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By John Gruber
apple.com/newsroom/2026/05/end-to-end-encrypted-rcs-messaging-begins-rolling-out-today-in-beta/
Samsung phones took spots 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9. The one phone not from Apple or Samsung in the top 10 was the Xiaomi Redmi A5 at #10. As I always say, take these numbers with a grain of salt, but according to Counterpoint, the bestselling phones, in order, are:
And Apple’s phone in spot #6 was not the iPhone Air, alas, but the year-old iPhone 16.
Apple stopped selling the Power Mac G5 (with space) in August 2006, so I’m not sure how much they care about Kraft using “PowerMac” (sans space) as a trademark for protein-enhanced macaroni and cheese. (I feel like there’s got to be a joke to be made here about a “cheese grater”...)
workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q22026
My thanks for WorkOS for, once again, sponsoring Daring Fireball for the last week. If you’re ready to sell to enterprise customers, your product may be ready — but is your auth infrastructure?
If you’re building B2B SaaS, especially AI, you quickly need enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, and audit logs. Your developers shouldn’t waste cycles rebuilding that infrastructure. Free them to focus on what sets you apart. WorkOS gives you production-ready APIs for auth and access control that integrate directly into your product. Trusted by over 2,000 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel.
I’m sure there’s a scene marker right at the cut, so that’s why an ad got inserted there. But, my god. Someone at Amazon should go to prison for this.
(I think it’s a total coincidence that the Febreze ad seems roughly color-matched to the sky. But scroll down in the Bluesky thread for some links to the absolute genius campaign from Cerveza Cristal beer, with spots specifically designed to integrate into Star Wars when it was broadcast on commercial TV in Chile. “Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough” might be the funniest TV commercial ever made.)
Update: Here’s Todd Vaziri’s 2026 HD remaster of the original jump cut, for your comparison. Enjoy.
mlb.com/news/broadcast-booths-around-baseball-mirror-john-sterling-signature-calls
claris.com/blog/2026/how-claris-is-building-for-what-comes-next
macrumors.com/2026/05/05/apple-mac-studio-mac-mini-ram-cuts/
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
Apple has removed more desktop Macs from its online store as the global memory shortage continues. Mac mini models with 32GB and 64GB of RAM are no longer available for purchase, nor is the M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB RAM.
The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is now available only in a 96GB RAM configuration, with higher-tier options eliminated. Both M3 Mac Studio and M4 Max Mac Studio models have delivery estimates of 9 to 10 weeks.
politicalwire.com/2026/04/29/iran-war-has-cost-25-billion-so-far/
You might think it counterintuitive that a movement obsessed with software would be spearheading a severe decline in the design quality of software, but in Patel’s definition, there’s no concept of software as art, as a practice, as a craft. Software brain is purely an obsession with software as a medium in and of itself. A means with no consideration for the end.
Daring Fireball
• Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q22026
If you’re building B2B SaaS, especially AI, you quickly need enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, and audit logs. Your developers shouldn’t waste cycles rebuilding that infrastructure. Free them to focus on what sets you apart.
WorkOS gives you production-ready APIs for auth and access control that integrate directly into your product. Trusted by over 2,000 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel.
Chess Peace — a new iOS game by Sam Shepherd — is my kind of logic puzzle. Each puzzle is a board with a few unplaced chess pieces. To solve you need to place all the pieces so that none of them attack each other. There’s a timer if you care, but I don’t. (And you can hide the clock.) Clever name too: the pieces need to be ... at peace with each other. You can download Chess Peace and try it out free of charge, and it’s just a one-time payment of $7 to unlock everything. Great simple premise, really well implemented.
thurrott.com/paul/334577/the-markdown-book-on-writing?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
Paul Thurrott:
I may or may not write and publish a short e-book about Markdown sometime this year, most likely as part of a monthly focus. But l’ve written small parts of it already, as I do, and I figured it might be interesting for at least some readers. And so here’s an early draft of an introductory chapter that may or may not be called “On writing.” We’ll see.
It’s odd how things turn out in life. Thurrott’s and my careers are almost uniquely parallel, but have seldom intersected. This book would have been a very surprising outcome to me, if you’d told me about it 20 years ago. Sort of a fun outcome, though, and I must admit to being curious what comes of it.
The fact that Paul Graham personally has billions of dollars at stake with OpenAI doesn’t mean that his public opinion on Sam Altman’s trustworthiness and leadership is invalid. But it certainly seems like the sort of thing that ought to be disclosed when quoting Graham as an Altman character reference.
blog.thinktapwork.com/post/812803664980967425/ios-app-store-search-is-rotten
tokyopaladin.substack.com/p/the-japanese-oreo-noir-kills-the
axios.com/2025/04/22/ai-anthropic-virtual-employees-security
daringfireball.net/linked/2026/03/13/amodei-ai-code-claim-chowder
Press release last week:
SightMD, a leading ophthalmology practice in the greater New England area, today announced a historic milestone in surgical innovation. Dr. Eric Rosenberg, DO, MSE, has become the first surgeon in the world to successfully perform cataract surgery using the Apple Vision Pro, powered by ScopeXR, a groundbreaking mixed reality surgical platform co-developed by Dr. Rosenberg.
The initial procedure was successfully completed in October 2025, and since that time, Dr. Rosenberg and his team have performed hundreds of additional cases using the platform, demonstrating both its scalability and real-world clinical impact.
Not being ready for mass-market popularity is such a different thing from not being ready for niche practical use cases. Would be a weird thing indeed if Apple “gave up” on this platform.
Bryan Hoch, reporting for MLB.com:
A colorful personality who engaged and entertained fans with a distinct conversational style, Sterling called 5,426 regular-season Yankees games and 225 more in the postseason from 1989 until his retirement in 2024. After initially stepping away from the microphone in April of that year, Sterling returned to call selected games late in the ’24 season, including each contest of the World Series.
At the time of his initial retirement, Sterling said that he considered himself to be “a very blessed human being,” noting that he had lived out a childhood dream of broadcasting on the radio for more than 64 years.
“It’s your medium. You do what you want,” Sterling once said. “You have to paint the picture, which I love doing.”
That’s baseball, Suzyn.
Gil Durán, posting on Bluesky:
It’s official! I’m permanently banned from X for tweeting “TLDR: Fascism.” (appeal denied)
“TLDR: Fascism” was Durán’s two-word response to this 1,000-word essay from Palantir describing their vision for a “Technological Republic”. (Alternative link to essay if you don’t want to visit x.com.)
Getting perma-banned from Twitter/X by Elon Musk gives Durán a nice Streisand-effect boost to promote his upcoming new book, The Nerd Reich. If the book is even half as good as its title it should be a bestseller.
