This is my favorite news from all of WWDC this week. I mean that. In a small way I mean it because I so loathe this aspect of MacOS Tahoe. But in a large way I mean it because it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team.

Rishi Ó:

My favorite Apple updates are not the flashy new features, but the quiet little touches: annoyances fixed, workflows made smoother, rough edges sanded down, and longstanding flaws thoughtfully reworked. To me, they’re the clearest sign of a company that cares about its craft.

Here’s a collection from a WWDC26 screen-grab, organized for easier reading, on improvements coming later this year.

That’s a lot of bullet points.

If you can make it in person, you should come. The California Theater is a beautiful big theater and tickets are still available.

You can also watch tonight’s show in live stereoscopic immersive in the Theater app from Sandwich Vision on Vision Pro. A purchase of the ticket to the live show, the Theater app for $12.99, is also good for replay forever — with surprise bonus features included. It’s a fun, truly immersive way to experience the show.

Hope to see you there tonight, one way or the other.

A brisk 76 minutes, including the post-credits Easter egg music video. The past few years ran about a half hour longer.

Julie Bort, TechCrunch: But the most telling detail wasn’t what Apple announced. It was how it chose to show some things off. Many of the Apple Intelligence demoes featured someone standing, phone in hand, pressing buttons or using voice commands in real time, while anot...

Apple Newsroom yesterday: This new version of Siri is built on Apple Intelligence, allowing Siri to draw on personal context understanding and help users find what they need in the moment across messages, emails, photos, and more. For example, users can ask Siri to find ...

Apple Newsroom: These new capabilities are powered by the next generation of Apple Foundation Models, custom-built in collaboration with Google and its Gemini models for deeply integrated Apple Intelligence experiences. These latest models run on device and on servers us...

Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services?

Enter auth.md. By exposing a single, machine-readable Markdown file at your service root, AI agents can dynamically discover your OAuth Protected Resource Metadata, parse required scopes, and authenticate seamlessly.

With native support in WorkOS AuthKit, you can now implement this protocol out of the box, giving AI tools a standardized, secure way to log into your application.

Read the auth.md docs.

Mark Gurman, reporting (?) for Bloomberg two short months ago: Apple Inc. plans to open Siri to outside artificial intelligence assistants, a major move aimed at bolstering the iPhone as an AI platform. The company is preparing to make the change as part of a Siri overha...

Apple’s developer message used to be that it was not just easy to develop apps for their platforms, but that it was easy to develop good idiomatically native apps. That’s still true for AppKit and UIKit, but it’s never been true for SwiftUI, and SwiftUI is now seven years old.

Alberto Romero: AI is like religion. Either you believe it changes everything, or you don’t believe at all. There is no moderate position; nobody believes in AGI “more or less,” just like nobody is “casually religious.” If God exists, the only coherent response is to reo...

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Ben Sandofsky, writing on the Lux Camera blog: After decades of shooting digital, I returned to analog photography in 2023. I thought it would be challenging, given the limited selection of film stocks, only to be surprised by how freeing it felt. It felt so much better ...

Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim, in a memo to the 60 Minutes staff obtained by The New York Times (gift links): We have had a hard time deciding whether to stay at 60 Minutes. We’re still deeply upset by the firings of Tanya and Draggan, strong leaders who ...

Josh Marshall: In a hearing today about the president’s bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House and plans to build a vast ballroom, a judge asked if the president could also bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and be subject to no legal challenge. The DOJ lawyer, Yaako...

Laura Hazard Owen, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab back in April: I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloo...

Nate Silver, back in April, under the headline “Social Media Is Turning Into a Freak Show”, where by “social media” he mostly discusses Twitter/X: But what does that remaining traffic consist of? I recently came across a bubble chart depicting the Twitter accounts that h...

Yours truly, last August:

I can’t see why Apple would want to get involved with a company like this though. Gurman’s report makes it sound like his sources are inside Apple, but man, this “Apple + Perplexity” thing feels more like something Perplexity would be seeding than one that Apple executives would be leaking.

Perplexity is still occasionally in the news (often not in good ways), but it seems to me they’ve slipped into the “afterthought” tier of AI startups — which is exactly why they started leaning into clownish stunts last year. Everyone who previously suggested Apple should — or even might — buy them has gone silent.

Ed Morrissey, writing for Hot Air, thinks Scott Pelley got what he deserved and Bari Weiss is doing a good job running CBS News: And Pelley forgot the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Instead, Pelley convinced himself of his own virtue and torched his ow...

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 9 June 2026, 7pm PT (Doors open 6pm)
Special Guest(s): For sure
Price: $45

The annual live audience episode of The Talk Show during the week of WWDC. If you can make it, you should come. You’ll even enjoy the prelude, mingling with fellow DF readers and listeners.

All this Sturm und Drang surrounding 60 Minutes has me thinking about a re-watch of The Insider, Michael Mann’s great 1999 movie. Letterboxd’s synopsis: “A research chemist comes under personal and professional attack when he decides to appear in a 60 Minutes exposé on Big Tobacco.” It’s a great movie, and feels apt AF at the moment. Here’s the original segment on 60 Minutes, which ran an entire half hour.

What’s going on today is like if — instead of getting shady, threatening, and litigious — the tobacco companies had just purchased CBS, purged the staff at 60 Minutes, and hired a bunch of pro-cigarette stooges to replace them.

Hayden Field and Tom Warren, writing for The Verge (gift link): This year’s Build had the vibe of a freshly single divorcée posting a thirst trap on Instagram. “It’s always fun to be at developer conferences in times of great change,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said ons...

Peter Borg: Lingon makes scheduling apps, scripts, shortcuts, and commands feel simple. Create a task in minutes, run it on a schedule, and stay in control. Lingon helps you run whatever you want whenever you want without living in Terminal. Schedule apps, scripts, shor...

Loren Brichter, back in 2020: Short story: Google Chrome installs an updater called Keystone on your computer, which is bizarrely correlated to massive unexplained CPU usage in WindowServer (a system process)[1], and made my whole computer slow even when Chrome wasn’t ru...

Two months ago Google launched a new native Mac app for Gemini. I’ve been trying it, on and off, since. It’s ... not bad. Certainly better than Claude’s Electron shitbox. But the Gemini app isn’t all that good, either. I’m sticking with ChatGPT, which remains far and away th...

Jason Snell at Six Colors, looking ahead to WWDC next week: These days, I’m getting emails pitching me for an endless stream of new Mac apps. It’s quite remarkable because there was a period five or ten years ago when it seemed like all app development on Apple’s platfor...

I look forward to pseudoscience like this finally getting some airtime on 60 Minutes. For 58 long years the program has been hopelessly biased toward actual science.

Back in 2011, when he was a tech columnist at The New York Times, Nick Bilton figured out that Apple was soon going to launch an Apple branded-television set, with no remote control. You’d just talk to it. This made no sense of course, as I pointed out.

Bilton closed his column thus:

The company is now close enough that it could announce the product by late 2012, releasing it to consumers by 2013.

It is coming though. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.

Maybe it’ll launch in time for Bilton’s first season at the helm of 60 Minutes this fall, with his all-new lineup of correspondents.

Scott Pelley, in a statement posted on Instagram (which I’ll quote in full, as the original is locked behind a dickwall if you’re not signed in to an Instagram account): There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes. The Sunday tradition is the most successfu...

Paramount’s “Press Express” page promoting 60 Minutes still lists all eight correspondents from the 2025–2026 season, the program’s 58th. (Perhaps they fired the person responsible for keeping the cast page up to date.) In the order they appear on Paramount’s listing: Lesl...