Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:
Let’s start with the surprises. Both M4 MacBook Air models are
priced $100 less than their predecessors: $1199 for the 15-inch
model and $999 for the 13-incher. If I’m not mistaken, this is the
first time that the new-generation design...
Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg on 6 December 2024, regarding Apple’s first in-house cellular modem, “Apple Plans Three-Year Modem Rollout in Bid to Top Qualcomm”:
For now, the modem won’t be used in Apple’s higher-end products.
It’s set to come to a new mid-tier iP...
Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg, on January 12:
The new entry-level iPads — J481 and J482 — will get faster
processors and Apple Intelligence. The current models have the A14
chip and 4 gigabytes of memory. Look for the new versions to have
the A17 Pro chip, matching the iPad mini, and a bump to 8
gigabytes of memory. That’s the minimum needed to support the new
AI platform.
The new iPads sport the A16 chip and thus do not support Apple Intelligence. But who cares about little details like that when you know the codenames, which is what really matters.
I’ll bet what happened is that Gurman was right, and the new iPads were set to use the A17 Pro chip and support Apple Intelligence. But after Gurman spoiled it seven weeks ago, Apple scrapped those plans and changed the chips to the A16 just to spite him.
Tapbots:
v2.3 is now available on the App Store for Mac and iOS/iPadOS!
What’s new?
Grouped Notifications (Mention and Notification tabs are now
merged)
Support for AlphaNumeric Post IDs (Can now log into more
services like GoToSocial)
Accessibility Improvements
Bug Fi...
Mark Gurman, yesterday at noon ET:
It’s not an “Air” — but the new Mac Studio, codenamed J575,
appears to be imminent. It could be announced as early as this
week along with the new MacBook Airs. There are signs these will
come with an M4 Max but that its new Ultra chip ...
Ron Filipkowski:
Trump’s Sec of Agriculture Brooke Rollins says the solution to
high egg prices for Americans is to get some chickens and raise
them in your backyard.
No exaggeration. She’s selling the idea of everyone raising chickens in their back yards as “awesome”,...
Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac:
Leitmotif, the team behind the awesome diff and merge Mac app
Kaleidoscope, is expanding its portfolio of native Mac apps for
developers. The company has acquired Taska, a native Mac app that
serves as a frontend for web services like GitHub...
Funny piece — if your surname isn’t “Null” — by Oyin Adedoyin for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):
Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves
caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the
word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The...
Ben Stiller, in a delightful piece for The New York Times on working up the gumption to tell Gene Hackman — with whom he was working in Wes Anderson’s excellent The Royal Tenenbaums, his favorite Hackman movie:
“ … but I have to say for me, there is one movie you made th...
Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:
The most consequential part of the Air’s update — perhaps the
only real update — is the M3 processor, which brings with it
GPU-based capabilities like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and
video encoding and decoding for ProRes and ProRes...
Apple:
Apple is committed to being transparent about government requests
for customer data and how we respond. We publish a Transparency
Report twice a year disclosing the number of government requests
for customer data Apple receives globally.
Apple’s most recent repo...
Elizabeth Chamberlain, writing for iFixit:
But it’s still missing MagSafe, for no obvious reason other than
making the phone less appealing to consumers than the rest of the
16 lineup. Wireless charging without the perfect alignment that
MagSafe allows is troubling.
I’...
President Donald Trump, on his very popular bespoke social network (random capitalization and various typos sic):
All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or
University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be
imprisoned/or permanently sent back to t...
Hartley Charlton, writing for MacRumors in October 2022:
The fourth-generation iPhone SE will feature a 6.1-inch LCD
display and a “notch” cutout at the top of the display, according
to Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) analyst Ross Young.
Good call on the size a...
Chance Miller, writing last week at 9to5Mac:
Dark Noise developer Charlie Chapman is out with a new Mac
utility called “Framous.” The app aims to be the best way
to add device frames to screenshots. [...]
Here are the ways Framous aims to streamline this process:
Auto...
Basic Apple Guy (with screenshot):
The same tagline from Apple’s 2008 announcement for the original
MacBook Air.
On the cusp of that announcement at Macworld Expo, AppleInsider photographed a bunch of banners with that slogan Apple had hung inside Moscone West. I swear I’m not making this up, but a bunch of people were speculating that the big announcement would be a deal with Adobe to bring Adobe Air (their still-in-progress next-gen Flash platform) to the iPhone (which was just over six months old).
Fond memories. Here are my initial thoughts and observations on the MacBook Air, post-keynote, and here’s the January 2008 archive of Linked List posts at DF. There were a lot of bad early takes on the Air.
Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:
In a whitepaper posted to Apple’s developer site entitled
“Helping Protect Kids Online”, the company details
several improvements it’s rolling out in upcoming software
updates, including making it easier to set up child accounts,
providi...
Jeremy Keith, writing at Adactio:
Ask anyone about their experience of using websites on their
mobile device. They’ll tell you plenty of stories of how badly
it sucks.
It doesn’t matter that the web is the perfect medium for
just-in-time delivery of information. It does...
John Cassidy, writing for The New Yorker (requires a free account to read, annoyingly):
Of course, these calculations can’t be taken literally. Even Musk
has said that he wants to protect essential workers. If the entire
federal workforce were eliminated, there’d be no o...
Jason Snell, writing last week at Six Colors:
While a lot of us have gotten excited about the potential of
Apple’s immersive video format, the truth is that the Vision Pro
is also a great viewer of more traditional 3-D video content. And
Apple has built a new visionOS ap...
Like any great caricature, Myers’s Elon Musk conveys a better sense of Musk than watching Musk himself does. A cruel and infinitely self-satisfied know-it-all, whose utter self-confidence runs counter to the fact that he’s unfathomably awkward, as uncoordinated socially as he is physically. Just an utter and total spaz, who believes no one’s jokes are funnier than his own. The sort of person no one likes but who has nevertheless parlayed tremendous wealth into great power, forcing his influence upon the world.
Ming-Chi Kuo, back on Sunday September 15:
Based on my latest supply chain survey and pre-order results
from Apple’s official websites, I’ve compiled key data on iPhone
16’s first-weekend pre-orders for each model, including
pre-order sales, average delivery times, and s...
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bots attacks and brute force attempts?
WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. Their simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior.
Your users trust you. Keep it that way. Check out WorkOS Radar today.
TMZ:
Seems Elon Musk is truly going to colonize Mars ... even if he has to do it himself, ’cause the tech mogul just welcomed his 14 child! Elon helped break the news Friday along with Shivon Zilis, with whom the billionaire already had three children.
You know what yo...
This “feature” accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they’re watching.
Matthew Green:
If you install WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger,
Signal, Snap or even Telegram(please
don’t!) you’ll encounter a simple feature that addresses
this problem. It’s usually called “disappearing messages”,
but sometimes goes by other names.
I’m almost embarrassed...
Meghan Bobrowsky and Jeff Horwitz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
Meta apologized Wednesday night for what it said was an “error”
that led to graphic and violent videos flooding the feeds of a
vast number of Instagram users, including minors. The videos,
which we...
Jeff Teper, president of collaborative apps and platforms at Microsoft:
In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings
so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring
Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern
c...
Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:
Meta has fired “roughly 20” employees who leaked “confidential
information outside the company,” according to a spokesperson.
“We tell employees when they join the company, and we offer
periodic reminders, that it is against our poli...
Founder Nirav Patel, writing this week on Framework’s company blog:
We went live this morning at the Framework (2nd Gen) Event with
our biggest set of announcements yet: Framework Desktop,
Framework Laptop 12, and the new Ryzen AI 300 Series
Framework Laptop 13. You can ...
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