Lauly Li and Cheng Ting-Fang, reporting for Nikkei Asia: Production orders for the iPhone Air have been cut nearly to “end of production” levels, despite it only becoming available in China last week, due to weak demand in other markets, multiple sources briefed on the m...

Reason enough to be rooting for the Blue Jays. Put this man in the Hall of Fame already. For chrissake his name is Donnie Baseball.

Link: mlb.com/news/don-mattingly-first-world-series

Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager, reporting for The New York Times: President Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that any...

Here’s an update I just posted to yesterday’s piece on organized phone theft rings in London:

I forgot to apply one of the core tenets of Brian Kernighan’s wonderful book Millions, Billions, Zillions ($19 in hardcover from Amazon; BookShop.org link to indie booksellers): always do some back-of-the-envelope double-checking of the math in news stories. 1.5 miles of aluminum (or even aluminium) foil from Costco is just 12 rolls at 200 meters each. I wouldn’t blink my eyes at someone with a dozen rolls of foil in the cart at Costco.

Link: daringfireball.net/linked/2025/10/20/london-phone-theft

Yours truly, yesterday: The problem I see with the MacBook power adapter situation in Europe is that while power users — like the sort of people who read Daring Fireball and Pixel Envy — will have no problem buying exactly the sort of power adapter they want, or simply r...

I took the above photo on Monday, June 9, this year at WWDC. Keynote day, around 1:30pm PT. I captured it using my iPhone 16 Pro and Not Boring’s !Camera app, using the built-in Mono Tokyo LUT. Like the other apps in Not Boring’s growing suite, !Camera can be mistaken b...

Jonathan Hoefler: The objects in the Apocryphal Inventions series are technical chimeras, intentional misdirections coaxed from the generative AI platform Midjourney. Instead of iterating on the system’s early drafts to create ever more accurate renderings of real-world ...

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: Not a fan of that design? Well, iOS 26.1 beta 4 is now available, and it introduces a new option to choose a more opaque look for Liquid Glass. The same option is also available on Mac and iPad. You can find the new option on iPhone and iPad by g...

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Michael Tsai, back on September 30, compiled a roundup of links regarding Electron apps causing systemwide lag on MacOS 26 Tahoe. The reason, seemingly, is that the Electron framework was overriding a private AppKit API. Of course.

Tomas Kafka wrote a shell script to find un-updated Electron apps on your system. Craig Hockenberry took Kafka’s shell script and turned it into an easy-to-use AppleScript application.

So, yes, Theo Browne, “software dev nerd”, Electron really is “that bad”. It’s actually, if anything, worse.

Link: mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/30/electron-apps-causing-system…

Jason Fried:

So what’s the net effect of this tiny little design detail that the owner may not even understand? Well, it looks like the watch is already half-way out of power after the first day, so it encourages the owner to wind the watch more frequently. To keep it closer to topped off, even when it’s not necessary. This helps prevent the watch from running out of power, losing time, and, ultimately, stopping. A stopped watch may be right twice a day, but it’s rarely at the times you want.

Small detail, material behavior change. Well considered, well executed, well done.

Link: world.hey.com/jason/when-design-drives-behavior-49baf157

SATCOM Security — a team of researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Maryland: We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. A shockingly la...

Nick Heer, at Pixel Envy: First of all, the dollar is not the currency in any of these countries. Second, the charger in European countries is €65, which is more like $76 right now. Third, Apple is allowed to bundle an A.C. adapter, it just needs to offer an option to no...

While poking fun at EU regulations leading Apple not to include a power adapter with the new M5 MacBook Pro across Europe, I wondered why the U.K. — which left the EU five years ago — was affected. DF reader C.A. wrote, via email: We did indeed leave the EU, but remain a...

Lizzie Dearden and Amelia Nierenberg, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): For years, London’s police assumed most of the phone thefts were the work of small-time thieves looking to make some quick cash. But last December, they got an intriguing lead from a woma...

Ben Zotto: Name every pioneering personal computer you can think of from the 1970s. The MITS Altair 8800. The Apple-1. The IMSAI 8080. You may even know about the SWTPC 6800 or Processor Technology Sol-20. There’s a computer missing from that list, and it’s an important...

Erin-Atlanta Argun: While Hockney is perhaps best known for his larger-than-life swimming pool paintings, bold coloured acrylics are certainly not his only forte. Contrary to the old saying, Hockney is a jack of all trades and a master of all he has worked with: from pai...

CNBC:

Apple shares rose 4% on Monday as a new report showed iPhone 17 sales off to a strong start in the U.S. and China.

The iPhone 17 series, which dropped in September, has outsold the iPhone 16 series by 14% in the U.S. and China within its first 10 days of availability, according to data from Counterpoint Research.

Just because a research firm claims iPhone 17 sales are up 14 percent doesn’t mean they are up 14 percent. These are estimates, not hard numbers from Apple — and Apple doesn’t share actual sales numbers with anyone. Some headlines get this right, but most don’t.

Link: cnbc.com/2025/10/20/apple-stock-iphone-17-us-china-sales…

Apple Newsroom: Apple and NBCUniversal today announced the launch of the Apple TV and Peacock Bundle, available beginning October 20. The first-of-its-kind bundle offers the services’ complementary array of award-winning originals, marquee live events and sports, beloved...

Jess Weatherbed, The Verge: A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage took down multiple online services for around four hours this morning, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, and more. As of 6:35AM ET, the AWS s...

Picking up steam, these protests are.

Link: theatlantic.com/photography/archive/2025/10/photos-no-kings…

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A few readers took exception to this bit from my post Wednesday regarding the new M5 MacBook Pro: The base 14-inch model, with the no-adjective M-series chip, is for people who probably would be better served with a MacBook Air but who wrongly believe they “need” a lapto...

I’m not really into commemorative coins, and I have to say I suspect Steve Jobs wasn’t either, but it’s a nice little recognition. No mention of it from the Mint, but the $1 value of the coin is the same as the salary Jobs drew from Apple.

Link: usmint.gov/news/press-releases/united-states-mint-releases…

Blockbuster sports streaming news from Apple Newsroom: Apple and Formula 1 today announced a five-year partnership that will bring all F1 races exclusively to Apple TV in the United States beginning next year. [...] Apple TV will deliver comprehensive coverage of Formul...

Speaking of Eddy Cue, he was the guest on Matthew Belloni’s excellent podcast, The Town, this week. (Overcast link.) Just a great interview in general. Cue doesn’t do many interviews but he’s my favorite Apple executive to hear speak, because he’s the least rehearsed and mos...

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 chip does not include a charger in the box in European countries, including the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, and others, according to Apple’s online store. In the U...

Good and thoughtful graphic essay by Matthew Inman, expressing why he dislikes AI-generated art. It’s been widely linked to, largely approvingly. I fundamentally disagree with the premise. Near the start, Inman writes: When I consume AI art, it also evokes a feeling. Goo...

Apple Newsroom, today: Apple today announced M5, delivering the next big leap in AI performance and advances to nearly every aspect of the chip. Built using third-generation 3-nanometer technology, M5 introduces a next-generation 10-core GPU architecture with a Neural Ac...

Luke Bouma, writing for Cord Cutters: In a seismic shift for the television industry, TiVo Corporation has quietly pulled the plug on its storied digital video recorder line, effectively ending an era that redefined how consumers interacted with broadcast content. As of ...