Eli Blumenthal, reporting for CNet: Looking for Google’s new Pixel 9 Pro Fold? You won’t find it at AT&T. The carrier has confirmed to CNET that it will not be offering Google’s newest Pixel Fold to its customers. The decision would be a blow to Google’s device ambit...

Juli Clover, writing last week for MacRumors: Distraction Control can be used to hide static content on a page, but it is not an ad blocker and cannot be used to permanently hide ads. An ad can be temporarily hidden, but the feature was not designed for ads, and an ad wi...

Jonathan Hoefler, on Threads: The Harris/Walz logo got a smart and subtle haircut this weekend, which, like the very best typography, is making everything better while drawing very little attention to itself. I read a lot of comments about political logos… Having helped...

Emma Roth, writing for The Verge: Google has finally taken the wraps off its Pixel 9 lineup, which includes three slab phones and a folding phone. The regular lineup consists of a base Pixel 9 with a 6.3-inch display, a Pixel 9 Pro XL with a 6.8-inch screen, and a new, s...

USA Today columnist Rex Huppke, on Donald Trump’s high-profile return to Twitter/X: But the online interview went off (the rails) with a multitude of hitches. X users erupted with either frustration or laughter as the planned start time passed, and nothing could be acces...

I neglected to call this paragraph out yesterday in my first link to this announcement from Patreon: Patreon is home to an incredible range of creators, all with unique circumstances and billing needs. Apple’s in-app purchase system, on the other hand, only supports Patr...

Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie, on Patreon being required by Apple to offer in-app subscriptions through their iOS app: But we also don’t think that Apple should be wholly blamed. This unfortunate situation, in which creators ultimately bear the biggest costs, is a s...

Nick Heer, writing at Pixel Envy: The 30% fee is also notable. As far as I can tell, only a handful of Patreon users would exceed the million-dollar annual threshold for Apple’s Small Business Program. That is, everyone who earns less than a million dollars per year thro...

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: Despite Apple’s rules and policies, Patreon had existed in an odd sort of gray area, as some of its subscription-based offerings could be consumed in its app while others could not. Another possible reason for the Patreon exception wa...

Patreon: As we first announced last year, Apple is requiring that Patreon use their in-app purchasing system and remove all other billing systems from the Patreon iOS app by November 2024. This has two major consequences for creators: Apple will be applying their 30% ...

New from the Steve Jobs Archive: an hourlong video of young Steve Jobs delivering a talk on design in 1983. Jony Ive wrote a splendid introduction:

The revolution Steve described over 40 years ago did of course happen, partly because of his profound commitment to a kind of civic responsibility. He cared, way beyond any sort of functional imperative. His was a victory for beauty, for purity and, as he would say, for giving a damn. He truly believed that by making something useful, empowering and beautiful, we express our love for humanity.

Link: stevejobsarchive.com/exhibits/objects-of-our-life?_kx…

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. Start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code. Ship complex features like SSO and SCIM (pronounced skim) provisioning in minutes instead of months.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Link: workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=display…

Back in the day, on classic Mac OS, there were no “privileges” for software. If you launched an app, or installed a system extension, that software just did what it wanted. Something as (seemingly) innocuous as a game or as necessarily powerful as a disk formatting utility j...

Sundar Pichai, on X:

Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend Susan Wojcicki after two years of living with cancer. She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her. She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world and I’m one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her. We will miss her dearly. Our thoughts with her family. RIP Susan.

Link: x.com/sundarpichai/status/1822132667959386588

Academic paper from over 100 researchers at Apple:

We present foundation language models developed to power Apple Intelligence features, including a ~3 billion parameter model designed to run efficiently on devices and a large server-based language model designed for Private Cloud Compute. These models are designed to perform a wide range of tasks efficiently, accurately, and responsibly. This report describes the model architecture, the data used to train the model, the training process, how the models are optimized for inference, and the evaluation results. We highlight our focus on Responsible AI and how the principles are applied throughout the model development.

Available here as a PDF.

Link: arxiv.org/abs/2407.21075#

Benjamin Mayo, writing at 9to5Mac: Following the EU ruling in June that said Apple’s App Store anti-steering policies are officially in breach of the Digital Markets Act, Apple is announcing changes. Specifically, these changes address the rules around app developers lin...

Jason Snell, “Apple’s Permissions Features Are Out of Balance”: Some users will make bad decisions. That’s just reality. The wrong reaction is to take the decision out of every user’s hands to protect the ones who might do something stupid. Apple needs to find that balan...

Developer Thomas Tempelmann just released version 2.5 of Find Any File, his file search utility for the Mac. Find Any File (FAF) has long been my go-to tool for file search. Why use FAF instead of Spotlight? Some feature highlights: FAF can find files that Spotlight doe...

Here’s a developer note from Apple confirming another change in MacOS 15 that many of us were hoping was a bug or glitch in the developer betas: In macOS Sequoia, users will no longer be able to Control-click to override Gatekeeper when opening software that isn’t signed...

Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac: With macOS Sequoia this fall, using apps that need access to screen recording permissions will become a little bit more tedious. Apple is rolling out a change that will require you to give explicit permission on a weekly basis to these...

Kylie Robison, reporting for The Verge: Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return da...

Big new update to the amazing flight-tracking app, with a particular focus on flight delays — both predicting them, and explaining them. I was using Flighty 4 in beta over the weekend, when my wife and I were in Montreal for a wedding. Our flight home Sunday was delayed by thunderstorms — both in Montreal and Philadelphia — and the information from American Airlines at the airport was all over the place. The information from Flighty was consistent, and spot-on. Wound up being about a 40-minute delay, no big deal — exactly as Flighty presented.

Flighty costs $48/year for an annual subscription, but has a super clever $4/week option for infrequent travellers. And if you don’t like subscriptions, Flighty offers fairly-priced lifetime purchases.

Link: apps.apple.com/app/id1358823008

On the whole I continue to think it’s a tremendous advantage for Kamala Harris to drop into the race as a fresh candidate just three months ahead of the election, but I think this branding effort is one area that shows signs of being rushed. It’s not horrible but it’s not go...

With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. It provides a complete User Management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and FGA. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Link: workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=display…

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire:

In many ways, Tim Walz is the person J.D. Vance pretends to be. He’s an authentic, decent and normal guy.

Link: politicalwire.com/2024/08/06/initial-thoughts-on-tim-walz/

Nate Silver: This was a choice designed to maintain the social fabric of the Democratic Party, and avoid news cycles about a disappointed left and Democrats’ internal squabbling over the War in Gaza. Or at least, that’s what I think it was: we’ll need to learn more about...

CNN:

During recent remarks at a “White Dudes for Harris” fundraiser, Walz made a rough-and-ready case for [Harris] before would-be small-dollar donors.

“How often in 100 days do you get to change the trajectory of the world? How often in 100 days do you get to do something that’s going to impact generations to come?” Walz asked. “And how often in the world do you make that bastard wake up afterwards and know that a Black woman kicked his ass, sent him on the road?”

I was hoping for Buttigieg or Shapiro, but that quote alone makes me like the cut of Walz’s jib. Also, Walz is the guy who got the whole “they’re weird” thing going.

Link: cnn.com/politics/live-news/kamala-harris-trump-election-08…

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired longtime DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. In a 2023 survey of IT and security professionals, 50 percent of respondents said that their organization’s vulnerability management program had support from leadership to “a large/great extent”. That’s good for them. But it also leaves a full half of respondents without enough support from leadership.

If you’re trying to get buy-in at your own organization, come equipped with the facts about the risks you’re facing, and come with a clear plan to remediate them. To learn more about how vulnerability management is changing, read 1Password’s blog post, and come prepared.

Link: 1password.com/daringfireball

David McCabe, reporting for The New York Times: Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a federal judge ruled on Monday, a landmark decision that strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and that may fundamentally alter the w...

Jason Snell, “Existential Thoughts About Apple’s Reliance on Services Revenue”: The intersection of hardware and software has been Apple’s home address since the 1970s. And yet, a few years ago, Apple updated its marketing language and began to refer to Apple’s secret sa...