Daring Fireball
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Sponsorship Openings for Daring Fireball (Including The Talk Show)
Sponsorships have continued selling briskly, of late . Knock on wood. As of yesterday, the next opening on the schedule wasn’t until the last week of December, and the Q1 2027 schedule is already filling up. However, due to some schedule rejiggering, next week is now open. If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of…
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★ MacBook Pro Pricing and Configurations for M6, M5 Pro, and M5 Max
I find it useful to organize all of the configuration options into tables on a single page, and I figured it might be useful to share this now, before I finish writing my full thoughts on the redesigned hardware and displays for the PROLED XDR models.
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The Only Good Easter Eggs Are Whole-Assed Easter Eggs
Marcin Wichary on the original iPod easter egg on Apple Music’s website 404 page: I am usually not a fan of easter eggs — most of them are poorly made — but this might be the best iPod recreation I’ve seen, and it’s an interesting thing to study: I think it generally covers all the modes etc. (with small exceptions) the typography looks accurate, it has the…
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GM to Pay $220 Million After Betraying Their Own Drivers’ Privacy
Jonathan Stempel, reporting for Reuters: General Motors will pay $220 million to settle allegations that it illegally sold drivers’ private behavior and location data to brokers, who then sold the information to insurers that used it to set and sometimes increase rates. The settlement, announced on Thursday, resolves claims by the attorneys general of 35 US…
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Patrick Stewart Dies at 86
Aaron Couch, The Hollywood Reporter: Patrick Stewart, the sophisticated actor who brought a Shakespearean touch to Star Trek and X-Men as he made an otherworldly transformation from British stage veteran to sci-fi icon, has died. He was 86. Stewart died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles following “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and…
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Apple Drops App Store Commission by a Whopping 4 Percent in Taiwan
Apple Developer News: Apple is making changes to the Taiwan storefront of the App Store, following discussions with the Taiwan Fair Trade Commission. As of October 31, 2026, the commission rate for standard Apple In-App Purchase and paid app transactions will be 26% on the Taiwan storefront of the App Store on iOS and iPadOS. Currently, that rate is 30%…
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A Health Update From Craig Hockenberry
Craig Hockenberry: If you noticed that the Iconfactory sites were kinda broken last week, now you know why. It’s because I was kinda broken last week. Now I’m finishing this post from a comfy chair on our deck. Typing into the latest version of WordPress and PHP. And I couldn’t be happier. No, you teared up a little reading this. Very good news from a very…
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Rolfe Winkler at The WSJ: ‘The Beleaguered Chip Sellers Getting Their Revenge on Apple’
Rolfe Winkler, in a crackerjack story for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Blevins, who left Apple in 2022, sometimes set up back-to-back meetings with suppliers so that rival sales teams might run into each other, stoking competitive tension. Sales representatives learned to pack nutrition bars to sustain them through negotiating sessions that Apple…
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The Space Shuttle Discovery’s Starboard Side ‘s’ Is Upside Down
How Jason Snell beat me to linking to this, I don’t know. But like I said back in February , when it comes to signage, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” ought to be “Mind your H’s and S’s”. ★
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Steven Levy on the New MacBook Pro, With, Yes, a Touchscreen
Steven Levy, writing at Wired with the scoop on the new MacBook Pros ( News+ link ): This turnaround is a big deal to Apple fans. Ternus shrugs off the drama. “The Mac is first and foremost an indirect input device, built around the trackpad and keyboard. But I think there’s times when it’s comfortable and handy to have touch.” Ternus and Apple want to make…
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Siri AI Expands to More Languages in OS 27.2
Apple Newsroom yesterday: With the 27.2 software updates released today, Siri AI — an entirely new version of Siri that is profoundly more capable, conversational, and personal — is expanding to more people around the world, with availability now in the French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish languages. [...] Siri AI is currently unavailable in…
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Apple Creator Studio Updated With a Slew of AI Features, Along With a New Open JSON File Format for Keynote
Apple Newsroom, with software news for Apple’s “Pro and Tell” week: Apple today introduced transformative updates to Apple Creator Studio , the powerful collection of creative apps designed to put studio-grade tools into the hands of modern creators across Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Final Cut Pro for Mac now includes built-in MotionVFX — an expansive collection…
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★ Prestructured WYSIWYG
Even if you’re a decent designer (or believe yourself to be), it’s liberating not to have a say in the matter. Constraints are sometimes freeing.
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Apple Also Announces iMac With M6
Just a speed bump, but speed bumps are good . Pricing and configurations: M6 with 2 Thunderbolt ports: Base price: $1500 RAM: 16 GB: +0 24 GB: +200 SSD: 256 GB: +0 512 GB: +200 1 TB: +500 M6 with 4 Thunderbolt ports: Base price: $1700 RAM: 16 GB: +0 24 GB: +200 SSD: 256 GB: +0 512 GB: +200 1 TB: +500 2 TB: +1000 Base price: $2300 RAM: 32 GB: +0 SSD: 512 GB…
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[Sponsor] WorkOS: Let Agents Sign Up for Your App Without a Browser
An agent can’t click through a signup page built for humans, so give it something it can read instead. Publish an auth.md file and agents register themselves without ever touching a browser login, and the user never gets pulled out of what they were doing. With WorkOS auth.md, enroll in the dashboard and AuthKit publishes the file. Agents read it, register…
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Apple Introduces New Base MacBook Pro With M6, 14-Inch-Only
Apple Newsroom’s “Pro and Tell” announcement week continues: Apple today announced the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 , delivering even more performance, powerful on-device AI capabilities, and faster connectivity for college students, business users, creators, and more. M6 features an advanced 12-core CPU with the world’s fastest CPU core, so everything…
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The NYT Seemingly Does Marissa Mayer Dirty
Alexandra Alter, in the lede for her profile of Marissa Mayer’s new AI startup Dazzle for The New York Times (gift link): Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task. Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief…
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Glenn Fleishman on Apple Notes and Markdown
Glenn Fleishman, writing at Six Colors, “Why Notes Will Never Let Us Edit Markdown”: The Notes app added Markdown import and export in the version 26 operating system releases, and the macOS 27 Golden Gate update lets us copy and paste as Markdown. Why can’t we just write natively in that hoary, simple format? I use Markdown all day, every day. In fact, I’m…
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★ Apple Announces New A20 Pro iPad Mini
Pros: OLED display, nano-texture option, A20 Pro chip, thinner and lighter. Cons: no Face ID, no ProMotion.
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A Simple Two-Step Shortcuts Shortcut Lets You Lock the iPhone Duo When You Close It
Federico Viticci: Don’t like that the iPhone Duo doesn’t auto-lock when you close it? You can fix it with this simple Shortcuts automation. Two steps: A conditional for when the iPhone is Closed . Lock the screen. I mentioned in my review that I kept closing the Duo expecting it to lock, like when closing a book (or a laptop, for that matter). And it didn’t…
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Tiny Computers for iPhone Duo
If you’ve got or get a Duo and don’t try this out, you’re not hooked up right. ★
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Duo Users Are Registering the Base of Their Index Finger as a Touch ID Coping Strategy
Some guy on Reddit (with an illustration video): Saw this online, tried it, and it works beautifully. Basically, I registered the lowest part of my right index finger. That part of the finger sits naturally when you go to swipe up at the phone. This resolves a major issue I had where I couldn’t easily just look at my phone to glance through notifications on…
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The Talk Show: ‘Lubricate the Inside of the Hinge’
Special guest: Joanna Stern. Special topic: The iPhone Duo. Sponsored by: Factor : Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year, while supplies last, with code talkshow50off . Notion : The collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side, with a developer platform teams can build on. ★
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iPhone Portrait Mode, 10 Years In
Speaking of Johnnie Manzari, he wrote a post yesterday marking the 10 year anniversary of Portrait Mode: Initially, Portrait mode was seen as a giant math problem. You’d do disparity calculations on the two sensors and output a depth map. The problem was this approach feels and looks digital; it feels fake. In areas without texture, it’s impossible to do…
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Reuters on the Duo Launch
Aditya Soni, Christine Chen, and Will Russell, reporting Friday for Reuters: CEO Ternus played greeter at a store in Austin, Texas, throwing open the doors and high-fiving customers as they streamed in, a video posted on X by CBS Austin showed. A known car enthusiast, Ternus’s Austin visit coincides with this weekend’s Formula 1 US Grand Prix in the city…
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Nicole Nguyen’s Duo Review for the WSJ
Nicole Nguyen (also with a 5-minute video ), writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Every time I used the Duo in phone mode, one-handed, I felt its heft. It’s wider and thicker than a Pro iPhone — and heavier, even compared with competing foldables. My hand actually hurts after using the Duo nonstop, straining to grip the device securely while…
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Marion Barry Meets the iPhone Duo
Jay Peters, The Verge: The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange bright line (or lines) across the right…
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MKBHD’s Duo Review
Marques Brownlee thinks the lack of Face ID will be the biggest gripe. I agree. And I love his central framing for the review: that the Duo is extremely polished around the edges (figuratively, but also true literally) but rough in the middle. But he spends more time griping about third-party apps that haven’t been optimized for the Duo than most other…
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Tim Pan’s iPhone Duo Review
I hadn’t heard of Tim Pan or Mediastorm until running across his 24-minute video review of the Duo. It’s a good and fair review, but what struck me are the rather astonishing production values . Amongst other things, they stress-tested the hinge with an industrial robot by opening/closing it 10,000 times. (That’s less than one-third the folds tested by…
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Apple Built a Photo-Realistic Functional Original iPod for Apple Music’s 404 Page
It seems like this amazing Easter egg only launched yesterday, to celebrate the original iPod’s 25th anniversary . Exquisitely well done. More like this, please. ★