Erin-Atlanta Argun: While Hockney is perhaps best known for his larger-than-life swimming pool paintings, bold coloured acrylics are certainly not his only forte. Contrary to the old saying, Hockney is a jack of all trades and a master of all he has worked with: from pai...

CNBC:

Apple shares rose 4% on Monday as a new report showed iPhone 17 sales off to a strong start in the U.S. and China.

The iPhone 17 series, which dropped in September, has outsold the iPhone 16 series by 14% in the U.S. and China within its first 10 days of availability, according to data from Counterpoint Research.

Just because a research firm claims iPhone 17 sales are up 14 percent doesn’t mean they are up 14 percent. These are estimates, not hard numbers from Apple — and Apple doesn’t share actual sales numbers with anyone. Some headlines get this right, but most don’t.

Link: cnbc.com/2025/10/20/apple-stock-iphone-17-us-china-sales…

Apple Newsroom: Apple and NBCUniversal today announced the launch of the Apple TV and Peacock Bundle, available beginning October 20. The first-of-its-kind bundle offers the services’ complementary array of award-winning originals, marquee live events and sports, beloved...

Jess Weatherbed, The Verge: A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage took down multiple online services for around four hours this morning, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, and more. As of 6:35AM ET, the AWS s...

Picking up steam, these protests are.

Link: theatlantic.com/photography/archive/2025/10/photos-no-kings…

My thanks to Mux for sponsoring last week at DF. Modern video should be simple to ship and scale. Mux makes it easy to build live and on-demand video into anything from websites to platforms to AI workflows.

Upload a video, get back a playback URL. No transcoding headaches. No CDN setup. Go further with the building blocks of your video: thumbnails, transcripts, and storyboards. Use them to create exactly what you want.

Future-proof your video stack with infrastructure trusted by Patreon, Substack, and Synthesia. Get started free, no credit card required. Use the code FIREBALL for an extra $50 usage credit, when you need it.

Link: mux.com/video-api?utm_campaign=fireball&utm_source=DF

A few readers took exception to this bit from my post Wednesday regarding the new M5 MacBook Pro: The base 14-inch model, with the no-adjective M-series chip, is for people who probably would be better served with a MacBook Air but who wrongly believe they “need” a lapto...

I’m not really into commemorative coins, and I have to say I suspect Steve Jobs wasn’t either, but it’s a nice little recognition. No mention of it from the Mint, but the $1 value of the coin is the same as the salary Jobs drew from Apple.

Link: usmint.gov/news/press-releases/united-states-mint-releases…

Blockbuster sports streaming news from Apple Newsroom: Apple and Formula 1 today announced a five-year partnership that will bring all F1 races exclusively to Apple TV in the United States beginning next year. [...] Apple TV will deliver comprehensive coverage of Formul...

Speaking of Eddy Cue, he was the guest on Matthew Belloni’s excellent podcast, The Town, this week. (Overcast link.) Just a great interview in general. Cue doesn’t do many interviews but he’s my favorite Apple executive to hear speak, because he’s the least rehearsed and mos...

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 chip does not include a charger in the box in European countries, including the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, and others, according to Apple’s online store. In the U...

Good and thoughtful graphic essay by Matthew Inman, expressing why he dislikes AI-generated art. It’s been widely linked to, largely approvingly. I fundamentally disagree with the premise. Near the start, Inman writes: When I consume AI art, it also evokes a feeling. Goo...

Apple Newsroom, today: Apple today announced M5, delivering the next big leap in AI performance and advances to nearly every aspect of the chip. Built using third-generation 3-nanometer technology, M5 introduces a next-generation 10-core GPU architecture with a Neural Ac...

Luke Bouma, writing for Cord Cutters: In a seismic shift for the television industry, TiVo Corporation has quietly pulled the plug on its storied digital video recorder line, effectively ending an era that redefined how consumers interacted with broadcast content. As of ...

Halo Fund:

Halo Fund, a new $1 billion growth fund founded by Ryan Smith and Ryan Sweeney, today announced a strategic secondary investment in 1Password, a leader in identity security and pioneer of Extended Access Management. Halo Fund is joined in this investment by legendary technology leaders, including Flume Ventures with Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy and former Zscaler Chief Strategy Officer Manoj Apte. This transaction underscores strong demand from innovators and investors to join 1Password’s journey.

Well I’m sure this will halt 1Password’s descent into enterprise/cross-platform shittiness.

Link: businesswire.com/news/home/20251009156976/en/Halo-Fund…

Adam Engst, at TidBITS:

Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface design brings transparency and blur effects to all Apple operating systems, but many users find it distracting or difficult to read. Here’s how to control its effects and make your interface more usable. Although the relevant Accessibility settings are quite similar across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, I separate them because they offer different levels of utility in each.

Comprehensive, illustrated overview of the various Accessibility settings (and, on MacOS 26 Tahoe, hidden command-line defaults settings) that let you adjust the transparency and contrast of Liquid Glass across the various Apple OS 26 interfaces. A useful guide for today — and, I bet, a useful look back at the first versions of Liquid Glass for the future.

Link: tidbits.com/2025/10/09/how-to-turn-liquid-glass-into-a…

Jason Snell, at Six Colors: The entire point of a streaming-only product is that once you’re off traditional TV, you can go beyond the single stream and provide interactive options. The whole point of streaming TV, especially sports, should be that you can leave the flat...

Modern video should be simple to ship and scale. Mux makes it easy to build live and on-demand video into anything from websites to platforms to AI workflows.

Upload a video, get back a playback URL. No transcoding headaches. No CDN setup. Go further with the building blocks of your video: thumbnails, transcripts, and storyboards. Use them to create exactly what you want.

Future-proof your video stack with infrastructure trusted by Patreon, Substack, and Synthesia. Get started free, no credit card required. Use the code FIREBALL for an extra $50 usage credit, when you need it.

Link: mux.com/video-api?utm_campaign=fireball&utm_source=DF

At the bottom of Apple’s press release announcing that F1 The Movie will be available for streaming on December 12: Apple TV+ is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity. Ahead of its global streaming debut on Apple TV, the film continues to be available for purc...

The president of the United States, yesterday on his blog:

THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6. If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies. What a SCAM - DO SOMETHING!!! President DJT

No president, of course, can be expected to remember everything that happened during his four-year term. But Trump, of course, was still president on January 6, and the events that day were — to say the least — historically significant. The entire point of the January 6 insurrection — for his role in which, Trump was impeached — was to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president on January 20.

The man is obviously unwell.

Link: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115359345947837427

I missed this story back in 2024, but it’s the same infuriating impulse toward infantilization as with the Bond posters this month. Amazon restored the correct poster art for Full Metal Jacket, but they didn’t learn the lesson: don’t fuck with art.

Link: warhistoryonline.com/news/full-metal-jacket-born-to-kill…

Brian Krebs: The world’s largest and most disruptive botnet is now drawing a majority of its firepower from compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices hosted on U.S. Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, new evidence suggests. Experts say the heavy con...

Apple Support: The Clips app is no longer being updated, and will no longer be available for download for new users as of October 10, 2025. You can continue to use Clips on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 or earlier. Clips is such an interesting story. It really was a great app. ...

My thanks to Drata for once again sponsoring DF. Their message is short and sweet: Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.

Link: drata.com/daring

Nellie Andreeva, reporting for Deadline back on September 23: The release of Apple TV+’s The Savant has been put on hold. The decision comes three days before the thriller starring Jessica Chastain was slated to premiere on the streamer Sept. 26. No new date has been set...

Clyde Haberman, The New York Times: Saul Zabar, who across more than seven decades as a principal owner of the Upper West Side food emporium bearing his family name kept New Yorkers amply fortified with smoked fish, earthy bread and tangy cheese, not to mention pungent c...

Garth Franklin, writing at Dark Horizons: Amazon has quietly walked back new James Bond thumbnail artwork on its Prime Video service following controversy over digital alterations to the original art. As reported here yesterday, the art was unveiled on the weekend to coi...

Apple Newsroom:

In addition to live games for fans in the Lakers’ regional broadcast territory — which covers Southern California, Hawaii, and parts of southern Nevada, including Las Vegas — full game replays and highlights will be available to Apple Vision Pro users in select countries and regions from both the SportsNet and NBA apps. These live games will be captured using the new URSA Cine Immersive Live camera from Blackmagic Design, a version of the camera that launched earlier this year to capture Apple Immersive for Vision Pro, and will be available for purchase next year.

I didn’t catch yesterday that these immersive broadcasts would only be available live within the Lakers’ local broadcast territory, which stinks, but alas, makes sense given how sports broadcasting rights work.

Link: apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/spectrum-brings-nba-games-in…

Jacob Krol, writing for Techradar: We’ve seen a broad range of content, but I’ve been waiting for something live — specifically, live sports. Seeing that Apple TV+’s Friday Night Baseball is capturing games with the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max gave me some hope, and now...

Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media: Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to r...