Kamala Harris off to a strong start, I think. Lots of policy but also layering in some bigger themes. 🇺🇸

Finally cancelling iTunes Match. Created playlists in Music.app to find and download every track with cloud status “matched” or “uploaded” to my Mac. In the process, found a gold mine of old audio recordings off my MiniDisc, circa 2004-2006.

Online grocery prices dropped last month. More surprising, Adobe tracks these kind of prices as part of their enterprise products. Talk about losing focus… That business feels very far apart from Photoshop.

Some good notes from Jason Snell after attending the iPhone 16 event. On AI’s staggered rollout:

They’re promoting a key feature of their new iPhone… that won’t be there if you order one for delivery on September 20. Maybe it’ll be there, in beta, a few weeks later. But only some of it. The rest of it will come in December, or maybe early next year, or maybe next spring. In dribs and drabs over time.

A related problem is that it’s going to be even longer (years) until the new Siri works consistently everywhere. I generally like Apple’s strategy, but on-device models will hold them back.

Stephen Hackett blogging about the increasingly-complicated Apple product lineup:

Sometimes, that means selling older products at discounted prices, but it feels like today’s event was a new chapter in that story. Some of the announcements today were hard to understand, even as someone who has written about Apple for nearly 16 years. The event felt undisciplined in areas, and felt somehow both too long and too short for what Apple had to introduce.

One of my first clicks on an Apple product page is the “Tech Specs” or “Compare” link. It really is a lot to make sense of now.

Not in a hurry to switch, but I will probably opt for the AirPods 4 to replace my AirPods Pro. The pros have never felt comfortable in my ears. It’s interesting that the 4s are split into a basic version and a “with noise cancellation” version, although the hardware appears identical.

Working on something to demo at FediForum later this week. Not entirely sure in what form it will actually ship, but could make for a good discussion. Thinking about the Mastodon API and its role in the fediverse.

Cohost is shutting down. From the staff account:

…we’ve struggled to fill the revenue and morale gap. Colin and I have been doing this for five years, Aidan for three, Kara for nearly two. We’ve been at or over capacity on moderation, engineering, and general operations nearly this entire time. We have all been on-call 24/7/365 since we launched two and a half years ago. The day-to-day needs of just running the site meant developing alternative funding options wasn’t possible.

They are going read-only and then will make data exports available.

Finished reading: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. Somehow I had never read this before now. Also my edition had an interesting afterward by her granddaughter with a history of the book and notes from earlier drafts. 📚

Rest in peace, James Earl Jones. I wouldn’t have guessed he was 93 already. An incredible life. Love this quote from him in the AP:

I realized early on, from people like Athol Fugard, that you cannot change anybody’s mind, no matter what you do. As a preacher, as a scholar, you cannot change their mind. But you can change the way they feel.

Solid updates from Apple as usual. They highlighted lots of health-related features, like hearing aids, sleep apnea, and satellite messaging. For environmental impact, I’m still curious if there will be a hit to their goals with the AI private cloud rollout.

Genuinely conflicted about this year’s iPhone Pro color lineup: black, white, silver, desert. I guess black? Need to see more photos to know where desert sits on the spectrum of subtle to Zune.

New Apple stuff is great and all, but hear me out… What if they integrated hardware, software, and services in a way that only Apple can do? 🤪

I’m sorry to be bitter, but in the first half hour of the Apple event, my takeaways are: they really should move back to live presentations, and please stop saying “only Apple can do”… If you say it too much for everything, it loses its impact. (New products look good, though.)

Ben Thompson predicts a $100 price increase for the new iPhones today, bringing it over $1k for the first time. So I guess if the iPhone 16 Pro is $1100, the Max will be $1200. Ouch. 💰

iPhone announcement day! As I talked about on @coreint, for the first time in years — maybe since the original iPhone? — I’m actually going to get a new phone right away. Not excited about the cost, but will be fun to play on the cutting edge a little.

The new iPhone announcement is just a couple days away, and on today’s Core Int we give our thoughts about the upcoming event, including a discussion about AI.

Looking up, at Beyond Van Gogh. In the old Austin-American Statesman building.

This post about Marissa Mayer’s company Sunshine on Platformer is several months old, but I saw it linked again this week and wanted to highlight something:

Employees say they learn what they are working on each week during Monday morning standup meetings, and that their mandate shifts frequently as Mayer changes priorities.

This sounds exactly like how I run Micro.blog, actually. Founder mode, I guess? It sounds chaotic and “bad” but it’s also a strength of a very small team to change our minds quickly.

Good news, everyone. Accidentally left the garage door open and someone stole a couple random things — looks like mostly power tools that are easy to replace — but they left the Power Mac 7500 and Power Mac G5. Suckers! They have no sense of quality and value. 🤪

Talking to Daniel today for the next podcast episode, about AI, and afterwards I was thinking about why I find ChatGPT so effective instead of Google search. It’s not just the “here’s the answer” but also the very fast, clean results. Imagine a web search with 5-10 results that was as simple.

John Gruber has a long take-down on the DMA. There is plenty to think about in this, but a quick comment on his point about Chrome:

My guess is that, perhaps counterintuitively, the single biggest beneficiary of this mandatory browser choice screen will be Google Chrome, which I consider the single most dominant software monopoly in the world today.

This rings true. Google puts Chrome in your face everywhere. Perhaps one side effect of this is that Apple is going to need to do actual marketing for Safari.

I feel that I’ve been overpaying for sending email for years. Making another attempt at migrating to Amazon SES with a dedicated IP. Should cut my bill in half and hopefully fix some reliability problems. (If anything bounced at SendGrid, it would stop sending emails until reset… Not great.)

People worry that AI will take over what humans should be doing. It’s more profound than that. Using AI has helped me understand what actually makes us uniquely human. Love, creativity, leadership, fear, individualism, beauty. Let’s lean in to what only we can do and let that drive everything else.

Taking a short break from Threads and Bluesky. Nothing against those services, but I started over-thinking the post length differences. I need to focus on work and blogging first. Because my blog natively uses ActivityPub, Mastodon folks will still see my posts.

In my blog post series for upgrades to my Honda Element, this post is a little different. It’s not an actual change to the car like the posts about CarPlay, the WeBoost, or my bed platform.

It is usually too hot to camp in Texas during the summer. To help beat the heat, I’m currently using a few portable fans and a water-cooled fan, the Evapolar evaCHILL. It doesn’t blow cold air, but it does blow cool-ish air. Every little bit helps. It also draws very little energy, about 10W from my Jackery.

I also swear by these simple fans by Dorobeen. They charge via USB-C and double as batteries that can charge a phone.

I’m still considering a “real” air conditioning unit like the EcoFlow Wave or Zero Breeze, but they are a lot bigger. I don’t think it’s currently worth the trouble.

While Micro.blog avoids viral features, making misinformation less likely to spread quickly, we still have a 30-day free trial that content spammers sometimes try to use. Thinking about going paid-only without a trial until after the election, to remove another potential source of problems.

Congrats to @rizzi@gloria.social on the release of the new Reeder! It’s a huge redesign, refocusing the app around timelines, viewing conversations, and more. Great integration with Micro.blog too.

“I’d run the risk of losing everything.
Sell all my things, become nomadic.”
— Clairo

My number one use case for AR glasses is when on a road trip and can’t stop to take pictures. Old buildings in forgotten towns, long abandoned, that were once beautiful.