“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...

Google Threat Intelligence Group, earlier this week: Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a new and powerful exploit kit targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS version 13.0 (released in September 2019) up to version 17.2.1 (released in December 2023)...

Nick Heer, writing at Pixel Envy, uses Pages (from 2009 through today) to illustrate Apple’s march toward putting “greater focus on your content” by making window chrome, and toolbar icons, more and more invisible: Perhaps Apple has some user studies that suggest otherwi...

The Verge: Sean Hollister: What would you say the differences are between the Apple and Google cases? Tim Sweeney: I would say Apple was ice and Google was fire. The thing with Apple is all of their antitrust trickery is internal to the company. They use their store, t...

Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge: But Google has finally muzzled Tim Sweeney. It’s right there in a binding term sheet for his settlement with Google. On March 3rd, he not only signed away Epic’s rights to sue and disparage the company over anything covered in the ...

Ethan W. Anderson, on Twitter/X:

I’ve plotted the most expensive McDonald’s burger and the least expensive MacBook over time. This analysis projects that the most expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop as soon as 2081.

Looking to the past, if you plug $599 in today’s money into an inflation calculator, that’s just ~$190 in 1984, the year the original Macintosh launched with a price of $2,495 (which works out to ~$7,800 today.)

John McCoy: From around 1970 to 1980, the Salem, Massachusetts-based Parker Brothers (now a brand of Hasbro) published games whose innovative and fanciful designs drew inspiration from Pop Art, Op Art, and Madison Avenue advertising. They had boxes, boards, and component...

Steve Jobs, on Apple’s quarterly results call back in October 2008: There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that. Harry McCracken, writing at the time:...

In August 2007, Apple held a Mac event in the Infinite Loop Town Hall auditorium. New iMacs, iLife ’08 (major updates to iPhoto and iMovie), and iWork ’08 (including the debut of Numbers 1.0). Back then, believe it or not, at the end of these Town Hall events, Apple executiv...

The MacBook Neo is the first major new Mac aimed at the consumer market in the Apple Silicon era. It’s meant to make a dent — perhaps a minuscule dent in the universe, but a big dent in the Mac’s share of the overall PC market.

Not sure if this page was there yesterday, but the main “Displays” page at Apple’s website is a spec-by-spec comparison between the regular and XDR models. Nice.

Juli Clover, at MacRumors, notes that neither the new Studio Display nor the Studio Display XDR are compatible with Intel-based Macs. (I’m curious why.) Also, in a separate report, she notes that Macs with any M1 chip, or the base M2 or M3, are only able to drive the Studio Display XDR at 60 Hz. You need a Pro or better M2/M3, or any M4 or M5 chip, to drive it at 120 Hz.

Update: My understanding is that if you connect one of these new Studio Displays to an Intel-based Mac, it’ll work, but it’ll work as a dumb monitor. You won’t get the full features. I’ll bet Apple sooner or later publishes a support document explaining it, but for now, they’re just saying they’re not “compatible” because you don’t get the full feature set. Like with the Studio Display XDR in particular, you won’t get HDR or 120 Hz refresh rates.

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

Here’s the backstory: With every new generation of Apple’s Mac-series processors, I’ve gotten the impression from Apple execs that they’ve been a little frustrated with the perception that their “lesser” efficiency cores were weak sauce. I’ve lost count of the number of briefings and conversations I’ve had where they’ve had to go out of their way to point out that, actually, the lesser cores on an M-series chip are quite fast on their own, in addition to being very good at saving power!

Clearly they’ve had enough of that, so they’re changing how those cores are marketed to emphasize their performance, rather than their efficiency.

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced a new family of displays engineered to pair beautifully with Mac and meet the needs of everyone, from everyday users to the world’s top pros. The new Studio Display features a 12MP Center Stage camera, now with improved image quality...

Apple Newsroom: MacBook Air now comes standard with double the starting storage at 512GB with faster SSD technology, and is configurable up to 4TB, so customers can keep their most important work on hand. Apple’s N1 wireless chip delivers Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 for seam...

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

A regulatory document for a “MacBook Neo” (Model A3404) has appeared on Apple’s website. Unfortunately, there are no further details or images available yet. While the PDF file does not contain the “MacBook Neo” name, it briefly appeared in a link on Apple’s regulatory website for EU compliance purposes.

My money was on just plain “MacBook”, but I like “MacBook Neo”.

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced the latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with the all-new M5 Pro and M5 Max, bringing game-changing performance and AI capabilities to the world’s best pro laptop. With M5 Pro and M5 Max, MacBook Pro features a new CPU with the world’s...

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced M5 Pro and M5 Max, the world’s most advanced chips for pro laptops, powering the new MacBook Pro. The chips are built using a new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture. This innovative design combines two dies into a single system on a ...