TikTok has finally been sold, sort of. New partners include Silver Lake, the private equity firm that owns WP Engine. It’s almost like Silver Lake doesn’t care much about the open web.

John Gruber’s one-sentence take on Apple adding more ads to the App Store:

I have a bad feeling about this.

Yep. Even ignoring that Apple shouldn’t be in the ads business, the problem with App Store search ads is they take up half the phone screen! It’s a lot of junk to scroll through.

For day five of the photo challenge: beard.

Casey Newton has predictions for 2026: the bubble will continue even as some AI companies fail, OpenAI will retire Sora, social media will increasingly be 16+, and other mostly AI-related predictions. On politics:

I predict AI concerns will take a backseat to the economy and a backlash to Trump’s authoritarianism. That said, I do think we’ll see the beginnings of an anti-AI movement — and perhaps a bipartisan one.

2026 might be too early for a substantial, mainstream backlash. But I do think as AI improves, both proponents and detractors will become more extreme.

Evergreen. Got our tree so early this year, it’s losing more and more needles every day. Just needs to last another week. 🎄

This is an amazing follow-up video from Joanna Stern on the Anthropic vending machine. I’m not super concerned about the outcome… Might be a good thing if our future robot overlords can be persuaded to trust humans. 🤪

If you use Day One and haven’t tried the cross-posting from Micro.blog to Day One, it is kind of magical. This is what one of my blog posts today looks like after it has been automatically synced to Day One.

It can be used directly for your main journal, or in a separate journal as an extra backup.

Listening to Jay Graber on the latest Revolution.Social. Rabble continues to do a great job of interviewing folks from across the social web. I think we’re all better off when we’re aware of what other platforms are doing, and so we can come from a point of potential collaboration, not competition.

Seeing videos of the new Samsung trifold phone has convinced me that foldables are good enough now. I don’t want a trifold, but I’m looking forward to Apple’s take on this. I’d prefer super thin at all costs, no outside screen, minimal battery and camera.

Tim Sweeney in a tweet about the new App Store rules for Japan:

Apple was required to open up iOS to competing stores today, and instead of doing so honestly, they have launched another travesty of obstruction and lawbreaking in gross disrespect to the government and people of Japan.

I’ve already spent half an hour reviewing the terms and comparing them to the EU. It’s such a waste of time for everyone, including Apple.

Apple is opening up third-party marketplaces to Japan, similar to the expansion in the EU. Slow and good progress for the App Store, but on first reading looks like there are still junk fees.

Sigh. This probably isn’t great:

load average: 69.13, 58.89, 48.27

Third day of the Micro.blog winter wonder photo challenge: firelight.

Calvin Tomkins, leading up to his 100th birthday, wrote a series of journal entries for The New Yorker, a mix of memories from his career and the new challenges of getting older and losing his vision:

When she types my spoken text, I spend the next few days editing it on my antediluvian laptop—changing words, deleting sections and redoing them, fine-tuning the focus. This gets harder and harder, but the alternative, I fear, is doing nothing.

The technical explanation for how Bluesky has implemented their find friends from contacts is fascinating. I don’t plan to do anything with phone numbers again, but I still learned some things from it.

Rainy day in Austin. Looking out from my car as the skyline fades up into the mist.

OpenAI often makes fun of their own product names — “really bad at naming things” — but Google’s image product is literally called Nano Banana. 🍌

I like this blog post by Robin Rendle about whether the current disruption of search engines might be a good thing:

Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.

Most blogs are not monetized with ads and shouldn’t be. There are still indirect benefits to writing on the web. Sharing for the sake of it, bringing people into newsletters or subscriptions, and building an audience that leads to other good things, jobs, friends.

For day 2 of the winter photo challenge: cozy blanket and cozy book, The Spellshop.

John Gruber blogging at Daring Fireball about the updated Apple TV logo animation and sound:

The new one feels like a branding stroke unto itself. Sonically, it doesn’t evoke anything else. It just sounds rich and cool. Visually, with its rotating prism effect, it does evoke the classic six-color Apple logo.

The new one is great. The glowing background of the old logo actually bugged me from the very beginning. Something about it felt wrong, like design that uses too many gradients getting muddled instead of crisp and clear.

MacStories 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award: Unread. Congrats @johnbrayton!

Eleven years after its inception and eight years after its second sale to a different developer, Unread still stands out in the third-party indie app market because it’s managed to honor its lineage while adapting to the ever-changing nature of the Apple ecosystem.

If you missed it, we brought our Core Intuition podcast back for another special bonus episode. We catch up on AI, the new Micro.blog Studio plan, Daniel’s family and college search, losing trust in Tim Cook, and whether Steve Jobs can be replaced.

Manu Moreale:

How about, instead of preventing “the kids” from accessing social media, we go in the opposite direction and keep all the adults out? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

🙂

Joking aside, I do think there is something to just make the social web better, for everyone.

Great blog post from Matt Haughey on driving a VW Buzz from Texas to Oregon. When the Buzz was announced, I was hoping it would look a little more old-school VW, but seeing one in person they look really good. Seems mostly well designed inside too.

Watched: Mushka. Andreas Deja helping keep hand-drawn animation alive, purposefully showing the pencil lines in the age of AI and computer-generated everything. 🍿

We just posted a new Core Intuition! Wha…?! Episode 26.2.

Nick Heer on locked Apple accounts:

Given this tight control, the bar for locking a user out of their Apple Account and, to some extent, out of their devices should be unbelievably high.

As an aside, I use iCloud but also (less frequently) copy my photos to Dropbox and Google Photos. Too important to only have one synced copy.

Tesla robotaxis in Austin no longer need safety drivers. Worrisome. Elon Musk’s insistence that self-driving does not need radar or lidar is just needlessly dangerous. Waymos drive better than human drivers in part because they can see better.

Six years ago I blogged about my favorite Christmas movies. No changes needed yet. 🎄

Too many guns. I don’t have a lot of words beyond what has already been said for years. Sad for the victims and families from Brown University and Bondi Beach. We should watch what Australia does next and learn from it.