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Michael Tsai

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Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Whither Liquid Glass?

William Gallagher: Apple’s Liquid Glass redesign of all of its operating systems from iPhone to Mac may have proven divisive, and it was certainly spearheaded by Alan Dye. But there is no possibility that it will be dropped, even as Bloomberg now reports that several designers left alongside Dye when he moved to Meta. This […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Tony Hoare, RIP

Liam Proven: Professor Charles Anthony Richard Hoare has died at the age of 92. Known to many computer science students as C. A. R. Hoare, and to his friends as Tony, he was not only one of the greatest minds in the history of programming – he also came up with a number of the […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

AirPods Max 2

Apple (Hacker News, Reddit, MacRumors): Apple today announced AirPods Max 2, bringing even better Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), elevated sound quality, and intelligent features to the iconic over-ear design. Powered by H2, features like Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, Voice Isolation, and Live Translation come to AirPods Max for the first time. The new AirPods Max […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

EagleFiler 1.9.20

EagleFiler 1.9.20 is a maintenance release of my Mac digital filing cabinet and e-mail archiving app that improves importing (from Mariner Paperless, Evernote, and Apple Creator Studio), adds some scripts for working with dates and filenames, and improves searching and tagging. macOS 26.4 adds some classes with strange names like AppIntentsServices.$RunnerServiceDispatcherActorProtocol and IDSFoundation.$IDSDRealTimeGroupSessionManager that confuse […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

AI Layoffs

Ari Levy and Jordan Novet: Atlassian said on Wednesday that it’s eliminating 10% of its workforce, or about 1,600 jobs, as the company restructures following a plunge in its stock price driven by developments in artificial intelligence. “We are doing this to self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales, while strengthening our financial profile,” […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

URL/NSURL Double-Encodes Characters Unnecessarily

Jeff Johnson: The older, simpler API [NSURL URLWithString:URLString] behaves the same as [NSURL URLWithString:URLString encodingInvalidCharacters:YES] when your code is compiled with the iOS 17 or macOS 14 SDK. So much for backward compatibility! [NSURL URLWithString:URLString] continues to work fine with example 1, leaving the URL string untouched, but it mangles example 2: https://example.org?url=https%253A%252F%252Fexample.org%253Ffoo%5B0%5D%253Dbar Notice that […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Lower App Store Fees in China

Apple (MacRumors): As of March 15, 2026, changes will be made to the commission rates that apply to the China mainland storefront of the App Store on iOS and iPadOS. The commission rate for standard Apple In-App Purchase and paid app transactions will be 25%. Currently, the rate is 30%. The commission rate for qualifying […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Five Decades of Thinking Different

Computer History Museum (MacRumors): Join us for a special CHM Live evening celebrating Apple’s first half-century, featuring speakers from across the eras of Apple history, including former Apple CEO John Sculley, Senior Employee Chris Espinosa, former Senior Vice President (SVP) of Hardware Engineering Jon Rubinstein (by video), and former Chief Software Technology Officer and SVP […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Meta Acquires Moltbook

Amanda Silberling (Hacker News, Slashdot): Meta acquired Moltbook, the Reddit-like “social network” where AI agents using OpenClaw can communicate with one another. The news was first reported by Axios and later confirmed to TechCrunch. Moltbook is joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, a Meta spokesperson told us. Moltbook creators Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will join the […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Apple’s 50th Anniversary

Tim Cook (MacRumors): Fifty years ago in a small garage, a big idea was born. Apple was founded on the simple notion that technology should be personal, and that belief — radical at the time — changed everything. […] At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday. But we couldn’t let this […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Ensembles 3

Drew McCormack (February): Had my Core Data sync framework, Ensembles, pretty much in maintenance mode. With Apple moving on to SwiftData, didn’t seem any point to modernizing the 15 year old ObjC codebase. But I had the thought to give Claude a shot at it, and in 2 days I’ve got a complete port: Swift […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

6K Display Comparison

Wade Tregaskis: Nobody else has even tried to make a bright 6k display – in fact, every non-Apple 6k display is outright dim by modern display standards – they’re barely brighter than the original 5k display in the 2015 iMac! […] For the price of one Apple Pro Display XDR you can get four Asus […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Hardware-Exclusive Mac Accent Colors

John Gruber: By default, the MacOS accent color in System Settings → Appearance defaults to a color that matches the Neo’s hardware — a fun trick Apple has been using for decades. David Deller: This is the first I’m learning that System Settings sometimes has a special accent color only available to a Mac with a particular […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

Greg Knauss: What I am talking about is being replaced, about becoming expendable, about machines gaining the ability to adequately perform a very specific function that was previously the exclusive domain of skull meat. What I’m talking about is that nothing I do matters. That nothing I can do matters. In just the past few […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

CoreDataEvolution

Fatbobman (Mastoson): This library is designed to simplify and enhance Core Data’s handling of multithreading, drawing inspiration from SwiftData’s @ModelActor feature, enabling efficient, safe, and scalable operations. […] Custom Executors for Core Data Actors CoreDataEvolution provides custom executors that ensure all operations on managed objects are performed on the appropriate thread associated with their managed […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Weathergraph 1.0.330

Tomas Kafka: Multiple locations — the most-requested Weathergraph feature — is finally here. Save home, work, your favourite trails, or your next destination. Switch between them instantly with a single tap. Finally. This is still my favorite weather app. As with the forecast provider toggle, the location toggle works on the main graph (and retains […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Acme Weather 1.0

Adam Grossman: Fifteen years ago, we started work on the Dark Sky weather app. […] We enjoyed our time at Apple. So why did we leave to start another weather company? It’s simple: when looking at the landscape of the countless weather apps out there, many of them lovely, we found ourselves feeling unsatisfied. […] […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Ars Technica’s AI-Fabricated Quotes

Maggie Harrison Dupré (Hacker News, more context): The Condé Nast-owned Ars Technica has terminated senior AI reporter Benj Edwards following a controversy over his role in the publication and retraction of an article that included AI-fabricated quotes, Futurism has confirmed. Earlier this month, Ars retracted the story after it was found to include fake quotes […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Paul Brainerd, RIP

Todd Bishop (via Adam Engst): In early 1984, Paul Brainerd and four engineers packed into his old Saab and another car and drove south on Interstate 5 from Seattle. They had been laid off after Kodak bought their employer, Atex, a company whose computerized text-processing systems let newspaper reporters and editors write and edit stories […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

AirPods Control Center Design in iOS 26

Marco Arment: I fail using this UI at least once a week. It’s the AirPods Control Center volume pane, where I go to put my AirPods Pro into Adaptive mode (which I have configured a hundred times to be part of the long-press selection, but that always gets inexplicably forgotten). What you’re SUPPOSED to do […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Hetzner Price Hikes

Hetzner (Hacker News, Reddit): The costs to operate our infrastructure and to buy new hardware have both increased dramatically. Therefore, our price changes will affect both existing products and new orders and will take effect starting on 1 April 2026. We have genuinely tried hard to optimize our costs and to prevent increasing our prices […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

1Password’s Price Hike

Adam Engst: 1Password has announced that prices for its popular password manager will increase for renewals made on or after 27 March 2026. In an email to users, the company said that 1Password Individual will increase from $35.88 per year ($2.99 per month, paid annually) to $47.88 per year ($3.99 per month), and that 1Password […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

The Age Verification Trap

Waydell D. Carvalho (Hacker News): In cases when regulators demand real enforcement rather than symbolic rules, platforms run into a basic technical problem. The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are. And the only way to prove that you checked […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Lower Google Play Store Fees and Registered App Stores

Ryan Whitwam (PDF): Late last year, Google and Epic concocted a settlement that would end the long-running antitrust dispute that stemmed from Fortnite fees. The sides have now announced an updated version of the agreement with new changes aimed at placating US courts and putting this whole mess in the rearview mirror. The gist is […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Welcome (Back) to Macintosh

Nick Heer: Snell converts the software score to an average letter grade of B to B–. Is Apple satisfied with shipping a consistently B product? I confess the grade I have given has been lower than this average. My experience with Apple’s software for the past several years has been markedly less than fine. Given […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Apple Watch Fitness Regressions

Gus Mueller (Mastodon): In episode 680 of ATP, at about 6:12 in, Marco Arment goes off on watchOS 26’s fitness app and trashes all the changes. And I couldn’t agree more with him. I thought it was just me who hated all the changes, and the slow animations, and the workout picker. It’s such a […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

How Long Will My Mac’s SSD Last?

Howard Oakley: To work out how long you can expect your Mac’s internal SSD to last before it reaches that cycle limit, all you need do is to measure how much data is written to it, and once that is 3,000 times the capacity of the SSD, you should expect it to fail through wear. […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

macOS 26.3.1

Juli Clover (release notes, no security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW): According to Apple’s release notes for the update, it adds support for the new Studio Display and Studio Display XDR. Apple has also released a firmware update for the new displays. See also: Howard Oakley and Mr. Macintosh. Previously: Studio Display and […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

iOS 26.3.1 and iPadOS 26.3.1

Juli Clover (iOS/iPadOS release notes, no security, no enterprise, no developer): According to Apple’s release notes, the update adds support for the new Studio Display and Studio Display XDR, and it includes unspecified bug fixes. Previously: Studio Display and Studio Display XDR iOS 26.3 and iPadOS 26.3

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

BenQ MA270S 5K Display

Andrew Liszewski: It was first announced last month without pricing or availability details, but BenQ has now shared all the specs for its new 27-inch 5K display designed for Mac users. The MA270S matches the size and 5,120 x 2,880 resolution of the new Studio Display and Studio Display XDR Apple announced yesterday, including a […]