Apple Newsroom:
Starting today, end-to-end encrypted RCS messaging begins rolling
out in beta for iPhone users running iOS 26.5 with supported
carriers and Android users on the latest version of Google
Messages. When RCS messages are end-to-end encrypted, they can’t
be r...
Samsung phones took spots 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9. The one phone not from Apple or Samsung in the top 10 was the Xiaomi Redmi A5 at #10. As I always say, take these numbers with a grain of salt, but according to Counterpoint, the bestselling phones, in order, are:
iPhone 17
iPhone 17 Pro Max
iPhone 17 Pro
And Apple’s phone in spot #6 was not the iPhone Air, alas, but the year-old iPhone 16.
Apple stopped selling the Power Mac G5 (with space) in August 2006, so I’m not sure how much they care about Kraft using “PowerMac” (sans space) as a trademark for protein-enhanced macaroni and cheese. (I feel like there’s got to be a joke to be made here about a “cheese grater”...)
Mark Gurman, in his Power On newsletter for Bloomberg over the weekend:
Though the Mac software introduced the same Liquid Glass
interface seen in iOS 26, the design language hasn’t translated
as smoothly to the larger displays and different input methods of
desktops and...
My thanks for WorkOS for, once again, sponsoring Daring Fireball for the last week. If you’re ready to sell to enterprise customers, your product may be ready — but is your auth infrastructure?
If you’re building B2B SaaS, especially AI, you quickly need enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, and audit logs. Your developers shouldn’t waste cycles rebuilding that infrastructure. Free them to focus on what sets you apart. WorkOS gives you production-ready APIs for auth and access control that integrate directly into your product. Trusted by over 2,000 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel.
Katie Paul and Jeff Horwitz, reporting for Reuters in late April:
Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’
computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for
use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a
broad initia...
Stu Maschwitz:
Prolost Watches is an iPhone app for managing your watch
collection. It’s part database, part journal; designed for the
detail-obsessed mind of the watch fanatic. As you log each day’s
choice of watch, insights are revealed. Wear logs trace a path on
the m...
I’m sure there’s a scene marker right at the cut, so that’s why an ad got inserted there. But, my god. Someone at Amazon should go to prison for this.
(I think it’s a total coincidence that the Febreze ad seems roughly color-matched to the sky. But scroll down in the Bluesky thread for some links to the absolute genius campaign from Cerveza Cristal beer, with spots specifically designed to integrate into Star Wars when it was broadcast on commercial TV in Chile. “Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough” might be the funniest TV commercial ever made.)
Great stuff around MLB:
Those around the league quickly honored that legacy during Monday
night’s slate of games. Tributes rolled in from across the league,
with various play-by-play announcers deviating from their typical
routines to give a nod to Sterling’s distinct st...
That previous item led me to look at Claris’s website for the first time in a while. And, lo, there’s a banner promoting a message from CEO Ryan McCann that was posted just yesterday, under the headline “How Claris Is Building for What’s Next”:
Every AI-generated applica...
Apple Newsroom, back in August 2024:
Apple today announced that Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri
will transition from his role on January 1, 2025. Maestri will
continue to lead the Corporate Services teams, including
information systems and technology, information se...
Apple has removed more desktop Macs from its online store as the
global memory shortage continues. Mac mini models with 32GB and
64GB of RAM are no longer available for purchase, nor is the M3
Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB RAM.
The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is now available only in a 96GB RAM
configuration, with higher-tier options eliminated. Both M3 Mac
Studio and M4 Max Mac Studio models have delivery estimates of 9
to 10 weeks.
Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:
Last March, Apple was hit with a class action lawsuit
after delaying the launch of the “more personalized Siri”
that was first announced at WWDC 2024. Apple agreed to settle the
case in December, and the full settlement terms are now available.
Ap...
Taegan Goddard, quoting the Financial Times last week:
The Pentagon said President Trump’s Iran war has cost the United
States at least $25 billion, driven primarily by the military’s
use of munitions, the Financial Times reports.
The New York Times had an interesting ...
Back in 2009, Merlin Mann and I jointly gave a talk at SxSW titled “Obsession Times Voice”. Regarding how it turned out, I wrote:
My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We
don’t make movies to make money; we make money to make more
movies.” To me, that...
David Smith, “Six Years Perfecting Maps on watchOS”:
I love going on wilderness adventures. I am rarely happier than
when I am far off into the mountains without a soul in sight. As a
result, I have spent a lot of time learning how to safely explore
and navigate when I’m...
If you’re building B2B SaaS, especially AI, you quickly need enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, and audit logs. Your developers shouldn’t waste cycles rebuilding that infrastructure. Free them to focus on what sets you apart.
WorkOS gives you production-ready APIs for auth and access control that integrate directly into your product. Trusted by over 2,000 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel.
Nick Heer:
If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a
key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes
apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog
boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles
of ...
Chess Peace — a new iOS game by Sam Shepherd — is my kind of logic puzzle. Each puzzle is a board with a few unplaced chess pieces. To solve you need to place all the pieces so that none of them attack each other. There’s a timer if you care, but I don’t. (And you can hide the clock.) Clever name too: the pieces need to be ... at peace with each other. You can download Chess Peace and try it out free of charge, and it’s just a one-time payment of $7 to unlock everything. Great simple premise, really well implemented.
I may or may not write and publish a short e-book about Markdown
sometime this year, most likely as part of a monthly focus. But
l’ve written small parts of it already, as I do, and I figured it
might be interesting for at least some readers. And so here’s an
early draft of an introductory chapter that may or may not be
called “On writing.” We’ll see.
It’s odd how things turn out in life. Thurrott’s and my careers are almost uniquely parallel, but have seldom intersected. This book would have been a very surprising outcome to me, if you’d told me about it 20 years ago. Sort of a fun outcome, though, and I must admit to being curious what comes of it.
Speaking of companies with valuable minority stakes in AI companies, there’s one thing that stuck in my craw about the blockbuster Ronan Farrow / Andrew Marantz investigative piece on Sam Altman and OpenAI last month for The New Yorker. It didn’t come up during Nilay Patel’s...
The New York Times, back in March last year (gift link):
To win the artificial intelligence race, Google not only has
developed its own technologies, but has also pumped
money into prominent A.I. start-ups. And to preserve its
competitive edge, Google has kept its owners...
Jeremy Provost, on the blog for Think Tap Work, his mobile app development company:
iOS App Store search is no longer about relevance. It’s about ad
inventory. With Apple’s introduction of a second search ad, for
any query where we weren’t #1, we’ve effectively moved dow...
Jake Adelstein (author of Tokyo Vice) on his blog Tokyo Paladin:
For decades, Japan’s Oreos weren’t made by Nabisco at all. They
were produced domestically by Yamazaki Biscuits, under a licensing
arrangement with what eventually became Mondelez International.
This was, b...
Marcin Wichary at Unsung:
I’m angry. (Clearly.) We should all be angry in face of stuff like
this. This is how people get fed up with software — because it
feels unstable and deteriorates on its own without needing
to.
I know I brought up that an existing power user bas...
Sam Sabin, writing for Axios one year ago:
Anthropic expects AI-powered virtual employees to begin roaming
corporate networks in the next year, the company’s top security
leader told Axios in an interview this week. [...] Virtual
employees could be the next AI innovation...
Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote:
But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is
that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of cod...
Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote:
But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is
that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of cod...
Press release last week:
SightMD, a leading ophthalmology practice in the greater New
England area, today announced a historic milestone in surgical
innovation. Dr. Eric Rosenberg, DO, MSE, has become the first
surgeon in the world to successfully perform cataract surger...
A colorful personality who engaged and entertained fans with a
distinct conversational style, Sterling called 5,426
regular-season Yankees games and 225 more in the postseason from
1989 until his retirement in 2024. After initially stepping away
from the microphone in April of that year, Sterling returned to
call selected games late in the ’24 season, including each contest
of the World Series.
At the time of his initial retirement, Sterling said that he
considered himself to be “a very blessed human being,” noting that
he had lived out a childhood dream of broadcasting on the radio
for more than 64 years.
“It’s your medium. You do what you want,” Sterling once said. “You
have to paint the picture, which I love doing.”
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