Ben Thompson has a wonderful take on yesterday’s event and what it says about Apple overall:
Apple, to be fair, isn’t selling the same sugar water year-after-year in a zero sum war with other sugar water companies. Their sugar water is getting better, and I think this year’s seasonal concoction is particularly tasty. What is inescapable, however, is that while the company does still make new products — I definitely plan on getting new AirPod Pro 3s! — the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates.
Apple Security Engineering and Architecture (SEAR):
Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) is the culmination of an
unprecedented design and engineering effort, spanning half a
decade, that combines the unique strengths of Apple silicon
hardware with our advanced operating system security to provide
industry-first, always-on memory safety protection across our
devices — without compromising our best-in-class device
performance. We believe Memory Integrity Enforcement represents
the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of
consumer operating systems.
That is, to say the least, an incredibly bold statement. But I think it’s true. This is a fascinating post, cogently written.
The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
President Trump on Thursday led leaders of the world’s biggest
technology companies in a version of his cabinet meetings, in
which each participant takes a turn thanking and praising him,
this time for his efforts to promote investmen...
For the first time, every model in Apple’s latest flagship iPhone
17 lineup features a base 256GB storage capacity, up from the
lowest 128GB option in the iPhone 16 series. The regular iPhone 17
now comes in 256GB and 512GB storage options, while the all-new
ultra-thin iPhone Air and the iPhone 17 Pro come in 256GB, 512GB,
and 1TB capacities.
Meanwhile, the iPhone 17 Pro Max is offered in the same three
capacities as the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro, but with the
addition of a maximum 2TB option.
I know it’s been 18 years, but it’s kind of wild to compare today’s storage tiers to the original iPhone’s 4, 8, and 16 GB options.
Dan Moren:
There were no doubt some shouts of joy when Apple mentioned it had a new version of its MagSafe Battery, but if you want one of those to boost your phone’s longevity, be aware: it’s an iPhone Air exclusive. The key’s in the name “iPhone Air MagSafe Battery”—Ap...
My thanks to TextJam for sponsoring this past week at DF. TextJam just launched last week, it’s a remarkable “1.0” release — a multi-player text editor / word processor with a novel twist on how humans interact with AI. TextJam introduces the metaphors of “pen” mode for writ...
MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:
And so you can’t help but wonder if part of the equation in this settlement wasn’t decidedly more cynical. Fresh off a new massive fundraise — one in which they raised far more than they were initially targeting, I might add — Anthropic h...
And so you can’t help but wonder if part of the equation in this settlement wasn’t decidedly more cynical. Fresh off a new massive fundraise – one in which they raised far more than they were initially targeting, I might add – Anthropic has a lot of money. More than perha...
In what’s potentially the first major payout to creatives whose work was used to train AI systems, Anthropic has reached an agreement to pay “at least” a staggering $1.5 billion, plus interest, to authors to settle its class-action lawsuit. The amount breaks down to smaller payouts expected to be approximately $3,000 per book or work. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said it’s “believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation.”
David Pierce, writing for The Verge:
Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO of enterprise software giant
Atlassian, was one of the first users of the Arc
browser. Over the last several years, he has been a prolific
bug reporter and feature requester. Now he’ll own the thing:
Atlas...
Dave Michaels and Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
“There are strong reasons not to jolt the system and to allow
market forces to do the work,” Mehta wrote.
Wall Street analysts scored the ruling a huge win for Google and
Apple since i...
David McCabe, reporting for The New York Times:
Google must hand over its search results and some data to rival
companies but does not need to break itself up by selling its
Chrome web browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. The
decision, by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the...
There are finallys, and there are finallys. Apple shipped the original iPad in April 2010. Instagram shipped in October 2010 — and was iPhone-exclusive until 2012. That Instagram didn’t ship a native iPad version of its app until now is really one of the strangest things in tech. But here it is.
One significant difference from Instagram on phones is that on iPad, it defaults to the Reels view, and you have to tap below Reels in the sidebar to get to your following timeline. Adam Mosseri explains their thinking behind this in this Reel (natch).
We’re excited to launch TextJam this week, a multi-player editor with a novel twist on how humans interact with AI. Ever tried to “AI chat” your way to a polished piece of writing, and wanted more control over the result?
TextJam has new inventions that make it easy to tell the AI what to keep and what to change, so you can get from draft to done faster. From typing in pen and pencil, to multi-touch gestures that intelligently resize text, TextJam is a bold new take on what a word processor can be. Try it today for free.
William Foege, William Roper, David Satcher, Jeffrey Koplan, Richard Besser, Tom Frieden, Anne Schuchat, Rochelle P. Walensky, and Mandy K. Cohen — all of them former directors of the CDC, under every president from Jimmy Carter to Trump — in a co-bylined op-ed for the NYT:
...
Bernie Sanders, in a NYT op-ed:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services,
is endangering the health of the American people now and into the
future. He must resign.
Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over
and over, that...
For your holiday listening enjoyment: Special guest Andru Edwards joins the show. Topics include Google’s Pixel 10 event and the Pixel 10 family of devices, AI’s effect on computational photography, foldable phones, and some speculation on Apple’s September 9 “Awe Dropping” event.
Sponsored by:
Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.
Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Get 3 months and 150,000 errors free.
Notion: The best AI tool for work, with your notes, docs, and projects in one space.
One more for my weekendspate of developer posts, but from the opposite of the LLM-assisted cutting edge: this wonderful collection of classic-era Mac programming books, carefully scanned as PDFs. These evoke nostalgia both for the classic Mac era and for the entire notion of “programming books”. (Via Michael Tsai and Rui Carmo.)
Sosumi.ai:
Ever notice Claude struggling to write Swift code? It might not be
their fault!
Apple Developer docs are locked behind JavaScript, making them
invisible to most LLMs. If they try to fetch it, all they see is
“This page requires JavaScript. Please turn on Java...
My thanks to Impending for sponsoring last week at DF to promote their new app, Walk the World. You surely know some of Impending’s other apps, like the innovative checklist/task app Clear. Walk the World turns your steps — your real-world activity — into a new kind of virtu...
From Apple’s Xcode 26 Beta 7 release notes:
Claude in Xcode is now available in the Intelligence settings
panel, allowing users to seamlessly add their existing paid
Claude account to Xcode and start using Claude Sonnet 4.
(155826755)
When using ChatGPT in Xcode, users ...
Shelby Talcott, reporting under the euphemistic headline “White House Fires CDC Director Over Vaccine Disagreements”:
A showdown at the CDC culminated in the White House formally
firing its director, Susan Monarez, on Wednesday night.
Monarez was ousted earlier in the d...
Truly phenomenal video from Real Engineering about a genuinely phenomenal product. In my review of the AirPods Pro 2 in 2023 — a year after they originally shipped, when the cases were changed to use USB-C — I called them “the best single expression of Apple as a company today”. That remains true. AirPods exemplify everything that sets Apple apart: miniaturization, “it just works” ease of use, opinionated design (you get them in any color you want, so long as it’s white), and, most of all, joyfulness.
It occurs to me that Apple doesn’t brag enough about its engineering accomplishments these days. Under their previous CEO, they’d spend more time in product introduction explaining how things work, like a lecture in a 101 college course. I miss that. This Real Engineering video fills in those gaps.
Christopher Yasiejko, reporting last week for Bloomberg Law:
CBP exceeded its authority in an Aug. 1 internal advice ruling
that overturned its own January decision without notice or input
from Masimo, the medical-device maker said in a complaint
filed Wednesday in the U...
Matthew Panzarino returns to the show. Topics include 007 logo creator Joe Caroff’s death at 103, Google’s weird “Made by Google” event hosted by Jimmy Fallon, the UK supposedly dropping its demand for an iCloud encryption backdoor, and Apple’s workaround for the Apple Watch blood oxygen sensor patent stalemate.
Sponsored by:
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Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Get 3 months and 150,000 errors free.
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Supply chain leaker Majin Bu has the scoop, including photos of the cases and their packaging, of Apple’s second attempt at a fabric-based successor to leather iPhone cases. Apple’s first attempt two years ago, FineWoven, was so unpopular that they didn’t even offer a premiu...
After a 25-year run, the website MacSurfer closed in 2020. But, as brought to my attention two weeks ago by Nick Heer, MacSurfer quietly returned in June. No one seemed to notice until this month.
The original MacSurfer was a bit of a weird site. Content-wise it was a daily...
Tulsi Gabbard — who, believe it or not, is the US director of national intelligence — on X last week:
Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our
partners in the UK, alongside @POTUS and @VP, to ensure Americans’
private data remains private and our Cons...
