I guess the European Commission hasn’t taken off for their months-long summer vacation quite yet:
[T]he Commission has issued preliminary findings of non-compliance
on three grievances:
First, X designs and operates its interface for the “verified
accounts” with the...
Camilla Hodgson and George Hammond, reporting for The Financial Times:
Microsoft has given up its seat as an observer on the board of
OpenAI while Apple will not take up a similar position, amid
growing scrutiny by global regulators of Big Tech’s investments in
AI start-...
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
Walmart+ members have early access to the deal as of 12 p.m.
Eastern Time today, and it will be available to all Walmart
customers starting at 6 p.m. Eastern Time today.
Walmart first began selling the MacBook Air with the M1 chip for
$699 in M...
I’ve been a big fan of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro since his term as our attorney general. He was absolutely fantastic in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Trump attempted to steal Pennsylvania.
But as of this week he might be my favorite politician in the entire country. He accomplished what I had long ago given up hope of ever seeing: replacing PA’s fugly-as-sin license plates with a new design that’s among the best I’ve ever seen. Good typography, great colors, and a new slogan and icon that exemplify Pennsylvania’s role as the birthplace of the longest-standing democracy the world has ever seen: the Liberty Bell.
Quinn Nelson on X:
Watch Ultra is the most shameless copy of an Apple product in
ages — and it’s hideous
Wait, it gets more shameless — Buds3 and Buds3 Pro are clones
of AirPods
It’s sad to see Samsung — who once was a leader in design and
innovation — start knocking ...
Nelson Aguilar and Blake Stimac, writing for CNet:
That’s right. There’s a hidden flight tracker built right into
iMessage that you probably would have never noticed unless you
threw in the right combination of details within a message. [...]
Although the airline name/f...
Dave Grochocki, writing for Microsoft’s Windows Insider Blog:
With this update, Notepad will now highlight misspelled words and
provide suggestions so that you can easily identify and correct
mistakes. We are also introducing autocorrect which seamlessly
fixes common typ...
Kieran Kelly, reporting for LBC:
New cars that are sold in Europe from this week will host
automatically-installed speed limiters, following the introduction
of a new EU law.
Even though the rule to install the technology does not apply in
the UK, many of the cars will ...
Imagine you could go back in time when Alex Bell started his phone company. Imagine for a moment that you could have owned a piece of his network. Well, you can’t. Until someone invents a time machine. Which they haven’t. What you can do however is own a piece of the next telecom juggernaut. Dabba is a low cost broadband internet service provider in India owned and powered by FAANG engineers and startup founders from around the world. Check it out, it’s the time machine you wish you had.
Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg:
For the first time, the digital assistant will have precise
control over actions inside of Apple’s apps. That means you can
ask Siri to, say, edit a photo and then ship it off to a friend.
It also will have the ability t...
My thanks to BriefLook for sponsoring last week at DF. BriefLook is a clever iPhone app that does one thing and does it well: it summarizes your postal (paper) mail. Just point your iPhone camera at a letter, and boom, a few moments later you get an AI-generated summary. Who it’s from, what it’s about, and what you’re expected to do about it. That’s useful for summarizing long letters in your own native language, but BriefLook can read and translate between dozens of languages. Truly an amazing use case for AI. Not too long ago a “universal mail translator / summarizer” was the stuff of science fiction. Now you can carry one in your pocket.
Download BriefLook and try it free of charge. Super useful, yet so utterly simple.
Epic Games, on X two days ago:
Apple has rejected our Epic Games Store notarization submission
twice now, claiming the design and position of Epic’s “Install”
button is too similar to Apple’s “Get” button and that our “In-app
purchases” label is too similar to the App St...
Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg last week:
Apple Inc. will get an observer role on OpenAI’s board as part of
a landmark agreement announced last month, further tightening ties
between the once-unlikely partners. Phil Schiller, the head of
Apple’s App Store and its f...
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:
Figma CEO Dylan Field says the company will temporarily disable
its “Make Design” AI feature that was said to be ripping
off the designs of Apple’s own Weather app. The problem was first
spotted by Andy Allen, the founder of NotBoring
Software, w...
Andy Allen:
Figma AI looks rather heavily trained on existing apps.
This is a “weather app” using the new Make Designs feature and the
results are basically Apple’s Weather app (left). Tried three
times, same results.
This is even more disgraceful than a human rip-off...
John Moltz returns to the show for a holiday-week look at the best of recent prestige streaming content, particularly Apple TV+. And, yes, a bit on the latest Apple/EU/DMA drama.
Sponsored by:
Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.
My thanks to WorkOS for 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.
The European Commission:
In particular, the Commission is concerned that Microsoft may
have granted Teams a distribution advantage by not giving
customers the choice whether or not to acquire access to Teams
when they subscribe to their SaaS productivity applications. Th...
Yours truly back in March:
After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship
schedule at DF is unusually open at the moment — including
this upcoming week.
Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring
Fireball ever since I started selling t...
Quinn Nelson, esteemed host of Snazzy Labs, returns to the show to recap the highlights of WWDC: Apple Intelligence, platform updates, and the latest salvos from the EC regarding Apple’s compliance with the DMA.
Sponsored by:
Trade Coffee: Enjoy 30% off your first month of coffee.
Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.
Wavelength:
We’re sad to announce that we’re shutting down Wavelength. We’re
so grateful to our users and community — you’ve been amazing.
On July 31st we’ll turn off our servers, which means that you’ll
no longer be able to sign in, create a group, or send messages.
Yo...
Sergiu Gatlan, writing for Bleeping Computer in 2021 (thanks to Kevin van Haaren):
Microsoft has announced that the Edge Vulnerability Research team
is experimenting with a new feature dubbed “Super Duper Secure
Mode” and designed to bring security improvements without
s...
Greg Bensinger, reporting for Reuters:
Amazon is planning a major revamp of its decade-old money-losing
Alexa service to include a conversational generative AI with two
tiers of service and has considered a monthly fee of around $5 to
access the superior version, accordi...
Salvador Rodriguez, Aaron Tilley, Miles Kruppa, reporting for The Wall Street Journal Sunday morning (News+):
In its hustle to catch up on AI, Apple has been talking with a
longtime rival: Meta. Facebook’s parent has held discussions with
Apple about integrating Meta Pla...
Last week I mentioned Apple’s prohibition on JITs — just-in-time compilers — in the context of their rejection of UTM SE, an open source PC emulator. Apple’s prohibition on JITs, on security grounds, is a side issue regarding UTM SE, because UTM SE is the version of UTM that...
An oft-told story is that back in 2009 — two years after Dropbox debuted, two years before Apple unveiled iCloud — Steve Jobs invited Dropbox cofounders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi to Cupertino to pitch them on selling the company to Apple. Dropbox, Jobs told them, was “...
Yesterday, quoting Anthropic’s announcement of their impressive new model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, I wrote:
Also, from the bottom of the post, this interesting nugget:
One of the core constitutional principles that guides our AI model
development is privacy. We do not tra...
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