Special guest Dan Frommer returns to the show. Topics include the indie media business, the iPhone Pocket, the iPhone Air (including rumors about the second generation model), AI “personalities”, and five years of Apple Silicon Macs. Also, six years of Dan’s site, The New Consumer.
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Jonathan V. Last, writing for The Bulwark:
The president of the United States gave a speech yesterday before
a group of McDonald’s corporate workers and franchise owners. I’m
going to quote a few sections of his remarks at great length,
because if you have not listened t...
President Donald Trump, today in the Oval Office alongside his “very good friend” Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, after ABC News reporter Mary Bruce had the temerity to pose a question regarding Mohammed having ordered the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist J...
Mark Gurman, in his (paywalled, alas) Power On column for Bloomberg over the weekend:
The next major update didn’t arrive until 2023, when Apple
finally transitioned the desktop to in-house chips with the M2
Ultra Mac Pro. Two years later, that model remains largely
unch...
Cloudflare suffered an hours-long global outage, starting around 12pm UTC / 7am ET, which brought down an enormous chunk of the Internet. This included, humorously, Down Detector. It also included (not so humorously to me) Daring Fireball, which has been routed through Cloudflare since 2018. My apologies if you tried to reach the site while it was down. (DF was back up by the time I woke up this morning.) As of this writing, Cloudflare still hasn’t determined exactly what happened, but they’ve been updating their status report for the incident a few times per hour. The most recent update:
We continue to monitor the system through recovery and we are
seeing errors and latency return to normal levels. A full
post-incident investigation and details about the incident will be
made available asap.
London Centric:
Sam was walking past a Royal Mail depot in south London in January
when his path was blocked by a group of eight men.
“I tried to move to let them pass, but the last guy blocked the
path,” the 32-year-old told London Centric. “They started pushing
me and...
Apple Newsroom, last week:
Apple today announced the launch of Digital ID, a new way for
users to create an ID in Apple Wallet using information from their
U.S. passport, and present it with the security and privacy of
iPhone or Apple Watch. At launch, Digital ID accepta...
Ryan Christoffel, reporting for 9to5Mac a month ago:
Meta has published a support doc that states its Messenger app for
Mac is being discontinued. New users won’t be able to download the
app at all, and existing users have about 60 more days of use
before it stops working altogether. Why the change? Unfortunately,
no reason has been given. But users are being pushed to the
Facebook website for all their Messenger needs instead.
Clerk makes authentication for iOS apps effortless — just drop in pre-built SwiftUI components for sign-in, MFA, and profile management. Fully customizable, always in sync with Apple’s design system, and packed with features devs love: social sign-in, user roles, and organization management. Launch faster, stay secure, and scale confidently, whether you’re building the next big thing or a startup MVP. See how Clerk makes complete user management easy for modern iOS teams.
OpenAI:
To start a group chat tap the people icon in the top right corner
of any new or existing chat. When you add someone to an existing
chat, ChatGPT creates a copy of your conversation as a new group
chat so your original conversation stays separate. You can invite
o...
Jay Yagnik, VP of AI innovation and research, on Google’s The Keyword blog:
Private AI Compute is built on a multi-layered system that is
designed from the ground up around core security and privacy
principles:
One integrated Google tech stack: Private AI Compute runs...
My thanks to WorkOS for their continuing support of DF with another sponsorship week. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. WorkOS provides a complete user management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and RBAC. The APIs are modular and ...
The Financial Times, under a four-person byline (“Tim Bradshaw, Stephen Morris, and Michael Acton in San Francisco, and Daniel Thomas in London”):
Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it
prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as...
Mayank Parmar, writing for Windows Latest:
WhatsApp on Windows 11 has just got a “major” upgrade, and you’re
probably going to hate it because it simply loads web.whatsapp.com
in a WebView2 container. This means WhatsApp on Windows 11 is
cooked, and it’s back to being ab...
Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information on Tuesday (paywalled, alas, but summarized by 9to5Mac here and here):
Apple has since sharply scaled back production of the first
iPhone Air and delayed the release of an updated version that was
meant to launch in ...
Rolfe Winkler and Yang Jie, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link, News+ link) under the headline “Apple’s iPhone Air Is a Marketing Win and a Sales Flop” (which headline, going from the web page <title> element, was originally the less sensational “Apple’s ...
Mark Gurman and Edward Ludlow, reporting for Bloomberg (paywalled, alas, but summarized by The Verge and Ars Technica)
Tesla Inc. is developing support for Apple Inc.’s CarPlay system
in its vehicles, according to people with knowledge of the matter,
working to add one o...
Via a DF reader, here’s a 20-second clip from the 1993 classic*Demolition Man that exemplifies how today’s overly effusive, ever-affirming AI chatbots were presented as elements of a profoundly dystopic future by sci-fi writers just a few decades ago.
OpenAI today, “GPT-5.1: A Smarter, More Conversational ChatGPT”:
GPT‑5.1 Instant, ChatGPT’s most used model, is now warmer by
default and more conversational. Based on early testing, it
often surprises people with its playfulness while remaining clear
and useful.
These...
Sony, in a 2021 Instagram post, regarding the uniforms that so infatuated Steve Jobs that he commissioned Miyake to design prototype vests for Apple employees to wear:
The history of the relationship between the two companies dates
back to the 1980s. It was Issey Miyake whom Akio Morita, chairman
of the board at that time, requested for a uniform design which
employees take pride in with comfort year-round.
That’s the light nylon fabric uniform, created by the first
collaboration of Sony and ISSEY MIYAKE.
Featuring removable sleeves, it’s perfect for summer.
From Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, chapter 28, “CEO: Still Crazy After All These Years”, p. 361:
On a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, Jobs asked Sony’s chairman,
Akio Morita, why everyone in his company’s factories wore
uniforms. “He looked very ashamed and told me tha...
Craig Grannell, writing for Stuff:
This collaboration with Issey Miyake was, we’re told, inspired by
the concept of “a piece of cloth”. The result of all that R&D? A
crossbody sock. It’s as if someone raided a warehouse of iPod
Socks, stretched them out and fashioned...
Apple Newsroom:
ISSEY MIYAKE and Apple today unveiled iPhone Pocket. Inspired by
the concept of “a piece of cloth,” its singular 3D-knitted
construction is designed to fit any iPhone as well as all
pocketable items. [...]
Crafted in Japan, iPhone Pocket features a singu...
Patrick George, writing for The Atlantic under the ominous headline “Enjoy CarPlay While You Still Can” (News+ link):
Some automakers have made a point of
proclaiming their allegiance to CarPlay, knowing that’s
what buyers want. Toyota’s EVs tell CarPlay how much electri...
I upgrade my iPhones and iPads to new iOS releases, including developer betas, pretty much willy-nilly. I’m more conservative about the Macs I use for work. For example, I rely on audio software from Rogue Amoeba for recording both The Talk Show and Dithering, and there were...
With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. It provides a complete User Management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and RBAC. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months. WorkOS si...
Jason Snell, writing at Macworld:
In that first event (which you can relive in the YouTube video
below), Apple announced its first wave of M1 Macs: the MacBook
Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. The
Macs themselves all used the same design as their Intel
predecessor...
I really liked the 30-minute format and the breadth of topics:
everything from API details to broader design considerations,
stats from their own businesses, and postmortems, plus all the
stuff he mentioned.
I’ve never been an indie software developer, but I found the
podcast extremely insightful. It’s influenced how I’ve thought
about my non-indie software development career, not just as
someone delivering bits that indies use, but also as a product
person who writes software as a means to an end.
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