Daring Fireball
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★ Initial Thoughts on This Week’s New Apple TV 4K (4th Generation) and HomePod Mini 2
At the old pre-June prices, you could buy a 128 GB Apple TV and a pair of HomePod Minis for $350 ($150 + $100 + $100). Four short months later, with today’s new models, that combination would cost $600 ($300 + $150 + $150).
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Secret Documents Reveal Donors Behind $330 Million for Trump’s Ballroom — Apple and Nvidia Top the List at $25 Million Each
Jonathan O’Connell, Sarah Blaskey, and Aaron Schaffer, reporting for The Washington Post ( News+ link ; Archive.today link ): A list obtained by The Washington Post reveals all the major donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project, including previously undisclosed contributors who have benefited from regulatory decisions, government…
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[Sponsor] WorkOS AuthKit: Auth for Your App, Free Up to 1M Monthly Active Users
Login looks simple until you’re building password resets, email verification, MFA, social providers, session management, and the enterprise SSO your first big customer asked for last week. AuthKit lets you: Offer SSO, MFA, passkeys, passwords, email codes, and social sign-in Add and remove users automatically with SCIM provisioning Track who did what with…
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The FBI Arrested a Saudi National OpenAI Employee for Planting a Recording Device in the Company’s Executive Conference Room
The Department of Justice, yesterday: An employee of OpenAI has been arrested for and charged with using or endeavoring to use an electronic, mechanical, or other device to intercept oral communications. Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a national of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was arrested on Oct. 9, and made his initial appearance in federal court today. “This…
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Apple HomeView
Apple Newsroom: Apple today introduced Apple HomeView , designed to be central to the home and personal to everyone in it. With a stunning 7-inch Liquid Retina display, HomeView brings entertainment, connection, and smart home management together in one place, from playing music and making FaceTime calls to home monitoring and hands-free automations with…
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Mark Stephens, a.k.a. Robert X. Cringely, Died at 73
Mary Alyce Stephens (née Neader), posting on Cringely’s Facebook account: Hello, this is Mary Alyce, Bob’s wife. I am coming to you with immense sadness to let you know that Bob passed away. His obituary follows. His family is not requesting anything, however, if you would like to make a donation in his honor, please consider The American Heart Association…
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★ X Once Again Marks the Spot
If you returned from exile on a desert island and took a look at X today for first time in a year, you might reasonably guess that Elon Musk got bored and sold it while you were away.
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‘Proof-of-Human’
Benjamin Mayo (on X, of course), commenting on Apple promoting behind-the-scenes footage showing that the cross-stitch “Welcome Home” logo for next week’s keynote/experience was stitched by hand: There needs to be a name for this phenomenon where every published piece of art by a company is now accompanied by a proof-of-human video. I agree, and I think…
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Let’s Check In on Trump’s Blog
An actual post from the sitting president of the United States: The White House considers anyone that uses the term, “Artificial Intelligence,” as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, “Super Intelligence,” THE ENEMY! President DONALD J. TRUMP His screws are so loose you can hear them rattling around. ★
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Apple Is Slow-Rolling iOS 27 Adoption, So Far
David Smith, last week: Been really interesting to watch the iOS 27 adoption curve over the first two weeks. Clearly on a different path than previous years. Still steadily growing, at a similar rate to the ‘steady growth’ phase of most years, but without the big surge at the start. Given that this rate is largely controlled by Apple’s automatic update…
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Joz Announces ‘Welcome Home’ Keynote Coming Tuesday, 13 October
It’s almost like you can predict the timing of such things , if you pay attention to Apple’s consistent patterns. ★
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Jaguar Type 01
This is a cool car. It doesn’t look like anything else and it looks like it’s been pulled a few years from the future. I don’t know about this whole trend where cars don’t have rear windows though. I get it that you just use the camera but my old habits says I want to see out the back sometimes. But the only reason I wouldn’t buy this thing is that turd of…
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Gurman Strikes Again: ‘Apple’s Smart Home Push Includes Doorbell, Lock, Thermostat Codeveloped With LG’
The incomparable Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: Apple Inc.’s upcoming push into smart home devices will include a doorbell, thermostat and other accessories developed through an unusual partnership with LG Electronics Inc. The products will be part of an ecosystem of devices that work with Apple’s new smart home hub, as well as an upgraded HomePod…
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Unofficial Command-Line Tool Removes Apple Intelligence From MacOS 27
Scharon Harding, Ars Technica: Unlike with previous versions of macOS, macOS 27 Golden Gate doesn’t have a toggle for turning off Apple Intelligence. That makes disabling AI features that you may not want more difficult. It also means that the AI models necessary for running Apple Intelligence will take up space on your disk , even if you don’t use them or…
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Steve Jobs, Walking Through a Mockup for Apple Park in 2010
What an apt photo, today of all days. What a gift Make Something Wonderful is. ★
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[Sponsor] Sunnny
How can B2B software be so friggin’ delicious? Early access drops 10/19. Spread the love. ★
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OpenAI Announces Their Text Watermarking Plans
OpenAI, today: The EU AI Act requires generative AI providers to make generated text identifiable in a machine-readable way. Text watermarking and detection remain early technologies with significant limitations, and views about their benefits and responsible uses are still developing. Our phased approach reflects both the EU AI Act requirements as well as…
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Ternus and Cook Tweet Brief Remembrances on the 15th Anniversary of Steve Jobs’s Death
John Ternus, posting on X: The way Steve taught us to care about every detail, every experience, every person, still guides our work today. Forever grateful. Tim Cook , also on X (with a photo I don’t recall seeing before): There are people who leave a mark on the world, and then there are people who change it entirely. Steve changed the world and so many…
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★ Apple Is Going to Further Tighten the Screws on Full Disk Access on MacOS, in Response to Agentic AI Apps Running Amok
Hopefully Apple has in mind a solution to this situation that will still enable knowledgeable power users to confirm agreement to a sufficiently scary warning and put their Macs in a state similar to what we have today. I worry.
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Yankees Sweep Boston in Two Games, by Combined Score of 18-2
In the 6th inning last night the Yankees were only ahead 2-0, and Red Sox first baseman Willson Contreras hit a home run, closing it to 2-1. Contreras decided to walk around the bases . The baseball gods do not look kindly upon that sort of jackassery. In the next inning, Contreras wasn’t paying attention and his laziness allowed a Yankee to reach base…
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Gurman Reports Apple Is Launching New ‘Smart Home’ Products on October 13
Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (gift link): Apple Inc. plans to make its long-delayed push into the smart-home market on Oct. 13, marking a critical product expansion for the company under new Chief Executive Officer John Ternus. At the center of the strategy is a smart-home hub code-named J490, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple also…
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Anthropic’s IPO Prospectus Is a Fucking Doozy
Echo Wang, reporting for Reuters yesterday: Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters. This is a strong clear lede, but even so it falls short of expressing the true magnitude of what Anthropic represents…
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Follow-Up on my Spitballed Predictions for Apple’s October
Regarding my post yesterday speculating on how Apple’s October — seemingly set to be a big one — might play out, a friend asked if any or all of the new stuff might be released through Apple Newsroom announcements only. Good question. Let’s run through the rumored new hardware products: Apple TV hardware: I’d love to say no, but the answer is yes. I could…
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Destroy Any Website
Desktop only, and you definitely want sound on. With things like this I always start with Kottke.org. No idea why, because it’s quite possibly the last site on the entire web I’d want to see actually destroyed. (Well, second-to-last.) ★
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Bastardica
“A foundry for bastard web fonts.” The default is a version of Times New Roman but every 7th glyph is replaced with one from Arial, but you can dial up whatever bastardization you want. This is why I’m not at all worried about AI destroying the world. Look at the horrible things human beings have made. ★
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‘When Did Google Get So F-Ing Weird?’
Sancho Panza: I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks. Kagi , the search engine I’ve been using for a few years now, gave me the exact sort of results to Panza’s query that he was looking for. ★
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Joanna Stern Pokes the Pickle
If anyone could devise a funny way to measure battery life, it’s her. ★
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‘Donald Decodes’ Interview Craig Federighi Regarding the iPhone Duo
Apple executives seemingly did very few interviews after the iPhone event three weeks ago. The best, perhaps by far, is this 11-minute video with Craig Federighi by “Donald Decodes”, a Chinese language creator. His YouTube account only has 1,100 followers (and only had 500 at the time of the video) and only one other video — presumably he’s got a big…
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Why Stolen Device Protection Makes Passwords Safer
Glenn Fleishman: Leaving Stolen Device Protection enabled does mean that you may have to wait an hour in some scenarios to manage aspects of your Apple Account, make changes to Face ID or Touch ID, change your device passcode, and a few other actions. But this minor inconvenience might assuage the kinds of concerns that Scott wrote in about, and make you…
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Jeremy Stern’s Profile of Mark Zuckerberg for Colossus
Jeremy Stern, in a massive and massively good profile of Mark Zuckerberg for Colossus: Unsure of my own ability to evaluate such things, I leave Meta HQ and spend another few days in Palo Alto and San Francisco ahead of my interview with Zuckerberg, seeking out a number of MSL’s competitors and investors who agree to speak to me on background. Many of them…