My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. An agent can’t click through a signup page built for humans, so give it something it can read instead. Publish an auth.md file and agents register themselves without ever touching a browser login, and the user never gets pulled out of what they were doing.
With WorkOS auth.md, enroll in the dashboard and AuthKit publishes the file. Agents read it, register, and get scoped, short-lived credentials you control.
Sponsorships have continued selling briskly, of late. Knock on wood. As of yesterday, the next opening on the schedule wasn’t until the last week of December, and the Q1 2027 schedule is already filling up. However, due to some schedule rejiggering, next week is now open. Up...
Apple’s dynamic configuration UI in their online store doesn’t hide or disguise the pricing or configuration options, but it doesn’t present all of the options at a glance. I find it useful to organize all of the configuration options into tables on a single page, and I figu...
Marcin Wichary on the original iPod easter egg on Apple Music’s website 404 page:
I am usually not a fan of easter eggs — most of them are poorly
made — but this might be the best iPod recreation I’ve seen, and
it’s an interesting thing to study:
I think it generally c...
Jonathan Stempel, reporting for Reuters:
General Motors will pay $220 million to settle allegations that
it illegally sold drivers’ private behavior and location data to
brokers, who then sold the information to insurers that used it to
set and sometimes increase rates....
Aaron Couch, The Hollywood Reporter:
Patrick Stewart, the sophisticated actor who brought a
Shakespearean touch to Star Trek and X-Men as he made an
otherworldly transformation from British stage veteran to sci-fi
icon, has died. He was 86.
Stewart died Wednesday at his...
Apple is making changes to the Taiwan storefront of the App Store,
following discussions with the Taiwan Fair Trade Commission.
As of October 31, 2026, the commission rate for standard Apple
In-App Purchase and paid app transactions will be 26% on the
Taiwan storefront of the App Store on iOS and iPadOS. Currently,
that rate is 30%.
Well there we go. The App Store in Taiwan — just like in Japan — is fixed.
Rolfe Winkler, in a crackerjack story for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
Blevins, who left Apple in 2022, sometimes set up
back-to-back meetings with suppliers so that rival sales teams
might run into each other, stoking competitive tension. Sales
representatives l...
How Jason Snell beat me to linking to this, I don’t know. But like I said back in February, when it comes to signage, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” ought to be “Mind your H’s and S’s”.
Steven Levy, writing at Wired with the scoop on the new MacBook Pros (News+ link):
This turnaround is a big deal to Apple fans. Ternus shrugs off the
drama. “The Mac is first and foremost an indirect input device,
built around the trackpad and keyboard. But I think there...
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
A teaser video shared by Apple CEO John Ternus today hints at
a potential name for the rumored MacBook models with touch-enabled
OLED displays: MacBook Studio. [...]
Apple is expected to show off the new MacBooks to selected tech
reporters and ...
With the 27.2 software updates released today, Siri AI — an
entirely new version of Siri that is profoundly more capable,
conversational, and personal — is expanding to more people around
the world, with availability now in the French, Japanese, Korean,
Portuguese, and Spanish languages. [...]
Siri AI is currently unavailable in the EU in iOS, iPadOS, and
watchOS. Apple is working constructively with the EU in an attempt
to find a path forward.
Don’t hold your breath. (Or if you prefer, N’y comptez pas trop.)
Apple Newsroom, with software news for Apple’s “Pro and Tell” week:
Apple today introduced transformative updates to Apple Creator
Studio, the powerful collection of creative apps designed to
put studio-grade tools into the hands of modern creators across
Mac, iPad, and...
One of the many small pleasures of my job is when someone else writes a good take on a subject that I have been meaning to write myself. Occasionally this stings, because it was something I really wanted to write myself. But usually it’s just awesome, because it’s an article...
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
Apple on Wednesday will announce 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro
models featuring touch-enabled OLED displays with thinner bezels,
a Dynamic Island instead of a notch, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and
a lighter and slightly thinner design, Bloomberg...
An agent can’t click through a signup page built for humans, so give it something it can read instead. Publish an auth.md file and agents register themselves without ever touching a browser login, and the user never gets pulled out of what they were doing.
With WorkOS auth.md, enroll in the dashboard and AuthKit publishes the file. Agents read it, register, and get scoped, short-lived credentials you control.
Apple Newsroom’s “Pro and Tell” announcement week continues:
Apple today announced the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6,
delivering even more performance, powerful on-device AI
capabilities, and faster connectivity for college students,
business users, creators, and more....
Alexandra Alter, in the lede for her profile of Marissa Mayer’s new AI startup Dazzle for The New York Times (gift link):
Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like
an impossible task.
Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher
wa...
Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:
Here is Apple’s full statement:
The response to iPhone Duo from early users has been incredibly
positive, and we are seeing exciting things from developers who
are rapidly updating their apps to take advantage of its unique
form factor. We are...
Glenn Fleishman, writing at Six Colors, “Why Notes Will Never Let Us Edit Markdown”:
The Notes app added Markdown import and export in the version 26
operating system releases, and the macOS 27 Golden Gate update
lets us copy and paste as Markdown. Why can’t we just writ...
Apple Newsroom announcement.
iPad Mini (A20 Pro) product page.
Tech specs page (PDF archive).
iPad comparison page showing new A20 iPad Mini, previous A17 iPad Mini, and the 11-inch M4 iPad Air PDF archive].
One-minute commercial.
Available in two colors, starlight a...
Federico Viticci:
Don’t like that the iPhone Duo doesn’t auto-lock when you
close it?
You can fix it with this simple Shortcuts automation.
Two steps:
A conditional for when the iPhone is Closed.
Lock the screen.
I mentioned in my review that I kept closing the Du...
If you’ve got or get a Duo and don’t try this out, you’re not hooked up right.
Update:But as Cabel Sasser notes, though incredibly fun, this was clearly made by a young Claude-aided developer who never used any of these actual old computers. Let’s just say there are a lot of ahistorical details.
Some guy on Reddit (with an illustration video):
Saw this online, tried it, and it works beautifully. Basically, I
registered the lowest part of my right index finger. That part of
the finger sits naturally when you go to swipe up at the phone.
This resolves a major iss...
My thanks to Sunnny for sponsoring last week at DF. Sunnny’s pitch to B2B companies is simple: you store valuable customer information across a myriad of systems, making it hard to get a simple overview. Sunnny consolidates your customer data, cleans it, resolves identities, identifies relationships, and presents it neatly for you, your team, and your AI model.
Speaking of Johnnie Manzari, he wrote a post yesterday marking the 10 year anniversary of Portrait Mode:
Initially, Portrait mode was seen as a giant math problem. You’d
do disparity calculations on the two sensors and output a depth
map. The problem was this approach fe...
Nicole Nguyen (also with a 5-minute video), writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
Every time I used the Duo in phone mode, one-handed, I felt its
heft. It’s wider and thicker than a Pro iPhone — and heavier,
even compared with competing foldables. My hand actu...
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