I know there’s been a lot of exciting World Cup action this week, but this 2018 clip from Japan is the best soccer video I’ve seen in a long while.

Link: x.com/BallStreet/status/950382135969566720

The UK Competition and Markets Authority:

‘Steering’ — the ability for developers to engage with customers about off‑platform options — is currently banned by Apple and restricted by Google in the UK. Lifting these constraints would allow developers to bypass mandatory fees set by platforms.

The CMA’s consultation includes principles to ensure that the fees Apple and Google charge for steering are fair and reasonable. Using an evidence-based framework, the CMA would expect steering fees to be lower than current app store charges, with savings passed onto UK customers or invested back into the developers’ businesses to support future innovation.

Japan’s MSCA is a good model for this.

Link: gov.uk/government/news/cma-consults-on-new-requirements-for…

Sam Tabahriti, reporting for Reuters: Britain’s competition regulator ​on Tuesday proposed allowing app developers to steer users to alternative payment options outside Apple and Alphabet’s Google app stores to cut fees and boost competition. The Competition and Markets ...

Munsif Vengattil, Aditya Kalra, and Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters: Sensitive lists of components and suppliers, ​and photos of Apple’s upcoming iPhone 18 Pro models are part of files posted on the dark web by the ransomware group that stole data from the U.S. fir...

Day One recognizes that many people struggle with journaling not because they can’t write, but because they don’t know how to begin or what a “good” journal entry about their day looks like. That’s why we built Daily Chat, a guided reflection experience that helps you talk through your day, organize your thoughts, and shape them into a journal entry.

Early testers commented: “Day One’s new Daily Chat is a true game changer for my daily journaling. The AI-powered chat makes capturing thoughts effortless and inspires creativity like never before. Writing my diary has never been this intuitive and fun!”

Try it for yourself, it will change the way you think about journaling.

Link: dayoneapp.com/blog/introducing-daily-chat/

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week to promote Auth.md, their new open protocol for AI agent registration. (Who’d have thunk that I’d be getting paid to promote new uses for Markdown 22 years after releasing it?)

Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services? That’s the question Auth.md aims to answer. It’s a single Markdown file you host at your domain that tells agents how to register your users, which flows you support, what scopes you expose, and how credentials get issued. It’s like robots.txt but for agent registration.

Cloudflare, Firecrawl, and Resend have already adopted it.

An open protocol authored by WorkOS. Read the spec.

Link: workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

Daniel Agee, an early member of the team at Glass, writing on the Glass blog: It’s not lost on us that Om’s photography, often taken in frozen lands in or around the arctic circle, was the polar opposite of his personality. While he focused on subtle shapes and hidden la...

Matt Mullenweg: Fundamentally, Om was a lover of humanity. He became a fast “regular” everywhere he went. He wouldn’t just buy coffee, he would also learn the name and story of every barista, the dogs and people in South Park. His deep curiosity and respect weren’t just ...

Clay Risen, writing for The New York Times (gift link): Mr. Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst, leading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism start-ups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and Inside.com. He was among...

Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge (gift link): If you’ve visited a cannabis club in Spain, [Sammy] Azdoufal says, chances are your photo ID was among them — and possibly your phone number, address, your favorite strains of cannabis, and how much you consumed each mon...

From the bottom of Rolfe Winkler’s report for The Wall Street Journal Thursday, on Apple’s unprecedented price increases (gift link): Apple’s price hikes arrived the day after Micron Technology, the big American maker of memory and storage, reported blowout quarterly ear...

Bernie Sanders, posting on Twitter/X Thursday (don’t complain to me that he doesn’t use his Bluesky account): Corporate greed is Tim Cook, the billionaire Apple CEO, claiming that hiking prices on Apple products by over $200 is “unavoidable” after it made $112 billion in...

From a September 2022 letter to then-Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, co-signed by Marco Rubio (then a Republican senator from Florida, currently secretary of state) and Mark Warner (Democratic senator from Virginia): We write to convey our extreme concern...

Microsoft’s Xbox blog: Effective August 1, 2026, we will be updating prices worldwide. The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our 2 TB model. Last October, we increased XBOX console pri...

Demetri Sevastopulo and Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times (paywalled, alas): Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to buy memory chips from CXMT, a Chinese company that the Pentagon has put on a blacklist because of alleged connections t...

Grace Kay and Theo Wayt, writing for the paywalled-with-no-gift-links The Information: xAI launched an upgraded video model last week, highlighting how it’s pushing ahead with its own visual efforts even as it brings in outside help to compete with rivals in areas like c...

OpenAI yesterday: We’re beginning a limited preview of the GPT‑5.6 series: Sol, our flagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and Luna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive performance to GPT‑5.5 while being 2× cheaper and Luna brings stron...

Reed Albergotti and Ben Smith, reporting last night for Semaphor: The decision, in a letter sent Friday afternoon to Anthropic, is a major de-escalation in the confrontation between the Trump Administration and one of the world’s most valuable private companies. Two week...

Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge (gift link): Since the Magnavox Odyssey came out in 1972, game consoles have been built with the same basic goal: to effortlessly play proprietary games on a TV screen. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have spent decades essentially sel...

Om died two days ago, after a long battle against a bum heart. Om and I often sat next to each other at Apple keynotes. This was not at all surprising or odd, insofar as we’d been friends for 20 years. Folks at Apple PR knew that we were close, and would often pair us...

Apple, in a statement issues to the press yesterday, quoted fully by MacRumors:

The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.

I saw a few other publications quote a sentence or two from the statement, but I like to see the whole thing. It’s not long.

Link: macrumors.com/2026/06/25/apple-explains-why-it-raised…

Via MacRumors’s Buyer Guide, the current third-gen Apple TV 4K models were introduced in October 2022, and sport the A15 Bionic chip that debuted with the iPhones 13 in 2021. It’s widely believed that new hardware models are coming this fall. I mentioned yesterday that the s...

On the eve of WWDC, in a post arguing that “SwiftUI Only Makes It Easy to Develop Bad Apps”, I wrote about an atrocious bug in Apple’s Journal app: If you’re running MacOS 26 Tahoe, open Journal and make a new dummy entry. Type something like “The quick brown fox.” Then ...

Some quick thoughts on the hardware prices Apple increased — and didn’t increase — today. Here’s a table with most of the base models whose prices increased: Original New Change Vision Pro $3500 $3700 6% HomePod $300 $350 17% HomePod Mini $100 $130 30% Apple T...

Heartbreaking news, shared by Om’s family:

Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends.

We invite you to share your remembrances of Om in the comments below or by posting and tagging his accounts on X/Twitter, Instagram, Threads, or LinkedIn.

Om kept this battle very private, so this news comes as a terrible surprise for many, and an incomprehensible gut punch for everyone who knew and loved him. Rest in peace, my friend.

So it goes.

Link: om.co/2026/06/24/1966-2026/

Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): The company briefly took down its Apple Online Store early this morning as it typically does when announcing new products. When it came back online, the price tags for Mac computers rose roughly 15% to 20%...

Jeff Johnson: Several weeks ago, John Gruber of Daring Fireball asked me whether I could reproduce an issue he was seeing in Safari: when a web page is focused, the Copy menu item in the main menu is always enabled, regardless of whether there’s anything selected in the ...

The WebKit blog (back during WWDC): If you look through the lists of features and fixes in Safari 27, you’ll notice that, although there are 58 brand-new features and 525 fixes — the largest pile of fixes in any Safari release in recent memory — most of what is released ...

When an AI agent tries to complete a task that requires a new account, it hits a wall: the sign-up form. There’s no standard for how an agent registers a user with an app on their behalf.

auth.md is a file you host at your domain that tells agents how to register your users, which flows you support, what scopes you expose, and how credentials get issued. Think robots.txt, but for agent registration. It composes existing OAuth standards.

Cloudflare, Firecrawl, and Resend have already adopted it.

An open protocol authored by WorkOS. Read the spec.

Link: workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

Kickstarter campaign from Jason Snell and Myke Hurley to fund a 50-episode narrative podcast on Apple’s 50-year history. (Actually, with stretch goals, more than 50 episodes.) The campaign has already hit its primary funding goal but there’s a week left in the campaign and more stretch goals to hit. Jason and I spoke at length about Designed in California on the latest episode of my podcast, and like I said there — if you enjoy podcasts like The Talk Show and Upgrade and aren’t backing this campaign, you’re not hooked up right. Really looking forward to this when episodes start dropping.

Link: designed.fm/