When I wrote last week about the false narrative that iOS 26 is seeing bizarrely low adoption rates compared to previous years, I neglected one source: Apple itself. Apple’s Developer site publishes a page with iOS and iPadOS usage for devices that “transacted on the App Sto...

Jeremy Fuster, reporting for TheWrap: But save for some theaters in Republican-heavy states, the film is unlikely to leave much of an impact at a slumping box office, with theatrical sources telling TheWrap that “Melania” is projected for an opening of around $3 million ...

Nicole Sperling and Brooks Barnes, reporting for The New York Times: Amazon paid Ms. Trump’s production company $40 million for the rights to “Melania,” about $26 million more than the next closest bidder, Disney. The fee includes a related docuseries that is scheduled t...

Ged Maheux, The Iconfactory: This week we announced a new Kickstarter that’s aimed at expanding the game offerings of Ollie’s Arcade, the fun, ad-free retro gaming app we introduced back in 2023. Ollie’s Arcade has always been a great way to escape doomscrolling, even if...

Adam Engst, back in November, at TidBITS: Did you know that, regardless of view, you can now swipe left on any call to reveal a blue clock icon that lets you create a reminder to call back in 1 hour, tonight, tomorrow, or at any custom time (below left, slightly doctored...

New Mac app by Mikey Clarke, and it’s just what it says on the tin: a “lovingly crafted Bluesky app designed and built just for the Mac”. I’ve been beta testing Aeronaut for months, and it’s the only interface to Bluesky I actually like. It’s a real Mac app — written mostly in AppKit, supporting all the right UI idioms and platform integrations. It’s not just the best Bluesky client I’ve seen, for any platform, but maybe the best new Mac app I’ve seen in years, period. Certainly the one whose very existence has made me happiest. Next time someone tells me no one makes good new native apps for the Mac anymore, I’m going to tell them Mikey Fucking Clarke does.

$2/month or $15/year. A veritable bargain for an app so nice.

Link: aeronautapp.com/

Bruce Springsteen:

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Best line from the lyrics:

Their claim was self-defense,
Just don’t believe your eyes.
It’s our blood and bones and these whistles and phones
Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies.

Whistles, phones, and birds.

Link: brucespringsteen.net/news/2026/streets-of-minneapolis/

Patrick McGee (author of last year’s bestseller, Apple in China, and guest on The Talk Show in May), commenting on Twitter/X re: Tim Cook’s company-wide memo regarding the “events in Minneapolis”: This literally says nothing, via intention and cowardice. It’s the kind o...

Tim Cook, in a company-wide memo (first published by Mark Gurman): Team, I’m heartbroken by the events in Minneapolis, and my prayers and deepest sympathies are with the families, with the communities, and with everyone that’s been affected. This is a time for deescala...

Andy Stone, VP of communications at Meta, responding, in a series of tweets on Twitter/X, to Jeff Horwitz’s report at Reuters yesterday, linked here last night, which claimed that “Zuckerberg blocked curbs on sex-talking chatbots for minors”: Never let the facts get in t...

Jeff Horwitz, reporting for Reuters: Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg approved allowing minors to access AI chatbot companions that safety staffers warned were capable of sexual interactions, according to internal Meta documents filed in a New Mexico state court case...

Adam Serwer, reporting from the streets of Minneapolis for The Atlantic, “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong” (gift link): The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological co...

Om Malik:

Cook is not stupid. He is not evil. He is trapped. The iron clasp of market expectations has turned him into what he never meant to be: a man who goes to parties at the White House while nurses die.

In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Roy Bland captures a cynical, post-ideological, corrupt English society: “You scratch my conscience; I’ll drive your Jag.” You could say the same of today’s Silicon Valley. It used to believe it could change the world. Now it just hopes the world won’t change its stock price.

Amy Jane Gruber:

If I ever meet Tim Cook I’m going to ask him if Mike Tyson enjoyed the movie.

Link: om.co/2026/01/27/a-ceo-captured/

MG Siegler:

Tim Cook is captured. There is simply no other explanation for his actions over the past year or so. But it perhaps culminated this weekend when Cook went to a special private showing of the documentary Melania at the White House. Yes, that Melania. That in and of itself would have probably been fine. I mean, it’s potentially problematic for a host of reasons that I’ll get to, but such is our world right now. Then one shot — a gunshot — turned attending that movie screening into a statement...

While Cook was enjoying his popcorn and champagne with the likes of Mike Tyson, Tony Robbins, and other “VIPs”, it was complete and utter chaos on the streets of Minnesota. Just hours earlier, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot and killed by ICE agents. Maybe, just maybe, postpone the movie premiere?

Link: spyglass.org/tim-cook-captured/

Ben Terris, writing for New York Magazine:

Fred Trump died in 1999 at age 93. He had, Trump said, a “heart that couldn’t be stopped” with almost no health conditions to speak of throughout his long life. “He had one problem,” Trump said. “At a certain age, about 86, 87, he started getting, what do they call it?” He pointed to his forehead and looked to his press secretary for the word that escaped him.

“Alzheimer’s,” Leavitt said.

“Like an Alzheimer’s thing,” Trump said. “Well, I don’t have it.”

“Is it something you think about at all?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think about it at all. You know why?” he said. “Because whatever it is, my attitude is whatever.”

Link: nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-addresses…

From the footer on the project’s website:

Moltbot was formerly known as Clawdbot. Independent project, not affiliated with Anthropic.

Makes sense, to be honest, that Anthropic would object to naming it a homonym for Claude.

One additional followup to my post the other day. In his terrific introduction to ClawdMoltbot, Federico Viticci wrote:

I’ve been playing around with Clawdbot so much, I’ve burned through 180 million tokens on the Anthropic API (yikes), and I’ve had fewer and fewer conversations with the “regular” Claude and ChatGPT apps in the process.

Those tokens aren’t free. I asked Viticci just how much “yikes” cost, and he said around US$560 — using way more input than output tokens.

Link: molt.bot/

Jonathan Rauch, writing for The Atlantic, “Yes, It’s Fascism” (gift link): Until recently, I resisted using the F-word to describe President Trump. For one thing, there were too many elements of classical fascism that didn’t seem to fit. For another, the term has been ov...

Ella Chakarian, writing for Rolling Stone (News+): On a recent Saturday afternoon, Kendall Mayes was mindlessly scrolling on X when she noticed an unsettling trend surface on her feed. Users were prompting Grok, the platform’s built-in AI feature, to “nudify” women’s ima...

Daniel Jalkut returns to the show so we can both vent about MacOS 26 Tahoe.

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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/01/26/ep-439

Good tip from “DifferentDan” on the Realmac customer forum, posted back in November: I saw on macOS Tahoe 26.1, Apple finally added an option in the Column View settings to automatically right size all columns individually and that setting would persist, but I don’t real...

Kif Leswing, CNBC:

Nvidia will become TSMC’s largest customer this year, according to analyst estimates and Huang himself. Apple is believed to currently be TSMC’s largest customer, mostly to manufacture A-series chips for iPhones and M-series chips for PCs and servers.

The positional swap will mark a fundamental shift in the semiconductor industry, reflecting Nvidia’s growing importance amid the artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out. [...]

Ben Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, said he projects Nvidia to generate $33 billion in TSMC revenue this year, or about 22% of the chip foundry’s total. Apple, by comparison, is projected to generate about $27 billion, or about 18% of TSMC’s revenue.

Link: cnbc.com/2026/01/26/nvidia-set-to-supplant-apple-as-tsmcs…

Connecting user accounts to third-party APIs always comes with the same plumbing: OAuth flows, token storage, refresh logic, and provider-specific quirks.

WorkOS Pipes removes that overhead. Users connect services like GitHub, Slack, Google, Salesforce, and other supported providers through a drop-in widget. Your backend requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh.

Simplify integrations with WorkOS Pipes.

Link: workos.com/docs/pipes?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

Joe Rossignol, writing at MacRumors:

Apple offers a Share Item Location feature in the Find My app that allows you to temporarily share the location of an AirTag-equipped item with others, including employees at participating airlines. This way, if you put an AirTag inside your bags, the airline can better help you find them in the event they are lost or delayed at the airport. [...] Below, we have listed most of the airlines that support the feature.

Apple’s announcement claims that 36 airlines support it today, and 15 more are coming soon.

Link: macrumors.com/2026/01/26/airtag-2-airlines-lost-bags/

Apple Newsroom: Apple’s second-generation Ultra Wideband chip — the same chip found in the iPhone 17 lineup, iPhone Air, Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Apple Watch Series 11 — powers the new AirTag, making it easier to locate than ever before. Using haptic, visual, and audio f...

I’ve been meaning since last month to link to Apple’s lists of the top iPhone apps in the U.S. for 2025. Here’s the list of the top 20 free iPhone apps: ChatGPT Threads Google TikTok — Videos, Shop & LIVE WhatsApp Messenger Instagram YouTube Google Maps Gmail — Email b...

Yours truly back in 2009, hitting upon the same themes from the item I just posted about TextEdit vs. Apple Notes: This, I think, explains the relative popularity of Mac OS X’s included Stickies application. For years, Stickies’s popularity confounded me. Why would anyon...

Perhaps at the opposite end of the complexity and novelty spectrum from Federico Viticci’s intro to Clawdbot is this piece by Kyle Chayka, writing at The New Yorker, from October: Amid the accelerating automation of our computers — and the proliferation of assistants and...

Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories: If this intro just gave you whiplash, imagine my reaction when I first started playing around with Clawdbot, the incredible open-source project by Peter Steinberger (a name that should be familiar to longtime MacStories readers) t...

My thanks to Meh for sponsoring last week at DF. Meh puts up a new deal every day, and they do it with panache. As they say, “It’s actual, real, weird shit you didn’t know existed for half the price you would’ve guessed.” Don’t tell any of my other sponsors, but Meh is my f...

A few weeks ago there were a rash of stories claiming that iOS 26 is seeing bizarrely low adoption rates from iPhone users. The methodology behind these numbers is broken and the numbers are totally wrong. Those false numbers are so low, so jarringly different from previous ...