Matt Mullenweg:
Fundamentally, Om was a lover of humanity. He became a fast
“regular” everywhere he went. He wouldn’t just buy coffee, he
would also learn the name and story of every barista, the dogs and
people in South Park. His deep curiosity and respect weren’t just
...
Clay Risen, writing for The New York Times (gift link):
Mr. Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst,
leading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism
start-ups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and
Inside.com. He was among...
Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge (gift link):
If you’ve visited a cannabis club in Spain, [Sammy] Azdoufal says, chances
are your photo ID was among them — and possibly your phone
number, address, your favorite strains of cannabis, and how much
you consumed each mon...
From the bottom of Rolfe Winkler’s report for The Wall Street Journal Thursday, on Apple’s unprecedented price increases (gift link):
Apple’s price hikes arrived the day after Micron Technology, the
big American maker of memory and storage, reported blowout
quarterly ear...
Sanders’s tweet is better punctuated and capitalized, but it’s the same argument as Trump’s. Zero economic sense, 100 percent ideological wishful thinking.
From a September 2022 letter to then-Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, co-signed by Marco Rubio (then a Republican senator from Florida, currently secretary of state) and Mark Warner (Democratic senator from Virginia):
We write to convey our extreme concern...
Microsoft’s Xbox blog:
Effective August 1, 2026, we will be updating prices worldwide.
The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB
models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our
2 TB model.
Last October, we increased XBOX console pri...
Demetri Sevastopulo and Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times (paywalled, alas):
Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to buy
memory chips from CXMT, a Chinese company that the Pentagon has
put on a blacklist because of alleged connections t...
Grace Kay and Theo Wayt, writing for the paywalled-with-no-gift-links The Information:
xAI launched an upgraded video model last week, highlighting how
it’s pushing ahead with its own visual efforts even as it brings
in outside help to compete with rivals in areas like c...
OpenAI yesterday:
We’re beginning a limited preview of the GPT‑5.6 series: Sol, our
flagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and
Luna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive
performance to GPT‑5.5 while being 2× cheaper and Luna brings
stron...
Reed Albergotti and Ben Smith, reporting last night for Semaphor:
The decision, in a letter sent Friday afternoon to Anthropic, is a
major de-escalation in the confrontation between the Trump
Administration and one of the world’s most valuable private
companies. Two week...
Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge (gift link):
Since the Magnavox Odyssey came out in 1972, game consoles have
been built with the same basic goal: to effortlessly play
proprietary games on a TV screen. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft
have spent decades essentially sel...
This is going to sound cornier than a bucket of Jiffy-Pop, but it is a profound irony that a man with such a big and beautiful figurative heart could have such a lousy literal one.
Apple, in a statement issues to the press yesterday, quoted fully by MacRumors:
The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented
challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an
extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have
never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We
have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we
have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on
a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and
Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working
tirelessly to find solutions.
I saw a few other publications quote a sentence or two from the statement, but I like to see the whole thing. It’s not long.
Via MacRumors’s Buyer Guide, the current third-gen Apple TV 4K models were introduced in October 2022, and sport the A15 Bionic chip that debuted with the iPhones 13 in 2021. It’s widely believed that new hardware models are coming this fall. I mentioned yesterday that the s...
On the eve of WWDC, in a post arguing that “SwiftUI Only Makes It Easy to Develop Bad Apps”, I wrote about an atrocious bug in Apple’s Journal app:
If you’re running MacOS 26 Tahoe, open Journal and make a new
dummy entry. Type something like “The quick brown fox.” Then
...
Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after
a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family
and friends.
We invite you to share your remembrances of Om in the comments
below or by posting and tagging his accounts on X/Twitter,
Instagram, Threads, or LinkedIn.
Om kept this battle very private, so this news comes as a terrible surprise for many, and an incomprehensible gut punch for everyone who knew and loved him. Rest in peace, my friend.
Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
The company briefly took down its Apple Online Store early this
morning as it typically does when announcing new products. When it
came back online, the price tags for Mac computers rose roughly
15% to 20%...
Jeff Johnson:
Several weeks ago, John Gruber of Daring Fireball asked me
whether I could reproduce an issue he was seeing in Safari: when a
web page is focused, the Copy menu item in the main menu is always
enabled, regardless of whether there’s anything selected in the
...
The WebKit blog (back during WWDC):
If you look through the lists of features and fixes in Safari 27,
you’ll notice that, although there are 58 brand-new features and
525 fixes — the largest pile of fixes in any Safari release in
recent memory — most of what is released ...
When an AI agent tries to complete a task that requires a new account, it hits a wall: the sign-up form. There’s no standard for how an agent registers a user with an app on their behalf.
auth.md is a file you host at your domain that tells agents how to register your users, which flows you support, what scopes you expose, and how credentials get issued. Think robots.txt, but for agent registration. It composes existing OAuth standards.
Cloudflare, Firecrawl, and Resend have already adopted it.
Kickstarter campaign from Jason Snell and Myke Hurley to fund a 50-episode narrative podcast on Apple’s 50-year history. (Actually, with stretch goals, more than 50 episodes.) The campaign has already hit its primary funding goal but there’s a week left in the campaign and more stretch goals to hit. Jason and I spoke at length about Designed in California on the latest episode of my podcast, and like I said there — if you enjoy podcasts like The Talk Show and Upgrade and aren’t backing this campaign, you’re not hooked up right. Really looking forward to this when episodes start dropping.
Jason Snell returns to the show for a look back at WWDC 2026, and a look ahead to Designed in California, his and Myke Hurley’s upcoming 50-episode Apple history podcast.
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Some follow-up thoughts on my earlier piece, regarding the second-gen iPhone Air’s additional camera lens being a 0.5× ultra-wide, not a 3× or 4× telephoto:
Ultimately, it’s the fact that I use my 0.5× lens not so much for photography but for scanning documents and notes, a...
Speaking of Mark Gurman, in the wake of Tim Cook’s unprecedented interview with the WSJ to warn that Apple is going to raise prices in response to the steep rise in RAM and SSD prices, he tweeted (XCancel link):
Regarding Apple price hikes, have to imagine these are fair...
Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is preparing a second-generation iPhone Air for spring
2027, aiming to boost the appeal of the slimmed-down device,
according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Current prototypes of the new model, code-named V62, ad...
4K restorations of Kubrick’s thirteen features and three shorts,
with their original soundtracks alongside the 5.1 mixes,
restored and remastered
Over twenty-five hours of interviews, documentaries, and
behind-the-scenes materials
Kubrick’s international version of
The Shining
A new 4K restoration of Vivian Kubrick’s behind-the-scenes
documentary Making “The Shining”
Newly recorded commentary tracks featuring filmmaker Lee Unkrich
(editor of the book Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”) and
author Michael Benson (Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur
C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece)
Bharat Iyer:
Let’s be real … if The Observer actually cared at all about your
privacy, they wouldn’t share your personal data with ONE HUNDRED
AND SIXTY ONE FUCKING PARTNERS. [...]
Imagine if, upon purchasing a copy of the Sunday newspaper in
1791, you were followed aro...
Basic Apple Guy, back during WWDC:
WWDC always brings a torrent of new content, details, and
platform-wide changes. One of the first things I noticed after
installing the macOS Golden Gate beta was the updated icon design.
The colours are much bolder, several icons have ...
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