Quinn Nelson on X: Watch Ultra is the most shameless copy of an Apple product in ages — and it’s hideous Wait, it gets more shameless — Buds3 and Buds3 Pro are clones of AirPods It’s sad to see Samsung — who once was a leader in design and innovation — start knocking ...

Nelson Aguilar and Blake Stimac, writing for CNet: That’s right. There’s a hidden flight tracker built right into iMessage that you probably would have never noticed unless you threw in the right combination of details within a message. [...] Although the airline name/f...

Dave Grochocki, writing for Microsoft’s Windows Insider Blog: With this update, Notepad will now highlight misspelled words and provide suggestions so that you can easily identify and correct mistakes. We are also introducing autocorrect which seamlessly fixes common typ...

Kieran Kelly, reporting for LBC: New cars that are sold in Europe from this week will host automatically-installed speed limiters, following the introduction of a new EU law. Even though the rule to install the technology does not apply in the UK, many of the cars will ...

Imagine you could go back in time when Alex Bell started his phone company. Imagine for a moment that you could have owned a piece of his network. Well, you can’t. Until someone invents a time machine. Which they haven’t. What you can do however is own a piece of the next telecom juggernaut. Dabba is a low cost broadband internet service provider in India owned and powered by FAANG engineers and startup founders from around the world. Check it out, it’s the time machine you wish you had.

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg: For the first time, the digital assistant will have precise control over actions inside of Apple’s apps. That means you can ask Siri to, say, edit a photo and then ship it off to a friend. It also will have the ability t...

My thanks to BriefLook for sponsoring last week at DF. BriefLook is a clever iPhone app that does one thing and does it well: it summarizes your postal (paper) mail. Just point your iPhone camera at a letter, and boom, a few moments later you get an AI-generated summary. Who it’s from, what it’s about, and what you’re expected to do about it. That’s useful for summarizing long letters in your own native language, but BriefLook can read and translate between dozens of languages. Truly an amazing use case for AI. Not too long ago a “universal mail translator / summarizer” was the stuff of science fiction. Now you can carry one in your pocket.

Download BriefLook and try it free of charge. Super useful, yet so utterly simple.

Epic Games, on X two days ago: Apple has rejected our Epic Games Store notarization submission twice now, claiming the design and position of Epic’s “Install” button is too similar to Apple’s “Get” button and that our “In-app purchases” label is too similar to the App St...

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg last week: Apple Inc. will get an observer role on OpenAI’s board as part of a landmark agreement announced last month, further tightening ties between the once-unlikely partners. Phil Schiller, the head of Apple’s App Store and its f...

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch: Figma CEO Dylan Field says the company will temporarily disable its “Make Design” AI feature that was said to be ripping off the designs of Apple’s own Weather app. The problem was first spotted by Andy Allen, the founder of NotBoring Software, w...

Andy Allen:

Figma AI looks rather heavily trained on existing apps.

This is a “weather app” using the new Make Designs feature and the results are basically Apple’s Weather app (left). Tried three times, same results.

This is even more disgraceful than a human rip-off. Figma knows what they trained this thing on, and they know what it outputs. In the case of this utter, shameless, abject rip-off of Apple Weather, they’re even copying Weather’s semi-inscrutable (semi-scrutable?) daily temperature range bars.

“AI” didn’t do this. Figma did this. And they’re handing this feature to designers who trust Figma and are the ones who are going to be on the hook when they present a design that, unbeknownst to them, is a blatant rip-off of some existing app.

Maybe now that the Adobe deal fell through, Figma is looking to sell itself to Samsung?

John Moltz returns to the show for a holiday-week look at the best of recent prestige streaming content, particularly Apple TV+. And, yes, a bit on the latest Apple/EU/DMA drama.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

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.

The European Commission: In particular, the Commission is concerned that Microsoft may have granted Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice whether or not to acquire access to Teams when they subscribe to their SaaS productivity applications. Th...

Yours truly back in March: After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is unusually open at the moment — including this upcoming week. Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling t...

Quinn Nelson, esteemed host of Snazzy Labs, returns to the show to recap the highlights of WWDC: Apple Intelligence, platform updates, and the latest salvos from the EC regarding Apple’s compliance with the DMA.

Sponsored by:

• Trade Coffee: Enjoy 30% off your first month of coffee.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

Wavelength: We’re sad to announce that we’re shutting down Wavelength. We’re so grateful to our users and community — you’ve been amazing. On July 31st we’ll turn off our servers, which means that you’ll no longer be able to sign in, create a group, or send messages. Yo...

Sergiu Gatlan, writing for Bleeping Computer in 2021 (thanks to Kevin van Haaren): Microsoft has announced that the Edge Vulnerability Research team is experimenting with a new feature dubbed “Super Duper Secure Mode” and designed to bring security improvements without s...

Greg Bensinger, reporting for Reuters: Amazon is planning a major revamp of its decade-old money-losing Alexa service to include a conversational generative AI with two tiers of service and has considered a monthly fee of around $5 to access the superior version, accordi...

Salvador Rodriguez, Aaron Tilley, Miles Kruppa, reporting for The Wall Street Journal Sunday morning (News+): In its hustle to catch up on AI, Apple has been talking with a longtime rival: Meta. Facebook’s parent has held discussions with Apple about integrating Meta Pla...

To put it in Steven Sinofsky’s terms, gatekeeping is a fundamental aspect of Apple’s brand promise with iOS.

Apple is focusing on what it can do that no one else can on Apple devices, and not really even trying to compete against ChatGPT *et al.* for world-knowledge context. They’re focusing on unique differentiation, and eschewing commoditization.

The whole point of the public web is that it’s there to learn from — even if the learner isn’t human. Is there a single LLM that was *not* trained on the public web? To my knowledge there is not, and a model that is ignorant of all information available on the public web would be, well, pretty ignorant of the world.