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...

Basic Apple Guy:

Where I and the rest of the internet take this from here remains to be seen. All I know is that Apple should definitely keep this Lil Finder around.

But no, I do not think this is the last we’ve seen of Lil Finder Guy…

Apple’s MacBook Neo ad campaign on TikTok — and seemingly exclusive to TikTok — is the most fun they’ve had with a campaign in ages. I love it.

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 viewing by people 25 to 54 years old during the fourth quarter. The stat, spanning broadcast, cable and streaming, was part of a report on viewership trends in the fourth quarter of 2025, released Thursday in the runup to upfronts.

Looking at the rest of the pie without sports, broadcast accounted for just 9.8%, with cable coming in at 18%. Streaming drew by far the largest tune-in, with 43% of all non-sports viewing, a reflection of the overall growth of advertising on streaming services like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max and others.

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...

Mahdi Bchatnia:

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...

Marcin Wichary:

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.

Jason Snell:

So here we are: Six Colors now has three Jeopardy! players as contributors.

Come on, Moltz, get your shit together.

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.

The correct order is Fn, Control, Option, Shift, Command — regardless if you’re using the words or the glyphs.

“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.

May the MacBook Neo live so long that its name becomes inapt.

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.

Apple could have stopped with the addition of MagSafe alone, and the 17e would’ve been a successful year-over-year update over the 16e. But there’s even more.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

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.”

They got me. I’m upgrading to Tahoe now.

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.

(Via Simon Willison.)

Help us Obi-Wan Lemay, you’re our only hope.

(Also, as noted by Joe Rossignol, Eddy Cue got an updated headshot.)

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...