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Text • John Gruber

Mark Gurman, Ace Reporter, on the New Regular iPads

bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-01-12/apple-2025-plans-iphone-17-smart-home-hub-ios-19-ai-apple-watch-ipads-m5

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg, on January 12:

The new entry-level iPads — J481 and J482 — will get faster processors and Apple Intelligence. The current models have the A14 chip and 4 gigabytes of memory. Look for the new versions to have the A17 Pro chip, matching the iPad mini, and a bump to 8 gigabytes of memory. That’s the minimum needed to support the new AI platform.

The new iPads sport the A16 chip and thus do not support Apple Intelligence. But who cares about little details like that when you know the codenames, which is what really matters.

I’ll bet what happened is that Gurman was right, and the new iPads were set to use the A17 Pro chip and support Apple Intelligence. But after Gurman spoiled it seven weeks ago, Apple scrapped those plans and changed the chips to the A16 just to spite him.

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Text • John Gruber

Tapbots Releases Ivory 2.3 — and Announces That Phoenix, a Bluesky Client, Is Coming

tapbots.social/@ivory/114110436182458268

Tapbots: v2.3 is now available on the App Store for Mac and iOS/iPadOS! What’s new? Grouped Notifications (Mention and Notification tabs are now merged) Support for AlphaNumeric Post IDs (Can now log into more services like GoToSocial) Accessibility Improvements Bug Fi...

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When I ask a personal question on one of the AI bots, all of a sudden on Facebook I'm getting ads about what I asked about. It could be a coincidence, but it's happened a few times, on more than one system. And I'm a paying customer on all of them.

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Text • John Gruber

Your Source for Scoops Half a Day Before They’re Announced Publicly

x.com/markgurman/status/1896972159731556579

Mark Gurman, yesterday at noon ET: It’s not an “Air” — but the new Mac Studio, codenamed J575, appears to be imminent. It could be announced as early as this week along with the new MacBook Airs. There are signs these will come with an M4 Max but that its new Ultra chip ...

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People who criticize Dems for weak opposition at the SOTU are not hypocrites only if they said before the event what they would do. I was glad not to have to choose. I think in the end they did what made sense to each one individually. The range of response by the Dems was much broader than the Repubs. We should be thankful they haven't capitulated, as so many have, esp in what we used to think of as journalism.

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We need a new kind of social network designed to run an effective response to fascism. So far all we have are profit centers for billionaires and wannabe billionaires.

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Watch out for people who celebrate your freedom while profiting from your enslavement.

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One thing to be grateful for, Trump didn’t invite any of the Jan 6 rioters back to the Capitol for his speech.

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Text • John Gruber

Trump 2.0 Is More Idiocracy Than Kakistocracy

bsky.app/profile/ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3ljj4sijyrk24

Ron Filipkowski: Trump’s Sec of Agriculture Brooke Rollins says the solution to high egg prices for Americans is to get some chickens and raise them in your backyard. No exaggeration. She’s selling the idea of everyone raising chickens in their back yards as “awesome”,...

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Text • John Gruber

Taska Is Now Part of Leitmotif (Developers of Kaleidoscope)

9to5mac.com/2025/03/04/makers-of-kaleidoscope-just-acquired-another-native-mac-app-for-developers-and-everything-is-50-off/

Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac: Leitmotif, the team behind the awesome diff and merge Mac app Kaleidoscope, is expanding its portfolio of native Mac apps for developers. The company has acquired Taska, a native Mac app that serves as a frontend for web services like GitHub...

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Text • John Gruber

‘When Your Last Name Is Null, Nothing Works’

wsj.com/lifestyle/null-last-name-computer-scientists-forms-f0a43b08?st=2u7onu

Funny piece — if your surname isn’t “Null” — by Oyin Adedoyin for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link): Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The...

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Text • John Gruber

‘Money Job’

nytimes.com/2025/02/28/opinion/ben-stiller-gene-hackman.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1k4.SQm-.jbz9WEyoATEH&smid=url-share

Ben Stiller, in a delightful piece for The New York Times on working up the gumption to tell Gene Hackman — with whom he was working in Wes Anderson’s excellent The Royal Tenenbaums, his favorite Hackman movie: “ … but I have to say for me, there is one movie you made th...

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The news should always report whether a bit of news is a financial plus or minus for Trump as in does this thing make him richer or poorer. That way you can zero in on the "why" of everything.

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I'm thrilled the Knicks are playing tonight. That's what I'll be watching. Let me know if anything happens in DC.

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Text • John Gruber

Apple Updates iPad Air (M2→M3) and Regular iPad (A14→A16), and Revamps Magic Keyboard for iPad Air

sixcolors.com/post/2025/03/apple-updates-ipad-air-and-ipad-revamps-magic-keyboard-for-ipad-air/

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors: The most consequential part of the Air’s update — perhaps the only real update — is the M3 processor, which brings with it GPU-based capabilities like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and video encoding and decoding for ProRes and ProRes...

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Text • John Gruber

Apple Hasn’t Updated Its US Government Transparency Report Since June 2023, 20 Months Ago

apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html

Apple: Apple is committed to being transparent about government requests for customer data and how we respond. We publish a Transparency Report twice a year disclosing the number of government requests for customer data Apple receives globally. Apple’s most recent repo...

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Text • John Gruber

iFixit’s iPhone 16e Teardown

ifixit.com/News/108430/iphone-16e-teardown-never-before-has-skipping-the-upgrade-made-more-sense

Elizabeth Chamberlain, writing for iFixit: But it’s still missing MagSafe, for no obvious reason other than making the phone less appealing to consumers than the rest of the 16 lineup. Wireless charging without the perfect alignment that MagSafe allows is troubling. I’...

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Text • John Gruber

The Free Speech Will Continue Until Trump’s Morale Improves

truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114104167452161158

President Donald Trump, on his very popular bespoke social network (random capitalization and various typos sic): All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to t...

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I'm trying to get ChatGPT to not assume I have the same abilities as it has. You can't dump a huge amount of code at me and expect me to quickly see what changed, that's not how human intellect works, but this is something it is extremely good at. Here's what I said to my bot...

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Text • John Gruber

Claim Chowder: October 2022 Rumors Regarding the iPhone 16e (a.k.a. ‘SE 4’)

macrumors.com/2022/10/09/iphone-se-4-to-feature-6-1-inch-display-with-notch/

Hartley Charlton, writing for MacRumors in October 2022: The fourth-generation iPhone SE will feature a 6.1-inch LCD display and a “notch” cutout at the top of the display, according to Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) analyst Ross Young. Good call on the size a...