Marcin Wichary: Were Touch Bar's problems software rather than hardware? With its retirement a few years in the rearview mirror, we know that the Touch Bar, mercifully, did not kill off function keys. (Although to my surprise, public hunger for increasingly minimalist keyboard layouts betray that even people who care greatly about keyboard ergonomics, or at least keyboard feel and esthetics, do…
John Gruber wrote about Om Malik , who recently passed away after battling heart issues. Om is one of those people who has always been well known but in the periphery to me. I've seen many dozen things of his, read a dozen things, and he's been one of hundreds of people who has seemed like a sharp tack, who has seen the right things at the right time. I have nothing of depth to add; rather he be…
Jason Snell, in The Talk Show , as transcribed (and ably commented) by Marcin Wichary : The new features with problems is not a crime. It happens. The crime is: they never fix the problems. And that’s the part that I would like to see Apple get better at: if you’re going to launch something, you got to maintain it. Sometimes I feel like Apple is willing to spend the money and time and effort to…
Kelsey Hightower in The Pragmatic Engineer I have been working with Kubernetes as part of my day job for the last couple of years, first very reluctantly. It is an interesting combination of an overcomplicated boondoggle that companies like Google find elegant because it takes few er entire departments to handle, and principled application of actual elegance. Kelsey Hightower has always been a…
The WWDC 2026 keynote was interesting. The Liquid Glass section focused entirely on how the first version needed work, and nearly all the highlights were about how improvements came from listening to developers and users and dialing what they had back. The macOS standard sidebars don't live in a blob with very uncomfortable margins (which were required for there to be a layer fit in between the…
WWDC used to be fun. I have never gone, and "going" will probably never be possible, but WWDC used to be something to look forward to. Fun features, new frameworks, expanded horizons. For the past ten years or so, it's been a mix of dread and hope. I hope they don't screw things up even more. I hope they don't lock down even more. I hope they don't take out the eyedropper, click on iOS, and flood…
The two biggest issues facing Apple right now: A software operation in shambles. The macOS desktop has forgotten what it is, cosplaying as a mismash of borrowed attributes from other OSes, that look the way they do because they serve different form factors and different needs. And software quality has gone down the tubes. Borderline open warfare between its own desire for control (and possibly…
Daniel Jalkut : My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against it is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it. I have written probably three pieces on this in the past year that I have chosen to not publish. My main problem with transformer-based, LLM-based AI, aside from its supporters, and very occasionally some of its detractors, is this: it doesn't know what the fuck…
Let's talk about storage. Let's talk about how there's been no meaningful improvement to the day-to-day act of using storage for many years now. Two decades ago, Sun introduced ZFS, which has pools, better integrity checking and more fluid allocation. A whole lot of noise and an Oracle-fork detour later, it basically completely works. You can forget about disks, by which I mean that you're a fool…
By all means, Tim Cook was a better choice for Apple CEO than most people you could pick out of a hat; perhaps even of high executives at Apple working at the time. But this judgement is not unalloyed. The following things happened under his watch (in no particular order): Apple decided against lowering the App Store 30% cut, despite internal arguments from top executives that the rationale was…
Tim Cook's letter to the Apple Community You share little pieces of your lives with me and tell me things you want me to know about how Apple has touched you. About the moment your mom was saved by her Apple Watch. About the perfect selfie you captured at the summit of a mountain that seemed impossible to climb. You thank me for the ways Mac has changed what you can do at work and sometimes give…
Apple Inc turned 50 this week, and it has been illuminating. For one thing, David Pogue's book Apple: The First 50 Years apparently contains a very interesting timeline about applications on the iPhone : Steve Jobs' original plan was that, just like Apple had written Maps and YouTube for Google, it would assemble "the largest development team in the history of the world, to build as many apps as…
9to5Mac : It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed. Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware. For the…
Danny Bolella, speaking to Apple Liquid Glass subject matter experts : The rationale usually points to the initial community backlash, the slower adoption rate of iOS 26, and the news that Alan Dye left Apple for Meta. The prevailing theory has been: “Just wait it out. They’ll revert to flat design.” I shared this exact sentiment with the Apple team. Their reaction? Genuine shock. They were…
You know, I wish I had a nickel for every time somebody asked me that. "Why doesn't Apple offer a stripped-down Mac that's more affordable?" During the past 15 years, the world has been obsessed with two questions: Would Steve Jobs have done that? and Would Jony Ive have done that? With MacBook Neo, I'm not even vaguely certain what the answer is. But refreshingly, I'm feeling that they are the…
Cupertino, California — Apple Inc. today introduced the newest members in the MacBook Pro family, MacBook Pro M5 Pro and MacBook Pro M5 Max, extending the range of power-efficient, powerful highend laptop computers made effectively worthless by its groundbreaking Liquid Glass user interface. "Maxing out at over 614 GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, the M5 Max SoC architecture is more efficient…
For at least 10 years, every Time Machine set up I have been in charge of, or tasked with maintaining for someone else, has eventually run into an issue where it stops backing up successfully. The only solution has been to start over, to not inherit backup state and to manually delete the old backup. My experience while looking up this solution repeatedly has been that this is not uncommon, and…
Ed Zitron: The Hater's Guide to Oracle Did I mention that Oracle took on $56 billion of debt to build data centers specifically for OpenAI? Or that the banks who invested in these deals don’t seem to be able to sell off the debt? Oracle’s stock is tied to the company “Oracle,” which is currently destroying its margins and annihilating its available cash to buy GPUs to serve a customer that cannot…
Chris Barnatt switches from an Android tablet to an iPad Certainly, there are many things you need to turn off in iOS to maintain security and privacy.
Paul Thurrott : "My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030," Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. "Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’ To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code…
It feels dark and mean-spirited to talk about wanting someone gone from a job. But considering the track record of Mr. Dye , considering the increasing number of OS releases, design language shifts and swerving over the years, considering the sense of impending doom that has begun to haunt the annual OS upgrades, if Mr. Dye is responsible for the general direction, it is a rational feeling to…
Tea (a dating safety app for women): A legacy data storage system was compromised, resulting in unauthorized access to a dataset from prior to February 2024. This dataset includes approximately 72,000 images, including approximately 13,000 selfies and photo identification submitted by users during account verification and approximately 59,000 images publicly viewable in the app from posts,…
Everyone's prognosticating a new iPhone model this year - iPhone Air (this year, iPhone 17 Air), which supposedly slims down the iPhone 16 Pro by about 2 mm, which is around 20-30% slimmer. This seems like an exercise in one of Apple's follies, in driving an acceptable thickness and weight to anorexic proportions, excising features and flexibility for a marketable measurement. Although this is not…
I link to things to read all the time. But sometimes a long article is better than a short article, and sometimes a book is better than a long article. Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly by John Kay John Kay coins the term obliquity to refer to ways of solving problems that are not direct approaches. Maybe that sounds nutty, but as an illustration, the richest people in the…
Eevee: The rise of Whatever A calculator does arithmetic for you — thus automating the tedious, repetitive part — but you still have to know which buttons to press to get the answer you want. You can’t just type the entire problem in and get Whatever — something that sounds plausible, with a microscopic disclaimer that checking it for accuracy is your problem. Calculators do have limitations at…
Riccardo Mori : The aesthetics for icon design may have changed dramatically in the intervening years, but I just find it sad that, with the gorgeous displays we have today, Apple recommends simple designs made out of a few boring shapes, and everything is now in service of a ‘liquid glass’ effect the system superimposes on every aspect of the user interface — as if this surface gimmick is more…
Translucent user interfaces is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Aside from movie visual effect trickery, it started out in Mac OS X's Aqua, followed by Windows Vista's Aero, followed by (then) OS X's Vibrancy, followed by Windows 10's Acrylic. Over time, more and more of the user interface has become translucent similar to foggy/privacy-preserving sheets of glass. The unstated goal has…
John Siracusa : The preponderance of the evidence is undeniable. Too many times, in too many ways, over too many years, Apple has made decisions that do not make its products better, all in service of control, leverage, protection, profits—all in service of money . To be clear, I don’t mean things like charging exorbitant prices for RAM and SSD upgrades on Macs or taking too high a percentage of…
MacRumors : The European Commission today announced a long list of changes that Apple is legally required to implement in future iOS 19 and iOS 20 updates. [..] We will be publishing an in-depth overview of all of the requirements, but in the meantime we have highlighted some key items below. Third-party smartwatches must be able to display and interact with iOS notifications by the end of 2025,…
Michael Tsai: Rotten (Starting off with John Gruber's Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino – which is both right and aptly put – but followed by a crazy quilt of reactions.) My thought after leaving this to fester a bit is that Apple today is focused on being Apple , and some might say on staying Apple . Apple before was focused on building products . There's an NBC Brian Williams…
Anders Hejlsberg and Dimitri Mitropoulos on Doom in TypeScript Anders Hejlsberg is the creator of C# and Turbo Pascal and a core developer and early architect on TypeScript. This video is Dimitri Mitropoulos showing various stumbling blocks on his way to making Doom run on TypeScript's type system . It's interesting thinking about the push and pull of academia obsessed with (functional) purity and…
Humane/HP fever dr— I mean Corporate Press Release: "Humane’s AI platform Cosmos, backed by an incredible group of engineers, will help us create an intelligent ecosystem across all HP devices from AI PCs to smart printers and connected conference rooms. This will unlock new levels of functionality for our customers and deliver on the promises of AI." [said Tuan Tran, President of Technology and…
Matt Gemmell: Back to Mac Almost eight and a half years ago, I switched to using an iPad as my full-time computer, having come from decades of having Macs. [..] I’m reminded of YouTubers who say that they tried using something as their main whatever for a whole week; well, I did it for eight years. Allow me to report back. [..] The thing is, there’s a lot of momentary waiting with an iPad. Waiting…
John Gruber : I’ve seen no celebratory tweets or announcements from European Commission officials celebrating the availability of Hot Tub. Just crickets chirping. When it comes to native iOS porn apps, the EU now has an unequivocal advantage over not just the United States but the rest of the world. You’d think they’d want to celebrate the achievement. Aaron Sorkin (in a manner of speaking): John…
"What goes into making an OS to be Unix compliant certified?" Terry Lambert: " A lot. " I was the tech lead at Apple for making Mac OS X pass UNIX certification, and it was done to get Apple out of a $200M lawsuit filed by The Open Group, for use of the UNIX™ trademark in advertising. [..] I was asked if I could lead a team to do #1. I said “Yes, under the condition that I could use the compliance…