Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 10 June 2025, 7pm PT (Doors open 6pm)
Special Guest(s): Indeed
Price: $50

A different type of show this year, and I’m excited for it. If you can make it, you should come. You’ll even enjoy the prelude, mingling with fellow DF readers and listeners.

Filipe Espósito, in a scoop for 9to5Mac all the way back in October: 9to5Mac has learned details about the new project from reliable sources familiar with the matter. The new app combines functionality from the App Store and Game Center in one place. The gaming app is no...

Scharon Harding, writing at Ars Technica: “Just disconnect your TV from the Internet and use an Apple TV box.” That’s the common guidance you’ll hear from Ars readers for those seeking the joys of streaming without giving up too much privacy. Based on our research and t...

Parshin Shojaee, Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh, Maxwell Horton, Samy Bengio, and Mehrdad Farajtabar, from Apple’s Machine Learning Research team: Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking...

If it takes Apple as long to have its own competitive LLMs as it did to have its own competitive web browser, I suspect they’ll soon be paying to use the LLMs that are owned and controlled by others, not charging the others for the privilege of reaching Apple’s platform users.

Kyle Hughes, in a brief thread on Mastodon last week: At work I’m developing a new iOS app on a small team alongside a small Android team doing the same. We are getting lapped to an unfathomable degree because of how productive they are with Kotlin, Compose, and Cursor. ...

Thomas Ptacek: LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves. Most importantly, they do...

I don’t use the web interface to Movable Type, my moribund-but-works-just-great CMS, very often. But I was using it today and noticed something odd. Next to the small-text metadata that says I’ve written 35,086 entries in total, it said I had one draft. One. I don’t use the ...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC. Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales.

New features they launched just last month include:

• WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]”
• WorkOS Vault — Encryption Key Management (EKM) and Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK)
• AuthKit Integrations — Native support for several new identity providers including LinkedIn, Slack, GitLab, BitBucket, Intuit, and more.

Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel.

From his family, on Atkinson’s Facebook page: We regret to write that our beloved husband, father, and stepfather Bill Atkinson passed away on the night of Thursday, June 5th, 2025, due to pancreatic cancer. He was at home in Portola Valley in his bed, surrounded by fami...

WhatsApp, on their official blog back in April 2023: Last year, we introduced the ability for users globally to message seamlessly across all their devices, while maintaining the same level of privacy and security. Today, we’re improving our multi-device offering furthe...

A brief follow-up to my love letter to Apple’s discontinued MagSafe Battery Pack this week. I wrote: They’re the only Lightning devices left in my life and they’re so good I’m happy to still keep one Lightning cable in my travel bag to use them. Among its other unique ...

I posted this update a bit ago, but it’s worth making a separate post so you don’t miss it if you read the original post before I added the update:

It goes without saying that any consumer survey is only as good as the surveyor. But CIRP, in particular, has posted some dubious ones, to say the least. Jeff Johnson pointed out on Mastodon that back in 2023, CIRP published a survey that claimed the Mac Pro accounted for 43 percent of all Mac desktop sales, with the Mac Mini and Mac Studio each accounting for only 4 percent each. That’s just bananas. That’s not like maybe wrong, that’s not gotta be a little wrong, that’s how could anyone publish this? wrong. It’s hard to believe anything from CIRP after they published that.

Tom Warren, writing for The Verge: “The experience supports Markdown style input and files for users who prefer to work directly with the lightweight markup language,” explains Dave Grochocki, principal product manager lead for Microsoft’s Windows inbox apps. “You can sw...

I think it’s become tradition for Mark Gurman to run a mega spoiler report on the WWDC keynote the Friday before. Don’t read it if you don’t want to see a lot of genuine spoilers. But here are a few non-spoilers: The AI changes will be surprisingly minor and are unlikely...

Truth Social is exceedingly unpopular when judged as a social network; but it’s exceedingly successful as a blog. All the other people using Truth Social are effectively reading his blog and shitposting comments and memes in response to his posts.

Ryan Christoffel, writing at 9to5Mac regarding a paywalled survey report from CIRP: CIRP recently performed a survey of Apple customers to get a sense of how the company’s three tentpole products — iPhone, iPad, and Mac — are performing. One focus was on understanding th...

Jake Schumacher, director of the 2017 documentary App: The Human Story, sent me a note that Sebastiaan de With’s post this week, “Physicality: The New Age of UI” (my thoughts here), reminded him of a clip from the movie where Neven Mrgan compared Skeuomorphic design to classic cars from the 1940s and ’50s. So true. If you’ve got two and a half minutes to spare, watch this.

Jérôme Marin, writing at Cafétech: The disagreement between Apple and Brussels centers on Article 5.4. In its English version, the article states that the gatekeeper — the term used by the Commission for the seven major tech companies subject to the DMA — “shall allow bu...

Nice write-up from Zac Hall at 9to5Mac: Theater for visionOS premiered a year ago with a clever software launch campaign: exclusively streaming John Gruber’s The Talk Show post-WWDC event live with 3D video. The Apple Vision Pro app has continued to mature since its deb...

Sandwich Vision: Theater, the premier platform for spatial media, cinema and events on Apple Vision Pro, is proud to announce the immersive livestream of The Talk Show Live from WWDC on Tuesday, June 10, 2025. Following last year’s groundbreaking first-ever immersive li...

Jacob Kastrenakes, The Verge: In April, a federal judge demanded that Apple begin allowing web links, cease restricting how links are formatted, and enable developers to offer external payment options without giving the company a cut of their revenue. Apple promptly appe...

Marco Arment, moved to write his first blog post in 11 months: For unspecified reasons, Apple has declined to participate this year, ending what had become a beloved tradition in our community — and I can’t help but suspect that it won’t come back. (A lot has changed in ...

Marcus Mendes, in a piece at 9to5Mac with multiple spoilers for next week’s keynote: Apple is working on supporting the ability to export notes in Markdown from Apple Notes, which is something third-party apps have supported for years. Granted, this is a niche feature, b...

Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC.

Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales.

Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel.

Upgrade your auth today.

Wayne Ma, reporting last month at The Information (a paywalled website so obnoxious that they force $300/year subscribers to click through an article-blocking popover pitching them on upgrading to a $500/year subscription), and summarized here by MacRumors: However, the ...

A team of researchers has uncovered a scheme they’ve dubbed “Local Mess” — used by Meta since September 2024, and Russian search engine Yandex since 2017 (!) — to de-anonymize Android users’ web browsing across millions of websites that include Meta’s and Yandex’s respective...

Dan Goodin, writing at Ars Technica: This abuse has been observed only in Android, and evidence suggests that the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica target only Android users. The researchers say it may be technically feasible to target iOS because browsers on that platform a...

Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto, reporting last week for NOTUS (“News of The United States” — a seriously good up-and-coming national affairs publication):

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report harnesses “gold-standard” science, citing more than 500 studies and other sources to back up its claims. Those citations, though, are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions.

Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all.

Shocking that these dipshits would generate their report with whatever came out of an LLM and not actually check — let alone, you know, read — the cited studies.

Dyson:

Join James Dyson as he introduces the new Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones cleaner. Our latest, most advanced floorcare technology — now available in Japan.

Nine minutes, short and sweet. I watched the whole thing and loved it. If it had been pre-recorded, I bet I wouldn’t have gotten more than two or three minutes into it, even though the video would have been more polished. There’s just something compelling about a live demo, even when you’re watching on YouTube.

(The new PencilVac looks cool too, but it seems too good to be true. I’ll be interested to hear from reviewers whether it, uh, actually sucks or kinda sucks.)