FeedCity

Chance Miller (Hacker News, Mac Power Users, Slashdot): Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware. […] The Mac Pro has lived many lives over the years. Apple released the current Mac Pro industrial design in 2019 alongside the Pro Display XDR (which was also discontinued […]

Adam Engst: Allen Gainsford first reported the issue, noting that many of his BBEdit AppleScripts no longer worked after upgrading to macOS 26.4. Attempting to run them produced macOS error code -1758 (errOSADataFormatObsolete)[…] Further investigation by Dafuki revealed a nuanced situation. In his testing, many AppleScripts—even some dating back to 2006—continued to run without issues […]

Joe Rossignol (Hacker News): Apple is “exploring” the idea of showing search ads in the Apple Maps app, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. […] Ads in the Apple Maps app would not be the traditional banner ads that you see on websites, but rather paid search results. For example, a fast food chain could pay […]

Hartley Charlton: Apple today announced Apple Business, a new all-in-one platform that unifies device management, productivity tools, and customer outreach features. The service is designed to be a consolidated replacement for several of Apple's existing business-focused offerings, including Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect. It provides organizations with a single interface […]

Juli Clover (Hacker News): OpenAI today said that it is ending support for its Sora AI video app just six months after it initially launched. Kyle Orland: The announcement comes days after leaked news of an OpenAI all-hands meeting in which company executives reportedly said they were refocusing on business and productivity applications rather than […]

Oliver Darcy, reporting for Status (paywalled, alas):

According to the data obtained by Status, BI ended 2023 with roughly 160,000 paid subscribers, a drop of about 14 percent from the prior year when it boasted about 185,000 subscribers. The slide did not stop there, however. In 2024, it closed the year with roughly 150,000 subscribers, a further six percent decline. And in 2025, the number fell again, to about 135,000 paid subscribers — another 10 percent drop.

All told, over roughly three years, BI saw its subscription base plummet by about 50,000, or a jarring 27 percent.

Not the sort of momentum you want.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for TechCrunch:

Almost four years after launching a security feature called Lockdown Mode, Apple says it has yet to see a case where someone’s device was hacked with these additional security protections switched on.

“We are not aware of any successful mercenary spyware attacks against a Lockdown Mode-enabled Apple device,” Apple spokesperson Sarah O’Rourke told TechCrunch on Friday.

Apple Newsroom: Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on r...

Todd Spangler, Variety:

Under the new pricing, effective March 26 for new users and rolling out to current customers depending on their billing cycle, Netflix’s Standard plan (which has no ads and provides streaming on two devices simultaneously) is rising by $2, from $17.99 to $19.99/month. The ad-supported plan is going up a buck, from $7.99 to $8.99/month, and the top-tier Premium plan (no ads, streaming on up to four devices at once, Ultra HD and HDR) is increasing from $24.99 to $26.99/month.

I pay the full $27/month because I’d rather cancel Netflix than watch ads, and I suspect I’d notice the difference between 4K and 1080p. But also because money runs through my fingers like water.

Safari is no longer breaking my menu-item-icon despising heart on MacOS 26 Tahoe, but the best trick to block the Tahoe “upgrade” notice on MacOS 15 Sequoia no longer works.

Yesterday I hatched an idea of a demo program that turns RSS 2.0 feeds with rssCloud into a WhatsApp-type communicator. I called it rss.network, and asked ChatGPT to draw a prototype. How I did it. I pasted a screen shot into ChatGPT and wrote: "i want you to draw me some...

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Did some work on my RSS feed this morning. There was only one source:account element in my RSS feed and it was to a Twitter account I lost control of a few weeks ago, the account I had there since 2006, that at one time was in the top 10 accounts on Twitter. I changed the ...

I have been a WebPass customer for years. Fast, reliable, founder-run. When there was a problem, you could reach someone who gave a damn. It was the kind of internet service that made you forget you were dealing with a utility. Then Google bought it. That should have been the warning sign. Google buys things …

Doing a little tuneup work on my blog's RSS feeds.

The Uses of Pessimism by Roger Scruton: Unscrupulous optimists believe that the difficulties and disorders of humankind can be overcome by some large-scale adjustment: it suffices to devise a new arrangement, a new system, and people will be released from their temporary p...

My website is now part of the web archive in the Dutch Royal Library. It took some experimenting to get it in there. Blogs will be blogs and the amount of links in mine choked the harvester it seems. Since 2007 the Royal Library has been archiving websites, and now stores some 25.000 websites. My […]

“Begin”? 

Keas

I had decided to suspend, and maybe not resume, writing on my big blog, but it’s my intellectual sandbox, the place where I try out ideas to see how they work out. I have missed that. So gradually I’m resuming, and: here’s a post explaining why Plato’s Republic has the wrong title.