FeedCity

Jason Snell: It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad ...

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced a significant expansion of factory operations in Houston, bringing the future production of Mac mini to the U.S. for the first time. The company will also expand advanced AI server manufacturing at the factory and provide hands-on training at its new Advanced Manufacturing Center beginning later this year. Altogether, Apple’s Houston operations will create thousands of jobs.

See also: Rolfe Winkler at The Wall Street Journal (gift link, News+ link): “Inside Apple’s Push to Build an All-American Chip”.

Todd Bishop, writing at GeekWire: Paul Brainerd, who went on to coin the term “desktop publishing” and build Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker into one of the defining programs of the personal computer era, died Sunday at his home on Bainbridge Island, Wash., after living fo...

Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors back on February 12: In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, seen by the Financial Times, FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson cites recent press coverage of a report from conservative media watchdog Media Research Center (MRC), which claimed tha...

Laurene Powell Jobs, in her introduction to the newest publication from the Steve Jobs Archive: Among the books that mattered to Steve was Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. I’m struck by this line from its pages: “Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will graduall...

Adam Grossman: Fifteen years ago, we started work on the Dark Sky weather app. Over the years it went through numerous iterations — including more than one major redesign — as we worked our way through the process of learning what makes a great weather app. Eventually, ...

Poll: Do you think less of a person if they show an interest in what you're doing? Results.

Speaking of OpenClaw, here’s Scott Shambaugh: I’m a volunteer maintainer for matplotlib, python’s go-to plotting library. At ~130 million downloads each month it’s some of the most widely used software in the world. We, like many other open source projects, are dealing w...

Sam Altman, last week on Twitter/X:

Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.

OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support. The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that.

I’m sure it will remain as open as the “open” in OpenAI’s own name.

Erin Griffith and Karen Weise, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): More than he did at any other major tech company, Mr. Epstein found success boring into the inner sanctums of Microsoft. Leveraging one connection into the next, he became privy to the company’s...

Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge (gift link): With Spencer’s retirement official, Microsoft is hitting the reset button on Bond’s Xbox strategy instead of embracing it further. Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma is now promising “the return of Xbox,” in a clear message ...

A piece of advice I gave my kids that I try to remember for myself as well:

You can get mad, or you can get what you want.

Before you decide to be angry, decide if you’re willing to give up what it is you want because you can’t have both.

Abby Haddican:

Times New Resistance autocorrects specific words as they are typed. For example, the word ICE autocorrects to the Goon Squad and the word Trump autocorrects to Donald Trump is a felon.

To the untrained eye, Times New Resistance looks just like Times New Roman — the official font of the U.S. State Department. When you install the font, it will appear in your font menus as Times  New Roman, with an extra space between the words Times and New.

Ligatures, man. Will they never cease to surprise?

It took me a while to realize..

1. Agentics are server software.
2. The things you used to write in Node.js and before that PHP and Perl, and in my case Frontier.
3. I had been trying to get ChatGPT to do exactly that for months.

We're going to spend a while reimplementing all our server software.

It would be super helpful if the whole thing could be packaged up so we can write our servers in English or whatever our preferred Really Simple Language is, and have it compiled to whatever internal language it likes, and not have to learn too much new jargon.

Jason Snell (complete commentary): It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in […]

Sabrina Valle and Gnaneshwar Rajan: Danaher, a $150 billion U.S. company that makes tools used in developing and testing medicines, on Tuesday agreed to buy Masimo for $9.9 billion, expanding in patient-monitoring devices in a surprise move outside its main focus. CNBC: Masimo’s non-invasive pulse oximeters will complement Danaher’s invasive Radiometer blood analyzer devices. […] […]

Samuel Axon (MacRumors): When Apple’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset launched in February 2024, users were frustrated at the lack of a proper YouTube app—a significant disappointment given the device’s focus on video content consumption, and YouTube’s strong library of immersive VR and 360 videos. That complaint continued through the release of the second-generation Vision […]

Jon Martindale (Hacker News): Typically, YouTube will stop playing on your phone or tablet if you turn off the screen; if you want to listen to an hour-long playlist or podcast on your next walk with your device locked in your pocket, you need to pay $13.99 per month. Dwayne Cubbins (Hacker News, Slashdot): While […]

Norbert Heger:

In the release notes for macOS 26.3 RC, Apple stated that the window-resizing issue I demonstrated in my recent blog post had been resolved.

You’ll never guess what happened between the RC (release candidate) version and the actual shipping version of 26.3.

Just kidding, you’ll guess.