Todd Spangler, reporting for Variety: Disney has now ended its partnership with OpenAI, which included plans for the media conglomerate to take a $1 billion stake in the artificial-intelligence company led by CEO Sam Altman. A Disney rep said in a statement to Variety: ...

Chrome engineer Eric Seckler, on Google’s Chromium Blog, under the bold headline “Android Sets New Record for Mobile Web Performance”: Today, we are proud to celebrate a major milestone: Android is now the fastest mobile platform for web browsing. Through deep vertical ...

Well, at least we know who taught her to talk like that.

Link: nytimes.com/2026/03/25/us/politics/melania-trump-robot.html…

Jessica E. Lessin, Amir Efrati, and Erin Woo, reporting for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information: While we have reported that Apple can tweak, or fine-tune, a version of Google’s Gemini AI so that it responds to queries the way Apple wants, the agreement give...

Katie Notopoulos, my favorite Sora user, at Business Insider (paywalled, alas, but available via News+): Eventually, my friends all seemed to get bored with the app. As I do at most parties, I stuck around longer than everyone else, but eventually I, too, found that the ...

Tim Hardwick at MacRumors: macOS Tahoe 26.4 includes a new slow charger indicator that tells MacBook users when their charging setup isn’t delivering full power. As described in an updated Apple support document, a “Slow Charger” label now appears in orange text in the b...

Jennifer Daniel, on her “Did Someone Say Emoji?” blog:

First came Melting Face 🫠, our collective surrender to the liquid state.

Then Dotted Line Face 🫥, the visual representation of sublimation: turning from a solid into a gas just to escape a conversation.

Now, we have Distorted Face (U+1FAEA), a moment defined by tension: where you aren’t just feeling an emotion — you are being physically altered by it.

I’ll live, but it feels a tad spiteful that Apple only adds new emoji to the current-year OS updates. So this year’s 8 new emoji are in MacOS 26.4, but not MacOS 15.7.5, despite both being released this week.

Link: jenniferdaniel.substack.com/p/new-emoji-distorted-face

One more nugget from last night’s 7-0 Yankees win over the Giants: During the sixth inning of Wednesday’s Opening Night matchup between two historic franchises, the Giants and Yankees, all-time home run leader Barry Bonds joined the Netflix broadcast booth at Oracle Park...

Nice 7-0 win last night over the San Francisco Giants.

The game was on Netflix, and it was the worst baseball broadcast I can recall watching in the HD era. The picture quality was just awful, with embarrassing dynamic ad injection. Yes, there was haze, but it’s not like crappy weather in San Francisco is a surprise. The game had the first Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) challenge in MLB history, but the broadcast missed it while it happened. And Netflix’s scorebug is without question the worst I’ve ever seen — as one guy on Reddit quipped, it was somehow “too big and too small at the same time”. I’d have to stand within arm’s reach of my TV to read those player names.

If this is the level of attention Netflix is going to pay to sports broadcasts, they should stick to bumfights.

Link: mlb.com/yankees/news/max-fried-yankees-shut-out-giants-on…

Last month I posted an item (linking to a post from Rob Griffiths) explaining how to hide the prompts in System Settings to upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe. The technique I posted involved hand-editing a device management profile.

This video from Mr. Macintosh shows how to do the same thing, but using the free iMazing Profile Editor to create the device profile instead of hand-editing the XML Property List. If you were spooked or put off by the original technique, but want to stay on MacOS 15 Sequoia and hide all the prompts related to Tahoe, watch this video.

MacOS 15.7.5 Sequoia came out this week alongside Tahoe 26.4, and it was delightful only to see the update notice for 15.7.5 in System Settings.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=uRg1pW8TSYk

When I first read this post from my friend Paul Kafasis last week — a One Foot Tsunami instant classic — I was hoping that I could think of an example that he missed. I can’t say I did. The closest, though, is ShowBiz Pizza Place, a 1980s archrival to Chuck E. Cheese. (Inst...

Apple Developer: Analytics in App Store Connect receives its biggest update since its launch, including a refreshed user experience that makes it easier to measure the performance of your apps and games. There’s a lot that’s new, but all the data is still collected wit...

Claude: In Claude Cowork and Claude Code, you can now enable Claude to use your computer to complete tasks. When Claude doesn’t have access to the tools it needs, it will point, click, and navigate what’s on your screen to perform the task itself. It can open files, use ...

Berber Jin, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): OpenAI is planning to unify its ChatGPT app, coding platform Codex and browser into a desktop “superapp,” a step to simplify the user experience and continue with efforts to focus on engineering and...

Sora, on Twitter/X:

We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.

We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.

Sora was kind of fun for a week or two. But, contrary to the above, nothing anyone made with Sora mattered. It was just a very (very) expensive lark.

Link: x.com/soraofficialapp/status/2036546752535470382

Good rundown of everything new and changed, as usual, from Juli Clover at MacRumors. This has been a noticeable change for me:

The App Store merges apps and purchase history, and has a dedicated section for app updates. It now takes two taps to get to app updates rather than having them available at the bottom of the profile page.

At first the extra tap irked me, but it really does make more sense for Updates to have its own section. I update apps manually, because I like reading release notes from developers who take the time to document changes, and I also like reading “Bug fixes and performance improvements” over and over and over again from developers who do not.

Link: macrumors.com/guide/ios-26-4-features/

Samsung: Samsung is introducing AirDrop support to the Galaxy S26 series, making it easier for users to share content between devices using Quick Share. The feature will begin rolling out from March 23, starting in Korea and expanding to more regions including Europe, H...

Steven Troughton-Smith, over the weekend: Here’s one for the icons-in-menus haters on macOS Tahoe: defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool NO It even preserves the couple of instances you do want icons, like for window zoom/resize. You do not need to restar...

npx workos@latest launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration into your codebase. No signup required. It creates an environment, populates your keys, and you claim your account later when you’re ready.

But the CLI goes way beyond installation. WorkOS Skills make your coding agent a WorkOS expert. workos seed defines your environment as code. workos doctor finds and fixes misconfigurations. And once you’re authenticated, your agent can manage users, orgs, and environments directly from the terminal. No more ClickOps.

See how it works →

Link: workos.com/docs/authkit/cli-installer?utm_source…

I love a single-purpose website like this. (I had no idea gas was so expensive in Hong Kong.)

Link: globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/

Apple Newsroom:

WWDC kicks off with the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union on Monday, June 8. The conference continues online all week with over 100 video sessions and interactive group labs and appointments, where developers can connect directly with Apple engineers and designers to explore the latest announcements. The conference will take place on the Apple Developer app, website, and YouTube channel; and on the Apple Developer bilibili channel in China.

I’ve never before heard of Bilibili, which seems to be a Chinese equivalent to YouTube.

As usual, there’s a lottery of sorts to attend the keynote in person.

Link: apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apples-worldwide-developers…

Here’s a post from 2015, linking to Rene Ritchie, then still at iMore, explaining how iMore found itself serving ever worse (and more reader hostile) ads. Not much has changed regarding the state of web advertising in a decade, and iMore — once a truly great site — is defunct.

Link: daringfireball.net/linked/2015/07/09/ritchie-bad-ads

What a lovely thing to drop amidst my recent consternation over the state of web design.

To paraphrase Richard III: A horse, a horse! My kingdom for native app developers with the conviction of the artist-developers in The HTML Review.

Link: thehtml.review/05/

The sitting president of the United States, on his blog:

Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP

As the elderly descend further into dementia, they lose their sense of propriety and simply speak their mind. (They also get confused and think they need to “sign” their text messages and social media posts.) Say what you want about Trump’s truthfulness generally, but here, he’s just being brutally honest. Let’s keep his “Good, I’m glad he’s dead” post bookmarked for when Trump himself finally keels over — after he chokes on a hamburger or whatever it’ll be that finally does him in — and the good people of the world rejoice and celebrate.

Link: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/116268334535345382

Stuart Breckenridge, examining a web page at PC Gamer:

Third, this is a whopping 37MB webpage on initial load. But that’s not the worst part. In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads.

This is so irresponsible and unprofessional it beggars belief. Web browsers ought to defend against this. Why not cap page loads by default at, I don’t know, 5 MB? And require explicit consent to download any additional content?

Link: stuartbreckenridge.net/2026-03-19-pc-gamer-recommends-rss…

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Greg Bensinger, reporting for Reuters: The latest effort, known internally as “Transformer,” is being developed within its devices and services unit, according to four people familiar ​with the matter. The phone is seen as a potential mobile personalization device that c...

Sean Hollister, The Verge (gift link): After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did no...

Regarding my earlier post expressing confusion/discomfort with Bluesky announcing a $100 million funding round almost an entire year after it closed, I had an interesting back-and-forth with Adam Vartanian on Bluesky (natch), where he wrote: If you see press reports that...

Bluesky: In April 2025, Bluesky raised $100 million in Series B funding led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Knight Foundation and True Ventures. In the months since, we’ve focused on scaling our team to mee...