Mark Gurman, in his weekend Power On column at Bloomberg (gift link): The Schiller exit is a bit more notable. Unlike Maestri, he still had a real job: The veteran executive ran the App Store and Apple Events. The App Store portion alone is no joke. It generates an estim...

How does this even happen? Who is this for? What possible purpose could by served by injecting a “We value your privacy” dickover into an RSS feed via iframes in the entry bodies?

Link: discourse.netnewswire.com/t/dickover-in-the-slashdot-rss…

In the wake of Nitter/XCancel’s demise, here’s a delightful new Safari extension from Zhenyi Tan (of And a Dinosaur fame): But sometimes people still post X content. Maybe you want to see Gruber roast Google Design. Maybe you want to see posts by Federico Viticci who rec...

Gloria Steinem, in a posthumous essay for The New Yorker: For me, saying that I am a feminist has always meant that I believe in the social, economic, and political equality of all males and females of all races and groups. I know this sounds too simple to need a word, b...

Marco Arment:

And I can’t help but feel that maybe we were better off before we knew everyone’s hot takes on everything.

The town coffee shop was just a coffee shop. We weren’t publicly shamed for going there because one of the owners was an ass. It was just a place to hang out with our friends.

Link: marco.org/2026/09/04/bob-and-van

Annie Palmer, CNBC:

Adobe on Thursday named Anil Chakravarthy as its next president and CEO, succeeding Shantanu Narayen, who announced he would step down earlier this year. Chakravarthy, who most recently served as president of Adobe’s customer experience orchestration and worldwide field operations, will take the helm Dec. 1, the company said. He will also join Adobe’s board.

I’m sure promoting the head of “customer experience orchestration” to CEO will restore Adobe’s focus on creating great tools for artists and designers.

Link: cnbc.com/2026/09/03/adobe-anil-chakravarthy-ceo.html

Mike Vorkunov, reporting for The Athletic (gift link): The NBA levied the largest punishment in league history on the LA Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer on Wednesday after a year-long investigation determined that they circumvented the league’s salary cap rules to help ...

I wrote two weeks ago about how the v4.3.0 update to TestFlight (released on July 21) broke the sort order for apps in the sidebar. Apple yesterday released v4.3.1, with these helpful release notes:

This update includes stability improvements and bug fixes.

One of the weirdest parts about this sort-order bug is that it only affected some people. I was obviously one of them; so was John Siracusa. For both of us, yesterday’s v4.3.1 update fixes the bug.

Link: apps.apple.com/us/app/testflight/id899247664

Remarking on MapQuest taking the #1 spot in the App Store (in the wake of their decision to ignore President Trump’s fiat renaming of Lake Ontario to “Lake America”), I mentioned yesterday that I’d never heard of Vinted, the #3 app. (A day later and MapQuest is still #1, by the way.)

Vinted, it turns out, is an eBay-like market for buying and selling used clothing. From a Lithuanian startup and the whole thing has been popular in Europe for a while, and obviously now is gaining popularity in the U.S.

Link: vinted.com/

Marcin Wichary, writing at Unsung, regarding a rather subtly astonishing FAQ for the game Super Metroid, written in the late 1990s by “rs1n”. It’s over 17,000 words long, and the whole thing is full-justified when viewed with a monospaced font, using no trickery with extra s...

Brian Krebs, reporting at KrebsOnSecurity: On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North ...

Simon Willison:

GPT-6 Astra is “rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS” — I’ve not tried it yet myself, so I don’t have a great deal to say about it yet.

It’s going to be API priced at the same rate as Claude Fable 5 and 5.1: $10/million input and $50/million output. This is clearly OpenAI’s Fable competitor, and appears to score higher than Fable on most of OpenAI’s self-reported benchmarks.

Link: simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/3/gpt6-astra/

Mark Gurman:

Apple Inc.’s Phil Schiller, one of the most visible and influential executives across both the Steve Jobs and Tim Cook eras, has stepped down from his role leading the App Store and product events.

The 66-year-old executive, who was Apple’s senior vice president of marketing until leaving that job in 2020, made the latest change in recent days, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

This is true, I’ve confirmed. (And the decision was not made “in recent days”, although the org chart change might have been.) Seems natural for this to coincide with the CEO transition. What a run for Schiller.

Link: bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-31/apple-s-phil…

Finya Swai, reporting for The Hill two days ago: MapQuest has surged in popularity on the app charts after the mapping service said it would not rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” after President Trump signed an executive order changing its name. The company said its...

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: “iPhone Handoff” can be set up from the Settings app, under the Cellular menu. During the setup process, you can choose which iPhone you want to be the main device that you use most often and which one you want to be the companion device. Apple...

Tim Cook: There is something truly special about Apple. I am most proud of what an annual report could never capture. This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything. We share a belief that what we build matters, and that we have both the opportunity and the re...

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: In today’s filing, Apple says that Liu’s lawyers recently handed over his MacBook that he used after leaving Apple. According to Apple, an “initial forensic analysis” of that MacBook revealed four things, quoted from Apple’s filing: Mr. Liu not ...

Give an agent an access token and it spreads: into the context window, into tool call logs, into notes it keeps between steps. Each copy works from anywhere, long after the fact.

Relay keeps the credential at WorkOS. Your agent names the user, WorkOS attaches that token, refreshes it, and releases it only to allowlisted hosts. A hijacked agent session is a live process you can kill.

Learn how it works →

Link: workos.com/blog/delegated-access-for-ai-agents?utm_source…

My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner inspired by paper day planners. I wrote quite a bit about Finalist when it fi...

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors, has an exemplary review of the experience: I didn’t mind the reduced pace of the NBA broadcast, which toggled between cameras under each basket, but Stratechery’s Ben Thompson felt strongly that the best option would’ve been a single c...

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Here are the full details on the price increases:

• Apple TV (monthly): $14.99 (up from $12.99)
• Apple TV (annual): $119 (up from $99)
• Apple One Individual: $21.95 (up from $19.95)

Prices for other Apple One plans are unchanged. When Apple increased the price of Apple Music last month, it also raised the Apple One Family and Apple One Premier plans, but not the Individual plan.

The higher prices go into effect today for new subscribers. Apple says existing subscribers will be notified of the price increase about a month before they are charged the new price.

Seems poetic that Tim Cook’s last action as CEO is a goose to services revenue.

Link: 9to5mac.com/2026/08/28/apple-announces-price-increase-for…

Jack Loftus, writing at McSweeney’s:

People assume scanning is the exciting part. And, sure, it is impressive. They shear off the spine, separate the pages, and run everything through these enormous machines so the computer can absorb every sentence ever written and use it to create some fairly compelling LinkedIn posts. But then, boy oh boy, the wheeled cart carrying those decimated remains comes to me. That is where the human touch enters the process, assuming you count industrial shredders and a giant burn pit out back as an extension of the hand, which I certainly do.

(Via Michael Sippey.)

Link: mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-the-guy-who-destroys-antique…

I think at least half a dozen people have sent me a link to this video and now that I’ve watched it, I understand why. Perfect.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=gGlpBuW6ZFc

I mentioned earlier that for anyone going along with the ruse that Lake Ontario is now named Lake America, the HOMES mnemonic no longer holds, the only two valid words in English with the new five letters are hames and shame, and that hames is rather too obscure.

But it’s not so obscure in Ireland, where they use it in an idiom: to make a hames of something is to make a mess of it. With that in mind, it’s hard to say which is more apt for this embarrassment, hames or shame.

(The other longstanding Great Lakes mnemonic is the phrase “Super Man Helps Every One”, which I don’t love because neither Superman nor everyone ought to be treated as two words, but it does have the advantage of sorting the lakes geographically from west to east.)

Link: daringfireball.net/linked/2026/08/28/trump-lake-ontario

Matt Walsh, described by Wikipedia as “an American far-right political commentator and podcast host” (a description that sounds harsh, but I’d say is describing him euphemistically), on Twitter/X (retweeting the official White House account’s announcement of the name change)...

Yours truly back in February 2025: The motivation behind the name change is simple as well. Trump didn’t change the US’s officially recognized name of, say, the Atlantic Ocean or the continent of Africa. He just as easily could, but he won’t. I’m starting to worry how ...

Jackie Llanos and Jenna Monnin, reporting for NOTUS: President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order meant to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” taking his apparent jab at Canada one step further as a trade war between the two countries escalates. The pres...

Jack Queen, Reuters: A U.S. judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic, ​the latest turn in the Claude maker’s high-stakes fight with the military over AI safety on the battlefield. Anthropic’s lawsuit in California federal court alleges that Def...

Jeff Halter has done it again: after bringing back the single greatest After Dark module (Ben Haller’s Lunatic Fringe game, via a modern runtime named Lunacy), he’s now released Afterglow: Running After Dark modules in the present day has involved fussy configuration of ...

Fun (but depressing?) data analysis project from Louis Abraham, showing how repetitive Claude is in the words it chooses when submitting GitHub pull requests. Abraham, in the project’s readme: GitHub pull request descriptions, grouped by the words they are written with r...