Let’s Just Get It Out of the Way and Talk About the New Icons First, but Let’s Also Use the Icons as a Proxy for Talking About the Broader Software Design Problems at Apple There’s a lot of hate for the new app icons of the entire Creator Studio suite, but while I think the...

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 ...

Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors: The service will officially cease operating on February 16, 2026. Setapp Mobile launched in open beta in September 2024. In a support page, MacPaw said Setapp Mobile is being closed because of app marketplaces’ “still-evolving and ...

OpenAI:

With this launch, ChatGPT now offers three subscription tiers globally:

• ChatGPT Go at $8 USD/month
• ChatGPT Plus at $20 USD/month
• ChatGPT Pro at $200 USD/month

And perhaps the bigger news:

We plan to begin testing ads in the free tier and ChatGPT Go in the US soon. Ads support our commitment to making AI accessible to everyone by helping us keep ChatGPT available at free and affordable price points.

Their pricing page has a comparison chart showing the differences in their four consumer tiers (free, Go, Plus, Pro). Screenshot, for posterity. The big difference that will keep me on the $20/month Plus plan for now is that the Go plan doesn’t have access to the Thinking model.

Link: openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-go/

Keith Broni, writing at Emojipedia, has a good illustrated survey of how most emoji sets have converged in meaning — almost entirely toward Apple’s designs: There are several structural reasons why Apple’s designs so often become the gravitational center of emoji converg...

Matt Richman, back in 2012: In 2009, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007 and 2008 combined. In 2010, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007, 2008, and 2009 combined. Last year, Apple sold 93.1 million iPhones, slightly more than it did in 2007, 2008, 2009, a...

Karissa Bell, Engadget: Several of Meta’s VR studios have been affected by the company’s metaverse-focused layoffs. The company has shuttered three of its VR studios, including Armature, Sanzaru and Twisted Pixel. VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer be updated wit...

Josh Woodward, VP of Gemini and AI Studio, on the Google blog: The best assistants don’t just know the world; they know you and help you navigate it. Today, we’re answering a top user request: you can now personalize Gemini by connecting Google apps with a single tap. La...

Jacob Krol, reporting for Techradar: While Verizon had a good few months, with the last major outage occurring in October 2024, it seems that the popular United States wireless carrier is having some issues. So, if you’re on Verizon and seeing ‘SOS’ in place of network b...

The letter speaks for itself, and is very much worth reading in full. I’ll quote only from the conclusion, which rhetorically feels very Bill: Continue to mislead Americans about what is truly at stake, and you will learn that Americans are better at finding the truth th...

Daniele Lepido and Antonio Vanuzzo, reporting for Bloomberg (paywalled, alas): Meta Platforms Inc. and EssilorLuxottica SA are discussing potentially doubling production capacity for AI-powered smart glasses by the end of this year, in a bid to capture growing demand and...

Apple Newsroom: Apple today unveiled Apple Creator Studio, a groundbreaking collection of powerful creative apps designed to put studio-grade power into the hands of everyone, building on the essential role Mac, iPad, and iPhone play in the lives of millions of creators ...

Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch: “We’ve structured this entire business around being a sustainable, profitable, and hopefully, long-running enterprise, but not a startup,” Migicovsky told TechCrunch on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last w...

Elon Musk, in a tweet responding to Google’s announcement of their deal to provide Gemini to Apple for use in Apple Intelligence:

This seems like an unreasonable concentration of power for Google, given that the also have Android and Chrome

I’m sure that if Grok were as popular as Gemini, Musk would turn down a deal with Apple to avoid concentrating “power” in his hands.

Link: macrumors.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-reacts-to-gemini-siri/

Here’s an illustrated follow-up regarding the absurdity of MacOS 26’s “looks like they’re rounded off like a child’s toy but actually they’re still rectangles with corners” windows. If you turn on always-visible scroll bars (which you should) and scroll to the bottom, they look like this:

(That’s Safari, which I think is a somewhat popular app.)

It would make more sense if we found out that the team behind redesigning the UI for MacOS 26 Tahoe was hired by Meta a year ago and deliberately sabotaged their work to make the Mac look clownish and amateur.

Link: daringfireball.net/2026/01/resizing_windows_macos_26

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 backend requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh.

Simplify integrations with WorkOS Pipes.

Link: workos.com/docs/pipes?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

Eddy Cue, in a rare bylined post on Apple Newsroom: The numbers reflect the incredible enthusiasm of our customers, whether it’s downloading an exciting new app or game, watching the hottest new show with family and friends, listening to their favorite songs, or shopping...

CNBC: The multi-year partnership will lean on Google’s Gemini and cloud technology for future Apple foundational models, according to a joint statement obtained by CNBC’s Jim Cramer. “After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most cap...

Norbert Heger, with a perfectly illustrated post, “The Struggle of Resizing Windows on macOS Tahoe”: Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing. This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using com...

Shit’s getting real, folks.

Link: federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20260111a.htm

U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), and Ben Ray Luján (D-New Mexico), in a letter addressed to Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai: Your app stores’ policies are clear. Google’s terms of service require apps to “prohibit users from creating, uploading...

My thanks to Copilot Money for sponsoring last week at DF. Copilot is a personal finance app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’ve always deeply believed in the value of embracing the design idioms and technical features of truly native apps for Apple platforms. Apple h...

Elizabeth Lopatto, writing at The Verge, “Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai Are Cowards”: Since X’s users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple’s and Google...

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic (gift link), on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection and the first year of the second Trump presidency:

We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander — they were actually aroused by it — and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.

Link: theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/02/trump-indecency-jan-6…

Ben Cohen, writing last week for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): One rainy day 40 years ago, Moylan was headed to a meeting across Ford’s campus and hopped in a company car. When he saw the fuel tank was nearly empty, he stopped at a gas pump. What happened next is ...

Kalley Huang and Tripp Mickle, writing for The New York Times (gift link): Threading the needle between adding new bells and whistles to Apple’s products while watching the bottom line has defined the careful, low-profile style of Mr. Ternus, who joined Apple in 2001. He...

Apple Newsroom: Today, Apple and Chase announced that Chase will become the new issuer of Apple Card, with an expected transition in approximately 24 months. Apple Card users can continue to enjoy the award-winning experience of Apple Card, which includes up to 3 percen...

The ACLU:

Taking photographs and video of things that are plainly visible in public spaces is a constitutional right — and that includes police and other government officials carrying out their duties.

However, there is a widespread, continuing pattern of law enforcement officers ordering people to stop taking photographs or video in public places and harassing, detaining, and arresting those who fail to comply.

Here’s their advice on what to say and do if you are stopped or detained for taking photographs or video.

Also, as good a time as ever for one of my periodic reminders to remember how to hard-lock your iPhone to temporarily disable Face ID: press and hold the side button and either one of the volume buttons at the same time for a few seconds.

Link: aclu.org/issues/free-speech/photographers-rights/filming…

Caroline Haskins, writing for Wired (News+ link, in case Wired’s paywall blocks you): Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is being used to flood X with thousands of sexualized images of adults and apparent minors wearing minimal clothing. Some of this content appears to not only...

Maybe “next year” meant “next next year”?

(They’re still accepting $100 deposits for pre-orders.)

Link: theverge.com/news/851151/trump-phone-missed-another-release…