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 change to how Safari reports the OS it is running on led many in the media to lose their minds.

The unpolished version of the feature we have today only reiterates my belief that Tahoe is a mistake to be avoided. It’s a good idea though, and there aren’t even many of those in Tahoe.

Ken Case, on The Omni Group blog: The features noted above already make for a great upgrade. But as I mentioned last year, one of the interesting problems we’ve been pondering is how best to link to documents in native apps. We’ve spent some time refining our solution to...

Free Mac utility by Zendit Oy: A macOS app that enhances control over Elgato lights, offering features beyond the standard Elgato Control Center software. Features: Automatically turn lights on and off based on camera activity Turn lights off when locking your Mac Syn...

Dr. Drang:

For weeks — maybe months, time has been hard to judge this past year — Trump has been telling us that he’s worked out deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices by several hundred percent. Commentators and comedians have pointed out that you can’t reduce prices more than 100% and pretty much left it at that, suggesting that Trump’s impossible numbers are due to ignorance.

Don’t get me wrong. Trump’s ignorance is nearly limitless — but only nearly. I’ve always thought that he knew the right way to calculate a price drop; he did it the wrong way so he could quote a bigger number. And that came out in yesterday’s speech.

Trump sophistry + math pedantry = Daring Fireball catnip.

Jeff Johnson: Finder has four view modes, represented by the four consecutive toolbar icons in the screenshot below, if you can even call that free-floating monstrosity a toolbar anymore: Icons, List, Columns, and Gallery. My preference is columns view, which I’ve been u...

Chance Miller, writing at 9to5Mac: When you use Walmart Pay, it’s incredibly easy for Walmart to build that customer profile on you. When you use Scan and Go, all of that same information is handed over. When you use Apple Pay or other payment methods, it’s much harder ...

Violet Jira, reporting for NOTUS:

The White House communications team posted a digitally altered photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota social justice activist, on Thursday that makes it appear that she was weeping during her arrest by federal agents.

The image is highly realistic, bearing no watermark or other indicator that the image has been doctored. The change is only apparent when compared to a different version of the same image posted by the Department of Homeland Security earlier in the day.

The White House, which has adopted a combative, flippant tone on its widely viewed social media pages, drew some backlash for the post online. In response, White House deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr called the image a “meme.”

It’s not a meme. It’s propaganda — an altogether false image presented as an actual photograph.

Aaron “Homeboy” Tilley and Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas, and with a miserly gift-link policy): But there are also potential risks to making Federighi head of AI. Giving oversight of AI to him reflects Apple’s cautious approach to the technolog...

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas): Apple is developing an AI-powered wearable pin the size of an AirTag that is equipped with multiple cameras, a speaker, microphones and wireless charging, according to people with direct knowledge ...

Mark Gurman, reporting at Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. has expanded the job of hardware chief John Ternus to include design work, solidifying his status as a leading contender to eventually succeed Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook.

Cook, who has led Apple since 2011 and turned 65 in November, quietly tapped Ternus to manage the company’s design teams at the end of last year, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That widens Ternus’ role to add one of the company’s most critical functions.

And on Twitter/X:

Ternus is now the “executive sponsor” of Apple’s design team, representing the critical function on Apple’s executive team. The move was under-the-radar: on paper, the teams report to Tim Cook despite Ternus’s role.

Here’s to hoping Ternus is as pissed as the rest of us are about MacOS 26 Tahoe.

Bridger Beal-Cvetko and Daniel Woodruff, reporting for KSL News:

SB138, sponsored by Cullimore, R-Sandy, would make Android, the world’s most popular mobile device operating system, an official state symbol, joining the ranks of the official state cooking pot (the dutch oven), the official state crustacean (the brine shrimp), and the official state mushroom (the porcini).

“Someday, everybody with an iPhone will realize that the technology is better on Android,” Cullimore told reporters during a media availability on Wednesday, the second day of the legislative session.

But, he added, “I’m the only one in my family — all my kids, my wife, they all have iPhones — but I’m holding strong.” [...]

“I don’t expect this to really get out of committee,” he said.

(Via Joe Rossignol.)

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire, in a post that pairs perfectly with Om Malik’s re: velocity bestowing authority: The new Democratic argument isn’t about restoring guardrails. It’s about moving fast — and using power unapologetically — to undo what Trump has do...

Om Malik: That’s why we get all our information as memes. The meme has become the metastory, the layer where meaning is carried. You don’t need to read the thing; you just need the gist, compressed and passed along in a sentence, an image, or a joke. It has taken the rol...

The Wall Street Journal (gift link; News+ link): When President Trump arrived in the snow-covered Swiss Alps on Wednesday afternoon, European leaders were panicking that his efforts to acquire Greenland would trigger a trans-Atlantic conflagration. By the time the sun se...

Margaret Killjoy, in a thread on Bluesky (via Kottke): I came to Minneapolis to report on what’s going on, and one of the main questions I showed up with is “just what is the scale of the resistance?” After all, we’re all used to the news calling Portland a “war zone” or...

Everything sucks. The whole world’s going to shit, especially our part of it, and it can feel like anything fun or silly is sticking your head in the sand. And yet. It doesn’t help to just be miserable. If you’re going to last, you’ve got to find your little moments of joy,...

Mark Gurman, at Bloomberg (gift link): Apple Inc. plans to revamp Siri later this year by turning the digital assistant into the company’s first artificial intelligence chatbot, thrusting the iPhone maker into a generative AI race dominated by OpenAI and Google. [...] T...

John Higgins, The Verge (gift link): As of today, Sony already relies on different manufacturing partners to create its TV lineup. While display panel manufacturers never reveal who they sell panels to, Sony is likely already using panels for its LCD TVs from TCL China S...

Jess Weatherbed, at The Verge: Sony has announced plans to spin off its TV hardware business, shifting it to a new joint venture with TCL. The two companies have signed a non-binding agreement for Sony’s home entertainment business, with TCL set to hold a 51 percent stak...

Is there anyone who doesn’t find this sad?

From Apple’s iPhone Mirroring documentation, boldface emphasis added: Click to tap: Click your mouse or trackpad to tap. You can also swipe and scroll in the iPhone Mirroring app, and use your keyboard to type. Open the App Switcher: Move your pointer to the top of the ...

Matthew Butterick:

But more importantly, in practical terms — what would be the point? Since 2011, I’ve run a small font business. Not long after I release a font, it will be uploaded to some public pirate-software website. I can’t control that. Like every other kind of digital-media file, anyone who wants to pirate my fonts can do so if sufficiently motivated.

For that reason — and independent of copyright law — my business necessarily runs on something more akin to the honor system. I try to make nice fonts, price my licenses fairly, and thereby make internet strangers enthusiastic about sending me money rather than going to pirate websites. Enough of them do. My business continues. (Indeed, in terms of rational economic choice, I’ve argued that software piracy doesn’t exist.)

If Trump declares that the U.S. is laying claim to all of the green cheese on the moon — say, to lower the price of dairy groceries — the news media should not respond with fact-finding articles with headlines like “How Much Cheese Is on the Moon?” They should respond with headlines like “How Many Marbles Are Left in Trump’s Head?”

Tom Fairless, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link; here’s a News+ link too): The German research echoes recent reports by the Budget Lab at Yale and economists at Harvard Business School, finding that only a small fraction of the tariff costs ...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. 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 back end requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh. That’s it.

Simplify your integrations with WorkOS Pipes.

Starting with a few words on the new app icons.

Verizon, in an announcement on Twitter/X regarding their daylong outage this week: Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence you expect and that we expect of ourselves. To help provide some relief to those affected, we will give you a $20 account credit that ...

By and large, iPhone owners do not care about third-party app marketplaces and they care even less about third-party browser engines. Popular demand isn’t going to come about from additional regulatory mandates or pocket-change fines imposed on Apple.