Smart, fair video from Quinn Nelson on the gap that remains between iPadOS 26 and desktop OSes. I think it’s right that there is a gap there. Apple has the Macintosh, the best desktop/workstation platform in the industry. So whatever the ideal is for iPadOS, it ought to fall short of MacOS in terms of technical capabilities, and instead offer a degree of simplicity and can’t-screw-it-up-edness that the Mac can’t match. But, some of the limitations that remain in iPadOS are just frustrating. iPadOS 26 is a huge leap forward, and I think sets the stage for Apple to address those limitations.

Another great video from Quinn Nelson. If your dumb cousin who knows you’re an Apple nerd approaches you on Christmas and says “Hey what’s going on at Apple, Bloomberg says it’s rats leaving a sinking ship over there?” and you don’t feel like explaining, just tell him to watch this video. Just the perfect explanation.

From a 2023 report at The Verge:

Sony highly confidential information about its PlayStation business has just been revealed by mistake. As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the margins Sony shares with publishers, its Call of Duty revenues, and even the cost of developing some of its games.

It looks like someone redacted the documents with a black Sharpie — but when you scan them in, it’s easy to see some of the redactions. Oops.

This is sort of the exception that proves the rule regarding redactions. If you redact a document digitally, you have to know what to look for (e.g. metadata) to be certain you’ve redacted everything you want to redact. If you redact a document on paper, you can just look at it, with good light and sharp eyes.

Splendid essay by Bilge Ebiri for The Yale Review, a meditation both on the films of Terrence Malick and several filmmakers he’s deeply influenced.

Christopher Goffard, reporting for the Los Angeles Times (News+ link): When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short — who became known as the Black Dahlia — he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mu...

CNN media analyst Brian Stelter, on Bluesky: As “60 Minutes” finalized its “Inside CECOT” report last Thursday, CBS sent the White House a request for comment. A WH spokesperson responded within a few hours. The quote was not included in the “60” report — so, judge for y...

Everyone who works with official PDFs in any capacity should know that if you start with a PDF containing text you want to redact, and you just place black bars atop that text and resave the file, the original text is all still there in the new PDF file. It’s the digital equ...

Copilot Money — the Apple Editor’s Choice money tracker — is expanding beyond iPhone, iPad, and Mac with the launch of its new web app, available now.

Copilot Money brings all your spending, budgets, investments, and net worth into one organized dashboard, with intelligent categorization and insights that help you stay on track without spreadsheets or app-hopping. Designed to feel calm and intuitive, Copilot makes it easy to understand your finances across all your devices.

Copilot is offering DF readers two months free with code DARING, plus 26% off your first year for a limited time, available through this link.

Elizabeth Lopatto, back in October, after Bari Weiss was first named editor-in-chief of CBS News by David Ellison after his acquisition of Paramount: This is the glass cliff to end all glass cliffs. You’re Marissa Mayer at Yahoo without the Googler street cred. You’re Na...

David Folkenflik, reporting for NPR: Just a day and a half before it was set to be broadcast, new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss pulled a planned 60 Minutes investigative segment centering on allegations of abuses at an El Salvador detention center where the Trump a...

Elizabeth Lopatto, writing at The Verge: 60 Minutes had already begun promoting the now-censored segment online. Because it was pulled so late, it seems that CBS missed at least one platform for distribution: Canada’s Global TV. Some people used a VPN to watch it; at lea...

My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner — a digital take on traditional paper planners. Its motto: “Most productivity...

It’s the practical results of legislation and regulation that matter, not the intentions. The Japanese government seemingly gets that, and acts accordingly.

The Computer History Museum: Thomas Knoll, a PhD student in computer vision at the University of Michigan, had written a program in 1987 to display and modify digital images. His brother John, working at the movie visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, foun...

Apple TV’s press page has stories this month announcing release dates and first looks for a bunch of shows: Imperfect Women (a “psychological thriller”), Beat the Reaper (“dramedy”), a still-untitled Monarch: Legacy of Monsters spinoff, Widow’s Bay (“blends genuine horror with character-driven comedy”), season 2 of the Idris Elba thriller Hijack, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a series from David E. Kelley starring Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nicole Kidman, and Nick Offerman (good cast!).

But not a word about Jessica Chastain’s The Savant, which was supposed to debut in September, was postponed after the Charlie Kirk shooting (against Chastain’s wishes), and has been in “At a later date” scheduling limbo ever since.

Yesterday I wrote: For the last 40 years Apple has only gone through three identity fonts: Garamond → Myriad → San Francisco. DF reader Cameron McKay emailed to observe: “It strikes me that Apple changes CPU architectures (68K → PowerPC → Intel → ARM) more often than i...

Alexander Smith and Claire Cardona, NBC News:

Online tipsters have had a mixed record when it comes to providing information about mass casualty incidents. But Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said this Reddit user “blew the case wide open” after posting about their encounter on Saturday with the suspect.

“I’m being dead serious,” wrote the Reddit user, identified in an affidavit as “John,” three days after the shootings at Brown. “The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental.”

I despise this design pattern, because it’s inherently slower than signing in using an email/password combination that was saved to my passwords app (which is Apple Passwords) and autofilled by my web browser. It’s not just a little slower but *a lot* slower.

Apple released all of its OS 26.2 updates a week ago today. A little unusual for Apple to release OS updates on a Friday, but I think they wanted to get these out before Christmas week. And I don’t think it was rushed — for iOS 26.2 at least, there were two release candidate...

Apple, on its Apple Ads site: Search is the way most people find and download apps on the App Store, with nearly 65 percent of downloads happening directly after a search. To help give advertisers more opportunities to drive downloads from search results, Apple Ads will ...

David Shepardson, reporting for Reuters: TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, said Thursday it signed binding agreements with three major investors to form a joint venture to operate TikTok’s U.S. app led by American and global investors in a bid to avoid a U.S. government...

Michael Bierut, “I Hate ITC Garamond”, for Design Observer back in 2004: ITC Garamond was designed in 1975 by Tony Stan for the International Typeface Corporation. Okay, let’s stop right there. I’ll admit it: the single phrase “designed in 1975 by Tony Stan” conjures up ...

Katie Deighton, reporting last month for The Wall Street Journal: Henry Modisett wanted his employer to stand out. Competitors of the artificial-intelligence firm Perplexity were embracing their science-fiction roots with futuristic branding that felt cold to him. So Mod...

Gift Card Database (GCDB) has a guide to spotting tampered gift cards: Whilst it may seem unusual, you should tear open this version of Apple gift card before you purchase it so that you can inspect the redemption code. Look for missing or scratched off characters (it ma...

You will recall the Apple Account fiasco of Paris Buttfield-Addison, whose entire iCloud account and library of iTunes and App Store media purchases were lost when his Apple Account was locked, seemingly after he attempted to redeem a tampered $500 Apple Gift Card that he pu...

Wes Fenlon, writing for PC Gamer: Did Windows 3.1 really ship with a garish color scheme that was dared into being? That was a story I needed to hear, so I went digging for the credits of the Microsoft employees who worked on the user interface back then and found my way...

The letter is typeset in Papyrus, the typeface for which James Cameron’s affection inspired not one but two classic SNL shorts starring Ryan Gosling — which Cameron has a good sense of humor about.

Terrence Malick’s letter accompanying Tree of Life in 2011 was plainly and humbly set in Helvetica. David Lynch’s accompanying Mulholland Drive was also in Helvetica, but in a very Lynchian way. And then there is Stanley Kubrick, whose letter to projectionists that accompanied Barry Lyndon was typeset in Futura — quite the feat in 1975. (It was almost certainly IBM’s Mid-Century typeface, a beautiful adaptation of Futura for their Executive line of typewriters.) Cool custom letterhead on Kubrick’s as well.

Modern Illustration is a project by illustrator Zara Picken, featuring print artefacts from her extensive personal collection. Her aim is to preserve and document outstanding examples of mid-20th century commercial art, creating an accessible resource for understanding illustration history.

Glorious collection of mid-century illustrations and graphic design. Also a good follow on Instagram. (Via Dan Cederholm.)

I dare say this post from Adrian Roselli — first published in 2015 and updated 16 times (and counting) since — is the definitive debunking of the pseudoscience claims regarding deliberately ugly fonts being somehow beneficial to readers with dyslexia.

Netflix’s “tadum” is so iconic that it’s the name of their company blog. HBO’s static + chanted om is the OG standard-setter. I suspect the new Apple TV fanfare will be seen in that class. The old one was not.