Tom Pritchard, writing at Tom’s Guide:

We put the iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro Max through the Tom’s Guide battery test, which involves surfing the web over 5G at 150 nits of screen brightness. The iPhone 16 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Plus have risen to the top with some incredibly impressive results — making our best phone battery life list in the process. Here’s how the new iPhone 16 models’ battery life stacks up against their iPhone 15 counterparts, and rival flagships.

Link: tomsguide.com/phones/iphones/iphone-16-battery-life-results…

Tom Dotan and Berber Jin, reporting late last night for The Wall Street Journal (News+): Apple is no longer in talks to participate in an OpenAI funding round expected to raise as much as $6.5 billion, an 11th hour end to what would have been a rare investment by the iPh...

iA, which has been shipping a version of iA Writer for Android for 7 years: By September, we thought we had honored our side of the new agreement. But on the very day we expected to get our access back, Google altered the deal. We were told that read-only access to Goog...

Elizabeth Lopatto, reporting for The Verge:

X is preventing users from posting links to a newsletter containing a hacked document that’s alleged to be the Trump campaign’s research into vice presidential candidate JD Vance. The journalist who wrote the newsletter, Ken Klippenstein, has been suspended from the platform. Searches for posts containing a link to the newsletter turn up nothing.

Posting this just in case there remained an iota of a thought in your head that Elon Musk is actually a radical “free speech” absolutist and not just someone who blew $44 billion buying Twitter to warp the entire platform in the direction of his own weird un-American political agenda.

Link: theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-blocks-jd-vance…

Nilay Patel returns to the show to consider the iPhones 16.

Sponsored by:

• Tiptop: A new way to pay that combines Instant Trade-In and Pay-in-4 at checkout.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/09/26/ep-409

Deepa Seetharaman, Berber Jin, and Tom Dotan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+): OpenAI is planning to convert from a nonprofit organization to a for-profit company at the same time it is undergoing major personnel shifts including the abrupt resignation Wedn...

Rasmus Larsen, writing for FlatpanelsHD: While reviewing LG’s latest high-end G4 OLED TV (review here), FlatpanelsHD discovered that it now shows full-screen screensaver ads. The ad appeared before the conventional screensaver kicks in, as shown below, and was localized ...

Gerald Lynch, editor-in-chief:

Dig out your old iPod and fire up your ‘Songs to cry to’ playlist, I come bearing sad news. After more than 15 years covering everything Apple, it’s with a heavy heart I announce that we will no longer be publishing new content on iMore.

I want to kick off by thanking you all for your support over the many years and incarnations of the site. Whether you were a day-one early adopter in the ‘PhoneDifferent’ days, came on board with ‘The iPhone Blog,’ or recently started reading to find out what the hell Apple Vision Pro is, it’s been a privilege to serve you a daily slice of Apple pie.

So it goes. Nice remembrances from Rene Ritchie (now at YouTube) and Serenity Caldwell (now at Apple).

Link: imore.com/apple/one-more-thing-goodbye-from-imore

Just appended the following to my piece from yesterday on Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype: Facebook ships VR headsets and a software platform with an emphasis so strong on “the metaverse” that they rename the company Meta. Apple announces, and then 7 months later ship...

I’ll link first to The Verge’s “Everything Announced at Meta Connect 2024” roundup because Meta still hasn’t posted today’s keynote address on YouTube; best I’ve found is this recording of the livestream, starting around the 43m:20s mark. I watched most of the keynote live a...

Reuters: Masimo said on Wednesday founder Joe Kiani has decided to step down as the medical device maker’s CEO, days after shareholders voted to remove him from the company’s board following a bitter proxy battle with activist hedge fund Politan Capital Management. The ...

Holds hand to earpiece... Correction: they’re bunking in a jail cell together in Brooklyn, not Gotham. We regret the error.

Link: nytimes.com/2024/09/24/arts/music/sean-combs-sam-bankman…

A swing-and-a-miss from MKBHD. Criticism of the app is on two separate levels, but they’re being conflated. Level 1: the app is not good. Level 2: a paid wallpaper app? — LOL, wallpapers are free on Reddit. That second form of criticism — that there shouldn’t even exist a pa...

Juli Clover, MacRumors: With the iPhone 15 models that came out last year, Apple added an opt-in battery setting that limits maximum charge to 80 percent. The idea is that never charging the iPhone above 80 percent will increase battery longevity, so I kept my iPhone at ...

Donald Papp at Hackaday:

There’s a wild new feature making repair jobs easier (not to mention less messy) and iFixit covers it in their roundup of the iPhone 16’s repairability: electrically-released adhesive.

Here’s how it works. The adhesive looks like a curved strip with what appears to be a thin film of aluminum embedded into it. It’s applied much like any other adhesive strip: peel away the film, and press it between whatever two things it needs to stick. But to release it, that’s where the magic happens. One applies a voltage (a 9V battery will do the job) between the aluminum frame of the phone and a special tab on the battery. In about a minute the battery will come away with no force, and residue-free.

Clever.

Link: hackaday.com/2024/09/22/hands-on-with-new-iphones…

Method Financial’s authentication technology allows instant access to a consumer’s full liability portfolio using just personal information and consent, eliminating the need for usernames and passwords.

With just a few lines of code, Method’s APIs enable real-time, read-write, and frictionless access to all consumer liability data with integrated payment rails. Method leverages integrations with over 15,000 financial institutions to stream up-to-date, high-fidelity data from users’ accounts and to facilitate payment to them.

Method has helped 3M consumers connect 24M+ liability accounts at companies like Aven, SoFi, Figure, and Happy Money, saving borrowers millions in interest and providing access to billions of dollars in personalized loans.

Link: methodfi.com/

Nilay Patel, writing at The Verge last week: I asked Apple’s VP of camera software engineering Jon McCormack about Google’s view that the Pixel camera now captures “memories” instead of photos, and he told me that Apple has a strong point of view about what a photograph ...

Mark Wilson, writing at Fast Company:

Now, a full five years later, are we meeting the LoveFrom mascot, Montgomery: a bear, paying homage to San Francisco’s Montgomery Street where LoveFrom is headquartered and will soon open its own store.

Montgomery has just appeared on LoveFrom’s website, where it will sniff and follow your cursor, before slowly navigating over the letters of LoveFrom like rocks in a pond.

A lovely mark and even lovelier animation.

Link: fastcompany.com/91195233/jony-ive-love-from-logo-building…

Tripp Mickle, writing for The New York Times: Mr. Ive and Mr. Altman met for dinner several more times before agreeing to build a product, with LoveFrom leading the design. They have raised money privately, with Mr. Ive and Emerson Collective, Ms. Powell Jobs’s company, ...

Zac Hall, with a public service message at 9to5Mac: For now, the bug is triggered when someone replies to a shared watch face in a thread on Messages in iOS 18. The threaded responses feature allows you to have an inline conversation about a specific message that may hav...

My thanks to WorkOS for, once again, sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. Start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code. Ship complex features like SSO and SCIM (pronounced skim) provisioning in minutes instead of months.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

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

Lauren Thomas, Laura Cooper, and Asa Fitch, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+): Chip giant Qualcomm made a takeover approach to rival Intel in recent days, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would be one of the largest and most consequential...

Carlton Reid, writing for Wired: The use of Apple smartphones as the principal camera system on 28 Years Later was subsequently confirmed to Wired by several people connected with the movie, detailing that the particular model used to shoot was the iPhone 15 Pro Max. [.....

Austin Mann: Over the past week we’ve traveled over a thousand kilometers across Kenya, capturing more than 10,000 photos and logging over 3TB of ProRes footage with the new iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max cameras. Along the way, we’ve gained valuable insights into t...

Los Angeles Dodgers DH Shohei Ohtani entered last night’s game in Miami with 49 stolen bases and 48 home runs for the season. Only five other players in MLB history have ever hit 40 home runs and stolen 40 bases in a season. No player had ever achieved a 50-50 season. Ohtan...

Speaking of “Leon” Musk, here’s Victor Tangermann, writing for The Byte: In March, the US government accused the founder of Moscow-based company Social Design Agency of orchestrating a “persistent foreign malign influence campaign” on behalf of the Kremlin. The propagand...

Cards Against Humanity:

We have terrible news. Seven years ago, 150,000 people paid us $15 to protect a pristine parcel of land on the US-Mexico border from racist billionaire Donald Trump’s very stupid wall.

Unfortunately, an even richer, more racist billionaire — Elon Musk — snuck up on us from behind and completely fucked that land with gravel, tractors, and space garbage.

Just look at it! He fucked it.

How did this happen? Elon Musk’s SpaceX was building some space thing nearby, and he figured he could just dump his shit all over our gorgeous plot of land without asking. After we caught him, SpaceX gave us a 12-hour ultimatum to accept a lowball offer for less than half our land’s value. We said, “Go fuck yourself, Elon Musk. We’ll see you in court.”

Link: elonowesyou100dollars.com/

The European Commission yesterday: Today, the European Commission has started two specification proceedings to assist Apple in complying with its interoperability obligations under the Digital Markets Act (‘DMA’). [...] Pursuant to Article 8(2) of the DMA, the Commission...

Still a little awkward for a tentpole marketing feature of the iPhones 16 arriving tomorrow, but a public beta is a notable milestone.

Link: macrumors.com/2024/09/19/apple-seeds-first-ios-18-1-public…

One of the many memorable moments in Steve Jobs’s 2007 introduction of the original iPhone was this slide showing four of the then-leading smartphones on the market. Jobs explained: Now, why do we need a revolutionary user interface? Here’s four smartphones, right? Motor...