Wednesday, July 8, 2026

Disk Not Ejected Properly

Mike Bombich:

The USB device drivers report that they are destroying the “Rocket XTRM Q” device due to a “link change interrupt”

APFS filesystem drivers report a “dangling mount”, failures to finish transactions before unmount, and dozens of “media is not present” errors.[…]

storagekit collects a report of the “disappeared” devices and notices that one of them was mounted. This is ultimately what leads to the “Disk Not Ejected Properly” notification.

Unfortunately, nothing in here explains what caused the “link change interrupt”; all we know is that the USB device drivers detected an interruption.

Not discussed here, perhaps because there’s little we can do about it, is the role of changes to macOS. I’ve documented problems in the past of hard drives, which used to work perfectly, suddenly start spontaneously unmounting with every backup after updating to a new OS version. The Sierra to Big Sur period was particularly bad, as I recall. (There are also some hard drive enclosures, and cheap SSDs, that seem to be problematic to matter the OS version, but I don’t continue to use those.) Sometime around Monterey or Ventura, the spontaneous unmounts almost completely disappeared for me, though Ventura introduced other mounting/unmounting problems. Last week, I finally updated to Tahoe, and I’m sad to say that spontaneous unmounts are back. Almost every night, one of my Samsung SSDs—connected to a Thunderbolt dock—gets reported as improperly ejected. Sometimes it remounts by itself; other times I have to unplug and replug it.

Previously:

Sunsetting Textual IRC Client

Codeux Software:

Textual is the world’s most popular application for interacting with Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chatrooms on macOS.

[…]

Textual supports very powerful modern technologies such as the latest IRCv3 specifications, native IPv6, client-side certificate authentication, and much, much more in an easy to navigate, clutter free experience.

Unfortunately (via Jan Lehnardt):

Textual has been sunset and will no longer receive updates.

Previously:

Apple Intelligence for Home’s iCloud+ Requirements

macOS 27 Golden Gate Beta 3 Release Notes:

Apple Intelligence for Home requires an iCloud+ subscription starting at 2TB.

Via Rajesh Pandey:

As part of the upgrade, the Home app uses AI to generate summaries of motion alerts from compatible HomeKit Secure Video cameras.

[…]

Apple likely requires the 2TB iCloud+ tier because HomeKit Secure Video already relies on iCloud+ storage tiers. The 2TB plan supports a larger number of cameras, and AI-generated video descriptions would add to Apple’s cloud processing costs.

That makes sense, but it seems odd because the iCloud tiers are named based on storage amounts, yet the feature isn’t tied to how much space you’re actually using. A lower iCloud plan with tons of free space doesn’t get the features, yet a nearly full 2 TB plan does. There are already restrictions where supporting more cameras requires higher plans, but that is at least quasi related to storage.

I reluctantly upgraded to a 2 TB family plan within the last year or so. We don’t store many files in iCloud, messages are set to auto-delete after a year, and I manually offload photos older than a year (except for hearted favorites). It’s hard to believe given how I remember the original 5 GB free tier once being sufficient, but staying under 200 GB became untenable without a lot of extra work. It doesn’t help that Live Photos sometimes gets inadvertently turned on, so that we’re storing all these little videos without realizing it.

Previously:

Tuesday, July 7, 2026

A New Firefox Look

Rizki Kelimutu:

Firefox is evolving with a refreshed design that makes the browser feel more modern, approachable, and consistent across desktop and mobile. The refresh also extends to Firefox’s voice and writing style, making product experience feel more human, direct, and unmistakably Firefox.

Via Jeff Johnson:

Nothing says “consistent” like making your large-screen keyboard & mouse UI exactly like your tiny touchscreen UI.

And nothing says “more human” like a manufactured voice and writing style.

rjacob:

Internally, we’ve been calling this work Project Nova, and today we’re excited to share a deeper look at what we’ve been building and where we’re heading next.

The goal of this work is to create a more cohesive foundation for Firefox: making the browser feel cleaner, warmer, faster, and more adaptable.

Some of the areas we’re working on include:

  • Simpler navigation and a redesigned Settings experience
  • Easier access to features like tab groups, split view, and vertical tabs
  • The return of Compact Mode
  • Refreshed visual updates across tabs, icons, spacing, and browser surfaces
  • More customization options, including new themes and wallpapers

Previously:

Sunsetting Maestral

Sam Schott:

As of June 2026, Maestral is no longer actively maintained. The current version will continue to work until certificates expire.

Via John Gruber (Mastodon):

I don’t know when these certificates are expiring. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when they do. I might try moving everything from my Dropbox account to iCloud Drive. That certainly seems worth trying before I resort to going back to Dropbox’s own monstrosity of a Mac client.

[…]

In theory, because Maestral is open source, someone could fork it and keep it going.

Nick Heer:

I use Dropbox only for some relatively basic but necessary things, like hosting PDFs for this very website, which is why Maestral has been the perfect client for me. It is a testament to the effect of a good third-party app that I have stuck with Dropbox despite its corporate-focused strategy pivot.

I’ve switched to iCloud Drive, which seems better, but not better than Old Dropbox.

Previously:

Apple Silicon and AI

Jason Hiner (MacRumors):

In an exclusive conversation with The Deep View ahead of WWDC 2026 in June, Doug Brooks, senior product manager of Apple silicon, discussed how Apple’s long-term investments in neural processing, unified memory, power-efficient computing, and hardware-software integration have positioned its devices for the AI era.

He also explained why Macs have become a favorite platform among AI developers, why Mac minis and Mac Studios are emerging as the preferred AI agent machines, and how Apple sees the future of on-device AI across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

[…]

“We build a chip knowing exactly what systems it’s going to go into. The chip can influence the system design, and the system design can influence the chip requirements. They’re married together very tightly. I’d actually go a step further and include software in that equation. As we enable new capabilities in the chip, we want to make sure those capabilities are exposed all the way through the software stack so developers can benefit and customers can benefit. Because if those transistors go unused, what’s the point? It’s not about adding something and hoping somebody finds a use for it. We want those capabilities available to solve real problems. I think that’s what allows us to build better systems and ultimately better products.”

It seems like a lot of it is just that developers like macOS.

Previously:

Monday, July 6, 2026

Castro’s Customer Support Lessons

Dustin Bluck (archive link, Hacker News):

I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator. I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate this, and it would build some degree of loyalty and appreciation.

[…]

However, what I found is this whole thing didn’t work as I thought it would. Sure sometimes we were able to wow customers, particularly when we responded right away with an exact fix for them. But the vast majority of our honest, thoughtful answers were deeply unsatisfactory to users, and it often annoyed them more than anything else.

[…]

Customers email us with confusion about how podcasts work, how the App Store works, how their Mac works, and any number of tangential issues. What tends to happen is the same users do this over and over, and once they find out we answer, the requests get more frequent and more burdensome.

[…]

To the user, any response aside from “Okay, we’re going to build that right now” is meh-to-negative. Various honest responses, such as “I thought about this or tried it in the past and it unfortunately didn’t work very well” are not going to knock their socks off. These just don’t do much in terms of loyalty and rapport.

[…]

Avoiding explanations and specifics tends to get a neutral response and doesn’t suck anyone in or waste too much time. In other words, the best approach for us is what most companies do. Because building loyalty or rapport at the moment something isn’t working and the user is frustrated hasn’t worked. The real positive experience comes when you actually improve the product, so that’s where we’re spending our time.

I have definitely seen all these categories of customer interactions, but I don’t agree with the conclusion. Yes, in the end you want to be improving the product, but I don’t think that’s fully separable from interacting with customers as humans. I’ve found spending time on customer support incredibly valuable for making my products better. Even a lone report of an issue can often lead to a fix and learning something important that has wider implications. It’s also enjoyable and motivational to hear about real people making use of what I’ve built or to turn around someone who started with a negative view. And it seems to help with marketing, too.

I also see a correlation with the apps that I use—the better ones tend to also have good support. That said, I use a podcast app that famously doesn’t offer support. There are different situations, and there’s more than one way to a good product and a successful business.

I do think there’s an art to all this. Not everything can be measured, and there’s more to it than just committing to answering e-mails thoughtfully. You need to set boundaries and steer the interactions to make them productive, efficient, and satisfying for both sides. I’m still learning.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-07): Jeff Johnson:

This is what you get from the free with IAP business model: most of your support emails are from freeloaders!

My apps are upfront paid, thus most of my support emails are from customers. I don’t get overloaded with emails, and paid customers are more incentivized to solve issues with you, because they’ve invested money into the app.

Vitor:

I find myself agreeing with you that customer support is valuable and we should do it. But over the years I have also realised that, in a way, being good at support is punishing. I’ll explain[…]

WhatCable 1.1.7

Darryl Morley:

WhatCable explains cable speed, charging limits, e-marker data, and connected devices in plain English. Name a cable and it tracks how the cable actually performs over time, so you can spot the one that has started misbehaving. No more guessing why a cable charges slow or refuses to drive your display.

Via Norbert M. Doerner:

It is open source, free, and definitely a tool to look into, if you have external drives on your Mac!

Previously:

Friday, July 3, 2026

Finder’s Elite Eliding

Marcin Wichary:

But I also want to show things that Finder does well, and this might be something no one does nearly as thoughtfully: text truncation.

[…]

Finder position the tooltip exactly atop the existing text. I think this is really clever: it avoids overlapping other useful information, and makes it faster to reorient yourself.

[…]

Lastly, Finder only shows the tooltip when it’s needed.

Previously:

Old Reddit Now Requires Logging In

Scharon Harding (Slashdot):

Reddit will start requiring people to be logged into Reddit to use old.reddit.com.

The new requirement will take effect “over the next month,” a Reddit employee going by the username boat-botany announced on the social media platform today. The person claimed that the change is part of an ongoing effort to “tighten how automated systems access Reddit.”

[…]

Perhaps more alarming for old-school Redditors is that boat-botany’s post left the door open for Reddit retiring old.reddit.com.

Nick Heer:

“New” Reddit is a janky, slow, bloated mess of a website that mostly displays text, images, and videos. “Old” Reddit is ugly but functional.

Previously:

UK CMA Proposals for External Payments and NFC

Ben Lovejoy:

The EU required Apple to permit third-party app stores, while a US court ruled that developers have the right to direct iPhone users to third-party payment platforms for app purchases and subscriptions. Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is now proposing to apply this latter rule in the UK.

Tim Hardwick (John Gruber):

The U.K.’s competition regulator has proposed letting app developers direct users to payment options outside Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, in a move aimed at increasing competition and reducing the fees charged by the two companies.

[…]

The regulator said any fees Apple and Google charge developers for enabling such “steering” must be fair and reasonable, remain below existing App Store and Play Store commissions, and allow developers to either pass savings on to consumers or reinvest them in innovation.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

Requiring Apple to allow apps to steer users to the web to make payments is, I’ve long argued, sensible regulation. I’ve also long argued that Apple has been obstinate in disallowing it. If in-app payments — through Apple’s system — can’t compete with out-of-app payments on the web, something is wrong with IAP. But it’s wrong to assume that payments outside IAP will result in lower prices and better policies for users.

Nick Heer:

They may increase prices when costs grow but that does not mean they do the opposite. But who cares? Lower costs permit more flexibility on pricing and, even if that money ends up in the pockets of developers instead of Apple, is that supposed to be a bad thing? Is there a reason why someone should be upset that they might pay the same amount but an indie developer gets to keep more of it?

The proposed policies are pretty straightforward from what I can see. Among other obligations, Apple is not allowed to use or require scare tactics when users are routed to an external payment mechanism and, while it is allowed to charge a steering fee, it is not allowed to count services not used by developers offering third-payments nor double-count for services already accounted for by other developer fees. Also, the CMA calls bullshit on Apple’s claim that third-party payments are particularly risky[…]

Previously:

Android AI Violates DMA

Ryan Whitham:

The issue before the commission currently is the built-in advantage for Gemini on Android. When you turn on any Google-powered Android phone, Gemini is already there and gets special treatment at the system level. The European Commission is taking aim at the lack of features available to third-party AI services. The commission believes that there are too many experiences on Android that only work with Google’s Gemini AI, and as a gatekeeper, Google must change that.

[…]

European regulators are proposing several broad changes to the way AI tools operate on Android phones. Some of this is straightforward, like allowing third-party AI tools to be invoked system-wide via hot words or button presses. This might also include allowing AI tools to view screen context when the user opens them.

[…]

Many of the Gemini AI features in Android, including Magic Cue, rely on running local models, and Google has been slow to allow third parties the system access to make that work effectively. So the EU is also suggesting a mandate that would ensure developers have the necessary hardware access to run local models “with high levels of performance, availability and responsiveness.”

Via John Gruber:

The difference between Google and Apple on this front is that Google just blazed ahead and shipped Gemini integrated into Android in the EU, and is now facing compliance problems after shipping. (Ask forgiveness.) Apple isn’t shipping Siri AI in the EU in iOS 27, knowing that it’s going to be deemed non-compliant. (Ask permission.)

Previously:

Thursday, July 2, 2026

EveryMac at 30

EveryMac:

On July 2, 1996, EveryMac.com launched.

Thirty years is a long time -- and a great deal has changed since then -- but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been there to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the original 128k to the current line. Thank you very much for your support through the years.

I think there used to be a bunch of sites like this, but EveryMac has endured, and it’s the one I’ve been using for long time. I asked proprietor Brock Kyle how he got started:

As you know, the Internet was different in the 90s. I was at least partially inspired by Guy Kawasaki’s evangelism and wanted to support what was at that time considered a decidedly “beleaguered” Apple Computer. Mac hardware was a topic that I was interested in and relatively experienced with -- or at least I thought so, I have learned a little bit more since then 🙃 -- and the site was simply my effort to contribute to the body of knowledge. I miss the ethos of those days.

Stephen Hackett:

There are a bunch of ways to support EveryMac, and its anniversary prompted me to chip in to help keep the lights on at a very important resource.

I am a huge fan of the site’s comparison charts, which make it easy to see how a particular model evolved over time[…]

Jason Snell:

Back in 1995 I worked on a project for MacUser magazine called the Mac Catalog, which was a FileMaker-based spec database much like EveryMac’s. I was the person who brought the Mac Catalog to the web for the first time, in fact!

Joe Rossignol:

Launched in 2022, AppleDB is a helpful resource that provides a database of Apple devices, software updates, firmware releases, and more.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-03): John Gruber:

I still feel like DF is a newcomer next to a site like EveryMac. 1996 for chrissakes. Steve Jobs wasn’t even back at Apple yet. What a great run it’s been and continues to be for EveryMac.

Mactracker, which is an app rather than a Web site, recently celebrated its 25 anniversary:

Mactracker provides detailed information on every Apple Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro ever made, including items such as processor speed, memory, graphic cards, supported OS versions, price, color, storage, and expansion options. Also included is information on early Apple systems, Newton, Apple TV, Apple accessories, audio, displays, modems, printers, scanners, storage, Wi-Fi products, Mac pro apps, and operating systems.

Update (2026-07-06): Adam Engst:

I first wrote about it in “EveryMac’s Ultimate Mac Sort Tool” (20 September 2011), we noted its 20th anniversary in “MacNN and Tekserve Close, EveryMac and Mactracker Carry On” (8 July 2016), and it has popped up in TidBITS periodically since. Although I also use MacTracker and Glenn Fleishman’s new Fruit Specs site, nothing compares to EveryMac’s depth and breadth, and its Ultimate Mac Comparison can be particularly helpful for identifying differences between Macs.

Hide My Email Vulnerability Exposes Real Address

Joseph Cox (MacRumors, Hacker News):

A vulnerability in Apple’s “Hide My Email” tool lets almost anyone discover a person’s real email address that is supposed to be hidden by the feature, and Apple has failed to fix it for more than a year, according to a security researcher and 404 Media’s own tests.

[…]

“Apple Hide My Email is leaking email addresses that are supposed to be hidden. We reported the issue and replication instructions to Apple over a year ago. We don’t know why it hasn’t been fixed, but we don’t feel comfortable waiting any longer. Hide My Email users deserve to know that it may be possible for attackers to discover their hidden email addresses,” Tyler Murphy, the co-founder of EasyOptOuts, which discovered and reported the issue to Apple, told 404 Media.

“Free, publicly accessible people-search sites make it easy to link an email address to other personal details, so people relying on Hide My Email for safety may be at risk,” Murphy added.

[…]

To test the issue I generated a new Hide My Email address and provided it to Murphy. Around five minutes later, he replied with my real email address linked to my Apple account which was supposed to be hidden.

Ben Lovejoy:

Murphy said that he reported the issue to Apple in June of last year, and the company told him it was looking into it. Apple said it had been fixed in March of this year, but Murphy found that wasn’t the case. He again contacted Apple, with the company saying that it would appreciate him not revealing the existence of the flaw until it had been resolved.

Apple then said it planned to address the issue in June, but since it still hasn’t been fixed[…]

Tyler Murphy:

March 19, 2026: Using the reproduction instructions from our initial report, we determined that the vulnerabilities hadn’t been fixed.

May 22, 2026: We realized that the vulnerabilities may have greater severity and scope than we thought initially and reported this to Apple. Apple never acknowledged the report of increased severity.

June 30, 2026: Apple again reported that the vulnerabilities were fixed and asked us to verify. We determined that the vulnerabilities hadn’t been fixed.

Jeff Johnson:

This is every fucking Feedback I file.

John Gruber:

Not good. Especially the “We reported the issue and replication instructions to Apple over a year ago” part.

This is becoming a pattern. At least Apple still allows third-party e-mail providers.

Nick Heer:

Very few details are available right now. I have seen speculation that the original email address is revealed when someone replies using their hidden email address, but the impression I get from Cox’s reporting is that no user interaction is necessary[…]

[…]

I am also unclear about how, as of May, the EasyOptOuts guys found the “vulnerability may have greater severity and scope” than initially reported. Ominous, though.

Previously:

Hide My Email Moving to private.icloud.com Domain

Apple (MacRumors):

Later this summer, Apple will unify the email domains used by Sign in with Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email under a single, shared domain: private.icloud.com.

New addresses generated for both features will be issued on the new domain.

[…]

Existing addresses on the legacy domains will continue to work and forward mail to users without interruption.

It’s unclear to me what the benefit of this is. Is there a reason to migrate legacy addresses?

Arseniy Shestakov (Hacker News):

This makes it much easier to ban all aliases without affecting non-relay mailboxes on iCloud mail.

This is certainly a big hit for iCloud privacy, since some plausible deniability together with Apple’s backing made banning iCloud aliases costly. But now a lot of services will just refuse to accept these emails, just like what happens with free temporary mailboxes.

John Gruber:

But my retort is that a service that won’t accept these email addresses is one that I probably don’t want to have anything to do with. The only reason not to accept private.icloud.com email addresses is if you want to do something invasive with users’ actual email addresses.

The main problem I have with Hide My Email is that some customers use it and then have no way to look up their purchase info via e-mail because they don’t know which address they used. Of course, I wouldn’t reject such addresses, but I wonder if services will start using the new domain to recognize that Hide My Email is being used and nudge the user to provide a different address.

Previously:

Golden Gate Spotlight

Hartley Charlton:

Apple today announced that it has rebuilt the search infrastructure that powers key features like Spotlight, Photos, and Mail across all of its major next-generation software platforms.

LLM search using Core Spotlight:

Level up basic search into a retrieval-augmented system using SpotlightSearchTool and LanguageModelSession. Explore Core Spotlight integration, delegate-based hydration patterns, and how metadata quality impacts your search results. Learn how to use custom PipelineStages for tasks like sentiment analysis. Discover best practices for indexing and building flexible, context-rich search experiences in your app.

Corentin Cras-Méneur:

So from what I understand from the WWDC keynote, Spotlight is actually going to work?? When I search for simple files, it fails the VAST majority of the time!

Saagar Jha:

I feel like I am watching the Mac OS X Leopard intro again guys how did we mess up search so bad we have to present it again

Howard Oakley:

Semantic search is different, in that its matches aren’t as crisp and Boolean. Rather than working like a simple index, it’s more like a thesaurus in effect.

[…]

Rather than compiling more exhaustive sets of keywords, semantic search can broaden the scope to cope better. And because we can interact through Siri, we can fine-tune our search results by specifying the cattle should be black and white, perhaps, and combining conventional search criteria such as location.

To get this to work effectively, there are some limitations. Because semantics are so contextual and variable, this involves apps and Core Spotlight. That’s a big benefit to user privacy, as Core Spotlight’s indexes are separated by user and stored locally, although in places like ~/Library/Metadata rather than volume-based Spotlight indexes in the existing hidden .Spotlight-V100 folders. And unlike global Spotlight indexing and search, it requires apps to have code to support both tasks, as it can’t just happen by magic.

While I’m sure we’ll all be impressed with many of the results of semantic search, hits that we never expected to find, it’s going to prove harder to assess those that it misses.

Rhythmic Fistman:

Never has it been so inconvenient to find a file whose name you know exactly

Maybe rebuilding Spotlight’s infrastructure will fix this, or maybe adding the semantic stuff will make handling simple cases like this worse.

i3aychikov:

Personally, in my experience, I’ve noticed that the new Spotlight is much faster than the one in MacOS 26 Tahoe. It opens with less delay, and finds the right app or file instantly when Spotlight in Tahoe seems to have had a slight delay.

See also: TidBITS-Talk.

Previously:

Wednesday, July 1, 2026

NetNewsWire 7.1

Brent Simmons:

  • The Current Activity window shows what the app is doing right now
  • The Activity Log window shows what the app did recently
  • The Account Stats window shows per-account article and status counts and database sizes, and it includes a Vacuum Databases button which can help with database size and performance
  • The Dinosaurs window lists feeds that haven’t updated in n months (with a text field where you specify n)

It’s great to have more visibility into what the app is doing. I was about to report a regression where Mastodon and some other favicons were pixellated, but this was quickly fixed in 7.1.1.

Previously:

macOS 26.5.2

Juli Clover (release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW):

According to Apple’s release notes for the update, macOS Tahoe 26.5.2 includes security fixes for the Mac.

Howard Oakley:

This addresses a total of about 29 vulnerabilities, including three in the kernel and a whole slew in WebKit. None are believed to have been exploited in the wild yet.

Previously:

iOS 26.5.2 and iPadOS 26.5.2

Juli Clover (iOS/iPadOS release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer):

Apple told Reuters that it released the updates earlier than planned due to concerns about AI-assisted hacks.

Previously:

Meta and YouTube Addiction Lawsuits

Cecilia Kang, Ryan Mac, and Eli Tan (March, Hacker News):

The social media company Meta and the video streaming service YouTube harmed a young user with design features that were addictive and led to her mental health distress, a jury found on Wednesday, a landmark decision that could open social media companies to more lawsuits over users’ well-being.

[…]

Citing features like infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations, K.G.M. sued Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, and Google’s YouTube, claiming they led to anxiety and depression.

Nick Heer:

For its part, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is standing up for beleaguered social media companies in an editorial today criticizing everything about these verdicts, including this specific means of liability, which it calls a “dodge” around Section 230.

[…]

Product design, though, is a different question. It would be a mistake, I think, to read Section 230 as a blanket allowance for any way platforms wish to use or display users’ posts. (Update: In part, that is because it is a free speech question.) From my entirely layman perspective, it has never struck me as entirely reasonable that the recommendations systems of these platforms should have no duty or expectation of care.

Nick Heer, on an April Massachusetts lawsuit:

To me, a non-lawyer, much of the actual text of the ruling (PDF) explaining why this lawsuit was not immediately turfed on Section 230 grounds seems pretty reasonable. For example, the judge says “[u]nder the default settings, Meta enables approximately forty types of notifications” for the Instagram app, which the government alleges “is designed to overwhelm young users and compel them repeatedly to reopen Instagram”. We can argue whether this is a meaningful thing for a government to police or if it is just another example of Meta resorting to tacky growth-hacking techniques instead of trusting their product is sufficiently compelling on its own. (Most days when I open Instagram in my browser, it puts a red badge over the notifications tab and suggests I have one new follower. I do not; I never have. It lies to me every time, presumably because it knows most people, including me, will usually click on that, thereby increasing a number on a dashboard somewhere.)

Mike Masnick:

couple weeks back, Jonathan Haidt published another entry in his ongoing campaign to convince the world that social media is inherently ruining kids’ lives. This one was a victory lap titled “Seven Lines of Evidence Against Social Media,” treating recent developments — including the social media addiction verdicts against Meta that most people are misunderstanding — as vindication of his thesis.

[…]

But then something inconvenient happened for Haidt’s thesis: Pew went and did a brand new study exploring teens’ experiences on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. This one asked the kids themselves.

[…]

Indeed, the research repeatedly suggests that for the very small number of kids who are facing mental health problems and overrelying on social media in response, the answer is a targeted intervention to help those individuals — not a broad “ban kids from social media” program.

Previously:

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Chatrie v. United States

Amy Howe:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that when law enforcement officials used a “geofence warrant” – a warrant that instructed Google to provide location data for cellphone users who were near a particular place during a specific time period – to obtain evidence used to convict a Virginia man of a 2019 bank robbery, they conducted a “search” for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. By a vote of 6-3, the justices sent Okello Chatrie’s case back to the lower court for it to consider whether, as the Fourth Amendment requires, the search was “reasonable.”

Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan emphasized that “[a]n individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information—even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company.”

[…]

For purposes of whether the government conducted a search, Kagan said, it does not matter that law enforcement officials “access[ed] only a short amount of cell-phone location information.” […] Nor does it matter, Kagan continued, that Chatrie gave Google permission to collect and use the location data.

Previously:

Dissecting Apple’s Sparse Image Format (ASIF)

Erik Schamper:

ASIF takes a lot of inspiration from existing virtual disk formats. Practically, that means it’s another sparse virtual disk format, and functions very similar to sparse VMDK, VHDX or QCOW2 files (for the uninitiated, it allow you to store a large disk, or file, in a smaller, “sparse” manner).

Shortly before the release of macOS Tahoe (late 2025), I thought it’d be a fun exercise to try and write a parser for ASIF files.

Previously:

App Store Complaint From Chinese Developers

Hartley Charlton:

A group of 48 China-based iOS developers have filed an antitrust complaint against Apple with the country’s market regulator over the App Store’s commission rates, the South China Morning Post reports.

The developers sent an open letter to China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), alleging that Apple failed to deliver on a promise to offer the lowest commission rate to the Chinese market. The group asked the SAMR to investigate and penalize Apple for allegedly abusing its market dominance to impose “unfair and excessively high” costs on local developers.

Apple lowered the fees in March but not as much as it did in Brazil and Japan.

Previously:

Kids Online Safety Act

Amanda Silberling (May 2025):

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has been reintroduced into Congress. If passed into law, this bill could impose some of the most significant legislative changes that the internet has seen in the U.S. since the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998.

As it currently stands, KOSA would be able to hold social media platforms legally accountable if it’s proven that these companies aren’t doing enough to protect minors from harm. The bill includes a long list of possible harms, such as eating disorders, sexual exploitation, substance abuse, and suicide. Though it overwhelmingly passed through the Senate last year, the bill was stifled in the House.

[…]

“Apple is pleased to offer our support for the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). Everyone has a part to play in keeping kids safe online, and we believe [this] legislation will have a meaningful impact on children’s online safety,” Timothy Powderly, Apple’s senior director of Government Affairs, said in a statement.

Nick Heer:

The App Store Accountability Act is based on model legislation written by the Digital Childhood Alliance. The lobbying group also publishes marketing pieces, including one (PDF) that calls Apple’s age verification frameworks “ineffective”. Specifically, it points to the lack of parental consent required “for kids to enter into complex contracts”, with “no way to verify that parental consent has been obtained”.

Maya Posch (via ednl):

Since the arrival of so-called ‘social media’ the central tenet of never giving out your personal information which was front and center during the 1990s and 2000s got quite literally flipped around. Suddenly we had massive corporations practically begging you to give every last scrap of your personal information, every intimate detail of your daily life and with it every last second of your attention span.

[…]

The upshot of this reversal is that instead of a mostly comfortable anonymous experience, suddenly every second that you’re awake has been turned into the equivalent of a schoolyard during recess, the watercooler banter at the office and similar social interactions.

[…]

This raises many questions, such as whether ‘social media’ and the FOMO it introduces is a legitimate addiction, and whether we shouldn’t make being online more anonymous rather than enforce a rather dystopian ‘real name’ policy onto the populace.

Joe Mullin (Hacker News):

Within the next week, Congress is preparing to vote on the KIDS Act, a sprawling package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package includes a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, combined with a collection of other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Instead of debating any of these proposals on their merits, lawmakers are attempting to move them all at once under an ultra-expedited process.

[…]

Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its requirements come at the expense of privacy, free expression, and the ability of people of all ages to use the internet without revealing sensitive data.

[…]

Several provisions of the bill create new rules around direct messages, disappearing or “ephemeral” messages, and AI chat services.

The bill includes language stating that certain KOSA requirements should not be construed to override strong encryption. But the protection is incomplete. The carve-out applies to certain features and messaging controls, but doesn’t apply to KOSA’s separate requirement that platforms “address” a list of harms to minors.

Previously:

UK Social Media Ban

Tim Hardwick:

The British government will introduce a ban on social media access for all users under 16 years of age, set to take effect in 2027.

[…]

The plan goes further than a similar ban introduced in Australia. It will cover major platforms Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X. An exhaustive list has not yet been released, but Starmer said the rules will apply to services “whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material.”

Messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal are not covered by the ban, and most social media platforms already require children to be over 13 to create an account and use their services.

Max Goldbart (Hacker News):

So-called AI ‘romantic companion’ chatbots – designed to simulate sexual relationships or roleplay with users – will have to enforce a minimum age of 18 and the government will also be looking in more detail at overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for under-18s, with more detail coming in July.

[…]

The government said it will “learn the lessons” from Australia’s experience by introducing more highly effective age assurance measures to support compliance, making it far harder for children to bypass safeguards.

Ax Sharma (Hacker News):

In practice that means anyone opening a new account will likely have to prove they’re over 16 by uploading an ID or passing a facial age scan, the same checks that adult sites serving UK visitors have implemented since July 2025 under the Online Safety Act.

Long-standing accounts are largely exempt, but signing up fresh now triggers verification, effectively ending anonymous account creation in the UK.

James Rodger (Hacker News):

New VPN rules are set to be issued by the Labour Party government as part of the under-16 social media ban. The government has not revealed any plans to regulate them, but ministers have said details about action alongside the social media ban, including regarding VPN use, will come in July.

Paige Collings and Jillian C. York (Hacker News):

There remains no reliable, privacy-preserving method of verifying the age of every internet user and methods vary from one platform to the next.

Young people will not simply be protected from being contacted by adults or endlessly scrolling—they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.

[…]

The provision also requires internet service providers to limit the time kids spend online, and has rules about who can contact them online. These extreme rules will take decisions about using technology away from families and put them in the hands of government regulators.

Cory Doctorow (Hacker News):

The problem is, there’s no such thing as “age verification” for the internet. What we call “age verification” is actually mass surveillance, so invasive and pervasive that it makes the ad-tech industry’s commercial surveillance look like some kind of cypherpunk darknet pirate utopia[…]

[…]

Any attempt to save kids from online harms should start with saving kids from online surveillance, but that’s the opposite of what we’re doing today. After decades of failing to pass and enforce privacy controls for the internet, those same governments are breaking all land-speed records to pass “age verification” laws that make privacy illegal[…]

Anonymous (Hacker News):

Lots of US states, European countries, and Australia have introduced “age verification” regulations. They present it as the classic “save the children” talking point, but it’s really just a precursor to attribution of speech, particularly attributing your words to your real identity.

Sean Hollister (via John Gruber):

Azdoufal is the security researcher who used Claude Code to help discover that every DJI Romo robot vacuum cleaner and a million baby monitors and security cameras were embarrassingly easy to hack. This time, he says he discovered over 985,000 photo IDs sitting on the public internet for any half-decent hacker to steal.

[…]

Traditionally, you’d need to provide a photo ID every time you wanted to get into a club. But with the verification system, the receptionist can pull up your stored identity documents and check if your face matches. There’s also an optional app called PuffPal that lets clubs scan a QR code for faster entry.

But when Azdoufal decompiled that PuffPal app, he explains in his report, he discovered that Nefos had no meaningful level of security.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-01): Craig Grannell:

I find it incredible that the UK government is about to create a cliff edge where teens will simultaneously be able to access social media and vote, having had no experience of the latter and with scant understanding of how algorithms work.

Update (2026-07-08): James Ball (via Nick Heer):

There are almost no truly public spaces on the internet. Everywhere we congregate is privately owned, even if it operates as a public space. But we seem somehow content to accept them as fiefdoms in their own right, beyond the reach of government. Instead of demanding that they function as safe and pleasant public spaces for all of us, we are asking our governments just to ban teenagers from them.

[…]

It is one thing to ban our children from one park when there are others nearby. It is quite another to ban them from every public space when there are no others on offer.

[…]

I am skeptical as to whether social media is as dangerous as some of its critics say. I am even more skeptical as to whether it is particularly dangerous to teens and young people. […] The central facet of my argument in this post is that wherever you land on the matters of the harms of social media, a ban for teenagers is the wrong response. If the harms are overstated, the policy is unnecessary. If they are not, it is an abdication.

Monday, June 29, 2026

What to Do With a Hot Mac

Howard Oakley:

Hot Macs have their own paradox: open Activity Monitor, select the CPU view, and at the top of the CPU % list will be kernel_task hogging the CPU cores with 100% or more, rather than its usual 4% or so. Kerb any temptation to kill it and hope it goes away, as it has taken control of your Mac to let it cool.

[…]

There are rare occasions when fans blow full on and kernel_task goes wild without any thermal problem. In Intel Macs, resetting the SMC is usually curative, but this could instead be the result of a fault in a thermal sensor, or in the SMC. Hardware diagnostics should tell you more. By far the most common cause of persistent problems is dust and debris in the air ducts, and in the case of some Intel Mac notebooks overheating of the left USB-C ports. For more details, see Apple’s note about kernel_task, which also confirms what I have written here.

[…]

If your Mac is showing early signs of thermal strain and still running, encourage heat loss by immediately[…]

Paul Haddad:

It boggles my mind that the biggest software company in the world, with total control of their hardware/software stack is totally incapable of shipping an OS that doesn’t include one or more daemons who just endlessly waste CPU cycles.

Bonus irony points because dasd’s purpose is supposedly to schedule low priority background processes.

Howard Oakley:

Continuing with the results from file compression, it’s straightforward to calculate the total energy required to compress the test file using the P and E cores:

  • When compressing using the ten P cores, power used was 51 W for a total of about 8.4 seconds, thus 428 J, or 43 J per core.
  • When compressing using the four E cores, power used was 255 mW for a total of about 150 seconds, thus 38 J, or 10 J per core.

[…]

In omitting GPU power from Energy Impact, many power- and energy-intensive tasks will appear far less demanding than they really are. This is becoming even more important now Apple silicon chips are being used increasingly to run AI computation locally.

Neither powermetrics nor Activity Monitor provide any estimates of power or energy used by other parts of a Mac, such as memory or the internal SSD, although those can also be important determinants of battery endurance and heat generation.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-02): Howard Oakley:

This article explains how you can improve your Mac’s cooling to cope better with extreme summer temperatures.

macOS California Adventure

Basic Apple Guy:

But what exactly is a Mavericks? Where is Sonoma? And how many Mac users could point to where Ventura or Tahoe on a map?

I decided to trace the history and real-world locations behind every California-inspired macOS release and the wallpapers used to market the them to the world. Enjoy.

Previously:

Shutting Down Notion Mail

Zac Hall:

Last year, Notion expanded its productivity suite to include Notion Mail, an AI-powered email client. Today, the company announced that it’s shutting down the Notion Mail inbox service this fall.

[…]

Today, more than half of Notion Mail users manage emails without ever opening their inbox. So, we’re going all in on using agents to run your inbox.

Previously:

Export Control for Fable and Mythos

Anthropic (tweet, Hacker News):

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

David Sacks (recently departed AI czar, via Dare Obasanjo, Hacker News):

Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.)

A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused.

Amrith Ramkumar and Robert McMillan (Hacker News):

The Trump administration’s decision to halt all foreign use of Anthropic’s most-capable AI models was prompted by conversations between Amazon.com Chief Executive Andy Jassy and U.S. officials including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, people familiar with the matter said.

Dare Obasanjo:

If Claude Mythos is as powerful and dangerous as Anthropic says it is then export controls are totally reasonable. After all, Biden put export controls on Nvidia GPUs for similar reasons.

That said, banning foreign worker Anthropic employees from Mythos reads more like retaliation than regulation.

Ben Thompson (via John Gruber):

Anthropic went on to make the case that non-universal jailbreaks were inevitable and also narrow, and that there was no evidence of a universal jailbreak; the jailbreak that was found, meanwhile, appears to have been reported by Amazon, which is notable given Amazon is both an investor in Anthropic and a major provider of inference to the company. As I write this, senior Anthropic staff are in Washington D.C. seeking to resolve what they insist is a misunderstanding, and which White House officials are suggesting is insouciance by the company’s leadership to legitimate national security concerns.

I don’t actually have much to add to the current conflict given how many facts are in dispute; what I am not surprised about is the fact that the conflict is happening: I already explained in Anthropic and Alignment why conflict between the U.S. government and Anthropic was inevitable. To that end, people who are arguing that Mythos isn’t powerful enough to warrant the government’s drastic action are missing the point: if it’s not powerful enough now, the next one will be, or the one after that, particularly now that models are increasingly useful in creating their successors.

[…]

The broader takeaway from that previous episode, however, is that Anthropic believes that they are the ones who should have final say over how Anthropic is used; given that they think only they should be developing leading edge AI, they by extension think that only they should have final say over AI generally. When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone.

Bruce Schneier:

The government’s actions won’t help. The problem isn’t any one particular model; it’s the general trend of increasing AI capabilities. And any real solution requires the sort of collective action that just isn’t possible right now.

[…]

The broader community had only a few days with Fable, but that time we learned some about its capabilities. Its difference is less the new model’s raw analytical and problem solving capabilities, and more that the model doesn’t need that sophisticated harness.

[…]

Human systems rely on so many norms that we scarcely recognize the existence of until they are broken. AIs naturally think outside the box, because they don’t have any real conception of what the box is or why it’s there in the first place.

There is no foolproof way to prevent people from using AI models to complete harmful tasks. There is no way to prevent the models from incidentally causing harm while completing benign tasks. AI models are no longer isolated from the real world. They browse the internet and answer emails.

Hayden Field:

Anthropic declined to comment multiple times this week about the state of the talks, saying there was no news to share. But the lack of news is the story here. After 14 days of high-intensity negotiations, nobody knows when or if Anthropic’s most powerful AI models will come back, let alone whether President Trump could expand his order to more companies with similar tech.

[…]

It’s not clear exactly why Anthropic and the administration remain at an impasse. One problem may be that there’s no clear framework for applying export controls to AI systems. Most companies making dual-use products — civilian systems with potential defense or military uses — can evaluate them using what’s essentially a checklist during the manufacturing and production process. Anthropic, however, is facing a complicated bureaucracy figuring out how to apply its rules from first principles.

[…]

Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of Luta Security, viewed a report about the Fable 5 vulnerability at Anthropic’s request. She thinks it’s significantly overblown. In a blog post, Moussouris detailed how researchers jailbroke guardrails that prevent Fable 5 from finding exploitable security holes, one of the unfettered Mythos 5’s scariest capabilities. […] In Moussouris’ eyes, however, this shouldn’t have triggered such a severe governmental action and is in fact an essential tool for AI coding.

Jared Perlo (Hacker News):

The U.S. government is allowing Anthropic to deploy its Mythos 5 model to a select group of customers and partners, according to a letter from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Anthropic that was seen by NBC News.

In the letter, Lutnick wrote that the government was confident in the guardrails Anthropic had put in place to allow trusted users to access the powerful AI system.

Julie Bort (Reddit):

It is now allowing Anthropic to make Mythos 5 available to more than 100 specific U.S. government agencies and companies, including allowing the non-American employees at those organizations to access to the model, both Semafor and Reuters report. This list also includes Anthropic’s own non-American employees, who were included in the original ban that forbade non-Americans from accessing the models.

[…]

Apparently, the administration did not address the release of Fable 5 in this directive.

It’s unclear what technical changes Anthropic may have made or what else they may have done to change Lutnick’s mind.

Kate Park (Hacker News):

On Wednesday, Chinese cybersecurity firm 360 reportedly unveiled Tulongfeng, an AI tool it says can go head-to-head with Anthropic’s Mythos.

Dare Obasanjo:

It seems inevitable that OpenAI and Anthropic will lobby the U.S. government to ban Chinese models in much the same way car companies effectively got Biden to ban Chinese EVs with 100% tariffs.

This puts them on a collision course with the hyperscalers like Microsoft who’ll happily host GLM & Kimi.

Previously:

Update (2026-07-01): Anthropic (tweet, Hacker News):

As of today, June 30, the export controls on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 have been lifted.

[…]

We have also restored access to Mythos 5 for a set of US organizations, following the US government’s approval on June 26. We continue to coordinate with the government to expand access to the broader set of domestic and international partners in the Glasswing program.

[…]

Importantly, the reported technique did not expose any unique Mythos-level cyber capabilities. The behavior reflected a borderline case for Fable 5’s safeguards—as we will explain below, there are some tasks that are unlikely to be dangerous but are nonetheless blocked by the safeguards out of an abundance of caution. The reported technique allowed access to one such behavior, but it only involved routine defensive cybersecurity work.

Even so, we moved quickly to address the reported bypass. Working closely with the government, we trained an improved safety classifier that targets and blocks the behavior described in the report. Users will be notified if a request to Fable 5 is blocked, and the request will instead be sent to Opus 4.8.

Friday, June 26, 2026

Xcode 26.6

Apple (xip, downloads):

Xcode 26.6 includes Swift 6.3 and SDKs for iOS 26.5, iPadOS 26.5, tvOS 26.5, macOS 26.5, and visionOS 26.5. Xcode 26.6 supports on-device debugging in iOS 15 and later, tvOS 15 and later, watchOS 8 and later, and visionOS. Xcode 26.6 requires a Mac running macOS Tahoe 26.2 or later.

[…]

Google Gemini is now available in the coding assistant.

Xcode adds support for the Agent Client protocol.

[…]

Launch Time similar-app goals have been refined for improved accuracy, establishing new baselines.

Previously:

Boom Mobile Restructuring

Our phones stopped working this morning, or perhaps last night, but everything looked fine on Boom’s Web site. I contacted their support, and as always they got back right away, but this time with bad news:

I’m deeply sorry to share that after careful consideration, we’ve made the very difficult decision to restructure through Chapter 11 bankruptcy. If this isn’t successful, then we will discontinue Boom! Mobile service. I know this is upsetting, and I want to personally thank you for trusting us. We’re committed to making your transition to another provider if you choose to do so.

So now I’m looking for another Verizon MVNO. The options and pricing seem to have changed a lot since the last time I was picking a plan. Some possibilities: US Mobile, Visible, RedPocket, Tello, Boost Mobile, and Total Wireless.

See also: Reddit.

Update (2026-06-29): I ended up going with US Mobile. I like that they offer smaller plans without unlimited data and that you can add extra lines sharing the same bucket of data for only $8. So far, so good. It was an easy switch—even for Visual Voicemail, which has given me trouble in the past. Their Web site works much better than Boom’s, which used to be good but had gotten unreliable in recent years.

Om Malik, RIP

Ryan Merket (Hacker News, Wikipedia):

Om Malik (@Om), the journalist, GigaOm founder, photographer and True Ventures partner whose work tracked the commercial internet from dial-up optimism to AI saturation, died on June 24 at Stanford Hospital after what his family described as a long health journey with his heart, according to a post on On my Om. He was 59.

[…]

That exchange was small. It was also the whole system in miniature. A founder could reach the editor directly. The editor was awake. The story was not filtered through a communications department, a conference stage or a banked embargo calendar. Malik helped build that operating system for Silicon Valley media: fast, conversational, porous, technically literate and dangerously close to the companies it covered.

Malik was not just one of the people who covered Silicon Valley. He became one of the people Silicon Valley used to understand itself. That was the gift and the complication of his career. He was a reporter, then a founder, then a venture investor, and he never entirely gave up any of those identities. He could spot a network shift early because he had spent decades watching pipes, protocols, business models and human ego interact at close range. He could also be too close to the machine he covered, a tension that defined the blog era he helped build.

[…]

On my Om, became less about scoops and more about judgment. He wrote about technology, photography, business cycles, health, memory and the human cost of living inside the network. He preferred the long arc to the launch post.

We were mutual readers for many years, and I respected him as a thoughtful writer, but I didn’t know him well. He always seemed like a kind soul, and reading the many comments about his passing that really comes across. When he announced the break recently, I hoped he was off to take some more wonderful photos.

Benjamin Clymer:

Through it all, Om Malik was just a kind, warm, funny (af), true, and honest friend who helped me get to the good times and ride out the bad. He’d been through a lot and wasn’t afraid to tell you all about it. He was a rare breed indeed in many ways, but having the confidence to show kindness and vulnerability in the world of venture capital is something that should be studied.

Om Malik (2020):

Given that I have been writing three decades, including eighteen-plus years a blogger, I am hardly surprised that I am repeatedly asked: how should I write? And my answer is always the same — write like a human.

Update (2026-06-29): See also:

“If You Can’t Stand By a Feature, You Shouldn’t Launch It.”

Jason Snell, on The Talk Show:

[… Apple] decides to do a big feature. The circus comes to town, they build the feature, they launch it, they leave town, and that feature sits there.

And the problem is, there’s bugs, things are broken, and in Year Two, you’re like, “You’re going to fix all the things that were broken in the thing you shipped last year, right?” And in the last decade, I would say, a lot of times what happens is they just don’t. And if you’re lucky, they’ll fix it Year Three or Year Four, […] give it a polish.

The thing that troubles me most about Apple software quality in general is the feeling like they don’t have the people to own the thing that they launch. They build the thing that they launch, and then those people go off and do something else, and nobody is maintaining and improving the thing that’s there.

Via Marcin Wichary:

I think this is spot on, and said really well. Are you honest with yourself about resourcing and focus for right after the launch and then later on? Have you really thought about worst case and best case scenarios vis-à-vis bug reports, latency, user feedback, and craft/​quality however you define it? Have you actually started to make room for those outcomes ahead of time?

For me, an ongoing tension with Apple is Finder, so central to my (and I imagine many people’s?) use of a Mac, but rewritten at some point eons ago in a new framework that caused all sorts of problems, and then pretty much abandoned like a proverbial American city’s downtown.

Revealing files in the Finder and Mail’s table view sort indicators have been broken for me since Big Sur. Disk Utility still doesn’t work as well as before its El Capitan rewrite. But these aren’t even big new features.

Jeff Johnson:

This is what happens when you release major OS updates every year: you have to keep launching new features.

Previously:

Update (2026-06-29): Jesper:

The issue really, that Jason pins down, is that it’s so easy to use incremental development, agile development, sprints, whatever, as a method to do the wrong thing. If you have a year-long schedule, it is easier to say “I will take care of the Finder”, and within the scope of that is a number of features that need be built, but there’s also room for ongoing maintenance. Within the confines of sprint planning, within a culture that sheepishly focuses on the wrong thing, or is obsessed by following the wrong number, or worries about the internal politics of appearing to not have it together, all of a sudden the same work, scheduled into 3 week long sprints, looks like poison.

I know of plenty of organizations that make this work. That have the maturity and discipline and culture to see bugs and defects for what they are, to allocate plenty of time to them and to focus extra time on them with regular intervals.

Qualcomm Acquiring Modular

Chris Lattner:

I’m excited to share that Qualcomm is acquiring Modular: this will accelerate our path to unifying accelerated compute with an open platform. This will also mark a new era in open software development for Qualcomm.

[…]

This will accelerate our progress and path, and their vision is expansive: [spanning] edge to cloud, CPU, GPU, NPU, and custom ASICs and perhaps more.

Modular (Hacker News):

As AI scales, efficiency, not capability, becomes a constraint. Performance-per-watt drives the cost of inference, and cost determines what scales. Meeting this demand requires more than hardware. Developers need software that connects system-level optimization with heterogeneous, disaggregated compute, turning silicon performance into reliable and efficient AI services across accelerators, environments, and use cases.

Previously:

Thursday, June 25, 2026

Apple Hardware Price Hikes

Osmond Chia (Hacker News, 9To5Mac, Engadget):

Apple plans to raise the prices of its products as the cost of the memory chips it uses has surged, the technology giant’s boss has said.

Tim Cook, Apple’s outgoing chief executive, told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that price increases were “unavoidable” as the situation around memory chips had become “unsustainable”.

Nick Heer:

During its holiday quarter, Apple’s profit margin on hardware was 40.7%; in its most recent quarter, that dropped to 38.7% — a remarkable figure for physical products. It is these high margins that led to analysts like Ming-Chi Kuo to claim Apple would keep prices more-or-less stable and offset the additional costs through its even higher-margin — 76.7% — services business.

Adam Engst:

Winkler suggests in his summary that Apple has absorbed the cost increases so far because it has always treated memory and storage upgrades as profit centers. That’s no surprise to the Apple community, which has long chafed at Apple’s premium prices for memory and storage. But now, for instance, the price of standalone internal flash storage is closer to and sometimes even higher than Apple’s upgrade prices.

[…]

Obviously, Apple could absorb such costs and more if it were to accept dramatically lower gross margins. But as high-minded and customer-focused as Apple is, the company is still in business to maximize profit.

I was recently looking to add another SSD and a few hard drives to my setup. Normally, prices go down over time, but currently it SSDs are about double the price I paid last year, and large hard drives are almost triple.

John Gruber (Hacker News):

Apple, to my recollection, has never before issued a warning about price increases. Keep in mind that Apple deals with prices in a very different way from its competitors. For Apple, prices are part of a product’s brand, so they don’t fluctuate with component costs.

Chance Miller (Hacker News, MacRumors, Mac Power Users):

Apple has raised prices across the board for many of its products today. MacBook Neo now starts at $699 (up from $599), while MacBook Air now starts at $1299 (up from $1099). Other impacted products include MacBook Pro, iPad, iPad Air, and many more. iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods pricing is unchanged.

Ben Lovejoy:

Earlier this week, I outlined three reasons for agreeing with Mark Gurman that the Apple price increases could be imminent, and that indeed proved to be the case.

iPhones have escaped the increases, but they are otherwise both broad-reaching and pretty dramatic. But perhaps the most surprising thing is that the MacBook Neo has been included …

Tim Hardwick:

Apple today increased the starting price of the Mac mini with M4 Pro chip by $200, taking the higher-tier model up to $1,599 on its online store.

[…]

Apple had already raised the Mac mini’s effective starting price in May by discontinuing the $599 configuration with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, leaving the $799 model with a 512GB SSD as the new entry-level option. Interestingly, the 16GB RAM / 256GB storage option has now been reinstated, but the $799 starting price remains.

Stephen Hackett has a table of the old and new prices.

Nick Heer:

Pre-announce it with a small delay, thus giving you a temporary sales boost as people scramble to get their orders in at current prices, and to soften the blow when the increases hit.

Matt Birchler:

I also can’t help but see that “we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac,” statement as implying more increases are coming. The iPhone price increase seems inevitable, and my money is on it starting with the new models in September.

Simon Sharwood:

Micron CEO, president and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra explained the SCAs in prepared remarks delivered during the company’s Q3 earnings call. He explained that Micron has signed 16 SCAs, most of them covering 2026 to 2030, and that they involve a commitment to buy a certain quantity of product and pay for it in a pricing band that has a floor and a ceiling price. The floor price covers the historically high gross margins mentioned above, and the ceiling price means those who commit to an SCA are insulated if memory prices go even higher.

Previously:

Update (2026-06-26): Hartley Charlton:

Micron’s chief business officer has hinted, without calling it out by name, that Apple’s tough supplier negotiations contributed to the conditions behind the global memory shortage.

M.G. Siegler:

For years, Apple has been able to dominate and dictate to their suppliers thanks to their scale. But the Asian operations which Tim Cook so famously set up, have been upended, like most everything else, by AI. From TSMC on down, Apple is no longer the customer dictating terms for the entire industry, it’s now the company which has taken over the mantle as the most valuable one in the world: NVIDIA.

Joe Rossignol:

Apple’s stock price dropped 6% on the day — its largest single-day loss since April 2025.

John Gruber:

Here’s a table with most of the base models whose prices increased[…]

[…]

iPad prices mostly went up 20–25%, but the hardest hit was the no-adjective base model, which rose almost 30%, from $350 to $450. That’s a big increase for a product meant to appeal to buyers for whom price is obviously their biggest concern.

John Gruber:

Anyone who purchased a MacBook Neo for $600 (or $500 with education discount) between March and this morning purchased the lowest-price MacBook Apple has ever sold — and perhaps the lowest-price MacBook they ever will sell.

Joe Rossignol:

Apple’s full statement:

The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.

[…]

Apple indicating that it needs to “begin” raising prices suggests that additional price increases might occur later.

Jason Martin:

“and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.”

I find this to be the most confusing part. Do we believe this to be a genuine effort? Even if so, how would a “solution” actually work? Would they actually lower prices if a solution were to be found?

They also just said they “will continue working” on bringing Siri AI to the EU right before saying in a different venue that they’d stopped working on it.

Jeff Johnson:

In a statement about the price increases, Apple said, “We can no longer shield customers from our 39% gross margin.”

Christina Warren:

Like, truly laughable. $200 for a 64GB Apple TV 4K that is almost 4 years old?

John Gruber (Mastodon):

But even setting aside the prices of competing devices, it just feels wrong to hike prices this much for four-year-old hardware running five-year-old pre-AI silicon. The higher-end model’s price went up 67 percent!

The only way this makes sense is if these prices are really meant for the upcoming new hardware, and those new models are more ambitious home hubs that warrant $200–250 prices.

Previously:

Update (2026-06-29): Zac Hall:

The Financial Times reports that Apple is seeking clearance from the Trump administration to purchase memory chips from a blacklisted Chinese company. The move would help it meet demand for product manufacturing during the ongoing global memory supply shortage.

Perhaps this is the “working tirelessly” that Apple was referring to.

Ben Lovejoy:

Apple previously sought permission from the Biden administration to do the same thing back in 2022, and that did not go well – despite promising to use the chips only for iPhones sold in China …

John Gruber:

Something happens — outside the company’s control — that causes those essential components to rise in price significantly.

[…]

What you cannot do is hold a philosophically consistent logically coherent view where your answer to how a company should respond in such a scenario is contingent on what the “something happens” is that caused component prices to rise.

Maybe—but that’s only relevant if you accept the premise that it was out of Apple’s control. I don’t know the details of the deals, but there’s an argument that the rising costs to Apple are to some extent Apple’s “fault.” If Tim Cook gets credit for helping suppliers expand capacity and locking in contracts for memory at low prices over the past two decades, doesn’t the same logic apply in reverse? The AI-driven shortages were foreseeable—and publicly discussed years ago. If you believe Micron that Apple chose to prioritize its own past numbers rather than securing its future supply, doesn’t that make today’s situation different from, say, a tsunami that unexpectedly wiped out a bunch of factories? I don’t know exactly how the increased costs should be apportioned, but I think the reasons for the costs are relevant, and I don’t think they’re fully exogenous.

sid:

If Apple has the balls to raise the prices of their products, they should also have the balls to increase trade-in values for older devices.

Update (2026-06-30): Kif Leswing:

But while tech giants like Apple and Microsoft, which both announced price hikes this week, have a hefty cash cushion, supply chain leverage and customers numbering in the millions or billions, a much wider swath of businesses face potentially dire straits. Most consumer electronics companies have little margin to spare and can’t confidently raise prices in an economy already grappling with inflationary pressures.

GoPro, the struggling maker of action cameras, warned this month that it might go out of business after memory costs shot up between 80% and 115% at the end of the first quarter. And shares of speaker maker Sonos are down 23% this year as memory prices pressure margins.

Update (2026-07-06): Basic Apple Guy:

Below you’ll find a bunch of charts chronicling the current state of RAMmaggedon, the global memory-chip crisis we currently find ourselves in.

Tony Krueger, RIP

Raymond Chen:

Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported the game Chip’s Challenge to Windows for the Windows Entertainment Pack. But that’s probably not the code he wrote that touched the most people.

Tony worked on Word 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, then on Word for OS/2 and Word for Mac, then returned to Word 6.0 and several versions beyond that. He probably holds the record for “most versions of Word shipped.”

[…]

Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work. And when it found a problem, instead of waiting for you to trigger a spell check, it immediately drew red squiggles under potentially-misspelled words (and later green squiggles under potential grammatical errors).

Update (2026-06-30): See also: Marcin Wichary and Jon Snader.

WebKit Always Enables the Copy Menu Item in Every App

John Gruber (Mastodon):

In most Mac apps, since the dawn of time, if there is nothing selected to be copied, the Edit → Copy (and Cut) commands are disabled. If you invoke the ⌘C shortcut while the Copy command is disabled, you hear an alert sound, letting you know that whatever you thought you were copying could not be copied because it wasn’t selected. That beep is useful context. This is proper behavior for all menu items — if they’re not available to do something, they should be disabled, and invoking a disabled menu item keyboard shortcut should beep. In any app that uses WebKit, since early in 2025, the Copy command is always enabled when a WebKit view has focus — but if nothing is selected, you get useless clipboard data that can’t actually be pasted anywhere. (And whatever was on your clipboard is now gone, or pushed back if you use a clipboard history utility.)

Jeff Johnson:

I decided to file a bug report on behalf of Gruber: Copy main menu item is enabled with no selection in the web page. I subsequently learned that the first appearance of the bug was January 2025 in the WebKit source code, February 2025 in Safari Technology Preview 213, and March 2025 in Safari 18.4, as a result of attempting to fix another bug, document.execCommand("copy") only triggers if there is a selection, reported in 2016, nine years prior!

[…]

Sadly, my bug report was closed with the resolution “won’t fix.” The refusal appears to be based on a misunderstanding[…]

Jeff Johnson:

LOL that was fast.

Sometimes Apple is hilarious.

Previously:

Xcode 27’s Device Hub

Apple:

You manage all the devices that appear in Xcode as run destinations using Device Hub.

Run your app on simulated devices in Device Hub to quickly evaluate new features and fix bugs, and to see how your interface works on devices that you don’t have physical access to. Run your app on physical devices to test features or services that have hardware dependencies or investigating performance issues. For more information, see Running your app on simulated or physical devices.

Fatbobman:

Device Hub is undoubtedly a major surprise. It integrates simulators, physical device management, system state testing, and dynamic size adjustment into a new workflow. Its impact on day-to-day development experience may be more direct than that of many individual APIs. That said, iPhone apps now also support dynamic size adjustment, which will bring new challenges for developers, especially in terms of data and state organization. Adapting to different sizes is not something that can be solved merely by relying on dynamic layout containers. In many scenarios, large and small sizes correspond to very different navigation logic.

Collin Allen (Mastodon):

Xcode 27 introduced, among other new features, a new Device Hub app for developers that takes the place of the Simulator app. Where Simulator relied on separate windows for each device, Device Hub brings them all together into a single window where each simulated device is the detail view from a source list of devices on the left. It’s a more organized approach, made necessary by the wide variety of platforms Apple and Apple platform app developers have to build and test against.

[…]

In releases prior to Xcode 27, you could resolve this by importing the root public certificate into the simulated OS. On iOS, this could be done by dragging and dropping the .cer file onto the Simulator device window. Nothing would appear to happen, but you could then navigate to Settings, General, About, Certificate Trust Settings and mark the certificate as trusted.

[…]

In Xcode 27 with Device Hub, this process is much more uniform. […] While this new process does require you to wrap certificates in an Apple Configurator profile, this is much more consistent with how Apple’s device management system works, as it relies on signed profiles with policies, not loose .cer files. And now, just by adding the .mobileconfig to the Profiles section of the device inspector, the embedded certificate is automatically marked as trusted, greatly speeding up installation on new virtual devices.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I get what Apple is trying to do with the Device Hub, but it’s nowhere near as usable and as useful as the iOS Simulator (in this seed)

Adam Overholtzer:

Device Hub is missing the “pixel accurate” and “point accurate” zoom options and that’s not acceptable.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Maybe someday the Simulator/Device Hub might even be able to output screenshots in the same orientation as the emulated device 😛

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Thanks to the remote control / screen sharing features of Device Hub, I can remotely navigate to Settings and start a software update on all my iOS27 devices without having to go collect them around the house 👌

Steve Troughton-Smith:

For all of Apple’s nonsense about adding iPhone Mirroring to the EU, the new Device Hub (iOS Simulator) lets you remote-control your physical iOS devices just fine. I don’t think the DMA has an opt-out for developer tools 😛

Steve Troughton-Smith:

It’s such a shame for now that Xcode 27’s Device Hub doesn’t support remote screen sharing with iOSes earlier than 27. I wish the screen sharing functionality was part of the developer disk image, and backported to iOS 26 and even iOS 18. Having a physical device plugged in somewhere is so much faster than booting a Simulator.

Previously:

Update (2026-06-26): Léo Natan:

Xcode 27’s “Device Hub” is a broken shitshow, but most importantly, it lacks the Debug menu, where you could toggle slow animations and simulate memory warnings. Apple works tirelessly to destroy any good tool they used to have.

He has a thread of issues. Hopefully these will be addressed before it’s out of beta.

Update (2026-07-01): Craig Hockenberry:

The Device Hub sometimes doesn’t kill CoreSimulator processes when you quit the app (not sure if this is a bug or intentional). Given that each device uses several hundred processes, the memory/processing impact is significant.

You’ll probably want to keep an eye on how many you have running: use right-click on the simulator in the list to “Shut Down” as necessary.

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

Swift Package Index Joins Apple

Ted Kremenek, Dave Verwer, and Sven A. Schmidt (Hacker News):

Bringing Swift Package Index to Apple allows us to build on its strong foundations while preserving its vision and expertise. Together, we’re building a comprehensive package registry to serve the Swift community’s evolving needs.

[…]

Swift Package Index will continue to operate as it does today. You can continue to rely on it to discover packages, check compatibility, and explore documentation. As we embark on this new phase, our goal is to accelerate development and introduce new features that make discovering and evaluating packages even better.

[…]

Swift Package Index will remain open source.

Helge Heß:

A little sad that this era ends. SPI was a stronghold of Apple independence, a package index run by independent and trusted individuals.

Swift 6.4

Swift 6.4 is now available in beta form with Xcode 27. The Swift Evolution proposals are listed here.

What’s new in Swift:

Discover the latest language advancements, including updates for everyday ergonomics, improved concurrency, and safer high-performance code. Explore workflow and language interoperability improvements and updates in embedded Swift.

Build real-time apps and services with gRPC and Swift:

Build engaging live experiences with gRPC in your Swift app and backend. gRPC is an open-source RPC framework designed for high-performance, bidirectional streaming APIs. Explore how the gRPC Swift package provides a modern, safe runtime built with Swift concurrency.

Explore numerical computing in Swift with MLX:

Bring NumPy-style computing natively to Swift with MLX Swift. Discover how to eliminate cross-language friction in your machine learning workflows by handling image processing, tensor operations, and neural network training in a single, type-safe environment. Explore the APIs that let you leverage GPU acceleration while enjoying the compiler, tooling, and debugging experience you already know.

Swift Group Lab:

Join us online for a deep dive into WWDC26 with Apple engineers and designers to ask questions, get advice, and follow the discussion about the week’s biggest Swift announcements.

Matt Massicotte:

There’s a voting system. And that means a number of questions weren’t selected. This time I copied those down and I thought it could be fun to take a shot at answering the ones that are more in my area.

Xcode 27 Beta 2 Release Notes:

The Swift dependency scanner has been optimized to avoid redundant setup work and header searches when looking up Clang modules during a single dependency-scan action, substantially improving scanning performance.

As a consequence of this change, every Clang module reachable from a single Swift dependency-scan action must have a unique module name. If two module maps visible to the same scan declare a Clang module with the same name, the scan may report an error.

[…]

System now provides Swift APIs for the C stat, lstat, fstat, and fstatat system calls. This includes a new Stat type with initializers from FilePath, FileDescriptor, or a C string; FilePath.stat() and FileDescriptor.stat() instance methods; and supporting types (FileType, FileMode, FileFlags, UserID, GroupID, DeviceID, and Inode).

Wade Tregaskis:

The final piece of the Prospective Vision for Accessors, this allows for more efficient accessors on structs, in a nutshell.

[…]

Now there’s a safer version of the existing withUnsafeTemporaryAllocation (first introduced in Swift 5.6). It works just like you’d expect. It comes in both “raw bytes” and typed elements versions, just like its unsafe predecessor.

[…]

The new isTriviallyIdentical(to:) method offers a guaranteed-fast way to check two objects for equality. It is essentially an optimised version of the existing equality condition provided by Equatable and the == operator. It’s useful because it guarantees O(1) time complexity, whereas == makes no formal guarantees at all (and for many types is O(N) or worse). But unlike the existing identity comparison operator === – also O(1) – it promises to do more than just tell if two objects are the exact same pointer, and it works on value types (not just reference types).

[…]

These new types generalise the existing patterns of borrowed and mutable references, that have previously existed in Swift in much more restricted forms (e.g. inout parameters are essentially MutableRef parameters, and Span & MutableSpan are array equivalents).

There’s now a built-in function for demangling Swift symbol names, in the Runtime module (that’s bundled with the Swift toolchain, alongside the stdlib etc).

Khoa Pham:

As Apple has aligned OS version numbers across platforms, Swift 6.4 takes the next step by letting you collapse repetitive availability attributes into a single anyAppleOS token.

[…]

There are situations where you need to call a deprecated API while you plan a migration, or audit a critical function for unsafe usage, without letting those concerns bleed into the rest of the project. The new @diagnose attribute handles both cases.

[…]

Some work should complete even after a task is cancelled, like flushing a file to avoid corruption. withTaskCancellationShield wraps a region where Task.isCancelled always returns false.

Antoine van der Lee:

Swift 6.4 implements SE-0493: Support async calls in defer bodies. This is one of those changes that feels obvious once you need it.

[…]

Swift 6.4 improves error handling for unstructured tasks through SE-0520: Discardable result use in Task initializers. The change helps you catch a subtle bug: creating a throwing task and then ignoring its returned task handle.

[…]

Swift 6.4 also implements SE-0530: Async Result Support.

[…]

Swift 6.4 implements SE-0518: ~Sendable for explicitly marking non-Sendable types. It allows you to communicate that a type has been audited and should not conform to Sendable.

Slava Pestov:

I thought it would be a good time to detail some of the type checker performance improvements we worked on since I shared the type checker performance roadmap last year. I’m also going to outline a couple of things we plan on looking at next.

Previously:

Swift 6.3

Holly Borla and Joe Heck (Hacker News):

Swift 6.3 introduces the @c attribute, which lets you expose Swift functions and enums to C code in your project. […] @c also works together with @implementation. This lets you provide a Swift implementation for a function declared in a C header[…]

[…]

Swift 6.3 introduces module selectors to specify which imported module Swift should look in for an API used in your code. If you import more than one module that provides API with the same name, module selectors let you disambiguate which API to use[…]

[…]

Provide pre-specialized implementations of a generic API for common concrete types using @specialize.

[…]

Guarantee inlining — a compiler optimization that expands the body of a function at the call-site — for direct calls to a function with @inline(always).

[…]

Expose the implementation of a function in an ABI-stable library to clients with @export(implementation). This allows the function to participate in more compiler optimizations.

The Swift Evolution proposals are listed here.

Florian Pircher:

I love that I can now name my module the same as the primary/only type of the module without making the module namespace unreachable.

Jordan Rose:

Congrats to my Swift colleagues for #finally pushing @c over the finish line! Been a long time coming.

Previously:

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

iOS 27 Recovery

Hartley Charlton:

To use the feature, users must turn the device off, then hold the side button to power it on. The Apple logo appears as it would during a normal boot, but holding the button for an extended duration brings up a progress bar, and the device then launches into the new recovery environment rather than continuing into iOS or iPadOS as normal. The process mirrors how recovery mode is triggered on Apple silicon Macs by holding the power button.

The new recovery screen offers five options: Recovery Assistant, Software Update, Diagnostics Mode, Erase All Content and Settings, and Recovery Mode.

Previously:

RCS in iOS 27

Ryan Christoffel:

Today following iOS 27 beta 2’s arrival, Aaron Perris discovered that the update adds at least two key RCS improvements:

  1. Proper reaction support, so no more “Aaron loved an image” messages
  2. In-line replies

Previously:

SwiftData in appleOS 27

SwiftData updates:

Section your query results by creating your query with a macro that takes a sectionBy parameter, as listed on the Additional query macros page.

Use types that conform to Codable in a model, including types you don’t control directly, by using the codable option for Schema.Attribute.

Receive real-time updates to models that match specified fetch criteria by using the ResultsObserver type.

Observe remote model changes with the HistoryObserver type.

What’s new in SwiftData:

Discover the latest enhancements to SwiftData. We’ll show you how to persist custom and third-party types using Codable, and group fetched data into sections in your SwiftUI app. We’ll also explore how to observe data store changes anywhere else using ResultsObserver and HistoryObserver, giving you the flexibility to drive powerful state objects and react precisely to model updates.

Again, there seems to be nothing new in Core Data this year, nor any communication about it. There’s still no interoperability for object IDs. The SwiftData changes seem fine but don’t really address the new framework’s deficiencies relative to Core Data. It seems like there are still basic problems with threading. I just don’t understand how Apple is deciding what to prioritize with this framework.

With SwiftUI, the bones seem questionable, but at least we can see that Apple is full steam ahead, with substantial progress to address limitations and pain points. SwiftData seemed to have better bones and is much less ambitious. Getting it right seemed like just a matter of follow through. But, for some inexplicable reason, it seems to lack the resources and/or urgency to reach its potential. And even though SwiftUI is clearly the chosen one, AppKit remains in development. Meanwhile, Core Data seems to be abandoned, even though SwiftData feels more like a side quest than a genuine attempt to supplant it.

The implicit message, for those who have build the core of their app on top of Apple’s old persistence framework, seems to be that Apple is not looking out for their needs. Core Data will surely get maintenance to the extent that Apple’s own apps need it, but there’s no evidence of a future or even a migration plan. The answer, I guess, is third-party frameworks, but that’s not an easy migration, either, since none is even as close a match as SwiftData.

Add persistence with SwiftData:

Experience SwiftData in action as we add persistence to an existing app. We’ll show you how to define your data models and seamlessly integrate persistent data with SwiftUI. You’ll also learn foundational skills for managing your app’s state using this expressive, declarative API.

SwiftData Group Lab:

Join us online for a deep dive into WWDC26 with Apple engineers and designers to ask questions, get advice, and follow the discussion about the week’s biggest SwiftData announcements.

macOS Golden Gate 27 Beta Release Notes:

Fixed: You might experience a deadlock for @Query when saving a ModelContext on a background actor while scheduling new async tasks for a ModelActor.

Paul Hudson:

I am so pleased to say these words: IT IS A BIG YEAR FOR SWIFTDATA! 🎉

Mohammad Azam:

SwiftData predicates can now work directly with enum values, resulting in cleaner models and simpler query code.

[…]

In iOS 27, Apple introduced support for compound predicates through the Predicate(all:) and Predicate(any:) initializers, making it easier to build queries dynamically based on user input.

I’m not sure why that took so long.

The framework is gradually moving beyond simple demos and becoming easier to use in larger, more sophisticated projects.

[…]

iOS 27 is the first release where many of the framework’s early rough edges have started to disappear.

Matt Massicotte:

Results of my now-yearly check to see if SwiftData’s ModelActor continues to sometimes run code on the main thread: yes it does

Fatbobman:

Compared with @Query gaining support for section fetches, and ResultsObserver enabling observation of query result changes outside views, I am more interested in @Attribute(.codable). It provides a clearer storage intent and gives developers a way to avoid falling into the black box of composition.

Of course, @Attribute(.codable) is not a silver bullet. It is more like a clearly defined escape hatch SwiftData provides for opaque Codable types: suitable for storing external types that you cannot model yourself, but still genuinely need to persist. The cost is that this content cannot participate in SwiftData’s predicate, sort, or migration awareness. Precisely for this reason, its value lies not in being “more powerful,” but in being “more explicit.”

However, SwiftData still does not provide cloud syncing for public / shared data, nor have I seen a clearer signal of performance improvements. These issues will continue to limit its adoption. For many developers, SwiftData this year feels more like it is filling key gaps rather than making a leap significant enough to fundamentally change confidence in it.

Helge Heß:

Codable types in SwiftData seem pretty lame given that SQLite absolutely does have JSON support and does support queries on it?

But the funnier thing in the MKMapItem.Identifier example is that MKMapItem.Identifier is a RawRepresentable==String, so it could actually be stored as a String in the store.

Previously:

Monday, June 22, 2026

CrashReportExtension

CrashReportExtension:

The Crash Report Extension framework allows you to perform analysis and produce a report when your app crashes. Your crash-handling code executes out-of-process, rather than from a signal handler or other in-process techniques.

You implement your handler by writing an app extension that conforms to the CrashReporterExtension protocol. The system calls your processCrashReport(process:) method when the app crashes. Use the CrashedProcess parameter to inspect the state of the crashed app by retrieving a crash reason, symbolicating relevant addresses, and communicating with the process over a read-only Mach port. After collecting the crash data, you can send a report back to your own server.

[…]

Crash Report Extension is available on iOS 27 and later. It isn’t available to Catalyst-based macOS apps, or on iOS apps running on Mac computers with Apple silicon.

The top of the page says “macOS 27.0+,” so I guess this means it does work for regular AppKit and SwiftUI Mac apps. It’s great to finally have a supported way to do this.

I don’t know why they can’t just give you the crash report text or .ips JSON directly, though. It looks like you have to use Mach IPC with the corpsePort to get the backtrace for each thread and then use the extension API to symbolicate the addresses. Even then, I’m not sure you can get all the information that’s in a standard crash report, such as the Application Specific Backtrace. Maybe you can find the address for gCRAnnotations/__crashreporter_info__ and load it with mach_vm_read?

Previously:

Friday, June 19, 2026

SwiftUI in appleOS 27

macOS Golden Gate 27 Beta Release Notes:

AsyncImage now automatically caches downloaded images using HTTP caching protocols, allowing servers to control caching behavior via standard headers.

[…]

Xcode 27 introduces a new @State implementation that avoids this repeated evaluation. This new behavior back-deploys to iOS 17 aligned OSes. The new @State is implemented with a Swift macro. It is largely source compatible with the property wrapper version, with a few exceptions.

[…]

Text views now support TextRenderer.

[…]

In apps built with the 27.0 SDKs, the new ReadableDocument and WritableDocument protocols support asynchronous reading and writing, progress reporting, and direct access to document URLs. New DocumentGroup initializers that adopt these protocols let you disable document creation for editing-only apps and present custom UI before any document is opened.

[…]

TextField respects custom font and color styling applied to its prompt.

[…]

List accepts drops in two cases that previously didn’t work: drags with compatible transfer representations are accepted into reorderable content even when the .reorderableItem transfer type isn’t present, and a .dropDestination(…) modifier declared on a list item now performs the drop.

SwiftUI updates:

Build your project in Xcode 27 or later to construct type-agnostic content from closures that you mark with ContentBuilder, which serves as the unified replacement for type-specific builders like ToolbarContentBuilder and CommandsBuilder.

Add reordering by drag-and-drop in containers such as lists, stacks, grids, or custom layouts with reorderable() and reorderContainer(for:isEnabled:move:).

Add custom swipe actions to views in containers such as scroll views, stacks, grids, or custom layouts using swipeActions(edge:allowsFullSwipe:content:onPresentationChanged:) and swipeActionsContainer().

[…]

Use the visibilityPriority(_:) modifier to prioritize important toolbar actions so SwiftUI keeps them visible as space shrinks, moving lower-priority items to the overflow menu first.

[…]

Present an alert or confirmation dialog from an optional data item or error object, and use that data to produce the content and title[…]

What’s new in SwiftUI:

Explore the latest additions to SwiftUI and discover how they can improve your apps. We’ll introduce a new Document protocol with direct disk access and snapshot-based diffing for building high-performance apps; new APIs for reordering content in lists, grids, and sections; and toolbar enhancements including visibility priority and auto-minimizing behavior. We’ll also cover expanded presentation APIs — including swipe actions on any view — plus AsyncImage caching improvements and lazy state initialization for Observable types.

Use SwiftUI with AppKit and UIKit:

Discover how to incrementally adopt SwiftUI in your existing AppKit or UIKit app. We’ll show you how to use the Observation framework to automatically update your views, integrate SwiftUI components into an existing view hierarchy, and bring gesture recognizers into SwiftUI. We’ll also explore how to add complete SwiftUI scenes to your app without changing your overall architecture.

Dive into lazy stacks and scrolling with SwiftUI:

Discover the inner workings of lazy stacks in SwiftUI. We’ll explore how LazyVStack and LazyHStack estimate sizes, lazily load subviews, and prefetch content to deliver smooth scrolling experiences. We’ll also cover advanced performance optimizations, state management best practices, and tips for precise programmatic scrolling. To get the most out of this session, we recommend basic familiarity with SwiftUI layout using stacks.

Compose advanced graphics effects with SwiftUI:

Discover how to craft rich, custom experiences by creatively composing SwiftUI layout and graphics APIs. We’ll show you how to break down complex designs and use a creative pipeline to chain simple building blocks together. Learn how to draw with layer shaders, animate with timelines, and anchor views with alignment guides.

Build powerful drag and drop in SwiftUI:

Follow along as we build a game of Solitaire to explore the latest drag-and-drop capabilities in SwiftUI. We’ll show you how to use the new reordering API to let people arrange content, implement drag containers to move multiple items at once, and customize the drag-and-drop lifecycle to fit your app’s rules.

There are also a bunch of labs.

Natalia Panferova:

Up until now it was a property wrapper conforming to the DynamicProperty protocol, but in Xcode 27 it becomes a Swift macro. In this post we will look at what the change means for @Observable models stored in @State.

Malcolm Hall:

Only took 3 years lol!

Majid Jabrayilov:

SwiftUI also introduces a new prominent tab role. You can use the prominent role for trailing-separated tabs, similar to search.

[…]

Document-based apps get a refreshed look and feel, along with a performance boost. It looks like Xcode has started using these improvements, which might explain why we see so much work around document-based apps this year. And finally, Xcode introduces SwiftUI Specialist and What’s New in SwiftUI skills for agentic coding in Xcode.

Fatbobman:

For me, the biggest change in SwiftUI comes from its comprehensive support for document-based apps. It not only adds a large number of new APIs, but also shifts the mental model toward “observable document objects + asynchronous snapshots + dedicated readers / writers.” This is clearly better suited to complex document apps, and it also aligns more closely with the overall evolution of modern Swift around Observation and Concurrency.

The sessions also mentioned that SwiftUI continues to optimize layout- and container-related implementations, bringing noticeable performance improvements in some scenarios. This is an improvement developers have urgently needed. However, SwiftUI still does not provide the ability to create custom Lazy containers, which remains a clear disappointment.

Natalia Panferova:

iOS 27 introduces new reordering APIs that work with any container. We can mark dynamic content with reorderable() and define the scope of the interaction with reorderContainer(for:). SwiftUI handles the drag preview, insertion placeholder, and drop animation, while our code applies the resulting change to the model.

SwiftUI’s drag container APIs are also now available on iPhone and iPad, after previously being limited to macOS. They let us make items in a collection draggable without making the collection reorderable, and include multiple selected items in the same drag. The APIs also support lazy generation of transferable values and drag-session observation.

robb:

I love the new #SwiftUI Text selection but without a way to make selection span multiple Texts in a group, it doesn’t really address our needs at Linear – here’s hoping we see an update in a later seed 🤞

Natalia Panferova:

The NavigationTransition protocol has been available in SwiftUI since iOS 18, letting us control how views animate when pushed onto a NavigationStack and when presenting sheets and full-screen covers. We specify the transition using the navigationTransition(_:) modifier on the destination or presented view, and SwiftUI uses it instead of the default animation for that context. Before iOS 27, SwiftUI provided two built-in conforming types: AutomaticNavigationTransition, used via the automatic static value, which defers to the system default for the current context, and ZoomNavigationTransition, used via zoom(sourceID:in:), which animates the presented view expanding from a source view marked with matchedTransitionSource(). iOS 27 introduces CrossFadeNavigationTransition, a new built-in transition that cross-fades between views without requiring a source, and adds AnyNavigationTransition, a type eraser that lets us select a transition at runtime.

Kyle Howells:

The last few years watching WWDC has been a mixed experience for me, because I honestly believe Swift and SwiftUI are actively either bad or being made worst.

Yet every year, the problems I have with them are doubled down on, not improved.

Kyle-Ye:

The FB21333309 cache bug I submitted is now confirmed to be fixed on iOS 27.

Instead of introducing a new CacheKey like I suggested, SwiftUI team choose to move the intensity payload out of the FeedbackType enum to a new Payload enum and add a new payload var to SensoryFeedback storage.

dasdom:

A few weeks ago I realised that most iOS jobs require knowledge of SwiftUI. So I started to rebuild my Mastodon client in SwiftUI. Then I got an offer for a new job and accepted it. This means I can get back to working on the ObjC version. Feels good. :)

Previously:

Update (2026-06-23): Natalia Panferova:

iOS 27 adds new AsyncImage initializers that accept a URLRequest instead of a URL. We can now configure request headers, cache policy, and timeout interval while continuing to use the built-in loading and phase handling provided by AsyncImage. A new asyncImageURLSession(_:) modifier also lets us provide the URL session used by asynchronous images in a view hierarchy.

Apple Clearing App Store Clutter

Ed Hardy:

Finding useful software in the App Store is about to get easier. Apple is apparently preparing to remove what it describes as “opportunistic” apps that provide little value to iPhone and iPad users.

It already had a policy of not approving applications that are “indistinguishable from what’s already widely available.” This week, it quietly warned developers that it will start removing low-value software that doesn’t attract attention from users.

App Review Guidelines (News):

4.3 (b) Don’t submit apps that are indistinguishable from what’s already widely available. Opportunistically creating variants of existing app categories or popular apps degrades App Store discovery, reduces overall app quality, and harms both users and developers. Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store. Repeated submissions of this kind may lead to removal from the Apple Developer Program.

Previously:

Mandatory Apple Intelligence

Rodrigo Ghedin (Hacker News):

That show of respect for its customers may change with iOS/macOS 27. Reports suggest that, at least in the first beta, Apple Intelligence is mandatory[…]

[…]

“So what’s the problem?”, you might ask. Apple’s AI takes up several gigabytes of storage and leaves less headroom for RAM.

Brandon Vigliarolo:

Those are small inconveniences, however, compared to my biggest gripe with Siri AI: It’s completely ruined Spotlight.

[…]

The new Siri-first interface that presumes that if you’re searching for anything but an app or file, you must want Siri to feed you a few links of Apple Intelligence’s choosing.

Getting to a web search from a Spotlight query now requires multiple taps: Type your query, tap “Show Results” (careful: hitting enter will trigger Siri to craft a response, eliminating the possibility of seeing any actual Spotlight content), tap on “Show More” next to the list of Siri-surfaced web results, scroll down until you see Search Google (or whatever engine you have set as your default), then tap that.

Apple Intelligence used to be opt-in, but now it seems that you can’t even opt out. I had previously mentioned the removal of the switch in the context of hypocrisy, but it seems there are enough issues here for it to warrant its own post. Also, I had previously written that the switch was combined with Siri, meaning that you could turn off Apple Intelligence if you turned off Siri, too. I now doubt that’s the case.

John Gruber:

I’m thinking that asking for a switch to turn of “Apple Intelligence” systemwide is like asking for a switch to turn off Spotlight.

Indeed, we can turn off Spotlight, both the indexing (except, alas, for APFS Time Machine volumes) and the UI, and I think that’s a good thing.

Previously:

Thursday, June 18, 2026

macOS Touch

Dan Moren:

Second only in speculation to the folding iPhone might be the reported MacBook Pro that will be Apple’s first Mac with a touchscreen.

[…]

A preponderance of drawing related features are specifically making their way to the Mac, including both in Notes and in Freeform. Those features have existed on Apple’s touch-first platforms for some time, but this is their first jump to the Mac. While nominally this will work with your trackpad or even using an iPad as input, it’s not hard to imagine a future where you might be able to draw right on your Mac’s screen.

Joe Rossignol:

“MacBook Ultra” is the rumored name for a new high-end model above the MacBook Pro. The laptop is rumored to feature an OLED display, touch-screen capabilities, a Dynamic Island, a thinner design, and M6 Pro and M6 Max chips.

macOS 27 includes a trio of hints about touch-screen support and a Dynamic Island in particular.

Hartley Charlton:

macOS 27 Golden Gate adds pull-to-refresh support to the Mac, adopting one of iPhone and iPad’s most familiar gestures for the first time.

Hartley Charlton:

Apple has added direct touch input to Sidecar with macOS 27 Golden Gate and iPadOS 27, allowing users to tap and interact with macOS interface elements using a finger on their iPad for the first time.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Unsurprisingly, UIKit-based iOS and Catalyst apps seem to handle touchscreen macOS better than AppKit apps, with all the little touches like swipe-to-go-back that you might expect.

David Price:

In a post to Weibo on Thursday, the leaker known as Instant Digital made a characteristically terse comment on the upcoming product. “It’s 100% confirmed that the MacBook screen will be touch-enabled,” they wrote (translated from the original Chinese using Google Translate).

Craig Grannell:

A touchscreen MacBook Ultra would face a similar challenge [as the Touch Bar]. It would launch as a niche, expensive device in a sea of non-touchscreen Macs. Developers would need to bet Apple was committed to rapidly rolling touchscreens out across its entire laptop line to justify their investment.

I don’t expect a touch screen to need as much developer buy-in as the Touch Bar.

The only way a MacBook Ultra makes sense to me is if it zips past that period of compromise. Which means a screen that detaches and effectively becomes an iPad, so you get a great laptop and a great touchscreen device. That sounds a lot like an iPad running macOS or, for that matter, a Microsoft Surface or any number of Windows hybrid laptops.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

NSMenuUseGlassWindowStyle

NSMenuEnableGestureTracking

macOS and iPadOS are moving closer together every day 🙃 Presume this will be enabled for the upcoming touchscreen MacBooks

Previously:

AppKit in macOS 27

macOS Golden Gate 27 Beta Release Notes:

AppKit adds NSRefreshController, providing pull-to-refresh functionality for NSScrollView.

[…]

NSToolbarItemGroup adds the role property and the NSToolbarItemGroupRole enum, allowing toolbar item groups to be tagged with a semantic role. NSSegmentedControl similarly adds a role property and the NSSegmentedControlRole enum, including a tabs role for controls that represent tab-based navigation and content selection.

[…]

NSTextSelectionManager provides common text selection interactions (click, drag, shift-click, double/triple-click word/line/paragraph selection) to a NSView with a set of NSGestureRecognizers rather than overriding NSEvent mouse methods. NSTextView now uses NSTextSelectionManager and provides its own set of NSGestureRecognizers to provide additional features in addition to text selection.

[…]

By default, NSMenu hides all menu item symbol images — non-symbol images remain visible. […] Use the new preferredImageVisibility property on NSMenuItem to customize the image visibility for your menu items. As in macOS 26.0, NSMenu automatically provides default visible menu item images for certain common system-wide menu items, such as Settings, Share, and Print.

AppKit updates:

Create events similar to UIControl events on NSControl with the new NSControl.Events type.

[…]

Initiate a drag operation from a gesture recognizer using the new beginDraggingSession(items:gesture:source:) method on NSView.

[…]

Update views automatically in response to Observable model changes using the guidance in Updating views automatically with observation tracking.

How is this different from what was announced last year?

Modernize your AppKit app:

Bring your AppKit app up to date with modern macOS conventions. Dive into handling input with control events and gesture recognizers, moving beyond traditional tracking loops. Enhance keyboard navigation in your app, implement graceful state restoration after restarts, and take advantage of new corner concentricity APIs that let your interface blend seamlessly with the macOS aesthetic.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

To summarize the singular AppKit session this year: hey remember all these APIs and design patterns from UIKit? Well they’re now in AppKit and you should use them! Also make your glass use interactive bounce effects.

Why? No reason!😉

TN3212:

In macOS 27, AppKit continues to standardize on gesture recognizers as the primary mechanism for input handling. This change directly affects Sidecar because gesture recognizers are the only way to respond to touch input from a Sidecar-connected iPad running iPadOS 27. If your app relies on tracking loops for mouse event handling, migrate to gesture recognizers to support Sidecar touch input.

This article explains how the gesture recognizer model works, how to implement gesture recognizers correctly for Sidecar touch input, how to update your existing event-handling code, and which APIs macOS 27 adds. Codebases that implement nextEvent(matching:) or mouseDown(with:), mouseDragged(with:), and mouseUp(with:) events are most affected by the updates discussed.

Greg Pierce:

After the AppKit session blindsided me a bit after telling me not to override mouseDown, and then telling me I should override hitTest

Mario Guzmán:

A few years ago, Apple introduced:

func tableView(_ tableView: NSTableView, userCanChangeVisibilityOf column: NSTableColumn) -> Bool

for NSTableView, which Is a native way users could control-click on a TableView column to show/hide columns.

This year, in #macOS27, they updated it to have a new “Reset to Defaults” option.

This is awesome bc I have done my own implementation of this feature JUST to have the option to “reset all columns” and now Apple just includes it!

Elevate your app’s text experience with TextKit:

Discover how to combine the convenience of built-in text views with the control of TextKit. We’ll show you how new APIs make it easy to extend UITextView and NSTextView with custom behaviors like line numbers and collapsible sections. We’ll also explore the TextKit architecture and walk through new caching and reuse policies for text attachments.

Previously:

UIKit in iOS 27

iOS & iPadOS 27 Beta Release Notes:

[You] can use UIScene.extendStateRestoration and UIScene.completeStateRestoration to extend state restoration for UIScene.ActivationState.background to UIScene.ActivationState.foreground lifecycle transitions.

[…]

iOS and iPadOS apps built with the 27.0 SDK or later are required to include a launch screen.

[…]

Siri can load resources from drag interactions installed in your app’s interface.

[…]

In apps built with the iOS 27.0 SDK, a presented view controller inherits its trait collection by walking up its view’s superview chain through the intermediate views of the presentation, rather than jumping directly to the presentation controller.

UIKit updates:

Use UICollectionViewCompositionalLayoutSectionProvider closures as part of automatic observation tracking to automatically invalidate and update compositional layouts when observable objects change.

[…]

Use UIRefreshControl and UIStepper in Mac apps built with Mac Catalyst. These controls are now fully supported in the Mac idiom.

[…]

Starting in iOS 27, apps built with the latest SDK must use the scene-based life cycle or they fail to launch.

[…]

Use NSTextTable, NSTextBlock, and NSTextTableBlock to represent table structures in attributed strings.

Modernize your UIKit app:

Discover the latest updates to UIKit. Learn how to update your iPhone app layouts to work great when resized with iPhone Mirroring and on iPad. Explore new APIs for tab and navigation bars, find out how to prepare your app for new Apple Intelligence capabilities, and get introduced to a skill for your coding agent of choice that helps modernize your codebase.

Kyle Howells:

iOS 27’s UIKit is a tiny release in terms of API changes, but does have some changes. There are no new top-level paradigms, but there’s an new addition to TextKit 2, a new scene accessory API, Liquid-Glass-era bar minimization controls, and a small amount of quality-of-life additions to menus, tab bars, and drag interactions.

Hartley Charlton:

Apple appears to be laying the groundwork for a foldable iPhone in iOS 27, with new references discovered in the operating system’s frameworks and a notable emphasis on flexible app layouts at this year’s Platforms State of the Union.

Jordan Morgan:

The nav bar and its friends got quite a bit of attention, and to be honest that’s where we will find most of the changes. They adapt to all sorts of sizes and situations…hmmm, I WONDER WHY!?

[…]

A few years ago, I wondered if UIKit would be deprecated altogether. That would’ve been drastic, sure, but I did wonder. These days, I don’t share the same concern anymore. SwiftUI gets better each year, and yeah — it’ll have top billing. But UIKit is solid, and it appears to be a core part of Apple’s strategy into the future.

Not much changed this year, and not much was added that’s flashy. But, that’s true of iOS 27 in several ways.

Previously:

Core AI Announced

Meet Core AI:

Discover Core AI, Apple’s new framework for on-device AI model deployment. Tour the ecosystem, from Python libraries for converting, authoring, and optimizing models, to a Swift API for simple plug-and-play inference and advanced use cases with strict latency and memory requirements. Explore the new Core AI models repository with ready-to-run examples for popular architectures. See how deep Xcode integration, including ahead-of-time model compilation, streamlines the workflow so you can deliver smarter, more responsive app experiences.

Dive into Core AI model authoring and optimization:

Dive into the complete custom model deployment workflow for Apple silicon with the new Core AI framework. Discover powerful techniques for authoring models using custom Metal kernels, alongside platform-aware compression strategies. The new Core AI Debugger offers deep intrinsic analysis, and AI-assisted workflows guide you from initial concept to optimized on-device execution.

Integrate on-device AI models into your app using Core AI:

Discover a curated collection of popular open-source models — including Qwen, Mistral, SAM3, and more — optimized for Apple silicon using the new Core AI Framework. Learn how to download, run, and benchmark models on your Mac, and integrate them into your app with just a few lines of code. Explore a new workflow for model compilation and on-device specialization to speed up first-time model load. Find out how to profile and optimize runtime performance with Core AI tools in Xcode.

Core AI Documentation (Hacker News):

Core AI helps you build, run, and deploy AI models in your app. Designed with Apple silicon in mind, Core AI allows your app to use the latest model architectures and inference techniques across the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine. The Swift API makes common tasks simple, while giving you more control over model specialization, caching, and inference performance when needed.

Previously:

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

WWDC 2026 Links

General:

Documentation:

Sessions:

Podcasts:

Previously:

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

SpaceX Acquires xAI, Goes Public, Acquires Cursor

Elon Musk (February, Hacker News):

SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform.

[…]

Current advances in AI are dependent on large terrestrial data centers, which require immense amounts of power and cooling. Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term, without imposing hardship on communities and the environment.

In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.

There are potential environmental and energy benefits to putting data centers in space, and Blue Origin’s Bezos also thinks this makes sense, but many are convinced that the numbers just don’t work (Reddit).

Kirsten Korosec and Russell Brandom:

But in its 24-year history, nothing quite compared to its initial public offering. Everyone seemed interested — perhaps because of the sheer size of the IPO. The company priced its 555.6 million shares at $135 each to raise $75 billion, making it the largest IPO in history and turning Musk into the world’s first trillionaire. That total raised figure would end up ballooning to $85.7 billion raised.

[…]

SpaceX shares opened June 12 at $150 on the Nasdaq public exchange, an 11% pop for the most anticipated debut in history. And it has continued to rise. The shares kept rising too. In midday trading, SpaceX shares soared 30%. SpaceX shares closed at $160.95, up 19%.

Sean O’Kane:

SpaceX passed Amazon to become the fifth-most valuable company in the world, after its stock price climbed 20% on Monday and more than 8% in early trading Tuesday, pushing its valuation past $2.7 trillion.

Reuters (Hacker News):

SpaceX is buying the startup behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, Anysphere, for $60 billion in an all-stock deal to boost its presence in the lucrative enterprise AI tools market.

Previously:

Apple Intelligence in appleOS 27

Apple (MacRumors):

Apple today introduced the next generation of Apple Intelligence, powered by a bold new architecture that integrates the latest Apple Foundation Models deep into Apple’s platforms and is uniquely designed to protect users’ privacy.

[…]

The next generation of Apple Intelligence also helps power Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri.

[…]

Image Playground offers new powerful ways for users to bring their imagination to life. They can create high-quality images in virtually any style, now including photorealistic, thanks to a new generative model that runs on Private Cloud Compute. This is a major transformation for image generation across platforms. And generated images will automatically include a hidden SynthID watermark to identify them as AI-generated.

[…]

Now Messages offers one-tap suggestions based on the context of users’ conversations, making it easier than ever to get things done, such as creating a reminder or a note.

[…]

Apple Intelligence powers even more enhancements across operating systems. With automatic proofreading, users receive improved suggestions for spelling and grammar as they type across the system.

Damien Petrilli:

Apple WWDC26 “big features”: selling a rebranded gemini.

John Gruber:

What’s confusing about this Apple-Google partnership is that Google pretty much calls all things AI “Gemini”. The models are “Gemini”, the assistant is “Gemini”, and the feature integrations are “Gemini”. So Apple is taking pains to emphasize that they’re building atop the Gemini models, not the Gemini assistant.

Google creating the model, Apple figuring out how to integrate it and make it easy to use. Are we back to Apple and Google each focusing on what they do best?

Dave B.:

This is my favorite Apple event in a long time.

Instead of bombarding you with a million new features that mostly feel half-assed, this feels like it’s actually catered to the user experience instead of to marketing checklists.

Matt Ronge:

All of these AI additions to MacOS/iOS look like nice improvements, but somehow it all feels unambitious given the current state of AI.

But I suppose it’s better for them to underpromise given what happened with Siri last year…

Christina Warren:

As I expected, Apple is going to punt the “on-device” story for Apple Intelligence and push towards the “private cloud compute” story for the models that you’ll actually want to use. I’m glad on-device isn’t going away, but it’s clear a hybrid approach is absolutely necessary

Hartley Charlton:

Apple’s most advanced on-device AI model in iOS 27 requires a minimum of 12GB of unified memory, meaning the standard iPhone 17 is excluded.

Alex Rosenberg:

The 16 Pro was explicitly sold as having Apple Intelligence-capable hardware.

Juli Clover:

Apple today said it is expanding Private Cloud Compute (PCC) beyond its data centers, partnering with Google and NVIDIA to run Apple Intelligence workloads on Google Cloud.

[…]

All server components and software are part of a trusted computing base subject to verifiable transparency and no-privileged-access guarantees, plus Apple has a cryptographically verifiable ledger of all Google Cloud hardware that is part of the PCC fleet to mitigate the risk of supply chain attacks. PCC on Google Cloud also uses many of the same architectural security patterns as PCC on Apple silicon.

John Siracusa:

PSA: Remember that Apple Intelligence is disabled in macOS if you boot from an external drive.

See also: Mac Power Users Talk.

Previously:

Update (2026-06-19): Apple:

As we continue to refine our approach to image generation, the ImageCreator class is being discontinued and will no longer work in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27 or later.

[…]

Transition to presenting the Image Playground sheet, which provides a consistent, system-managed image generation experience. Alternatively, you can integrate another image generation service of your choice.

Apple Foundation Models in appleOS 27

Apple:

At the heart of this architecture is our third generation of Apple Foundation Models (AFM), a family of five foundation models custom-built in collaboration with Google. These span from on-device models to server-based models running on Private Cloud Compute.

Apple Foundation Models are built to unlock a wide range of helpful experiences for our users, like an entirely new Siri and intelligent tools that make everyday apps smarter and more useful.

Hartley Charlton:

“The amount of the Google Assistant we use is none,” Federighi said, explaining that Apple uses none of the Gemini models deployed to Google’s customers, none of Google’s client-side code, and no Google Search infrastructure as the knowledge backbone.

Federico Viticci:

The cloud models hosted on Private Cloud Compute are interesting: they’re not “Gemini” models; they’re Apple Foundation Models trained using proprietary data via RL, which were then “refined” with data from Google’s “frontier” models.

[…]

I’ve been covering the AFM family of models for a while now, and AFM Core Advanced is one of the most interesting on-device models I’ve read about in a while, especially in the context of model size for mobile devices and built-in multimodality with support for text, images, and audio. I’m very keen to play around with this model and understand how it holds up in practice. I wonder if the new CLI (!) for AFM will let you test this one.

Awni Hannun:

It’s very cool that Apple shipped a 20B parameter on-device.

You can’t put 20B parameters in RAM at any reasonable precision. To make it work they are using pretty exotic architecture by today’s standards.

A small model predicts from the query (or prompt) which experts to load from Nand into RAM. The key distinction from a typical MoE is that you do this once per query and then generate all the tokens with the same experts (instead of switching the experts for every token).

Greg Pierce:

Looks like there’s still a 4K context size on local FoundationModels. Pretty limiting.

Kyle Howells:

Really disappointed SwiftUI’s result builder syntax has infected FoundationModels API too.

How did a million modifier methods become the default way to build APIs?

It’s horrible for discoverability, code completion, documentation.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

FoundationModels is one of the highlights of this WWDC; I think it’s now finally what we hoped we were getting two years ago, and thought we were getting last year (just the models themselves were barely up for it then). I finally feel like I can build features with it, though I really don’t like the Sword of Damocles Apple is holding above Private Cloud Compute and how it can permanently lock you out of using the models forever across all your apps if you hit a download threshold. Poison pill

John Gruber (Mastodon):

These strict limits don’t seem to be getting as much attention as they should. It’s nice that for small developers who meet the above criteria, access to PCC has no cost. But there’s no way (yet?) to buy your way out of these limits.

[…]

The “fewer than 2 million first-time app downloads from any of their apps” restriction is particularly notable. It’s not 2 million installations for apps that are using PCC, but 2 million downloads for any app the developer has ever released.

Chad Podoski:

Is there a real time count somewhere of total lifetime downloads for a developer account, so one can plan if they at risk of the switch tripping? Reminds me of the small business qualifications. I had to try to figure out if an employers developer account was going to exceed the revenue threshold for the year. I was left trying to determine it from sales reports, not to mention sales date versus pay out date confusion. I think I botched the calculation in the end.

Anthropic (Hacker News):

Claude for Foundation Models is a Swift package that makes Claude available as a server-side language model in Apple’s Foundation Models framework. The package conforms Claude to the framework’s LanguageModel protocol, so you drive it with the same LanguageModelSession API you use for Apple’s on-device model: respond(to:), streaming, guided generation, and tool calling all work the same way.

Requests go directly from your app to the Claude API; Apple is not in the request path and does not see prompts or responses. Usage is billed to your Anthropic account at standard API pricing.

Previously:

Update (2026-06-17): Simon B. Støvring:

Apple is literally stopping me from building a brand new app using Private Cloud Compute because I made a successful app a few years ago.

The new app might be a success, or it might be a complete flop. Nobody knows yet.

I would understand it if Apple were to limit developers once an app reaches a certain number of downloads or active users, but that’s not what’s happening here.

Instead, they’re blocking developers before they’ve even had a chance to build and ship the app.

Agentic Password Updates

Hartley Charlton (9To5Mac):

Apple today announced that the Passwords app can now automatically update weak and compromised passwords using Apple Intelligence and Safari to take action on a user’s behalf.

[…]

Apple describes the system as agentic, with Apple Intelligence and Safari securely navigating through websites, signing in, and upgrading accounts to strong passwords without the user needing to intervene beyond an initial tap.

Craig Hockenberry:

Raise your hand if you’re going to trust an AI agent with your passwords.

Maybe it’s architected so that the agent doesn’t see the actual passwords, but I find the idea of this ghost surfing through sites, logged in as me, really creepy.

Rob Mathers:

I still see Safari failing to save generated passwords in some cases.

Previously:

Photos AI in appleOS 27

Apple (MacRumors):

With Spatial Reframing, users can improve the composition of a photo after it’s been taken. Spatial Reframing builds on Apple’s deep understanding of spatial models thanks to Apple Vision Pro, so users can touch and drag a photo and preview in real time how the perspective shifts — as if they’d repositioned the camera in the original scene. Using powerful image models, Spatial Reframing will only generate new content where the perspective has been shifted, ensuring the reframed photo stays consistent with the original scene.

Users can also expand images with the Extend tool to give their subjects more breathing room. For example, they can straighten a crooked horizon without cropping out anything important, or adjust the aspect ratio, and Extend will fill in the missing pieces. Additionally, the popular Clean Up tool gets a major upgrade, so users can remove distractions with better quality and more realistic infill, even when the scene is complex.

These seem like useful features. I think it’s fine for Apple to offer them, but they do seem somewhat at odds with its previous preening about how they believe in the sanctity of photos that actually happened.

Kuba Suder:

“Reframing photos with AI” - I don’t like this at all 👎

Kind of the crosses the line to cheating about reality too much for me… it’s one thing to lighten or darken or colorize pixels, but another thing to reposition them against each other.

Louie Mantia:

“Deep respect for photography” right after a demo on generating images bc they do not respect art.

Jeff Carlson (Mastodon):

Generative AI is a technology that photographers are distancing themselves from (or should be), thanks to all the AI slop being produced everywhere. And yes, that includes creations from Apple’s Image Playground app, the image generator that the company also showed off during the WWDC keynote.

But generative AI doesn’t need to mean full images created from text prompts. When applied to selective areas, like erasing a piece of trash next to a subject’s feet, generative AI can do some of the menial work of replacing pixels that photographers would otherwise spend time retouching in an app like Photoshop. Google’s Pixel phones include a similar Magic Eraser tool.

Spatial Reframing is a great example of how the technology can be used to enhance real photos you capture.

Brian MacDuff:

I can personally confirm that Apple’s Photos “Clean Up” feature is DRASTICALLY improved in iOS 27. 😳

John Siracusa:

This is a bit hyperbolic and unkind, so I hope you can forgive me for venting. And, hey, who knows? Maybe the fancy new AI-powered reframing feature will actually get broad use. (But I doubt it…)

See also: MacRumors.

Previously:

Update (2026-06-18): Ben Lovejoy:

In the two weeks since, my view has been very much reinforced. The Clean Up tool is now significantly more powerful, while the Reframe and Extend tools address similar real-life needs …

AI-Generated Shortcuts

Hartley Charlton:

Apple today announced that users can now describe a shortcut in natural language, with Apple Intelligence automatically building the automation in the background.

Marcus Mendes:

Users can simply describe what they want, such as “when I’m leaving work, text my wife with my expected ETA,” and Shortcuts will actually build the shortcut to make it work.

This sounds great in that I find creating shortcuts annoying. It’s not always clear which building blocks I should be using, and stringing them together properly seems tedious and fiddly. On the other hand, I dislike how AppleScript doesn’t get first-class support for the functionality and triggers that are available to Shortcuts.

Simon B. Støvring:

Data Jar got sherlocked, and that genuinely makes me happy.

Simon B. Støvring:

Apple should let users filter out and maybe even rewrite notifications from any app using Shortcuts.

[…]

The new notification automation trigger in Shortcuts is super cool. As far as I can tell, it won’t let me modify the notification content or filter out notifications based on the content, but it’s still a quite powerful addition.

[…]

Third-party automation triggers in Shortcuts are now possible. Sort of.

Just send a notification containing data meant for the new notification trigger to consume.

Anders Borum:

iOS 27 allows 3rd party shortcuts actions to run for longer than 30 seconds making me publish 2 actions that have been hidden behind feature flags for years.

Create cloud servers, run commands and destroy them again right from Shortcuts.

Previously:

Update (2026-06-26): Jason Snell:

This is as close as we’ve come, across 40 years, to the original dream of putting computer power in the hands of everyone. You can literally tell your device what you want it to do, and when—”every morning show me my to-dos and calendar events for the day”—and it will generate a program to do it and a schedule to run it.

[…]

Yes, there are lots of limitations. Describe a Shortcut doesn’t work with third-party apps, only Apple’s own stuff (at least, for now). It can sometimes get confused, especially with complex queries. And it has an interesting tendency to kick things to the Use Model action—why am I not surprised that an AI model likes to build Shortcuts that themselves use AI models?

But when it works, which is most of the time, it’s magical.

Simon B. Støvring:

Shortcuts on macOS Golden Gate is… Something.

Dedicating that much window space to a larger shortcut tile and a text field feels incredibly wasteful.

Friday, June 12, 2026

App Store Personalized Recommendations and Keylogging

Sarah Perez:

This week, Apple announced a series of discovery features that will personalize app recommendations based on users’ interests and behavior, providing a new way for developers to have their app discovered.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the iPhone maker introduced Personalized Collections in the App Store, which will showcase recommendations tailored to the individual. These will also include new “App Notes” that explain why the specific apps were recommended to you. Starting this week, you’ll find these new personalized suggestions in various places in the App Store, including the Apps or Games tab or on the Search tab.

Mysk:

Now Apple is putting the extensive identifiable analytics they collect in the App Store in action. They record every tap and there’s no way to turn it off.

They can even calculate your typing speed.

[…]

If you don’t like Apple Music privacy options, you can stream music from Spotify. But where else can you download apps on the iPhone?

The data is associated with your account and unencrypted.

Previously:

Update (2026-06-17): Mysk:

The screenshot in the sub-post was taken from a CSV file you get when requesting your data from Apple. It’s called “App Store Click Activity.” Every event contains 110 attributes 🤯

In this PDF, Apple describes the data points collected in this category.

I requested my own data yesterday but am still waiting for Apple to prepare it.

Mysk:

There’s an ongoing class action lawsuit against Apple related to this. In iOS 26, Apple added an option to “reset” the identifier associated with “usage statistics,” but we haven’t seen any effect for this option. The analytics are still identifiable and linked to the user.

See also: John Gruber, Thom Holwerda, MacRumors.

Update (2026-06-19): Mysk:

It is not only about recording your typing skills in the search field, the App Store app even reports how much time you spend on every part of an app description as you scroll, hence recording your reading skills 🙃.

Apple also forces iOS to open any App Store link in the App Store app, and that will immediately log a detailed event that user XYZ has viewed that particular app as well as the referrer.

[…]

This data collection is not new. Apple has been doing it at least since iOS 14 when we discovered it. All data collected is NOT anonymous. The data is associated with your Apple ID. This means that given a court order, Apple has to hand this data to law enforcement.

Mysk:

Just for fun, I generated a 1000-character text and pasted it in the search field in the App Store. Well, the analytics captured the entire text, linked it to my ID and sent it to Apple, before even pushing “enter”. Now imagine you accidentally paste something private in there🙃

Update (2026-06-23): I received my own personal data from Apple and can confirm that it does include my timestamped App Store search queries.

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