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...

Bernie Sanders, posting on Twitter/X Thursday (don’t complain to me that he doesn’t use his Bluesky account): Corporate greed is Tim Cook, the billionaire Apple CEO, claiming that hiking prices on Apple products by over $200 is “unavoidable” after it made $112 billion in...

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...

Om died two days ago, after a long battle against a bum heart. Om and I often sat next to each other at Apple keynotes. This was not at all surprising or odd, insofar as we’d been friends for 20 years. Folks at Apple PR knew that we were close, and would often pair us...

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.

Link: macrumors.com/2026/06/25/apple-explains-why-it-raised…

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 ...

Some quick thoughts on the hardware prices Apple increased — and didn’t increase — today. Here’s a table with most of the base models whose prices increased: Original New Change Vision Pro $3500 $3700 6% HomePod $300 $350 17% HomePod Mini $100 $130 30% Apple T...

Heartbreaking news, shared by Om’s family:

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.

So it goes.

Link: om.co/2026/06/24/1966-2026/

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.

An open protocol authored by WorkOS. Read the spec.

Link: workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

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.

Link: designed.fm/

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.

Sponsored by:

• Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free daily greens, with code talkshow50off.
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• Finalist — A daily planner for iPhone, iPad and Mac, built on proven paper-based planning methods. DF readers get six months free; see details at the link.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/06/23/ep-450

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...

30-disc set includes:

• 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)

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Link: criterion.com/boxsets/9000-the-complete-kubrick

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 ...

My thanks to Mux for sponsoring Daring Fireball last week. Video is a boatload of data. Every video file in your product contains audio, objects, and scenes that most stacks can’t read or access.

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Ben Chapman, reporting for The Independent in 2019: After 40 years of advertising its lager as “Probably the best beer in the world”, Danish brewer Carlsberg has confessed that the famous slogan may not be true. Reacting to falling sales and increasingly harsh comments f...