04-30-25 -

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers Rules, in Excoriating Decision, That Apple Viola...
I’m linking here to Techmeme’s roundup of news coverage and commentary, but I highly recommend you start by reading Gonzalez Rogers’s 80-page decision. It is excoriating. I’ve read few legal decisions quite like it. But it’s also incredi...

04-28-25 -

Is Chrome Even a Sellable Asset?
There are two ways to consider a forced divestiture of Chrome by Google, as the U.S. Department of Justice has, for months now, been requesting after Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled that Google has illegally maintained its monopoly in web search. One is...

04-28-25 -

Another Periodic Suggestion to Try, Just Try, Switching to Kagi for Search
Aaron Pressman, writing earlier this month in The Boston Globe, “Why I Abandoned Google Search After 27 Years — and What I’m Using Instead”: The UK now requires travelers from America to obtain an electronic travel authorization, o...

04-14-25 -

[Sponsor] Dekf Coffee Roasters
Coffee has always been about bringing people together. For us, it started with a simple question over a late-night cup of decaf: why do coffee lovers who skip the caffeine have to skip the craft too? At Dekáf, we believe those who drink coffee p...

04-09-25 -

WebKit Adds Support for text-wrap: pretty, Now Shipping in Safari Technology ...
Jen Simmons, writing on the WebKit blog, “Better Typography With text-wrap pretty”: For over 30 years, the web had only one technique for determining where to wrap text. The browser starts with the first line of text, and lays out each wo...

04-09-25 -

How Many New iPhones Can Fit on a Freight Plane?
This sounds like one of those puzzles job interviewers often ask, but there’s a practical relevance at the moment: What’s a ballpark estimate for how many iPhones Apple might have hustled to ship into the US on those five freight planes ahead ...

04-04-25 -

Tired: Irresistable Force vs. Immovable ObjectWired: Unchanging Prices vs. No...
Akash Sriram, reporting for Reuters under the headline “A $2,300 Apple iPhone? Trump Tariffs Could Make That Happen.”: Most iPhones are still made in China, which was hit with a 54% tariff. If those levies persist, Apple, opens new tab has...

03-31-25 -

[Sponsor] Democracy
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Pos...

03-31-25 -

France Fines Apple $162M for App Tracking Transparency, Taking the Side of Su...
Jon Brodkin, reporting for Ars Technica, “France Fines Apple €150M for “Excessive” Pop-Ups That Let Users Reject Tracking”: France’s competition regulator fined Apple €150 million, saying the iPhone maker went overboard in its im...

03-30-25 -

The Studio Is Fantastic So Far
With season 2 of Severance complete (with a remarkable bang), Apple TV+ has slid right into a new prestige series, The Studio, starring (and co-created by) Seth Rogan as the newly-appointed chief of the fictional and dysfunctional Continental Stud...

03-26-25 -

The Website That Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss (Youre Reading It)
Back in 2017, the iPhone X was announced alongside the iPhones 8 and 8 Plus in mid-September. The iPhones 8 shipped that month, and I published a review of the iPhones 8 on September 19. The iPhone X, though, wasn’t available to order until Octo...

03-25-25 -

It Might Be Time for Me to Collect Some Being Right Points for My 2023 Bluesk...
Yours truly back in May 2023, in a thread on Mastodon (at the time, you needed an invitation code to get into Bluesky, and it was just a few months after Musk’s takeover and remaking of what was once Twitter): Bluesky is going to skyrocket t...

03-24-25 -

[Sponsor] Lex.Games: Free Daily Word Games
Lex.Games is an iOS app (and website) for playing eight daily word games. I paid Gruber many thousands of dollars to run this ad for free games which themselves have no ads. Please keep reading. The games: Conlextions: Inspired by NYT’s Conn...

03-21-25 -

Keyboard Maestro Hack of the Week: Dont Paste Images
My number one tip for becoming a Mac power user is to get into Keyboard Maestro. Using Keyboard Maestro feels like gaining superpowers. I keep meaning to write more about Keyboard Maestro, and so I’m just going to start documenting all the littl...

03-16-25 -

A Postscript on the Singular Nature of Mark Gurmans Reporting
My post Friday commenting (read: wise-cracking) on Mark Gurman’s explosive report on an all-hands Siri team meeting at Apple was begging for a bit of meta commentary on the reporting itself. But I’ve been doing so much of that regarding Gurman...

03-12-25 -

Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino
In the two decades I’ve been in this racket, I’ve never been angrier at myself for missing a story than I am about Apple’s announcement on Friday that the “more personalized Siri” features of Apple Intelligence, scheduled to appear betwe...

03-11-25 -

A New System-Wide UI Look for iOSLet Alone MacOS, TooWould Be a Huge Deal
Ben Lovejoy, writing at 9to5Mac: Our editor-in-chief Chance Miller wryly commented that a radical new look would serve as a great way to distract from the ever-slowing progress on the new Siri. But in truth, I think many more Apple users will ...

03-11-25 -

[Sponsor] WorkOS: Scalable, Secure Authentication
Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO and RBAC. Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth ...

03-07-25 -

Apple Is Delaying the More Personalized Siri Apple Intelligence Features
Here’s a statement I got this morning from Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy, verbatim: “Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduce...

03-06-25 -

ABC Shuts Down FiveThirtyEight, and Pulls the Plug on Its Website
Oliver Darcy, reporting at Status (paywalled, alas), on the sudden demise of FiveThirtyEight: On Wednesday morning, shortly after sending an all-staff memo announcing layoffs at ABC News, network president Almin Karamehmedovic joined a virtual...

03-01-25 -

Why Cant We Screenshot Frames From DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices?
Nora Deligter, writing for Screen Slate in June 2023, “Elegy for the Screenshot”: About five years ago, Catherine Pearson started taking screenshots of every bouquet featured on The Nanny (1993–1999), the six-season CBS sitcom that was t...

02-26-25 -

The iPhone 16e
I’ve spent the last six days using the iPhone 16e, and the experience has been a throwback. In many ways, the iPhone 16e both looks and feels like the modern-day progeny of the early Steve Jobs era iPhones. Early iPhones like the plastic 3G and ...

02-21-25 -

Apple Pulls Advanced Data Protection From the UK, in Defiance of UK Demand fo...
Apple, in a very precisely worded statement issued to the media (including me) this morning: Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the United Kingdom to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this ...

02-19-25 -

Thoughts and Observations on Todays iPhone 16e Announcement
Last week Tim Cook teased a “newest member of the family” product announcement coming today; turns out it was the iPhone 16e, a device whose name briefly paralyzed me with indecision regarding how to capitalize it,1 which replaces the three-ye...

02-17-25 -

Golfo del Gringo Loco
You saw the news last week, I’m sure, that both of the major mapping-app providers, Google and Apple, have updated their maps to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”. Microsoft’s Bing Maps, which I would describe as a minor...

02-10-25 -

Foxs New Scorebug Graphic Design, and Our Innate Resistance to Change
A scorebug is industry jargon for the sub-genre of chyron (itself jargon) that shows ever-present information about a televised sporting event while you’re watching. These graphics display the teams, the score, the time remaining, and other meta...

02-10-25 -

Nikes So Win Won the Super Bowl
Well, the Philadelphia Eagles, of course, won the actual Super Bowl, winning in a romp so one-sided that they would have embarrassed the Chiefs less if they had pantsed Patrick Mahomes at the 50-yard line. But the second contest is for best commer...

02-10-25 -

[Sponsor] ClerkComplete User Management for Your iOS Application
Integrate authentication and user management services with applications made for the Apple ecosystem with Clerk’s iOS SDK. Built with Swift, the SDK adheres to modern standards, delivering the idiomatic and consistent developer experience you ex...

02-07-25 -

My 2024 Apple Report Card
This week Jason Snell published his annual Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2024. As I’ve done in the past — 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 — I’m publishing my full remarks and grades here. On Snell’s report card, voters give...

02-06-25 -

Bootable Mac Startup Drive Backups, and Another Ode to SuperDuper
Dave Nanian, last week at the Shirt Pocket blog: Just a quick post: macOS 15.3 is now out, and with it, a fix for the broken replicator. As such, macOS copying will work again with Erase, Then Copy backups. No update to SuperDuper is necessary...

02-04-25 -

Hot Tub, a Hardcore Porn App for iOS, Hits AltStore in the E.U.
From an AltStore announcement yesterday: iPhone turns 18 this year, which means it’s finally old enough for some more ~mature~ apps… Introducing Hot Tub by c1d3r, the world’s 1st Apple-approved porn app! The screenshots and video prev...

02-01-25 -

As if Anyone Needed Further Proof, Patrick Soon-Shiongs Los Angeles Times Is ...
Editors note from The New Republic: As The New Republic reported on Friday, The Los Angeles Times — currently in a race to the bottom with The Washington Post to determine which of the two venerable institutions can sell out to Donald Tr...

01-29-25 -

Pebble Founder Eric Migicovsky Is Bringing It Back
David Pierce, writing at The Verge, “The Pebble Smartwatch Is Making a Comeback”: Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to ...

01-28-25 -

My Spitball Theory on TikToks Current Semi-Reprieve in the U.S.
Here’s an addendum to my post yesterday on the recent shake-up atop the generally stable “top free downloads” list in the App Store. Some of the shake-up is from new entrants, like the much-ballyhooed AI chatbot DeepSeek. But a lot of it is ...

01-28-25 -

Openvibe, a Multi-Social-Network App for Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads (Supposed...
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch “Automattic and Others Back Openvibe, an App That’s Unifying the Open Social Web”: Launched in 2024, Openvibe initially supported three of the more prominent open social networks, all of which operate using differ...

01-25-25 -

Thin Is In
Dominic Preston, writing for The Verge, “Oppo’s Next Foldable Is About as Thin as USB-C Allows”: Oppo has been steadily teasing the Find N5 on Chinese social network Weibo for the past week. Find series product manager Zhou Yibao has now...

01-24-25 -

ICE Raids Are an Escalation of Our Long-Simmering De Facto Cold Civil War
Sareen Habeshian and Russell Contreras, reporting for Axios, “Mayor Accuses ICE of Detaining Vet, U.S. Citizens in N.J. Immigration Raid”: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided a Newark, New Jersey, business venue on Thur...

01-23-25 -

Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber
Writing about the current state of Apple Intelligence yesterday, I mentioned how utterly stupid and laughably wrong Siri is when asked the simple question, “Who won Super Bowl 13?”, and mentioned that that particular example came from a friend...

01-22-25 -

[Sponsor] Fucking Amazon
I sold Woot to Amazon and they made it shitty. So I quit. Then I got bored. I started A Mediocre Corporation with a few others from Woot. We just launched a classic daily deal site — only one thing for sale each day. Meh. Oh, and since you...

01-21-25 -

Lets Not Mince Words Regarding Trumps Executive Order to Pause Enforcement of...
Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR, under the dreadfully incorrect headline “Trump Signs Executive Order to Pause TikTok Ban, Provide Immunity to Tech Firms”: According to the order, the law will be paused for 75 days and companies that work w...

01-19-25 -

BrikTok
Unsurprisingly, time expired without ByteDance selling TikTok, so the U.S. ban went into effect last night at midnight and (also unsurprisingly) it’s been chaotic and confusing. TikTok was down, but now (as I type this Sunday afternoon) it’s b...

01-18-25 -

Nokias Next-Day Internal Competitive Analysis of the Original iPhone Largely ...
A few days ago Nokia unveiled their Design Archive at Aalto University in Finland. Fahad X spotted a real gem — an internal confidential slide deck shared within the company the day after Apple had introduced the original iPhone at Macworld ...

01-13-25 -

[Sponsor] Protect Your App With WorkOS Radar
Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bots attacks and brute force attempts? WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. A simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect ba...

01-13-25 -

One Bit of Anecdata That the Web Is Languishing Vis--Vis Native Mobile Apps
Just after New Year’s some sort of underground cable screw-up resulted in our home, along with an irregular swath of our neighborhood, losing electricity for 26 hours. We don’t lose power often, and when we do, the outages are usually brief, b...

01-11-25 -

Nvidia, the New King of Keynotes
There were several interesting announcements made at Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Keynote at CES 2025, including a new RTX 50 generation of gaming GPUs and an upcoming $3,000 Mac-Mini-sized “personal AI supercomputer” called Project Digits. But...

01-07-25 -

After Years of Moderation-Heavy Zagging, Zuckerberg Announces That Meta Is Go...
Mark Zuckerberg today announced major changes to the way Meta is going to apply content moderation across Facebook, Instagram, and (I presume, Threads). His main announcement is a video, for which there’s an unofficial transcript here. Zuckerber...

01-06-25 -

Apple Claims It Will Soon Further Clarify Which Notifications Are AI-Generate...
Liv McMahon and Natalie Sherman, reporting for BBC News: The company, in its first acknowledgement of the concerns, on Monday said it was working on a software change to “further clarify” when the notifications are summaries that have been...

01-01-25 -

[Sponsor] ListenLater.net
Turn articles into podcasts and listen on the go. Email any article, and our AI transforms it into human-like narration, delivered straight to your private podcast feed. Whether it’s a long read or a quick blog post, enjoy it hands-free on any p...

12-29-24 -

OpenAIs Board, Paraphrased: To Succeed, All We Need Is Unimaginable Sums of M...
From an un-bylined post from OpenAI’s board of directors on Friday: The hundreds of billions of dollars that major companies are now investing into AI development show what it will really take for OpenAI to continue pursuing the mission. We ...

12-23-24 -

[Sponsor] Due
Thrice a week, I pay for my son’s tuition. Once, I forgot, and the tutor had to ask for it days later. I felt terrible for making him ask. After putting it in Due, awkward moments like that never happened again. If keeping promises, meeting dea...