Speaking of tariff refunds, here’s an official statement from Senator Elizabeth Warren from a few weeks ago: U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote to Target, Apple, Amazon, Nike, Motorola, Walmart, and Energizer pushing these companies — each of which have or are...

Nicole Carpenter and Diego Argüello, reporting for Game Developer: “There was a specific window of time this year where we charged tariffs to customers,” Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser explained in an e-mail to Game Developer confirming the news. “We tried absorbing the c...

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac: Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac that the ads rollout in Maps began in the last few days. And it will continue ramping in the weeks ahead to all users. There are two places you’ll find ads in the Maps app: Before searching: Suggested Places in the...

Alain Pannetrat, founder of Lectronz: Lectronz is a marketplace for open-source hardware makers and DIY electronics. Most of our sellers are not factories or well-funded start-ups. They are engineers, independent designers, and hardware enthusiasts working from spare roo...

Wikipedia: The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a heuristic in systems thinking coined by the British management consultant Stafford Beer, who stated that there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”...

Chance Miller:

Not to be overshadowed by the new Mac mini and Mac Studio, Apple today has also released an updated version of its Polishing Cloth. In an age of everything getting more expensive, the new Polishing Cloth is cheaper than before at $9 (down from $19). [...]

Apple released the Polishing Cloth in October 2021 and sold out almost instantly. While it has become a meme, it is genuinely a good polishing cloth for your Apple gear.

Moore’s Law comes for everything eventually.

Link: 9to5mac.com/2026/08/25/apple-releases-new-polishing-cloth…

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Apple has officially announced its next product event, where it will unveil the iPhone 18 Pro lineup and its first foldable iPhone. The event will take place on September 9 at 10 am, PT. The tagline reads “Surprise and shine,” and the invitation features a glowing Apple logo with a sun shining through.

Apple generally prefers Tuesdays, but on years when Labor Day falls in the second week of September, they move it to Wednesday.

Link: 9to5mac.com/2026/08/26/apple-officially-announces-iphone-18…

XCancel:

On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.

The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.

We are seeking legal advice and won’t share more details for now.

Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.

I didn’t want to jinx them, but this obvious threat hanging over their head was the main reason I never linked only to XCancel rather than directly to tweets on x.com. This sucks not just because some people don’t want to visit x.com, but because XCancel was a faster-loading website with no bullshit.

Update: Nitter, the open source project that XCancel was an instance of, got the same cease and desist and also shut down.

Link: xcancel.com/

Bill Friskics-Warren for The New York Times: Her death was announced in a video posted on social media by her nephew Bryan Seaver. No cause was provided. Concerns about Ms. Parton’s health were raised last year as she postponed and later canceled a Las Vegas residency, a...

I made a mistake in my table earlier today regarding the base price of the M5 Max Mac Studio, but my mistake was because of a rather sneaky design in Apple’s purchasing flow. Apple’s web interface looks like this: Both of the available M5 Max SoCs have 18-core CPUs, but ...

If you already read my “What Is the Point of the DMA?” piece yesterday, this morning I added a lengthy footnote regarding the DMA’s predecessor, the GDPR. Click through to read the entire note, but here’s the kicker:

The GDPR went into effect 10 years ago. By their inaction, they obviously think it’s working just fine. I think they look at the situation and realize, with satisfaction, that every time any website presents a cookie-permission dickover, that dickover effectively has a “Brought to you by the European Commission” badge on it. They were here, they did something, and everyone around the world sees the fruits of the GDPR cookie regulations every time they open their web browser. Job well done.

Link: daringfireball.net/2026/08/what_is_the_point_of_the_dma#fn1…

Apple today announced an all new lineup of Mac Mini (M6 and M5 Pro) and Mac Studio (M5 Max and M5 Ultra) desktops. The Apple Newsroom announcements for Mac Mini and Mac Studio only note base model prices. Here’s my attempt to put all of the RAM/SSD configurations into conden...

Apple Newsroom: Apple today debuted M6 in the new Mac mini and M5 Ultra in the new Mac Studio, providing an extraordinary leap in performance and AI capabilities. M6, Apple’s first state-of-the-art 2-nanometer chip, advances every compute block, delivering gains across e...

Finalist 4 is the biggest update yet to the paper-inspired day planner for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and now Apple Watch. The headline is Notes, in the app or as a folder of Markdown files that round-trips with Obsidian. Tasks in those files land on the right day, next to your reminders and events, even inside the macOS menu bar app.

The rebuilt Timeline lets you pencil tasks into your day, and Apple Pencil gets special powers to sketch the plan in seconds.

There’s tons more, brewed over four months with 1,000 beta testers. Try it free on the App Store.

Link: finalist.works/?utm_source=df-aug-2026

Apple Developer News: Starting later this year, new Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com. Existing addresses on privaterelay.appleid.com will continue to work and forward mail to users without i...

Wesley Hilliard, reporting for AppleInsider last week: A report from Irish Independent detailed the European Commission’s response to Apple’s new business terms for the EU. They share that they welcome the changes and will monitor Apple’s implementation of the terms. He...

10 years ago I wrote about BitCam 1.0: Gorgeous, unbelievably faithful one-bit camera app for iPhone done in the style of the original Mac. A lovely tribute to Bill Atkinson’s remarkable dithering algorithm. “Catnip for old-school Mac users,” says John Siracusa. Check ou...

I complained last week that starting with an update last month, the list of apps I’m testing in Apple’s TestFlight app has been sorted alphabetically, rather than by recency. Whatever is going on with this sort order, it isn’t affecting everyone. John Siracusa, amongst many ...

John Moltz, in his weekly members-only column for Six Colors (no gift links, but Moltz’s column is worth the subscription in and of itself): This week Anthropic announced that in order to identify AI from human-generated content it would be watermarking all text it gener...

Ian Austen, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): The morning after he pulled negotiators from trade talks in Washington and set off a new round of American tariffs, Prime Minister Mark Carney on Saturday explained to Canadians why he walked away, calling the U.S...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring the Daring Fireball weekly newsletter this week to promote their Agent Registration. Agents are hitting your signup flow and they’re bouncing off a browser login that was designed for humans. Every one that gives up is a signup you never see.

WorkOS Agent Registration turns that traffic into signups. Enroll via the dashboard and AuthKit publishes an auth.md file that agents read to register for scoped, short-lived credentials you control.

Make your app agent-ready today.

Link: workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

Toby Sterling, reporting for Reuters: The Dutch Data Protection Authority has fined Uber €825 million ($966 million) for deactivating driver accounts through automated systems without adequately informing them, according to an August 17 decision reviewed by Reuters. The...

Microsoft’s iPhone app for OneDrive has long supported creating three new document types via a big “+” button right in its file viewer: Excel, Word, PowerPoint. It recently came to my attention that they’ve added a fourth document type, and they even gave it real Microsoft-style “they just have no taste” file icon. Just look at it. The whole world’s coming to an end, Mallory.

Link: techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/onedriveblog/introducing…

Walmart:

When we think about convenience, we think about a lot of things, but making shopping feel simpler and more seamless from start to finish is a big part. And one of the moments where that matters most is at checkout.

We want customers and members to have choice in how they pay, so they can check out in the way that works best for them. Now, beginning Aug. 24, we will be adding Tap to Pay to our payment options at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, with plans to roll it out to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and to fuel stations by mid-2027.

When I think about convenience, I think about CurrentC, scanning stupid-ass QR codes, and waiting 12 years to adopt Apple Pay.

Link: corporate.walmart.com/news/2026/08/21/more-ways-to-pay-tap…

It occurred to me last night that I’d gotten less feedback regarding recent posts than usual. There were a few items I’d posted in recent days that I felt sure to hear from readers about, both yea and nay. But: nothing. Crickets chirping. I almost always hear from squeaky wh...

Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch last week: Decentralized social network Bluesky was one of the bigger beneficiaries of the exodus from Elon Musk’s X in November 2024, following the U.S. elections. But now, nearly two years later, the social network and would-be X comp...

Mike Masnick, in a thread on Bluesky: Multiple people I know have told me that they love the idea of Bluesky, and want it to succeed, but have abandoned it for X because they use agentic tools in their work and find them incredibly useful, and feel that any mention of th...

Bluesky and Threads both pull the same trick: When you take a screenshot on iOS of an individual tweet, they replace the “Follow” button in their user interface with their logo. Tim Marinin noticed this in the Bluesky app, got curious, and because they publish the app’s sour...

Apple Newsroom, on Tuesday: Apple today announced changes to its business terms for apps in the European Union, following close collaboration with the European Commission. These changes resolve Apple’s disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative...

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Earlier this week, a developer version of a Mac computer software update accidentally included references to several upcoming Apple products, including a video of the AirPods with cameras in action. [...]

But the product challenges are still being resolved, and the camera AirPods remain off the company’s 2026 release schedule. Apple continues to believe the earbuds will launch in 2027, said the people, who asked not to be identified when discussing unannounced products.

If true, it makes that video even stranger. If not, we can file this along the flat-sided Series 7 Apple Watch.

Link: bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-19/apple-s-camera…