app (or whatever it is you’re trying to get Apple to sign) that is over 4 GiB, you must use a disk image (DMG) to package it for notarytool, not a zip file. This is because support for files larger than 4 GiB requires […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

San Francisco Demands Removal of Nudify Apps

Matt Burgess (MacRumors, ArsTechnica): On Thursday, San Francisco city attorney David Chiu sent legal notices to Apple and Google demanding that they remove from their app stores 13 face-swapping apps, which allow users to create AI-generated nonconsensual nude images. The letters say the Silicon Valley giants should stop “aiding and abetting” the sale of explicit […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

EU Exempts Apple Watch and AirPods From Battery Removal Requirement

Hartley Charlton: The European Commission yesterday adopted new exemptions to its Batteries Regulation that free the Apple Watch and AirPods from having to offer user-removable and replaceable batteries. […] The reasoning largely mirrors why devices like electric toothbrushes were already exempt: Opening a compact, sealed enclosure and failing to reseal it properly could let water […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Apple Intelligence to Launch in China

Hartley Charlton: Reuters reports that China’s Cyberspace Administration registered Apple’s on-device generative AI service this week, putting it on a list of newly cleared providers that also includes homegrown systems from Chinese phone makers. An unnamed source told the outlet that Apple’s AI features in the country will draw on models from both Baidu and […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Golden Gate Squircle Jail

Paul Kafasis: With last year’s release of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple made a mess of app icons. In the first betas of MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), however, there are signs of a turnaround. We’re urging Apple to continue making improvements, by restoring the ability for MacOS app icons to have distinct shapes. […] After decades […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Clear and Tinted Icons Are a Hard Pass

Adam Engst: Of the TidBITS readers who chose to respond to the poll, only 1% said they use clear icons on the Mac, and no one admitted to using tinted icons. On the iPhone, clear icons were twice as popular—a whopping 2%—and just 1% of respondents said they use tinted icons. Dark icons, which retain […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Suno Hack and Audio Scraping

Jason Koebler (tweet, Reddit): The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

SpamSieve 3.3.1

SpamSieve 3.3.1 is an update of my Mac e-mail spam filter that improves the filtering accuracy and includes various optimizations, fixes, and updates for macOS 27. Some interesting engineering issues were: I’m still supporting macOS 10.13, but the app can now build with the macOS 12 deployment target in preparation for Xcode 27. The way […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Flickr 5.0

Phil Gyford: Flickr recently updated their iOS/iPadOS app to version 5 (App Store link) and, while it’s not radically new, for a service whose changes have been incremental over recent years it contains a lot of differences. However I’ve yet to find any official changelog or update information. […] When displaying multiple grouped photos from […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

macOS 27 Public Beta

Juli Clover: Apple today released the first public beta of macOS Golden Gate, expanding the macOS 27 beta test to non-developers. You can sign up to test the update on Apple’s beta website, and then download it by going to System Settings > General > Software Update and toggling on the macOS 27 beta. Jason […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

iOS 27 Public Beta

Juli Clover: Apple released the iOS 27 public beta today, and if you’ve been curious about the new software, now’s the time to try it out. iOS 27 brings Siri AI, performance improvements, and lots of new Apple Intelligence features. […] Everything feels snappier than it did in iOS 26. Animations are quicker, apps launch […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Sunsetting CoreStorage

Apple: In macOS 28 and later, the Mac OS Extended file system format will be supported only for volumes (disks and other storage devices) that aren’t encrypted. For future macOS compatibility, either decrypt or reformat any encrypted Mac OS Extended volumes. I think Apple removed the user interface for creating such volumes way back in […]