Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced a significant expansion of factory operations in Houston, bringing the future production of Mac mini to the U.S. for the first time. The company will also expand advanced AI server manufacturing at the factory and provide hands-on training at its new Advanced Manufacturing Center beginning later this year. Altogether, Apple’s Houston operations will create thousands of jobs.

See also: Rolfe Winkler at The Wall Street Journal (gift link, News+ link): “Inside Apple’s Push to Build an All-American Chip”.

Link: apple.com/newsroom/2026/02/apple-accelerates-us…

Todd Bishop, writing at GeekWire: Paul Brainerd, who went on to coin the term “desktop publishing” and build Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker into one of the defining programs of the personal computer era, died Sunday at his home on Bainbridge Island, Wash., after living fo...

Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors back on February 12: In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, seen by the Financial Times, FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson cites recent press coverage of a report from conservative media watchdog Media Research Center (MRC), which claimed tha...

Laurene Powell Jobs, in her introduction to the newest publication from the Steve Jobs Archive: Among the books that mattered to Steve was Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. I’m struck by this line from its pages: “Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will graduall...

Adam Grossman: Fifteen years ago, we started work on the Dark Sky weather app. Over the years it went through numerous iterations — including more than one major redesign — as we worked our way through the process of learning what makes a great weather app. Eventually, ...

Speaking of OpenClaw, here’s Scott Shambaugh: I’m a volunteer maintainer for matplotlib, python’s go-to plotting library. At ~130 million downloads each month it’s some of the most widely used software in the world. We, like many other open source projects, are dealing w...

Sam Altman, last week on Twitter/X:

Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.

OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support. The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that.

I’m sure it will remain as open as the “open” in OpenAI’s own name.

Link: x.com/sama/status/2023150230905159801

Erin Griffith and Karen Weise, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): More than he did at any other major tech company, Mr. Epstein found success boring into the inner sanctums of Microsoft. Leveraging one connection into the next, he became privy to the company’s...

Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge (gift link): With Spencer’s retirement official, Microsoft is hitting the reset button on Bond’s Xbox strategy instead of embracing it further. Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma is now promising “the return of Xbox,” in a clear message ...

Abby Haddican:

Times New Resistance autocorrects specific words as they are typed. For example, the word ICE autocorrects to the Goon Squad and the word Trump autocorrects to Donald Trump is a felon.

To the untrained eye, Times New Resistance looks just like Times New Roman — the official font of the U.S. State Department. When you install the font, it will appear in your font menus as Times  New Roman, with an extra space between the words Times and New.

Ligatures, man. Will they never cease to surprise?

Link: abbyhaddican.com/times-new-resistance

Norbert Heger:

In the release notes for macOS 26.3 RC, Apple stated that the window-resizing issue I demonstrated in my recent blog post had been resolved.

You’ll never guess what happened between the RC (release candidate) version and the actual shipping version of 26.3.

Just kidding, you’ll guess.

Link: noheger.at/blog/2026/02/12/resizing-windows-on-macos-tahoe…

Brent Simmons, last month: The big change from 6.2.1 is that it adopts the Liquid Glass UI and it requires macOS 26. (Note to people who aren’t on macOS 26: we fixed a lot of bugs in 6.2 and 6.2.1 knowing that many people might skip, or at least delay, installing macOS ...

Trader Joe’s:

Like their milk chocolate brethren on our shelves, our Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups are made with real peanut butter that’s made with slowly roasted and ground Virginia peanuts. The luscious, smooth, rich, dark chocolate enveloping that peanut butter is crafted from high quality cacao beans. Other purveyors of peanut butter cups fill theirs with all kinds of “extraneous” ingredients. Ours are free of such things. We eschew artificial flavors and preservatives, as well as colors other than those derived from natural sources. We’re quite certain they taste better our way.

Trader Joe’s speaketh the truth and throweth some shade.

Update: In the name of science, I tried both.

Link: traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/dark-chocolate-peanut…

Brad Reese, on LinkedIn last week: My grandfather, H. B. Reese (Who Invented Reese’s), built Reese’s on a simple, enduring architecture: Milk Chocolate + Peanut Butter. Not a flavor idea. Not a marketing construct. A real, tangible product identity that consumers have tr...

My thanks to Sentry for sponsoring last week at DF. Sentry is running a hands-on workshop: “Crash Reporting, Tracing, and Logs for iOS in Sentry”. You can watch it on demand. You’ll learn how to connect the dots between slowdowns, crashes, and the user experience in your iOS app. It’ll show you how to:

• Set up Sentry to surface high-priority mobile issues without alert fatigue.
• Use Logs and Breadcrumbs to reconstruct what happened with a crash.
• Find what’s behind a performance bottleneck using Tracing.
• Monitor and reduce the size of your iOS app using Size Analysis.

Link: sentry.io/resources/ios-workshop-jan-2026/?utm_source…

Lydia Mee, reporting for Motorsport:

IMAX has announced that a select number of races will be shown live in IMAX locations across the United States in 2026. The new fan viewing experience is part of a collaboration with Apple TV, which has taken over the broadcasting rights for the championship in the US on a multi-year deal from 2026.

“F1 is a rapidly growing force in sports and culture in the US, and by bringing F1 on Apple TV live to IMAX theatres nationwide, we’re delivering the energy and excitement to even more screens in a truly immersive way,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of music, sports, and Beats.

You know what would add even more screens in an immersive way? If Vision Pro users had access to the same live screenings on virtual IMAX screens.

Link: motorsport.com/f1/news/f1-to-screen-live-in-imax-theatres…

A reader pointed out that the 2026 Formula 1 season starts in Australia on March 8. You will recall from October that Apple TV is now the exclusive broadcast partner for F1 in the U.S. Apple is already dabbling with live immersive sports broadcasting for VisionOS with a limi...

Paul Ford, in an op-ed for The New York Times (gift link):

All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.

Link: nytimes.com/2026/02/18/opinion/ai-software.html?unlocked…

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors: Apple invited select members of the media to the event in three major cities around the world. It is simply described as a “special Apple Experience,” and there is no further information about what it may entail. The invitation features a 3D ...

Speaking of iOS 26, here’s Joe Rossignol reporting for MacRumors: Apple has shared updated iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 adoption figures, revealing how many iPhones and iPads are running those software versions. These adoption numbers are based on iPhones and iPads that transact...

Apple Support: If iPhone isn’t responding, and you can’t turn it off then on, try forcing it to restart. Press and quickly release the volume up button. Press and quickly release the volume down button. Press and hold the side button. When the Apple logo appears, relea...

Learn how to connect the dots between slowdowns, crashes, and the user experience in your iOS app. This on-demand session covers how to:

• Set up Sentry to surface high-priority mobile issues without alert fatigue.
• Use Logs and Breadcrumbs to reconstruct what happened with a crash.
• Find what’s behind a performance bottleneck using Tracing.
• Monitor and reduce the size of your iOS app using Size Analysis.

Watch it here.

Link: sentry.io/resources/ios-workshop-jan-2026/?utm_source…

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. 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 back end requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh. That’s it.

Simplify your integrations with WorkOS Pipes.

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

Joanna Stern (last week):

After 12 years with The Wall Street Journal, this is my final column and video as a full-time employee. I’m off to build something new and independent. I’ll still pop up on these pages and at WSJ events from time to time. Can’t get rid of me that easily! Before I go, I wanted to reflect on the past dozen years in tech — in a letter to my first-month-on-the-job self.

The video version of her sign-off column is worth it for the Velveeta gag alone.

Link: wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/12-years-consumer-tech-phones-ev…

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: After planning to include the new capabilities in iOS 26.4 — an operating system update slated for March — Apple is now working to spread them out over future versions, according to people familiar with the matter. That would mean po...

Jeff Johnson: In today’s macOS 26.3 update, Apple implemented a “fix” for an issue I blogged about a month ago, macOS Tahoe broke Finder columns view. (At the behest of John Gruber and the Apple Style Guide, I’m now using the term “column view” rather than “columns view....

Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica at the end of January: Apple also outlines a number of usage restrictions for the generative AI features that rely on external services. Apple says that, “at a minimum,” users will be able to generate 50 images, 50 presentation...

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…

Simon Willison:

OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I’ve had a few days of preview access — it’s a solid app that provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent and adds some interesting new features, most notably first-class support for Skills, and Automations for running scheduled tasks.

Interesting, for sure. But super-duper interesting? I don’t know.

Link: simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/2/introducing-the-codex-app/

Apple Newsroom:

Xcode 26.3 introduces support for agentic coding, a new way in Xcode for developers to build apps using coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex. With agentic coding, Xcode can work with greater autonomy toward a developer’s goals — from breaking down tasks to making decisions based on the project architecture and using built-in tools.

I don’t know if this is super-duper interesting news, but I think it’s super-duper interesting that Apple saw the need to release this now, not at WWDC in June.

Link: apple.com/newsroom/2026/02/xcode-26-point-3-unlocks-the…