Earlier this week, a developer version of a Mac computer software
update accidentally included references to several upcoming Apple
products, including a video of the AirPods with cameras in
action. [...]
But the product challenges are still being resolved, and the
camera AirPods remain off the company’s 2026 release schedule.
Apple continues to believe the earbuds will launch in 2027, said
the people, who asked not to be identified when discussing
unannounced products.
Zac Hall at 9to5Mac, a month ago:
Sometimes a small change can make a big impact. That’s especially
true for Apple’s latest TestFlight update for users with a lot of
pre-release software.
Apple just updated TestFlight for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and more.
The new version, 4....
Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with NBC News to
exclusively power all of its programmatic, or automated, display
advertising sales, CEO Adam Singolda tells Axios.
Agents are hitting your signup flow and bouncing off a browser login built for humans. Every one that gives up is a signup you never see.
WorkOS Agent Registration turns that traffic into signups. Enroll via the dashboard and AuthKit publishes an auth.md file agents read to register for scoped, short-lived credentials you control.
Joe Flint, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
Walt Disney’s ABC has sued the Federal Communications Commission
alleging the agency’s efforts to challenge its broadcast licenses
and regulate its talk show “The View” are illegal and an effort to
quash speec...
Marcus Mendes at 9to5Mac has a fun update on U.S. v. Apple, the ill-considered antitrust case started by the Biden administration. A bunch of what the DOJ argues are anticompetitive features in Apple’s platforms, Apple argues are in fact privacy and security related.
Back i...
Paresh Dave and Aarian Marshall, reporting for Wired (News+ link in case Wired hits you with their paywall):
The incidents involved two different shipments of high-value
technology traveling from Silicon Valley to Southern California,
according to Pachuca, who says he le...
Stuart Heritage, writing for The Guardian, under the splendid headline “Dickovers, Baggravation and Botiquette: 18 New Words to Describe Our Tech Hellscape”:
The “dickover” is the scourge of the modern age. Coined in May by
John Gruber, a tech writer, it is defined as “a...
Thibault Sottiaux, the OpenAI genius in charge of Codex and the new ChatGPT Homer Simpson car, on Twitter/X:
I don’t come often to GMail [sic] (OpenAI is a Slack company),
but I swear, every time I do open it, there is a new button
somewhere around the top right corner.
...
macOS 27 Golden Gate beta 6 introduces redesigned traffic light window controls. The new look resembles older Mac OS X systems with more detail in each button.
Nice. But these changes can’t improve fast enough for me — I am impatient. The MacOS user interface had been in a slow, steady, sad, no-fun decline for years, and then, a year ago, the bottom fell out with the disaster of 26 Tahoe.
But all the changes in 27 Golden Gate are in the right direction. Golden Gate is not a mixed bag. Designers with taste and talent are clearly back at the helm. And I love that they’re still pushing UI and icon changes in mid-August, entering the home stretch of the .0 beta cycle.
Some follow-up to this weekend’s stemwinder “Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing”:
Temperature
Contra a bunch of idiots at Hacker News and elsewhere, I understand that popular LLMs do not just pick the “best” token (word) at each ...
The Savant is a political thriller series starring Jessica Chastain that was supposed to debut a year ago. Apple “postponed” it, apparently out of fear of upsetting extremist right-wing nut jobs because the show is about an undercover investigator (Chastain) hunting down ext...
The Financial Times, back on July 1, with the transcontinental byline “Michael Acton in San Francisco and Barbara Moens in Brussels” (non-paywalled summaries from 9to5Mac and MacRumors):
Apple chief executive Tim Cook and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen
held “constructive”...
When I wrote this week about Anthropic’s announcement that all Claude models, worldwide, would soon begin “watermarking” everything they generate, including text, to comply with this EU regulation, we were left to speculate how this was going to work, because Anthropic offer...
Cory Weinberg, Jemima McEvoy, Jessica E. Lessin, and Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information:
As Amodei has hopscotched the globe to preach about the potential
and risks of AI — from New Delhi to Davos to Sun Valley — Clark
has a...
James Padolsey, on the Claude-text-watermarking-to-comply-with-an-EU-regulation imbroglio:
The same thought that led to this law could have applied to
calculators at the time of their inception, had their outputs
revealed themselves through artefacts. Thankfully, a sum b...
The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
To help alleviate the supply crunch, Apple is looking to Chinese
manufacturers.
“The Trump administration is not in favor of that,” Lutnick said
in an interview after touring an Apple manufacturing facility in
Houston. There have to ...
XCancel:
XCancel is an instance of Nitter.
Nitter is a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end
focused on privacy and performance. The source is available on
GitHub at https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [...]
Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for ex...
My thanks to Drata for sponsoring last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.
Following up on my post yesterday about modern iPhones and scratch resistance, and my personal habits of (a) almost never using an iPhone case, and (b) never setting the iPhone face down except on soft (cloth) surfaces.
I should have anticipated this, because I’ve had this ...
This page from Google Design on their “Material 3” UI language came to my attention after my snarky post about the ungainly new to-do app they bizarrely bragged about on Twitter/X this week. I don’t think this “Material 3” page is new — I think it’s a few years old — but I’d...
Philip Michaels, writing last September for Tom’s Guide:
iPhone 17 torture test videos done by JerryRigEverything
indicate that Ceramic Shield 2 certainly resists scratching, with
scratch testing leaving only light scratches at level 7 on the
Mohs scale of hardness. Scra...
A few years ago I’d have looked at this post and maybe leaned toward the idea that a precocious 8th grader somewhere hacked into the @GoogleDesign Twitter account and tried to pass off their little to-do app as having come from Google’s design team. But this is apparently real. I almost hope it’s AI slop and that there aren’t any human designers there who think anything in this app has appropriate proportions or is aesthetically pleasing.
(Here’s an XCancel link for the x.com averse. You can just change any x.com/* URL to xcancel.com/*. But, alas, the XCancel mirror of the original tweet loses the animation showing the UI in motion — for some, but not all, users.)
Joanna Stern, writing at The New Things (gift link):
I used to love the blinking notification light on my BlackBerry,
and later my Droid 2. It was a simple way to know I had a message
without actually looking at my messages. Then BlackBerry let you
customize the color, a...
David Imel, The Verge:
But in our current moment, the photos people are drawn to are not
flawless — and that’s created a real problem for the people
making smartphone cameras. “The gap between what two random people
want from their camera is growing dramatically,” says I...
Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch:
With this year’s Pixel 11 series launch, Google is thinking more
agentic AI to complete your tasks. With Gemini, U.S.-based users
will be able to order groceries, book rides, or get coffee, for
instance. Plus, Gemini can call businesses on users’ ...
Sam Rutherford, writing for Engadget:
Granted, the P11 Pro Fold still includes IP68 dust and water
resistance, which is better than what you get on the Z Fold 8 line
(IP48). But after making an absolute tank of a foldable phone with
last year’s model, I said Google reall...
Victoria Song, The Verge:
The $399 Google Pixel Watch 5 isn’t about the hardware. Sure,
there’s a new satin pyrite case finish, a few new strap colors,
and a Steph Curry Special Edition. Under the hood, there’s a
slightly faster Qualcomm processor and an itty-bitty batte...
Mia Sato, The Verge:
Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails
related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation
emails didn’t name specific items anymore, and instead listed only
item categories.
“Your Beauty item is confirmed!” an...
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