You can speculate what the ‘e’ in ‘16e’ stands for, but in my head
it stands for ‘essential’. Some things that I consider
particularly essential to the iPhone are all there: fantastic
build quality, an OLED screen, iOS and all its apps, and Face ID.
It even has satellite connectivity. Some other things I also
consider essential are not here: MagSafe is very missed, for
instance, but also multiple cameras. It would be reasonable to look at
Apple’s Camera app, then, and see what comprises the ‘essential’
iPhone camera experience according to Apple.
Alex Cheema is the founder of EXO Labs, an AI company focused on “AI you can trust with your data” by making systems that run locally, on computers you own and control. Apple provided him with two M3 Ultra Mac Studios, each maxed out with 512 GB of unified memory. Within a d...
Gus Mueller:
A week or so ago I was grousing to some friends that Apple needs
to open up things on the Mac so other LLMs can step in where Siri
is failing. In theory we (developers) could do this today, but I
would love to see a blessed system where Apple provided APIs t...
Scharon Harding, writing for Ars Technica:
Reports of Roku customers seeing video ads automatically play
before they could view the OS’ home screen started appearing
online this week. A Reddit user, for example, posted
yesterday: “I just turned on my Roku and got an ... ...
Eric Migicovsky:
We’re excited to announce two new smartwatches that run open
source PebbleOS and are compatible with thousands of your beloved
Pebble apps.
Core 2 Duo has an ultra crisp black and white display,
polycarbonate frame, costs $149 and starts shipping in Ju...
Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire regarding pollster David Shor’s appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast:
His surveys indicate a clear causal relationship: People who
relied on TikTok for news were much more likely to swing toward
Trump than those who got their infor...
Random Augustine has written a splendidly nerdy but very approachable overview of the evolution of Apple’s XNU kernel over the last decade:
2017 — Page Protection Layer
With the release of the iPhone 8 and iPhone X containing the A11
processor, Apple introduced a securi...
Nick Heer:
They are impressive, but my interpretation of statistics like
these is that one often finds percentages used like this when
neither actual number is very large. Nevertheless, another
indication that browser choice screens can have a positive
effect for smaller...
Ten years ago I bought a pair of Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro headphones for use while podcasting. My product research was rigorous and exhaustive: I asked Marco Arment which headphones I should buy, he said these, so I bought them. They’re offered in three impedance variants: 32...
New (well, newish) Mac app from John Siracusa:
Hyperspace searches for files with identical contents within
one or more folders. If it finds any, it can then reclaim the disk
space taken by all but one of the identical files — without
removing any of the files!
You can ...
Not new, but new to me, is this delightful 7-minute short with a behind-the-scenes look at SNL’s cue card team, led by longtime main cue card guy Wally Feresten. Sometimes you just can’t beat analog.
As a kid I loved Richard Scarry’s books. As an adult I loved (and love) Chris Ware’s graphic novels. As a parent I loved reading Scarry’s books, again, with my son. So of course this essay from Ware, commemorating the 50th anniversary edition of Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, hit hard for me. Bet it will for you too.
Om Malik:
I have my own explanation, something my readers are familiar with,
and it is the most obvious one. Just as Google is trapped in the
10-blue-link prison, which prevents it from doing something
radical, Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company
weighed d...
Tesla’s share price has been having a hard time of it lately. The stock has lost about half its value since its all-time high back in December, and, since Musk took office alongside Donald Trump in January, dropped for 7 consecutive weeks, rebounding only ever-so-slightly la...
I’ve been commenting and expanding upon some of the commentary my piece prompted, and I have a few more coming, but it’s good to have Tsai collect a comprehensive overview.
Ray Maker, writing at DC Rainmaker:
This would not only be the first time Apple has created a
non-watch heart rate sensor, but even more notably, the first time
the company has enabled heart rate broadcasting over existing
Bluetooth heart rate standards.
The question th...
I’m a month late linking to it, but Chance Miller wrote a terrific review for 9to5Mac:
The last several releases from Beats, such as the Studio Buds
Plus and Solo 4 headphones, have been powered by a
custom Beats chip rather than an Apple-designed chip like what’s
used i...
Sebastiaan de With, on X, linking to my “Something Is Rotten” piece last week:
Ex-MobileMe team here. This was a brutal time.
It was so bad that when he presented iCloud onstage, Steve said “I
know what you’re thinking: why should I trust them? They’re the
ones who gave...
From Drexel’s YouTube channel:
But far less recognized is that Drexel made the very bold decision
of committing all students to purchase a previously unreleased and
untested computer from Apple. This was, of course, the Macintosh
(introduced in January 1984), which was u...
Alissa Falcone, in a good piece looking back at (my alma mater) Drexel University’s groundbreaking deal with Apple 40 years ago to provide deeply discounted Macintoshes to all students, and integrate them throughout the campus and curriculums:
Drexel was prepared to buy ...
Ten years ago I played two small roles in the release of the aforelinked Becoming Steve Jobs. First, I got to announce the book here at Daring Fireball, after having been sent an advance copy a few weeks earlier. My praise for the book then was glowing, but in hindsight, I t...
During Friday’s episode of Dithering — a free listen — Ben Thompson reminded me that my headline reference last week, alluding to the well-known line from Hamlet, had been used, to great effect, once before. Brent Schlender wrote a crackerjack piece for Fortune in March 1997...
A new feature in our membership CMS (Passport — check it out) lets us make individual episodes of Dithering free for everyone to listen to (on the web). I can’t think of a better way to first use this new capability than to open up Friday’s episode, recapping my “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” article, and the resonance with which it hit. Even the cover art — selected weeks ago — captures how I’ve felt this week.
My post Friday commenting (read: wise-cracking) on Mark Gurman’s explosive report on an all-hands Siri team meeting at Apple was begging for a bit of meta commentary on the reporting itself. But I’ve been doing so much of that regarding Gurman lately that I thought it best t...
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring this week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC.
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From Apple’s support documentation:
You can generate a report of requests your iPhone has sent to
Private Cloud Compute.
Go to Settings, then tap Privacy & Security.
Tap Apple Intelligence Report, then choose a report duration
for the last 15 minutes (default) or ...
Jess Weatherbed, reporting for The Verge:
iPhone and Android users will be able to exchange end-to-end
encrypted (E2EE) RCS messages in the near future thanks to newly
updated RCS specifications. The GSM Association announced that the
latest RCS standard includes E2EE ba...
In an item earlier this week observing that Swift Assist, the most ambitious Xcode-related Apple Intelligence feature shown at WWDC last year, not only hasn’t yet shipped but still is not in beta, I wondered whether Apple actually demoed it live last year. John Voorhees, wri...
Katie Notopoulos, writing at Business Insider (Apple News+ link):
It’s possible that this strident defense is backfiring — creating
a “Streisand Effect” that’s publicizing the book even more.
Notopoulos isn’t one to pull punches or hedge, normally, but there’s no quest...
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