Apple Newsroom, last week: Apple today announced the launch of Digital ID, a new way for users to create an ID in Apple Wallet using information from their U.S. passport, and present it with the security and privacy of iPhone or Apple Watch. At launch, Digital ID accepta...

Ryan Christoffel, reporting for 9to5Mac a month ago:

Meta has published a support doc that states its Messenger app for Mac is being discontinued. New users won’t be able to download the app at all, and existing users have about 60 more days of use before it stops working altogether. Why the change? Unfortunately, no reason has been given. But users are being pushed to the Facebook website for all their Messenger needs instead.

There’s a nearly identical support document for the native Messenger app for Windows too. They’re not even replacing them with web-app wrappers, like they just did with the Windows WhatsApp client. Just telling users to use the website.

Link: 9to5mac.com/2025/10/16/meta-is-killing-off-messengers-mac…

Clerk makes authentication for iOS apps effortless — just drop in pre-built SwiftUI components for sign-in, MFA, and profile management. Fully customizable, always in sync with Apple’s design system, and packed with features devs love: social sign-in, user roles, and organization management. Launch faster, stay secure, and scale confidently, whether you’re building the next big thing or a startup MVP. See how Clerk makes complete user management easy for modern iOS teams.

Link: go.clerk.com/QO9JV9f

OpenAI: To start a group chat tap the people icon in the top right corner of any new or existing chat. When you add someone to an existing chat, ChatGPT creates a copy of your conversation as a new group chat so your original conversation stays separate. You can invite o...

Jay Yagnik, VP of AI innovation and research, on Google’s The Keyword blog: Private AI Compute is built on a multi-layered system that is designed from the ground up around core security and privacy principles: One integrated Google tech stack: Private AI Compute runs...

My thanks to WorkOS for their continuing support of DF with another sponsorship week. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. WorkOS provides a complete user management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and RBAC. The APIs are modular and ...

The Financial Times, under a four-person byline (“Tim Bradshaw, Stephen Morris, and Michael Acton in San Francisco, and Daniel Thomas in London”): Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as...

Mayank Parmar, writing for Windows Latest: WhatsApp on Windows 11 has just got a “major” upgrade, and you’re probably going to hate it because it simply loads web.whatsapp.com in a WebView2 container. This means WhatsApp on Windows 11 is cooked, and it’s back to being ab...

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information on Tuesday (paywalled, alas, but summarized by 9to5Mac here and here): Apple has since sharply scaled back production of the first iPhone Air and delayed the release of an updated version that was meant to launch in ...

We have no idea how many of them they made, but seemingly, the price was not a problem for this product.

Link: macrumors.com/2025/11/14/iphone-pocket-already-selling-out/

Rolfe Winkler and Yang Jie, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link, News+ link) under the headline “Apple’s iPhone Air Is a Marketing Win and a Sales Flop” (which headline, going from the web page <title> element, was originally the less sensational “Apple’s ...

Mark Gurman and Edward Ludlow, reporting for Bloomberg (paywalled, alas, but summarized by The Verge and Ars Technica) Tesla Inc. is developing support for Apple Inc.’s CarPlay system in its vehicles, according to people with knowledge of the matter, working to add one o...

Via a DF reader, here’s a 20-second clip from the 1993 classic^* Demolition Man that exemplifies how today’s overly effusive, ever-affirming AI chatbots were presented as elements of a profoundly dystopic future by sci-fi writers just a few decades ago.

^*OK, OK — cult classic.

Link: clip.cafe/demolition-man-1993/lately-i-just-dont-feel-like…

OpenAI today, “GPT-5.1: A Smarter, More Conversational ChatGPT”: GPT‑5.1 Instant, ChatGPT’s most used model, is now warmer by default and more conversational. Based on early testing, it often surprises people with its playfulness while remaining clear and useful. These...

Toggle the “Light” switch here. It’s going to do what you hope it does. (Via Jason Fried.)

Link: incommonwith.com/collections/table-lamps

Sony, in a 2021 Instagram post, regarding the uniforms that so infatuated Steve Jobs that he commissioned Miyake to design prototype vests for Apple employees to wear:

The history of the relationship between the two companies dates back to the 1980s. It was Issey Miyake whom Akio Morita, chairman of the board at that time, requested for a uniform design which employees take pride in with comfort year-round.

That’s the light nylon fabric uniform, created by the first collaboration of Sony and ISSEY MIYAKE.

Featuring removable sleeves, it’s perfect for summer.

The second photo shows Akio Morita trying one on. See also: this Instagram post from SPOT Closet.

What a find it would be for someone to uncover one of Miyake’s prototype vests for Apple.

Link: instagram.com/p/CT2STaKlJbM/?hl=en&img_index=1

From Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, chapter 28, “CEO: Still Crazy After All These Years”, p. 361: On a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, Jobs asked Sony’s chairman, Akio Morita, why everyone in his company’s factories wore uniforms. “He looked very ashamed and told me tha...

Craig Grannell, writing for Stuff: This collaboration with Issey Miyake was, we’re told, inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth”. The result of all that R&D? A crossbody sock. It’s as if someone raided a warehouse of iPod Socks, stretched them out and fashioned...

Apple Newsroom: ISSEY MIYAKE and Apple today unveiled iPhone Pocket. Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth,” its singular 3D-knitted construction is designed to fit any iPhone as well as all pocketable items. [...] Crafted in Japan, iPhone Pocket features a singu...

Patrick George, writing for The Atlantic under the ominous headline “Enjoy CarPlay While You Still Can” (News+ link): Some automakers have made a point of proclaiming their allegiance to CarPlay, knowing that’s what buyers want. Toyota’s EVs tell CarPlay how much electri...

I upgrade my iPhones and iPads to new iOS releases, including developer betas, pretty much willy-nilly. I’m more conservative about the Macs I use for work. For example, I rely on audio software from Rogue Amoeba for recording both The Talk Show and Dithering, and there were...

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 RBAC. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months. WorkOS si...

Jason Snell, writing at Macworld: In that first event (which you can relive in the YouTube video below), Apple announced its first wave of M1 Macs: the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. The Macs themselves all used the same design as their Intel predecessor...

Marco Arment and David Smith:

In our final episode, we reflect on how indie app development has changed over the past decade. Thanks for listening, everyone!

Michael Tsai:

I really liked the 30-minute format and the breadth of topics: everything from API details to broader design considerations, stats from their own businesses, and postmortems, plus all the stuff he mentioned.

Ricky Mondello:

I’ve never been an indie software developer, but I found the podcast extremely insightful. It’s influenced how I’ve thought about my non-indie software development career, not just as someone delivering bits that indies use, but also as a product person who writes software as a means to an end.

Link: relay.fm/radar/331

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.

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

Don Van Natta Jr. and Adam Schefter, reporting for ESPN: President Donald Trump wants the Washington Commanders to name their planned $3.7 billion stadium after him, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation told ESPN. A senior White House source said there have ...

Following up on the previous item, here’s Fred Vogelstein, at Crazy Stupid Tech: Rivera says that he’s not naive about the long term, however, “given the astonishing rate of improvement in AI capabilities we’ve seen. So we just have to improve our own stuff. And a major ...

Gabe Rivera, back in September: A milestone such as this demands that we reflect and generate pithy takeaways, for the fans or at least for the perpetual gaping maw of AI models. Fortunately, our 20 years of existence offers no shortage of fodder. Perhaps the one major a...

Paul Kafasis, writing at One Foot Tsunami: While Apple had previously urged developers to use squircle icons on our apps, they’ve now taken things much further to ensure compliance. It’s a shame. Apple updated their own app icons on Tahoe, for both the squircle shape as...

Tyler Hayes, writing for This Week The Trend: The Razr+ 2024 model measures 3.46 inches tall, but still has a 4-inch diagonal screen size. For comparison, the smallest modern (2021) iPhone is the 13 mini, and that one is 5.18 inches tall. The Razr foldable is a legitimat...