Antonio G. Di Benedetto, The Verge:
Somehow, the PC makers still don’t see it coming. Here’s how
[Asus CFO Nick] Wu described the MacBook Neo, specifically its
8GB of RAM limitation:
“I think when Apple positioned the product, it’s probably focused
more on content consu...
Maggie Harrison Dupré, writing for Futurism:
Earlier this month, Ars retracted the story after it was found to
include fake quotes attributed to a real person. The article — a
write-up of a viral incident in which an AI agent seemingly
published a hit piece about a human...
Tim Cook:
At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering
yesterday. But we couldn’t let this milestone pass without
thanking the millions of people who make Apple what it is today — our incredible teams around the world, our developer community,
and e...
Eli Tan, reporting for The New York Times:
Meta’s new foundational A.I. model, which the company has been
working on for months, has fallen short of the performance of
leading A.I. models from rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic
on internal tests for reasoning, codi...
Dade Hayes, reporting for Deadline:
While the rise of sports programming in recent years has been
well-documented, new figures from Nielsen illustrate the extent of
its dominance. The measurement firm said sports accounted for
29.2% of all advertising-supported TV viewin...
Business Insider, one year ago:
Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic, said on Monday
that AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the
code in our software in a year.
“I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is
writing 90% ...
Craig Mod, on creating his own custom accounting software with Claude Code:
Simply put: It’s a big mess, and no off-the-shelf accounting
software does what I need. So after years of pain, I finally sat
down last week and started to build my own. It took me about five
day...
Les Orchard:
I started programming in 1982. Every language I’ve learned since
then has been a means to an end — a new way to make computers do
things I wanted them to do. AI-assisted coding feels like the
latest in that progression. Not a rupture, just another rung on
th...
Accents is an app that lets you use the iMac/MacBook Neo accent
colors on any Mac.
It’s a fun idea from Apple to have default accent colors that are, by default, exclusive to specific Mac hardware. But what exemplifies the Mac is that a clever developer like Bchatnia can make these accent colors available to any user on any Mac via a simple utility like Accents. (Via Michael Tsai.)
Apple Platform Security Guide:
MacBook Neo combines system software and dedicated silicon
elements within A18 Pro to provide additional security for the
camera feed. The architecture is designed to prevent any untrusted
software — even with root or kernel privileges in m...
Alex Weprin, reporting for The Hollywood Reporter:
In a sign of strength for the streaming platform, Apple’s senior
VP of services Eddy Cue tells The Hollywood Reporter that
viewership for last week’s Australian Grand Prix was up year over
year compared to the 2025 race, which aired on ESPN.
“The 2026 Formula 1 season on Apple TV is off to a strong start,
with fans responding positively and viewership up year over year
for the first weekend, exceeding both F1 and Apple expectations,”
Cue says.
As is typical for Apple, the company declined to give any specific
numbers, though last year’s Australian GP averaged 1.1 million
viewers for ESPN.
So we don’t know the viewership number, but we know it’s higher than 1.1 million. That’s like a semi-Bezos number.
Tech Re-Nu, on YouTube:
That leaves us with a fully disassembled laptop. We’ve done this
in less than 10 minutes, which is absolutely amazing for an Apple
laptop. I can’t say we’ve ever had a Mac that looks as repairable
and as modular as this one. No sticky tape, no tri...
There are fun things you can do in software when it is aware of
the dimensions and features of its hardware. [...]
The rule here would be, perhaps, a version of “show, don’t tell.”
We could call it “point to, don’t describe.” (Describing what to
do means cognitive effort to read the words and understand them.
An arrow pointing to something should be easier to process.)
I just learned the word proprioception a few weeks ago, in the context of how you can close your eyes and put your fingertip on the tip of your nose. Perfect word for this sort of hardware/software integration too.
When I re-read my 2006 piece “And Oranges” today before linking to it, I paused when I read this:
And while it is easy to find ways to complain that Apple is not
open enough — under-documented and undocumented security updates
and system revisions, under-documented and undocumented file
formats — it would be hard to argue with the premise that Apple
today is more open than it has ever been before. (Exhibit A: the
Web Kit project.)
It’s not often I get to fix 20-year-old typos, and to my 2026 self, “Web Kit” looks like an obvious typo. But after a moment, I remembered: in 2006, that wasn’t a typo.
Dr. Drang, back in 2017:
If you write about Mac keyboard shortcuts, as I did yesterday, you
should know how to do it right. Just as there’s a proper order
for adjectives in English, there’s a proper order for
listing the modifier keys in a shortcut.
I haven’t found any ...
“Mr. Macintosh”, on Twitter/X last week:
Small change:
Looks like Apple updated the keyboard on the new M5 16‑inch
MacBook Pro. The Backspace, Return, Shift, and Tab labels are
gone, replaced with symbols instead.
All the new MacBook keyboards sport this same change, ...
Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac back on January 28:
Halide and Lux co-founder and designer Sebastiaan
de With announced today that he is joining Apple’s human
interface design team. This marks a return to Apple for de With,
who previously worked as a freelancer for ...
Mark Pilgrim’s reappearance on Daring Fireball this week prompted me to revisit this essay I wrote 20 years ago. Holds up pretty well, I think.
This bit, in particular, seems particular apt w/r/t Tahoe:
I’m deeply suspicious of Mac users who claim to be perfectly happy
with Mac OS X. Real Mac users, to me, are people with much higher
standards, impossibly high standards, and who use Macs not because
they’re great, but because they suck less than everything else.
Just over a decade ago, reviewing the then-new iPhones 6S, I could tell which way the silicon wind was blowing. Year-over-year, the A9 CPU in the iPhone 6S was 1.6× faster than the A8 in the iPhone 6. Impressive. But what really struck me was comparing the 6S’s GeekBench sco...
Your whole day on one screen. Finalist is an iOS/macOS day planner that pulls in your calendars, reminders, and health data so nothing falls through the cracks.
The latest version launches now and adds subtasks, calendar bookmarks, HealthKit in your journal, and a spoken daily briefing you can trigger from your Lock Screen.
Run it alongside what you already use. It quietly picks up what your current setup doesn’t. Free trial on the App Store, Lifetime license available.
Over the years I’ve been writing here, I’ve often used the term speed bump to describe a certain type of hardware update: a new version of an existing product where the new stuff is mostly faster components, especially the CPU and GPU, but where a lot of the product, includi...
Featuring bubble-style lines with colorful gradients, the
wallpapers come in Mac Purple, Mac Blue, Mac Pink, and Mac Yellow.
The design and the colors spell out the word “Mac.”
Naipanoi Lepapa, Ahmed Abdigadir, and Julia Lindblom, reporting for the Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten:
It is stuffy at the top of the hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. The grey
sky presses the heat against the windows. The man in front of us
is nervo...
Simon Willison:
There are a lot of open questions about this, both ethically and
legally. These appear to be coming to a head in the venerable
chardet Python library. chardet was created by Mark
Pilgrim back in 2006 and released under the LGPL. Mark
retired from public i...
Donald Knuth, who, adorably, effectively blogs by posting TeX-typeset PDFs:
Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been
working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus
4.6 — Anthropic’s hybrid reasoning model that had been released
three weeks earlier! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions
about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn
not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to
celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and
creative problem solving. I’ll try to tell the story briefly in
this note.
My thanks, once again, to WorkOS for sponsoring this week at DF. npx workos is a CLI tool, replete with cool ASCII art, that launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration directly into your existing codebase. It’s not a template generator. It reads your code, understands your stack, and writes an integration that fits.
The WorkOS agent then type-checks and builds, feeding any errors back to itself to fix. See how it works for yourself.
Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always r...
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