Friday, October 9, 2026

Alexa Tablets

Hartley Charlton:

The flagship Alexa Tablet 12 Pro starts at $499.99 with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, aiming to rival the iPad Pro at a significantly lower price point. It features a MediaTek Dimensity 8400 chip, a 12-inch display with an adaptive refresh rate of up to 120Hz and a 3:2 aspect ratio, a 6.5mm-thick aluminum body, Wi-Fi 6E, and quad Dolby Atmos speakers. Amazon claims that the device has up to 16 hours of video playback.

A $549.99 version adds a “Nanomatte” display, using precision-etched glass developed with Corning to reduce glare. Higher configurations offer up to 16GB of RAM. Unlike Apple’s nano-texture display option, which requires a 1TB or 2TB iPad Pro, Amazon’s matte finish is available with 128GB of storage.

[…]

The Alexa Tablet 11 starts at $329.99 with 8GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, offering an 11-inch 2.5K display with a 90Hz refresh rate. A 128GB version costs $379.99. The smaller Alexa Tablet 8 starts at $229.99 with an 8.7-inch display, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage.

Ryan Whitwam:

Amazon has dropped the Fire branding in favor of Alexa, and the new Alexa Tablets are now Google-certified Android devices.

Throughout the history of Fire Tablets, Amazon downplayed its use of Android. They ran Android apps from the company’s Appstore platform, but there was no Google integration with “Fire OS.” However, Amazon shut down its app store last year. The new Alexa Tablets run full-fledged Google-y versions of Android with the Play Store and all the apps you’d expect.

M.G. Siegler:

So the question is if these new Amazon Alexa Tablets can do what the previous Android tablets never could in tailoring software for the form-factor. I remain skeptical of that but perhaps stock Android plus some good Amazon + Alexa+ (as well as Prime Video) integration will be good enough?

[…]

The screen – namely the fact that it's a matte texture – sounds interesting[…]

Previously:

macOS 27 and External Displays

Jeff Benjamin:

A drawback of using an HDR-ready third-party monitor on macOS 26 Tahoe was the inability to activate High Dynamic Range at the common 2560 x 1440 scaled resolution. Fortunately, the newest macOS release resolves this problem.

Alexander Cohen:

  • Symptom: scrolling is choppy on the Studio Display XDR at 120Hz or Adaptive (47–120Hz). At 60Hz, and on the MacBook’s own screen, scrolling is smooth.
  • What devices are affected: M5 Pro MacBook Pros have reproduced the problem; other repots suggest the Mac mini with M5 Pro chip is also affected. Apple lists M5 Pro MacBook Pro models as supporting the Studio Display XDR at 120Hz.
  • Likely cause: measurements suggest the GPU stays at a low clock speed while scrolling and misses frame deadlines.
  • Workaround: MacRumors Forums poster Tiguanito’s M5ScrollBoost, a small menu bar app that encourages the GPU to run faster while you scroll.

Previously:

OpenAI Marks AI-Generated Content

OpenAI:

Starting today, API customers globally will be able to opt in to text watermarking for select models. Text watermarking will remain off by default in the API.

Over the coming weeks, we will add an invisible watermark to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text output in the European Union.

[…]

More details about how textGrain works can be found in our technical report (opens in a new window), which will be updated with additional details in the coming weeks. We also plan to make the technology available in open source so that others can build on it.

[…]

At a target false positive rate of 1%, our detector identified watermarks in about 80% of 200-token passages, compared with about 95% of 400-token passages, for content such as psychology.

Via John Gruber (Mastodon):

OpenAI has made this available via an API so developers should be able to actually see if this adulterates text output with real-world usage.

Third, none of these companies have yet made their watermark detectors publicly accessible. I remain highly skeptical that they will work as advertised in the real world. I think this is all somewhat of a sham to claim compliance with the EU AI Act without actually providing anything that anyone can actually use in a practical way.

Previously:

OpenAI’s Dots

John Voorhees:

Earlier this week, I was at OpenAI’s annual DevDay conference where it launched Dots, a personal agent that lives inside the ChatGPT app.

[…]

Dots are persistent, cloud-based agents that use the plugins and other tools you’ve connected to ChatGPT, after you allow them to do so. Your Dot has its own virtual Linux computer to assist you with your work. And at first, your Dot, which is depicted by a colorful character you can customize, doesn’t have access to anything else. However, as you give your Dot tasks that need access to other tools, it will ask for your permission to access other tools.

[…]

But being a cloud-based agent has its downsides, too. Out of the box, your Dot can’t access your computer’s files and apps. That’s easily fixed by clicking or tapping on your Dot and granting it access to your Mac, so it can use the Mac alongside its own VM.

Previously:

Thursday, October 8, 2026

Margaret Hamilton, RIP

Janine Liberty (Hacker News, NASA, NYT, WSJ, Slashdot):

Margaret Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died on Sep. 30. She was 90.

A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline.

[…]

Moments before the Eagle module was set to land on the lunar surface, the onboard computer raised the alarm. It had detected a 1202 error: The computer was overloaded due to a fault in a hardware switch, and it was possible the system would not be able to handle the complex landing procedure.

But Hamilton and her team had engineered priority-driven software, able to shut down unnecessary background tasks in order to prioritize mission-critical tasks. Houston trusted Hamilton’s software and allowed the mission to proceed, and two men walked on the moon for the first time.

Dave DeGraw:

The following is an excerpt from a textbook called Fluency With Information Technology: Skills, Concepts, & Capabilities, 7th Edition ISBN 0-13-444872-3

At the time of publishing, the Wikipedia page for Margaret Hamilton has an important quote about the origin of the term “software engineering”. I was moved by this and wanted to add it to my /quotes page, but needed to verify the source of the quote. I was bothered that the source came from an interview given for an out-of-print textbook that as far as I can tell is unavailable to legally obtain. The interview is also not published in later editions of the book.

Fortunately, I was able to find the complete interview and I am publishing that excerpt here under fair use doctrine for educational, archival, and personal informational purposes only.

The Computer History Museum has an article and a full oral history.

Previously:

What a Broken Wrist Taught Me About iOS 27 Dictation and macOS Voice Control

Adam Engst:

Apple has significantly improved dictation in iOS 27 by adding a few capabilities for editing text from the Voice Control system. In other words, Apple has finally done some of the things I requested in “How iOS and macOS Dictation Can Learn from Voice Control’s Dictation” (31 August 2020). Remember, dictation is what you get when you tap the microphone button on the keyboard, while Voice Control is an all-encompassing system that you turn on in Settings > Accessibility > Voice Control. The problem with leaving Voice Control on permanently is that it’s constantly listening and thus inserting text when you don’t want that, and at times I have felt that its dictation isn’t as good.

Most notably, when you’re using iOS’s regular dictation, you can now change the case of words and phrases by saying “Capitalize phrase” or “Lowercase phrase.” Incorrect capitalization of words drives me up the wall. Equally useful is the ability to fix misheard or misspoken words by saying “Replace phrase1 with phrase2.” Most other Voice Control commands aren’t available in dictation, but you can say “Select phrase” and “Undo that.”

[…]

Unfortunately, while Apple added some of Voice Control’s capabilities to dictation in iOS 27, it didn’t extend that effort to macOS 27 Golden Gate. Put simply, when you use dictation in macOS, you don’t have access to any text-editing commands.

Previously:

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Opening a File’s Git History in Tower

Tower 18:

But something has changed: thanks to AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex, even the most devoted GUI fans are now spending more and more time in the terminal. You kick off a task, the agent does its thing… and then you want to actually see what happened.

That’s where Tower shines, so we felt the path from the terminal to Tower deserved a serious upgrade. With Tower 18, the Tower Command Line Tool (gittower) is no longer just a way to open a repository — it takes you to exactly the place you want to look at.

I’ve been wanting this for 15 years or so. Thanks, AI! You still can’t open a file in Tower by dragging it onto the Dock icon. Nor can you just pass it to gittower and have it figure out which repo it belongs to. But if your working directory is already within the working copy, you can now use gittower to open the file history. I’ve written a script that finds the current file in the frontmost app (BBEdit, Xcode, or Finder) and opens it in Tower.

Previously:

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Constructive Data Modeling

Alexis King (tweet):

The type systems provided by mainstream languages have grown vastly more sophisticated, but how much value does that complexity actually provide programmers in practice? I would like to make the case that it is somewhat less than one might think. While at times convenient, invariants can be captured in the type system using a small set of simple tools applied in principled fashion, and while fancy type systems may be convenient, they have misled many programmers by obscuring what is possible to model without built-in type system support. This talk aims to provide a simple shift in perspective, plus a set of concrete design principles, to make modeling invariants in types feel accessible to the working programmer without fancy language support.

“Type system as obligation tracker” is a catchy phrase, like her previous “parse, don’t validate” (Hacker News).

See also: Matt Diephouse.

Tuesday, October 6, 2026

Reddit to Remove RSS

Jeff Johnson (June):

This new RSS rate limiting was perhaps foreshadowed by an r/modnews post a couple of weeks ago[…]

judy-funnie (September, via Jeff Johnson):

Because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, we'll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 while preserving moderation workflows that depend on it through supported alternatives.

[…]

To close this gap, in the next few months, we'll further limit access [to Old Reddit] for logged-in users to only those who have used Old Reddit in the last six months (which covers the vast majority of all Old Reddit users).

Ana Maria Constantin:

Public API access ends in March 2027, Reddit said in a separate post for developers. It will stop accepting new API requests on 31 October. From 12 January, it will start cutting off apps that have not registered.

Jeff Johnson:

Since I use RSS to follow Reddit, I intend to discontinue my Reddit use on November 13, unless Reddit backtracks on their user-hostile decision to drop RSS.

[…]

My biggest regret in leaving Reddit is that I‘ll have to shut down my product support subreddit.

[…]

The most ridiculous part of Reddit’s announcement was the suggestion that subreddit moderators replace RSS feeds with Discord notifications. What perversity, insanity to recommend a competing social network as the only practical way to use yours! I’m also skeptical of Reddit’s public excuse for dropping RSS: bot scraping. As I noted back in June, Reddit is already rate-limiting RSS feeds. If the current limits are insufficient, why not impose stricter limits?

John Brayton:

I am disappointed because I know that many Unread customers use Reddit’s RSS feeds to keep up with subreddits.

Sarah Perez:

Moderators have already expressed worry about how this shift would impact their workflow. When Reddit hinted earlier that it was preparing for the end of RSS on its site, many responded by complaining that Reddit would become unmanageable for them. Meanwhile, many users stressed that RSS was how they enjoyed accessing Reddit’s content.

Previously:

Update (2026-10-07): John Brayton:

I overlooked the fact that Feedly uses Reddit’s API to retrieve articles from subreddits. The folks at Feedly expect this functionality to continue working after Reddit removes their feeds.

iPhone 18 Pro Max AT&T Cellular Issues

Chance Miller:

Apple has confirmed an issue causing a “small number” of iPhone 18 Pro Max devices on AT&T to lose cellular service.

Apple released software and carrier updates to prevent the issue from affecting additional users, but the company tells 9to5Mac that devices that have already lost service will require a hardware replacement.

John Gruber:

It’s only a problem for AT&T customers. No such problems on Verizon or T-Mobile.

[…]

It’s only the 18 Pro Max, not the regular 18 Pro. The salient fact here is that the only iPhone 18 Pro models that use Qualcomm cellular modems, rather than Apple’s own C2 modem, are 18 Pro Max devices in the U.S..

[…]

I’d love to understand how a software update can prevent existing devices from being affected, but a software update cannot restore service to existing devices that have already been affected.

Joe Rossignol:

Apple and AT&T have yet to disclose the underlying cause of the issue.

Eric Schwarz (Mastodon):

It could be as simple as a power calculation geared towards devices with Apple’s C2 modems.

[…]

The other weird variable seems to be AT&T—out of the three US carriers, AT&T is the only one with a lot of the 3.45GHz 5G band in use[…] Most AT&T MVNOs like Cricket, U.S. Mobile, Gigs-based services, and H2O still use 5G NSA on AT&T and it seems they haven’t gotten the new carrier bundles on 18 Pro Maxes.

[…]

Because of those things, my working theory is that an 18 Pro Max on AT&T was connecting to 5G SA and when it was on that unique 3.45GHz band (maybe trying to hold on to spotty service?), it would basically cook its modem and there’s no fix other than replacement.

Previously:

Monday, October 5, 2026

Unspecified Full Disk Access Screw Tightening

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors, Lobsters, TidBITS Talk):

Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function properly on the Mac. Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems—including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history—without users’ full knowledge and understanding.

[…]

Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action. Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially.

Guy English:

It was pretty obvious something like this would happen after the Muse accessing Messages news.

Jeff Johnson:

What we have is just one noisy, confused journalist, Jason Aten. He granted FDA to Muse but refuses to admit it, to the public or even to himself.

I see several issues with the current Full Disk Access system:

  1. Backup apps need FDA, but so do many other types of apps. Often, they don’t need full disk access but rather they need to work around a missing or broken API. All of my apps except ToothFairy use FDA, not because I want to or because it’s easier to code, but because without it the user experience would be much worse or key features wouldn’t work at all.

  2. There is no API for apps to see whether they have FDA or to request it from the user. It’s not like, say, accessing the user’s Contacts where macOS pops up a standard dialog and the app supplies a “reason” string to specify why it wants access. Instead, each app presents its own set of instructions for how to enable it deep in System Settings. It requires the confusing maneuver of first adding the app to the list; it doesn’t automatically show up with a slider switch next to it, like with other privacy settings. This adds an obstacle for users to get up and running with an app but doesn’t really provide additional security, just obscurity.

  3. FDA is not granular. There’s no way for apps to request only the permissions they actually need. For example, SpamSieve wants to be able to access the user’s mail, but it doesn’t need or want to see their iMessages or browser history. This is bad for users because they may be exposing more information than they want to and bad for developers because some users will think your app isn’t worth the risks.

  4. There is no way for the user to see what the app actually did. If it tells me that it wants FDA to access my mail but actually it mucked around with my Time Machine backup, how would I know?

  5. Apple’s wording in System Settings is not very clear. I don’t think most users really understand what FDA is doing.

  6. The previous items combine to create opportunities for malfeasance. It’s normalized that many apps that seem like they wouldn’t need full disk access do need FDA, so this makes it easier for apps to trick the user into granting it under false pretenses. Apple requires that apps coach the user through the process, so it’s normal that users mostly see text from the app (which might not be trustworthy) rather than standard text from Apple, as with other permissions prompts.

But the problem in the Muse case was not malfeasance. Rather, it seems that Muse asked Aten to enable FDA, but he doesn’t remember doing so or didn’t understand what he was doing. It sounds like Apple wants to make this consent more clear, which is good, but other issues would remain. As with the recent keychain story, this feels like a bandaid rather than a thoughtful solution to the real problem. The issues with FDA were clear when it was introduced 8 years ago, and many Radars were filed, but it’s been virtually unchanged since.

Apple seems to think that by making a scarier warning they can convince more users not to grant FDA—or at least perhaps deflect blame from Apple to the user if they later regret it. Maybe that solves Apple’s problem, but it doesn’t really solve the user’s problem. The user is installing Muse because it’s more capable than Siri. They probably do want it to access some protected data, e.g. so it can find information in their mail or messages. So they actually do need to give it FDA. Aside from deterrence, Apple is not actually protecting the user. And the deterrence is kind of sketchy. Rather than providing a safe way for users to choose what to share with a competing product, Apple is saying the only option is to share everything, and then discouraging that. Meanwhile, there’s no switch to turn off Apple Intelligence. It’s like they expect you to stay on eWorld and not download Netscape. I actually really liked eWorld, and the broad Internet wasn’t totally safe (though neither was eWorld), but that doesn’t seem like much of a strategy.

Jeff Johnson:

Below I’ve embedded […] a screen recording of a macOS Virtual Machine showing the first run experience of the Meta Muse app.

[…]

It’s important to note that macOS has no API for an app to request or acquire Full Disk Access. The only way for an app to receive Full Disk Access is via the Full Disk Access pane of System Settings, as shown in the video. Thus, the only thing an app can do is open the System Settings pane for the user, as also shown in the video. Once the user is in System Settings, it’s up to the user to manually grant Full Disk Access.

Without Full Disk Access, Muse cannot access the user’s Messages database. If it could, that would be a macOS zero day vulnerability.

[…]

Aten oddly writes as if the “if you give it Full Disk Access” earlier in the article were counterfactual, merely hypothetical, still insisting that he did not give Full Disk Access to Muse.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

I really worry about just how much Apple is going to lock Full Disk Access down. I use it with several apps that couldn’t function properly without it, and would be severely hampered if I needed to authorize it manually every time they do something.

Ben Lovejoy:

However, what Apple absolutely must not do is to make the mistake it made with macOS Sequoia over screen recording. Sure, this is also incredibly dangerous and very strong warnings are appropriate, but what Apple did then was to force us all to confirm these permissions on a weekly basis, as well as after every restart.

Dave Nanian:

Well, this is certainly ominous news for backup programs.

Like it’s not hard enough to turn this stuff on…

Nick Heer:

Is Apple suggesting this capability could be limited in the future to backup applications alone? I do not like that.

[…]

Because of the lack of information available at present, I do not want to get too far ahead of myself, but I am concerned that it could be a significant curtailing of application permissions. It has the potential for further self-preferencing, as Apple will surely exempt Siri from the kinds of permissions requests it requires of third-party apps, even as it is updated with additional capabilities.

[…]

Call me a naïve little baby if you want, but I do not think preserving Siri’s dominance on Apple’s devices is the company’s reason for locking down Full Disk Access. But Apple’s existing restrictions are part of the reason Siri was awful for a decade. If it had the opportunity to compete with third-party replacements, I doubt it would have languished in a miserable state for as long as it did.

John Voorhees:

[Only] a handful of apps to which I’ve granted Full Disk Access are backup apps. Others include the Finder replacement Bloom, launchers like Alfred, the wonderful selection utility PopClip, Apple’s own Pixelmator Pro, Setapp, TestFlight, Supercharge, Madden NFL 27 Arcade Edition, Hazel, and many others. It’s a diverse selection of apps covering everything from Apple’s own apps to Mac utilities that are longtime favorites of MacStories readers, and even one Apple Arcade game.

[…]

On the one hand, it seems to suggest that users will simply have to jump through additional explicit hoops to grant Full Disk Access to their agents and other apps. On the other hand, claiming that Full Disk Access was designed solely for backup apps raises red flags that could signal that the company intends to restrict the kinds of apps that can use Full Disk Access. I sure hope not.

Dan Moren:

But there are plenty of legit uses for Full Disk Access. Just looking at my MacBook Air this morning, I’ve given that permission to three apps: Terminal, BBEdit, and SuperDuper. All apps that I trust with that level of power because of their long history and because in order to do what they do best (or at all), they need that access. (Interestingly, on my Mac mini, that list also includes SpamSieve, KnockKnock, and Shortcuts—though not BBEdit, for whatever reason.)

[…]

I think there is a good argument for protecting Full Disk Access further, but there’s also only so much you can do to protect a user from themselves. Ultimately, this is a cat-and-mouse game, and while I don’t want my data purloined or misused, I also don’t want my computer locked down to the point that I can’t use it for all the things I want to do.

Ben Thompson (Hacker News):

To say that I’m nervous about what Apple’s solution will entail is a massive understatement. There is one aspect in which the Mac is the perfect agent host: Apple has, for decades, invested in a combination of scriptability, automation, and accessibility APIs (these are very often the same thing) that makes it remarkably well-suited to computer use. Then there is the fact that macOS is a certified Unix system; this means that agents — which are perfectly suited to the command line — have access to the entire universe of tooling built for Unix systems. And, of course, Mac hardware is amazing.

The problem is that for my particular use case — a headless, always-on Mac Mini that I primarily access from other computers and my phone through the ChatGPT and Claude apps — macOS is incredibly hostile. The biggest issue is GUI-only permission prompts that are invisible to software running on said computer, including agents.

[…]

This system is annoying but manageable on your primary Mac; it’s a disaster on a headless Mac running agents, for two reasons. First, agents write new programs all of the time, and in my case, those programs need access to devices on my network (SMB shares, for example, trigger a TCC warning). What I need is a permission layer for agents, not the programs they create; TCC is operating at the wrong level of abstraction.

Second, the TCC subsystem exposes its prompt in a protected space that no program can see; that means that programs silently fail and the agents don’t know why; what I have to do is remember that there is probably a permissions prompt on screen, log into the Mac Mini with screen-sharing software, and click OK.

Wade Tregaskis:

Apple’d get a long way by just renaming the privilege. How many laypeople understand what a “disk” even is? Regular people just talk vaguely about how much “memory” their computer has - if they think about it at all other than when they run out of disk space - at which point, how many just think that means they have to buy a new computer? So, how about just “Full Access to All Your Data”? Call it what it basically is.

Jason Anthony Guy:

If Apple has time (or is especially motivated), it might also add more granular options to control what data apps can access. For example, instead of today’s single toggle that grants an app access to the broadly defined “data like Mail, Messages, Safari, Home, Time Machine backups, and certain administrative settings,” it might instead allow you to enable access to specific data on a per-app basis. This would allow, for example, Muse to access Mail and Safari, but not Messages or Time Machine.

Kevin Grant:

With all the levels of entitlements and crap they added, I find it ironic that SIP is “only” implemented as “open up every damned thing to everyone” without more refined levels.

John:

I was frankly surprised when I learned FDA was for a machine, across user accounts, rather than for a single user. It seems like granting root, something the *nix community has tried to reduce and lock down for decades.

I certainly don’t trust anyone’s AI with root, and creating a weak, non-admin, user for AI experiments should be a safe path.

Jimmy Callin:

While [Gruber sees] this as a “why we can’t have nice things” moment, I see it as another case of Apple using privacy to limit competition in areas it currently lag behind.

I’d prefer to decouple trust in how my personal data is handled from trust in a particular platform or software vendor. That’s what I personally value about EU’s approach: give people rights over their information, make mishandling it a legal liability, and severely punish companies that break those rules.

Apple getting unique privileges to access sensitive data simply because they own the platform, and thus there is an implicit trust in their handling of it, feels like a brittle long-term strategy. If this works without causing anti-trust issues, it only makes Apple more dominant while locking out potentially useful software.

Previously:

Update (2026-10-06): See also: TidBITS Talk and Vitor.

Howard Oakley:

Whether or not you would ever want to unleash AI agents on your Mac, Apple does need to refine Full Disk Access as a matter of urgency. But its design and engineering cannot be rushed. Merely adding to the complexity of current Privacy settings wouldn’t help users, many of whom already find privacy protection confusing and opaque.

Sherief, FYI:

it’s clear there’s consumer demand for automated access to iMessages, and instead of offering a proper API with audit trails and fine-grained controls Apple would rather force users to FDA then cry fowl when they grant FDA.

Previously:

Friday, October 2, 2026

Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite, and Kindle Colorsoft 2026

Amazon (Hacker News, Slashdot):

The all-new 6-inch Kindle is the most pocket-sized Kindle we’ve ever made. With 16GB of storage, up to 6 weeks of battery life, and 30% faster book opening than the previous release, it is lighter and features a new seamless flush-front design. This required rethinking how the display, front light, and touch layers are assembled and bonded. We’re also introducing edge-to-edge color across the entire family. The housing is made from recycled materials with a 100% recycled cobalt battery. Starting at $149.99 and available in Ube and Graphite.

[…]

The all-new Kindle Paperwhite is thinner and lighter than the previous lineup, waterproof with an adjustable warm light for comfortable reading at any hour, and up to 12 weeks of battery life on a single charge. The Paperwhite display uses an oxide-thin film transistor backplane and is the largest Kindle Paperwhite display with the highest contrast ratio—delivering deep blacks and crisp text, and images that pop off the screen, whether you’re reading in bright sunlight or under the covers at night. The Signature Edition adds aluminum rear housing, 32 GB of storage, an auto-adjusting front light, pogo pin dock charging, and double tap to turn pages—all while remaining thinner than the previous version.

Lauren Forristal:

Kevin Keith, Amazon’s vice president of devices, said the company is using “Cap” (capacitive) touch technology and haptics to create what he describes as a “dead zone.” As a reader grips the Kindle, the device detects where a finger is resting and adjusts the touch-sensitive area accordingly.

Lauren Forristal:

Amazon announced a range of new accessories on Thursday. And one of them, a $34.99 remote called the Kindle Click, caught our eye.

The Kindle Click is a compact Bluetooth remote designed to let readers turn pages without touching their Kindle.

[…]

Amazon also announced other accessories as part of the new Kindle family, including a magnetic cover with physical page-turn buttons and a charging dock stand for the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition and Colorsoft Signature Edition.

I still wish for the return of built-in page-turn buttons, but the new Page Turn Cover is the best news on this front in a while. Unfortunately, it adds bulk, costs $80, and doesn’t work with the base Kindle or the regular Paperwhite.

The Paperwhite Signature Edition is $249.99, and Amazon is offering me $50 off if I “Upgrade” my old Oasis by October 8. This isn’t explained very well, but it sounds like you keep the old device, and it doesn’t get bricked. There’s a separate 20% + $5 offer for a “Trade-In” where you do give up the old device. There’s a bundle with the Page Turn Cover and the Sling Bag, but there doesn’t seem to be a bundle with just the cover.

Jason Snell:

I admit that I find it somewhat shocking that even a basic e-reader costs $170 these days, but here we are.

[…]

I gotta say that I don’t love that Amazon has decided that to use page-turn buttons, you need to pay $80 and keep your Kindle in a case. But at least they’re finally offering an option. (For the record, Kobo’s Libra Colour is priced similarly to the Paperwhite Signature Edition and has buttons right on it, no case required. It’s the e-reader I use the most these days.)

Previously:

Update (2026-10-05): Tony Polanco:

It replaces standard Qi wireless charging with a pogo pin dock system[…]

I’ve been looking at various options with page-turn buttons and not really finding anything that I like compared with my dying Oasis:

I want page-turn buttons, but probably not as much as I’d prefer a smaller size. I’m leaning towards just getting the base 2026 Kindle at 140g. It has the same size screen as the Oasis but with warmer color.

I’ve perhaps made the mistake of purchasing most of my content from Amazon. But their system does work very smoothly across all my devices, and the hardware alternatives are not as compelling as I expected.

Apple Intelligence Reports

Howard Oakley:

In Golden Gate there are currently three sources of records of AI transactions. Those handled entirely on-device appear only to be recorded by Unified log entries, while interactions with Siri are provided in a detailed transcript in the new Siri app.

[…]

Although that transcript includes external references implying that an off-device model was used, no explicit information is given, and entries don’t make clear what information left the device, or whether that was handled by PCC or Apple’s secure implementation in Google Cloud.

Apple’s documentation refers users to the Apple Intelligence Report (AIR) available from Privacy & Security settings. When enabled, this will generate at the user’s request, a report covering the last 15 minutes or 7 days of AI interactions which “may include personal data such as messages and text you enter in intelligent writing tools.”

Glenn Fleishman:

Because of the peculiar nature of AI large language models (LLMs), Apple has to “talk” to Siri AI just like we talk to ChatGPT or Claude. But what does Apple say in these system prompts?

[…]

The report is formatted in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), which is not meant to be read by humans. However, you can open it in a JSON reader, such as the free JSON Viewer, for a color-coded view that’s easier to examine, or cut and paste it into a text editor or word processor. Reports can get large, though, and JSON Viewer only handles files up to 10 MB. Try OK JSON if you hit that limit ($24.99 with a 7-day free trial). Neither app soft-wraps long lines, so I copy the prompts into BBEdit ($59.99, free mode available) for searching and viewing.

Howard Oakley:

I pointed out that the bulk of most AIRs are privateCloudComputeRequests, metadata for requests processed by PCC, whose main contents are attestation bundles. Those are provided in Protobuf format, and encoded using Base64, making them difficult to access.

However, Apple states that “you can parse, canonicalize, and verify attestation bundles from the Apple Intelligence Report using the pccvre attestation subcommands.” This article explains how you can do that without compromising the security of your Mac, using a Virtual Machine.

Howard Oakley:

Once you’re happy the AIR will be worth browsing, return to that setting and click on the Export Activity button. Be sure to save that AIR with the default .json extension.

[…]

Provided you’re running macOS Golden Gate, download the first beta of my new app AIRer from here: AIRer100

[…]

If there are records in that AIR, they will be listed by time and date, with the oldest at the top, in the left sidebar. Select one of them, and its useful contents will be displayed in the main part of AIRer’s window.

Previously:

Mac Installer Plug-Ins Bug

anonymoussingh:

We maintain a macOS product whose installer uses custom InstallerSection plugin bundles to show configuration panes during install. Starting with macOS 27 beta 6, all of our plugins stopped loading in Installer.app — the panes never appear and the install fails because our preinstall step depends on data the panes collect.

HirohikoKihara (via Ric Ford):

A third-party PKG installer that ships a custom Installer Plugin no longer displays one of its selection panes. The plugin bundle appears not to be loaded, so the pane that it provides is silently skipped and the user cannot choose the intended installation option.

FE:

This is regression for all latest updates eg. 15.8, 27.7, 28.0. This bug refuse open installer plugin for security reason in spite of the plugin and installer are correctly signed, notarized and works seamlessly in previous macOS versions. Workaround is copy installer (*.pkg) to local file system (home, desktop folder).

Previously:

Thursday, October 1, 2026

EagleFiler 1.9.22

EagleFiler 1.9.22 is a maintenance release of my Mac file/note organizer and e-mail archiving app. This version works around various bugs in macOS 27, adds capture support for the Thorium Web browser, and improves importing from Mariner Paperless.

Previously:

I Said No and Apple Said Yes

David Bushell (Mastodon, Hacker News):

I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off.

[…]

And today I discovered that Apple had [in macOS 27] removed the “no” switch.

[…]

Digging through macOS 27 settings I turned off Siri (again). Of course, multiple unkillable Siri processes remain, stealing memory and writing data. For what purpose? Who knows. Note that they removed “Apple Intelligence” from this control.

[…]

All of this garbage was enabled after upgrading to macOS 27 despite me having “Apple Intelligence & Siri” turned off already. That was a rather explicit “no”, no?

Previously:

Update (2026-10-02): Coeur (via HN Reader):

Author claims the system setting “Privacy & Security > Apple Intelligence Report > Report Duration” with its 3 options [Off | 15 minutes | 7 days] sends that data to Apple with that frequency. This is wrong - this is a transparency report so that you as a user can see everything that is getting sent to Apple as a part of Apple Intelligence. Nothing additionally is getting sent to apple if you switch this away from “Off”.

To me, the main point of the post was about the missing off switch for Apple Intelligence itself. Bushell was forced into enabling a feature (and storage use) he had specifically turned off, and there is no option to block his data from being sent to Private Cloud Compute. But, yes, the first sentence I quoted from Bushell is wrong. The report feature isn’t periodically sending data to Apple; it’s reporting what was already sent. Turning it off does not add any additional privacy, except from someone snooping the report file directly on your Mac. Apple’s wording explaining the report was confusing but has improved somewhat in recent versions.

Accessing the Keychain Without the Password

Bob Gendler:

Since macOS 26.4, there’s been an issue with the keychain hiding in plain sight and that issue is it’ll take ANY password. Say what? The story behind CVE-2026–43728.

[…]

Where this is a bit more of a kicker…you can reset the keychain password without even knowing the real one.

[…]

Now did Apple fully fix it, well mostly. Something is different after macOS 26.4 (I believe it’s the new, User Authentication Daemon — userauthd). On macOS 26.3, if you ran security lock-keychain and then security unlock-keychain it HAD to be your keychain password. But now they added this note to the man page.

Unlocking the login keychain might succeed when an incorrect password is presented, if other unlock factors are available.

Previously:

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

App Store Scam: “Update My Phone”

John Gruber:

“Update My Phone & Apps: Guide” is an iOS app from developer Tair Olzhasev. By default, the only thing it does for free is give you a “Check for Updates” button that launches the system Settings app. It doesn’t even take you to the General → Software Update screen. It just takes you to the root level of Settings.

Everything else it purports to do requires a $15/week subscription. That’s $780 per year.

Jeff Johnson:

You can tell it's a scam without even downloading the app, because it has no website and hosts the privacy policy on sites.google.com, a dead giveaway.

The 3-day trial with auto-renewing subscription is also a huge red flag. By no coincidence, 3 days is the minimum subscription trial length allowed by Apple. All the scams use it.

Christian Tietze:

Being part of a team with a successful App Store app opens my eyes for how weird the app store is.

This is not the Bear Notes the Shiny Frog team is working on :)

This one seems to not be a scam—and there’s only a one-time $3.99 IAP—but it sure is confusing.

Previously:

Backporting SwiftUI APIs

Dave DeLong:

I can improve the process of removing backwards compatibility shims by using conditional compilation to remind me when they’re no longer necessary!

[…]

This does mean that the first time we change our deployment target, we’ll get a bunch of compilation errors. But given the nature of how Backport is implemented, this should be a relatively quick process to move past. (And of course, you’re welcome to use #warning instead of #error).

Shaps Benkau:

SwiftUIBackports mirrors Apple’s SwiftUI API names, shapes, behavior, documentation, and availability where practical. This keeps app code familiar today, and easy to migrate away from once your deployment target reaches the native API.

Backports are discovered through .backport, the Backport namespace, or backport-prefixed environment values.

Majid Jabrayilov:

Usually, we don’t see many new APIs in intermediate releases like 27.1, but this time is different. Apple introduced several new iPhone Duo-related APIs in the 27.1 release. This week, we will learn how to use all of these new APIs without bumping your project’s target version.

[…]

Here we introduced the toolbarVerticalBehavior function on the Backport type that handles availability checks and calls the new APIs if available or returns a plain view when it is not available.

Previously:

AI AppleCare

Joe Rossignol:

Apple recently considered laying off about 5,000 support employees [to replace them with AI], but it has put those plans on hold indefinitely, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

[…]

Last month, we reported that customers who call the AppleCare phone number (1-800-APL-CARE) from the U.S. or Canada are now routed to an AI-powered support assistant.

Joe Rossignol:

The assistant can answer questions and troubleshoot issues with your Apple products, with it able to provide detailed step-by-step instructions. The assistant can still transfer you to a human advisor if it cannot answer a specific question, or if you ask to speak to a real person.

[…]

Apple has also been testing a new AI-powered chatbot in its Apple Support app, through a new “Ask” tab that has rolled out to a limited number of users.

I actually kind of like support chatbots in that they can be very fast for handling basic issues. As to the layoffs, it’s not clear to me whether this is Ternus reversing a Cook idea or something else.

The main problem I have (and I hear others having) with Apple’s support is that for more difficult problems you reach a ceiling where nobody can help you and it seems like nobody cares. Anything that can’t be addressed via a hardware swap is like filing a very time consuming Radar that goes into a black hole with no follow-up. Some software issues seem fixable in that they are more like server database entries than bugs. A sufficiently high level support person should be able to go in and edit the entry. But it seems like this only happens when there’s a major story in the press.

Scott:

Apple could probably lay off 5000 AppleCare workers if Apple programmers spent more time working on their operating systems and default apps for another 6 months before releasing them to the public.

Previously:

The App Store Review Process Needs Fixing

Lex Friedman (Mastodon):

Though allegedly focused on benefiting users (through better safety and compliance), App Store review in its current form mostly frustrates the people it claims to protect.

[…]

Those are all scammy apps that got through. Apple’s review capacity isn’t infinite. Every hour a reviewer spends poring over a bug-fix update to an app that’s been in the store for years is an hour not spent catching the fake LastPass app.

[…]

And the review process is fundamentally flawed anyway: It works best with developers who are trying to do the right thing. Plenty of apps pull their content, features, and behavior from servers their developers control. Feature flags, remote configuration, and web views mean an app can behave differently the day after approval than it did the day of vetting. A determined bad actor can get past App Review. An honest developer just waits in a slow, nebulous line.

[…]

At WWDC 2020, the company announced that bug fixes for apps already in the App Store would no longer be held up over guideline violations (except for legal issues); developers could address those problems in a subsequent update instead. That’s a good policy! Based on developer complaints I’ve seen, Apple hasn’t honored that agreement.

He suggests a Trusted Developer Program.

Previously:

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

Apple Loses Haptics Patent Case to Taction

Blake Brittain (PDF, patent 1, patent 2, Hacker News, 9To5Mac):

A US jury ruled that Apple owes San Diego-based Taction ​more than $5.7 billion for using its patented technology to power the haptic feedback in iPhones and Apple Watches. Apple said it would ​appeal the country’s largest such verdict to ​date.

[…]

Apple denied the allegations and ​said the patents were invalid.

neuropsychguy:

Taction Technologies has real products (used in various headphones) -- in case anyone is wondering about whether the company is only a patent troll.

[…]

What’s complicated about this case is that Apple developed the Taptic Engine before Taction filed its original patent application. Apple’s original Taptic Engine was different from what Taction later patented. However, Apple subsequently redesigned the Taptic Engine, and those later designs incorporated a combination of suspensions and ferrofluid damping that a jury (in California -- this isn’t in Texas) has now found fall within Taction’s patent claims.

Malcolm Owen:

In effect, the jury says that Taction has proven Apple has infringed, but not that Apple did so knowingly.

[…]

Apple was accused of buying and reverse-engineering two Kannon headsets that used the technology.

The $5.7 billion seems so high compared with the $634 million in the Masimo case where Apple seemed a lot more guilty.

Previously:

CFXMLParser 7-Byte Crasher

Nicolas Seriot:

// "<a>" in UTF-16 LE + a single dangling byte
const UInt8 bytes[] = {'<', 0, 'a', 0, '>', 0, 'X'};

[…]

The whole bug is a confusion between bytes left versus UTF-16 characters left. The result is repeated buffer doubling until allocation fails, and a local process crash if the exception is uncaught.

macOS 27.0.1

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

Apple says macOS Golden Gate 27.0.1 fixes unspecified bugs.

See also: Mr. Macintosh and Howard Oakley.

Previously:

macOS 26.7.1 and macOS 15.8.1

macOS 26.7.1 (security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer):

This update provides bug fixes and security updates for your Mac.

macOS 15.8.1 (security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer):

This update provides bug fixes and security updates for your Mac.

Though not called out in the release notes, macOS 15.8.1 fixes the regression with RAW files.

For some reason, Apple removed the customary “is recommended for all users” from the release notes.

Previously:

iOS 27.0.1 and iPadOS 27.0.1

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

According to Apple’s release notes, iOS 27.0.1 addresses an issue that could cause Face ID not to work properly on the iPhone 18 Pro.

Some iPhone 18 Pro users have complained that authentication can fail to work for things like unlocking a locked app. In some cases, the device freezes up and then reboots. Other users have seen a “ Face ID is Not Available” message when attempting Face ID setup, and others have experienced issues with the Require Attention for Face ID setting.

Juli Clover:

Apple’s security support pages say there was a CoreGraphics out-of-bounds write issue that could be exploited with a maliciously crafted file, allowing for arbitrary code execution. […] Apple says the flaw was exploited in an “extremely sophisticated attack” on targeted individuals running older versions of iOS.

Previously:

Monday, September 28, 2026

Not Muse in the App Store

Jeff Johnson:

The Muse from Meta app description says at the beginning, “Muse is your personal AI agent that gets things done, always working on what matters to you.” The Muse AI app description says at the beginning, “Muse is your professional AI agent that gets work done, always helping move important tasks forward.” Near the end, the Muse from Meta app description has the heading “SMART, BUT STILL LEARNING.” Near the end, the Muse AI app description has the heading “POWERFUL, BUT STILL LEARNING.”

In other words, Muse AI is a blatant copy of Muse from Meta, the latter of which is currently the #1 iOS App Store download in the United States. I don’t know where Muse AI ranks in the iOS App Store, but I do know that it’s currently the #20 Mac App Store download in the US.

And the real Muse app isn’t in the Mac App Store, so it has no competition.

By the way, I’d also like to draw your attention to the #11 Mac App Store download, as shown in my screenshot above: App for Instagram º. Yes, the app name includes the º character, a phenomenon I’ve written about before.

[…]

The top search result for “VLC” in the Mac App Store is Video Player for VLC, developed by muhammad faisal jabbar, not by VideoLAN. VLC for Mac is distributed outside the Mac App Store. You may notice a similarity between the icon of the official VLC app in the iOS App Store and the icon of Video Player for VLC.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-29): John Gruber:

“Muse AI” is now gone, but “App for Instagram °” and “Video Player for VLC” are both still there.

Jeff Johnson:

The Reddit commenter claims that the scams receiving public attention are “the tip of the iceberg from a limited, outsider perspective,” which is an accurate metaphor, yet the commenter and I have dramatically different interpretations of that metaphor. For the commenter, the iceberg represents the vast number of scams allegedly caught by Apple app review but not seen by the public; for me, the iceberg represents the vast number of scams not caught by Apple app review and not seen by the public either. To put the argument another way, the commenter appears to assume that the majority of scams in the App Store receive widespread public attention, in blog posts such as mine or in the news media, so the relatively small number of stories we hear is indicative of a relatively small number of scams in the App Store, whereas my own impression is that the vast majority of scams in the App Store do not receive widespread public attention. Scam hunting is not my job, merely an occasional hobby. It’s so easy for me to find scams, they practically fall into my lap whenever I look. I could spend all day every day finding and listing App Store scams, if I were sufficiently motivated (I’m not). You would think that someone working for Apple would be sufficiently motivated, by a paycheck, to spend all day every day finding and listing and most importantly removing App Store scams, but I’ve seen no evidence of it.

I think Johnson is right about the iceberg. Most of the scams that get publicity are at the top of the charts. One view is that all the scam apps that Apple misses end up being popular. What are the odds? The other is that we notice them because they’re popular and that there’s also a vast number of deceitful or dangerous apps lurking.

Dan Moren:

Speaking of App Store shortcomings, I really hate when I want to see how much an app costs and I get this impenetrable list of IAP options. It’s impossible to know without installing and opening the app what the payments options are. Be great if Apple helped make this clearer—which options are actually available? What are their various plans (monthly, weekly, etc.)?

Meta AI for Mac and Muse

Zac Hall:

The new Meta AI desktop app is version 1.0 beta at launch and weighs just 16MB once installed.

Based on initial inspection, it runs natively on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 15 or later, using an AppKit and SwiftUI shell with WebKit for richer chat content. In other words, this is not an Electron app or a repackaged iPad release.

It includes Mac-specific hooks, making the desktop experience more robust than the Meta AI mobile app.

Karissa Bell:

The Mac app brings a few new capabilities compared with Meta AI’s existing website and mobile app. For example, it enables users to share part of their screen so the assistant can “see” what they’re working on and provide more specific answers.

Juli Clover:

The app is primarily meant for businesses and content creators, and it integrates with Facebook and Instagram. It incorporates analytics tools so it can answer questions about performance, and connects with Google Workspace for document access. Google Workspace access requires a professional Facebook or Instagram account.

John Gruber:

Passes the Settings window sniff test too — it actually has a Settings window.

[…]

The Mac app is not available in the App Store. You need to download it directly from Meta’s web page, using the “Download for Mac (Beta)” link. The ChatGPT and Claude Mac apps aren’t in the Mac App Store either — they do too many things outside the App Store’s mandatory sandbox (and probably use APIs require that special entitlements in the App Store too).

Sarah Perez:

Meta’s new AI assistant app, Muse, is now available on Mac.

On the Mac, Muse can interact with your files, messages, calendar, notes, and mail, all within their native applications.

Terrence O’Brien:

Jason Aten, a contributing editor at Inc Magazine, posted on Threads screenshots of an interaction he had with Muse in which the assistant asks him some questions about a conversation he was having in Messages.

The problem is that Aten says he didn’t give Muse access to his messages. When asked how it knew about the contents of his messages, Muse replied, “I saw the notification previews, not your message history. I haven’t been reading your texts.” Aten continued to push, asking how Muse was receiving message previews, it didn’t have a good answer.

M.G. Siegler:

The number one response I’ve gotten to my thoughts on Meta’s Muse personal assistant agent is some variation of “I will never trust Meta with my data.” But the number two response is arguably more interesting (and related): “Why didn’t Google build this?”

Pieter Arntz:

Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle says it’s trivial to turn Muse into “the ultimate backdoor.”

[…]

According to Ars Technica, Wardle found that a locally running application or terminal command could alter an undocumented Muse configuration setting that controls the server used for dictation transcription. By redirecting dictation traffic to an attacker-controlled server, an attacker could capture voice prompts and obtain the authentication token for the victim’s Muse account.

John Gruber:

Four days later and Muse still holds the #1 spot in the U.S. iOS App Store.

See also: Joanna Stern.

Alexandr Wang (Watts Martin, John Gruber):

Here’s the best part: we have no idea what people will want. The world until now has been shaped by the small number of fanatics who have somehow found a way to make their wants real. But we’ve never seen humanity with every single person’s agency fully switched on. Eight billion people who just need to write their dream down in order to get started making it happen.

So we built Muse to help people build the world they want.

Damien P. Williams:

So uhhhhhh… Apparently meta’s muse “AI” is just straight up doxxing people to strangers on FB marketplace???

Via Mike Masnick:

Almost all of Meta’s PR about Muse was about how careful they had been to set it up not to do things like this, how they delayed the launch by months to carefully design it so it could be trusted. And then…

Previously:

Grok Bot

SpaceXAI (MacRumors):

Grok Bot is in beta and available today for SuperGrok, SuperGrok Plus, and SuperGrok Heavy; Cursor Pro, Pro+, and Ultra; and Cursor Teams Standard and Premium subscribers on desktop and iOS. Grok Bot comes with its own usage, separate from your Grok and Cursor plans, so anything you hand off to a Bot won’t count against your existing usage. Download the app, create your first teammate, and start handing off work.

[…]

Inside SpaceXAI, that already looks like real, multi-step coordinated jobs being handled: a sales Bot updating the CRM with call transcript notes and drafting follow-ups, an ops Bot seating new hires and processing invoices received in Gmail, and an engineering Bot reproducing a bug in the product UI, filing the ticket, and handing the fix off to a debugging Bot.

[…]

People inside SpaceXAI often run multiple Bots in parallel, with one to manage the others. A chief of staff sits on top, with a specialist for each lane: inbox management, expenses, recruiting, bug fixes, or operations. Instead of multiple agents you have to manage, Grok Bot gives you a small team that can work in parallel so you’re not the middleman.

Artificial Analysis (Hacker News):

Grok 4.6 gains 5 points over Grok 4.5 on the Intelligence Index just over one month after its release, or +23 points compared to Grok 4.3. This brings SpaceXAI back to the intelligence frontier alongside OpenAI, behind only Anthropic.

Kun Chen:

i’m 80% sure Grok Bot was originally built by the Cursor product team, and got rebranded after the acquisition

John Bai:

Believe it or not, the original Grok Bot started as an exploration of what an ambient computer assistant might look like.

I wanted to give an expressive face to a helper that could also use your computer. The character evolved, but that sense of presence stuck around.

Dare Obasanjo:

A real dilemma. People whose opinions on tech topics I take seriously are saying good things about Grok Bot.

It sounds like it nailed OpenClaw/Hermes for the masses but as a point of principle I don’t use MechaHitler. I would love an overview of what it gets right that everyone else missed.

I don’t trust xAI (or Meta) with my data, but it doesn’t seem like Siri AI can do all that much. So far, I’ve been too busy to do much with agents, even on a test Mac. But I don’t think agents are going away, so there’s a tension here that will need to be resolved eventually. My guess is that most people will throw caution to the wind in order to get results. Maybe Google will have something more trustworthy and powerful by then.

Previously:

OpenClaw 2.0

Juli Clover:

OpenClaw for iOS can be used alongside an existing gateway as a secure node for chat, voice approvals, sharing, and device-aware automation.

The iOS app replaces iPhone and iPad workarounds that involved using Telegram or WhatsApp for on-the-go access.

Hannes Rudolph (Hacker News):

This update touches every part of OpenClaw, including installation, messaging, memory, skills, models, automations, the browser and native apps, plugins, security, and a very long tail of fixes. We started by simplifying installation and rebuilding the browser app as a first-class experience, but doing that properly meant carrying the cleanup through the rest of OpenClaw until it became OpenClaw 2.0.

Previously:

Friday, September 25, 2026

FruitMenu Redux

Rosyna Keller:

FruitMenu Redux revives a utility (FruitMenu) that brings lost Mac OS Classic features to Mac OS X. Specifically, it restores the fully customizable Apple menu.

It’s no longer a haxie that works by patching the operating system. Now, it’s a regular app that hooks into other apps (e.g. to switch to a particular window) using the accessibility APIs.

The first step was to implement every FruitMenu feature that’s still possible in the current macOS security environment. That immediately ruled out features requiring patching menus (sigh, I really miss patching menus) and features that require privileges now gated behind restricted entitlements. I also added support for viewing and executing Shortcuts.

[…]

Additionally, you can set a hotkey to any item you add to FruitMenu Redux!

[…]

Because SwiftUI doesn’t support dynamic menus, I had to rewrite all the menu code to use AppKit’s NSStatusItem and NSMenu as NSMenu is now a first-class citizen on macOS and fully supports dynamic submenu building. This means that FMR doesn’t even try to build the contents of a folder under you actually attempt to show the contents of the folder. Not only is this significantly faster, but it also uses significantly less memory.

FruitMenu is now available (Mastodon):

A built-in visual editor displays your menu on the left and a library of over 30 item types on the right. You drag items from one to the other (almost like Font/DA Mover, the best UX ever created). The library includes files and folders, submenus, Running Applications (and you can enable an option to show open windows and tabs), Mounted Volumes, Recent Items, Force Quit, Sleep, Restart, Shut Down, Shortcuts, Software Update, separators, System Settings panes, and more!

Anything you put in the FruitMenu Redux Items folder in your Library also appears in Files, folders, and aliases.

$10 (with $7 intro price), not in the Mac App Store because of accessibility.

Rosyna Keller:

OMG, Core Transferable, why do I have to declare a public UTI in my info.plist for internally dragging from one list in my app to another list in my app?! It’ll never be decoded by another app!

This was the fix to a bug I reported. With the new SwiftUI drag API, you apparently have to declare private internal drag types in your plist (on Tahoe, but not on Golden Gate).

Xounds, which plays sounds in response to user interface actions, is also back. Unlike FruitMenu, this one never appealed to me—I actually prefer to have the audio muted most of the time. I do find it interesting that it supports the old sound set files from Mac OS 8. Apple dropped the APIs for playing these way back during the 64-bit transition, but Xounds knows how to extract and play the audio.

Previously:

Flickr 5.0.9

I haven’t seen it documented, but it looks like Flickr went back to shipping its rewrite of the app. It’s better than before but loses the scroll position when going from an individual photo back to the grid.

Previously:

Antennagate Q&A

Hartley Charlton:

A 47-minute video of the Q&A session from Apple’s 2010 iPhone 4 “antennagate” press conference has surfaced on YouTube, showing Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, and Bob Mansfield answering reporters’ questions.

[…]

Jobs used his prepared presentation to announce free cases for eligible customers and a 30-day return option. Apple later posted video of that presentation, but left out the Q&A, which was documented at the time through written reports and photographs.

John Gruber:

The Q&A was on the record (which is the entire point of a Q&A), and was reported widely, but I don’t think there’s ever been video of it. Here’s a report by Jeff Carlson at TidBITS, published the day the event was held, which states, “The video omits a long and interesting Q&A at the end.”

Then, yesterday, video of the Q&A hit YouTube. I don’t know what truck it fell off the back of, why it took 16 years, or how it came into the hands of “Sir Mix-A-Lot Rare Music”, but I’m sure glad it did. There are parts of this Q&A that I remembered, and parts I didn’t. Carlson was exactly right: it was long and it was interesting.

My main takeaway is still that there were two stories here, but most of the media missed one of them, and Apple was happy to focus on the other.

The first story was that holding iPhone 4 in the wrong way would reduce the signal strength. Apple pointed out that other phones had the same problem, to varying degrees, and offered cases as a solution.

The second was that, even with a case, iPhone 4 had worse reception than previous iPhones. I saw this directly myself: testing my iPhone 3GS and my father’s iPhone 4 in some areas that had poor signal, and finding that one worked reliably and the other was completely unusable. Apple examined my father’s iPhone 4 and assured us it wasn’t a lemon, so there was no choice but to return it. AnandTech did some more precise testing and published some graphs that were consistent with what we saw. I think it was the only bad iPhone Apple made.

In the Q&A, the first question was about Jobs’s health. The second was about whether Apple was going to make any changes to the antenna. Jobs responded that the iPhone 4 antenna was better in almost every way than previous designs. But Apple did end up redesigning the antenna with the iPhone 4s, and it worked just fine in my same test areas. It’s possible that the cell towers had changed in the interim, but the 4s worked well for me everywhere that it could be expected to and ended up being one of my favorites.

Nick Heer:

Sam Henri Gold decided to pick apart the changes between iOS 4.0 and iOS 4.0.1, which changed the number of bars shown in moderate-to-low reception areas[…]

Previously:

Golden Gate and the Notch

Jason Snell:

Apple has added some light menu-bar management, specifically to deal with items that overflow the notch on some MacBook models. I’m glad that it’s taken this tentative step, though I wish it were more—it’s okay, Apple, you can sherlock all those menu-bar-management utilities out there—and of course, it should’ve happened back when the notch first appeared five years ago.

Previously:

Thursday, September 24, 2026

Locked Down Passkey and Keychain Backups

I remain unhappy with Apple’s passkey backup story. There’s little documentation about this, but from what I can tell:

The above is last year’s news, but I don’t think I had written it all in one place before. The new bad news is that, as of macOS 26.4, these problems now affect regular passwords, not just passkeys. (You do have more flexibility to export passwords, though.)

Rich Trouton (Hacker News):

Historically, you could copy the login keychain file from one Mac to another and be able to open it on the destination Mac by providing the password to that keychain. As of macOS Tahoe, this does not appear to work for Macs which use Secure Enclave.

[…]

From that, it appears that unlocking the login keychain requires more than the password because the keys it unlocks are tied to the Secure Enclave of the Mac where the keychain was created. With the decryption keys stored in the source Mac’s Secure Enclave, manually copying the keychain to another Mac and then unlocking it won’t work. The password you have for the keychain may be correct, but the actual keys needed to decrypt its contents won’t be available on the destination Mac.

Jeff Johnson:

According to Apple, all Apple silicon Macs, as well as some Intel Mac models, have the secure enclave processor, so the issue affects millions of Mac users.

[…]

If anything happens to your Mac, if it’s stolen or becomes inoperable, your login keychain is also lost, unrecoverable, even if you have a copy of the login keychain file! This is a stunning development that has left me bewildered and irate. WTF was Apple thinking? To my knowledge, Apple did not even publicize the change in Tahoe.

[…]

How does Migration Assistant handle the situation on Tahoe? I don’t know. I would guess that since Migration Assistant still has access to the old Mac, it simply decrypts the old login keychain and copies the login keychain entries to the new login keychain on the new Mac, rather than transferring the keychain files directly.

[…]

I recommend that you open your login keychain with the Keychain Access app (now located in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications) and check what’s in there, the data that you’re in danger of losing. Whether you realize or it not, many apps use the login keychain. For example, Google Chrome and other Chromium browsers store passwords in the login keychain. MailMate stores email account passwords in the login keychain. The open source RSS reader Vienna stores website passwords in the login keychain. The Zoom app also uses the login keychain. My Developer ID code signing certificate is stored in the login keychain; if I’m not mistaken, I believe that Apple’s own Xcode put it there. And of course, any items that you’ve manually added to the login keychain would be lost if the keychain file could not be unlocked.

Howard Oakley:

I have confirmed that a login.keychain-db copied from my Mac mini M4 Pro to a virtual machine (VM) running macOS Tahoe 26.6.2 cannot reveal any of its secrets to the Keychain Access app on the VM, as it refuses to accept the valid password. Not only that, but Keychain Access running in a VM cannot access the login.keychain-db keychain copied from another Tahoe VM, although neither has been anywhere near a Secure Enclave.

If you intend migrating manually between Macs, don’t waste time trying to copy across the login keychain, as it’s not likely to work, and its secrets will remain.

[…]

I performed test migrations between VMs, and demonstrated that Migration Assistant does copy the contents of the login keychain successfully to the destination Mac.

I think this only happens if you migrate over a network, with the old Mac acting as a server. I prefer to connect the old Mac using Target Disk Mode, but in that case Migration Assistant wouldn’t be running on the old Mac so the special sauce wouldn’t work. Likewise if I were trying to do the migration using a third-party cloning app.

Howard Oakley:

  • Loss of physical access to a Mac running 26.4 or later prevents access to any items stored in its login keychain.
  • Hardware failure requiring logic board replacement may have the same effect on restoring the contents of its login keychain (assuming that migration from a backup doesn’t work).
  • Restoring an Apple silicon Mac in DFU mode may be similar in effect.

What I don’t know yet is whether you can unlock and access any login keychain written by macOS 26.4 or later and migrated from a backup accessed directly from a different Mac. This would occur in one-Mac migration, when Migration Assistant uses a backup of a Mac not acting as a Migration server. This would only be possible if the backup also stored the additional secret required to access the login keychain, which seems unlikely.

[…]

Apple’s documentation for macOS Tahoe and the copying of keychains makes no mention of this change, in spite of its serious consequences and the change being made almost six months ago.

It there states “If you didn’t use Setup Assistant, the best way to copy your keychains to a new computer is to export and then import them using Keychain Access”. However, Keychain Access can only export some keychain items including certificates and keys, but not passwords. And to do that, the Mac must be able to unlock and access those items in the source keychain. Thus, Apple’s recommendations are out of date and will now fail.

rsUSA0 (via Jeff Johnson):

When upgrading to macos 27 Golden Gate, I erased my system through recovery to do a clean install. I planned to manually migrate data back to the computer from an external drive clone of Macintosh HD and a Time Machine backup. This has worked well in the past and eliminated system bloat.

When I manually migrated my login keychain, it opened, showed entries, but it wouldn’t accept my password to reveal any actual passwords. The window shakes like I’m using the wrong password. I’m 100% sure I’m using the correct password. I also tried every password I’ve ever used and I’m certain it’s not a password issue.

Perhaps even restoring to the same Mac failed because the clean install wiped the key stored in the Secure Enclave. [Update (2026-10-01): See update below.]

Jeff Johnson:

Some people who read my previous blog post misunderstood the issue, because they didn’t know that the macOS login keychain is distinct from iCloud Keychain.

[…]

In the Keychain Access app, you can see two separate default keychains, one of which is the login keychain. The other default keychain is named “iCloud” if you’ve enabled iCloud Keychain, “Local Items” if not. There’s actually a longstanding issue with this keychain analogous to the newer issue with the login keychain.

[…]

Mac users like myself who forsake iCloud Keychain face the prospect of no disaster recovery for the Local Items keychain. My habit is to manually create a new password item in the login keychain and only then supply the credentials to an app, for example, Safari AutoFill. Ironically, the login keychain change brought by macOS 26.4 sabotages my password backup procedure[…]

jen1x:

Today, I got my new Mac mini M6. When I started setting up the new machine, it asked me to update to macOS 27, so I followed the instructions.

[…]

After signing in to iCloud, it asked me to enter the passcode of one of my Apple devices. I entered the correct passcode and even tried the passcodes for all of my devices, but I keep getting the same message:

Verification Failed
There was an error verifying the passcode of your iPhone

I don’t like having to rely on iCloud.

Previously:

Update (2026-10-01): TN3137 has been updated for macOS 26.4:

Historically each file-based keychain was a standalone file. You could, for example, copy a keychain file from one Mac to another and still use it, as long as you knew the keychain password.

In macOS 26.4 and later that’s no longer the case. A keychain file might reference a protected entropy file. To unlock such a keychain you need both the keychain password and the protected entropy file.

[…]

These protected entropy files are stored in /var/db/SystemKeys. If you’re creating a backup product, make sure to back up that directory. Without it, the keychain files that you back up might be useless.

[…]

The /var/db/SystemKeys directory is not directly accessible, even when running as root, so you can’t copy a protected entropy file in the normal way. To access it, disable System Integrity Protection (SIP).

First things first: I don’t think turning off SIP every time you make a backup is a real solution. And I don’t understand what problem Apple is really trying to solve with protecting the entropy file; it seems like they don’t trust their own encryption. Lastly, it’s not explicitly stated, but I don’t think copying the entropy file helps with backing up passkeys.

That aside, I find the details both illuminating and confusing. This probably explains the rsUSA0 case above, where restoring to the same Mac didn’t work. The key wasn’t stored in the Secure Enclave but rather in the entropy file on the SSD, which had been wiped. This also suggests a simpler way for Migration Assistant to work; it could have special access to copy the entropy file without having to actually open the keychain.

It also seems to be saying that, if you turn off SIP and copy the entropy file, you can then access your keychain backup from another Mac. But I’m not sure how to square that with Apple’s keychain documentation:

Keychain items are encrypted using two different AES-256-GCM keys: a table key (metadata) and a per-row key (secret key). Keychain metadata (all attributes other than kSecValue) is encrypted with the metadata key to speed searches, and the secret value (kSecValueData) is encrypted with the secret key. The metadata key is protected by the Secure Enclave but is cached in the Application Processor to allow fast queries of the keychain. The secret key always requires a round trip through the Secure Enclave.

How can copying the entropy file work if the Secure Enclave is required? My guess is that the entropy file itself is encrypted (NSFileProtection) using the Secure Enclave. So accessing it on the original Mac does require going through the Secure Enclave. But when you make a backup, the entropy file gets decrypted. Maybe accessing the keychain on the second Mac causes file protection to be re-applied to the contents of /var/db/SystemKeys, so then it becomes protected by that Mac’s Secure Enclave.

Previously:

Update (2026-10-02): Dave Nanian (Mastodon):

This is obviously not a good user solution, because no one is going to boot to Recovery, turn off SIP, back up, boot back to Recovery, and turn SIP back on. Thinking they would do so is kind of crazy.

[…]

SuperDuper handles this situation. When you make a bootable copy, the required keys are copied without requiring any special steps.

SuperDuper itself can’t read the entropy file, but it uses Apple’s asr tool to make bootable backups, and that has special access. (Unfortunately, it can’t update the entropy file without making a fresh bootable backup, but in practice I don’t expect it to need updating.) I had not been bothering to make most of my backups bootable, since in most cases I just want to restore to an internal SSD, not actually boot from the backup. But I now think it makes sense to choose bootable backups as the default.

Howard Oakley (Rich Trouton):

I won’t expand on my feelings any further than by saying that in my 37 years as an Apple developer, I have never come across anything so shameful.

Unfortunately, it seems like the keychain stuff was just the warm-up act.

Update (2026-10-05): Howard Oakley:

[macOS 26.4] Added the protected directory at /var/db/SystemKeys to backups of Data volumes, and protects them in backups.

So Time Machine does back up the entropy file. I missed this because I didn’t see /var/db in my backups, but it turns out that they do have /private/var/db/SystemKeys and are just missing the /var symlink.

Update (2026-10-07): Jeff Johnson:

The -s option to the security show-keychain-info is not yet documented in man security, not even on the latest version of macOS Golden Gate. Moreover, the -s option does not work on macOS Sequoia and earlier. In general, the security show-keychain-info command reveals no information unless the specified keychain is unlocked, which makes it impossible to discover the salt of a keychain file that you can’t currently unlock. However, as long as you already have the entire contents of the /var/db/SystemKeys directory from the macOS volume on which a keychain file was created, the inability to determine the keychain file’s salt beforehand shouldn’t be much of a problem, because in practice there are typically only a few salt files, so you can simply copy them all to another macOS volume.

[…]

You don’t actually have to disable SIP to add files to the /var/db/SystemKeys directory, because you can do so from another boot volume. You have to boot into recovery anyway in order to disable SIP, so you could simply edit /var/db/SystemKeys from recovery rather than disabling SIP on the non-recovery volume.

The security unlock-keychain command lacks an option to specify the location of an entropy file or to provide the file data directly, so unfortunately a login keychain can’t be unlocked from the recovery volume, only from a volume where you can add files to the /var/db/SystemKeys directory.

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

Siri AI Ships (But Still Beta)

Apple:

Siri AI is a completely reimagined version of Siri that is more personal and powerful. With detailed responses and rich, natural conversations, Siri AI helps users get more done than ever before.

Built on Apple Intelligence, this new version of Siri draws on personal context understanding to help users find what they need in the moment across messages, emails, photos, and more. And with even more systemwide app actions, Siri AI can help users with tasks such as drafting an email from scratch or editing and sharing a set of photos.

[…]

Siri AI already works seamlessly with apps from Apple’s vast ecosystem of developers. Users can continue to take action in the apps they already use with Siri, like texting a friend in WhatsApp or playing a book on Audible. And soon, users will be able to ask Siri AI to draft an email in Microsoft Outlook, search for a homework assignment in Notability, or add a restaurant recommendation to Tripsy.

With onscreen awareness, Siri AI can answer questions or take actions related to the content on a user’s screen. For example, while viewing their favorite sports team’s website, a user can ask Siri to find all the upcoming home games and add them directly to their calendar. And Siri AI can also use broad world knowledge to get up-to-date information on virtually any topic.

Federico Viticci:

And these advantages sum up why I struggled to understand Siri AI at first. Is Siri AI only passable because it has an unfair advantage due to proprietary integrations that other AI models can’t use? Can it stand on its own as a good implementation of AI for most people? Does it fundamentally reinvent how we use our devices, or is it just a lot of hype for a slightly better Siri?

[…]

I find Siri AI’s underlying models to be subpar compared to the competition: for anything beyond a simple knowledge query, I can’t see Siri AI replacing ChatGPT and its superior reasoning modes combined with web search. For simpler queries – the kind that a Google AI overview could also capably answer – the balance of speed and terse formatting is optimal in Siri AI. If I’m watching a movie and want to know how old an actor is, or if I want to know the meaning of a word, Siri AI is perfect for it and I no longer need to reach for ChatGPT or my personal agent in Open Minis. As we’ll see later, I find the Siri app to be extremely barebones and representative of the state of the art for chatbot design…two years ago.

The lack of an “agent mode” for Siri AI stings, and it’s why I can’t replace my beloved Codex or Hermes Agent setups with it.

However, Siri AI eventually clicked for me for the opposite reason: it can do things in and with apps that no other third-party agent can. Yes, they are simpler actions, and, no, results aren’t always perfect; but if you love the Apple app ecosystem and prefer using excellent native apps to cross-platform web ones, Siri AI is a breath of fresh air in the AI landscape right now.

[…]

By and large, what Apple has built works, and as a user of Apple devices and the new Siri AI, you will never see any of its underlying complexity.

Ivan Mehta:

For years, I barely used Siri for anything beyond menial tasks like setting timers or alarms. That has changed with iOS 27, as I now repeatedly use Siri for complex requests and to make sense of on-screen context.

David Pogue:

Apple may be the last company to embrace AI. But wow, was it worth the wait.

The new AI Siri came out this week as part of OS 27 for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac, and it’s a life changer. A phone changer. It replaces most Google searches, most ChatGPT or Claude interactions, and cumulative hours of fumbling and searching and dragging and copying and finding and tapping and pasting.

[…]

Now that the final version is out, I wanted to see how often it gets things right. It is AI, after all. So I ran it through 125 tests.

Andrew Cunningham:

By default, Siri uses the Apple models described above, primarily the AFM 3 Cloud model (you can tell the local models can’t do much here because most Siri queries fail if you switch off your Internet connection). ChatGPT is still available in System Settings as an extension, with an option to make it speak using a different voice than Siri’s.

While Apple Intelligence as a whole can’t be turned off, users can opt out of the Siri AI beta at this point if they’d like. If you do this, you’ll be given the option to turn Siri off entirely or to use what Apple now dubs “Siri Classic.” In either mode, the UI for Spotlight reverts to its previous style.

The new Siri experience is so much like Copilot or the AI answers in Google Search that it barely seems worth remarking upon, which is both a comment about how “behind” its rivals Apple is in the AI race and how “caught up” Apple feels now that it has shipped something usable.

[…]

The Siri app isn’t much to look at, but I actually like that about it—I’ve lost track of the number of completely different Copilot apps Microsoft has shipped with Windows 11 and what the capabilities of those versions have been. Compared to that, it’s kind of nice to have a simple, clean, Mac-native app that just presents a chronological list of every question or conversation you’ve had with Siri.

Howard Oakley:

So far the biggest single objection to Golden Gate has been the storage space required to support this. As I’ve shown in my own figures, this could be as low as 10 GB, but is more likely to be around 30 GB. Add to that the 28 GB or so required for the system itself, and that’s a substantial burden on your Mac’s internal SSD.

Kirk McElhearn:

MacRumors ran an article this morning about this today, and what’s interesting is how different people report different storage sizes for the same devices. Why are some people, running the same operating system, seeing different storage sizes? And why isn’t the size the same on all Macs, at least those running the same processor? My M4 iMac reports 32.22 GB; not that big a difference, but still about 1.6 GB less than my laptop.

Nick Heer:

I do not think Apple should not have local models. But as it is surely the single largest system component now, consuming about the same space as an entire Sonoma installation, I think it is stingy of Apple to ship 256 GB base storage even on its lowest-priced computers.

See also: Reddit and Hacker News.

Christian:

I installed Golden Gate a week ago. Since then, I have been noticing an expected battery drain (Siri AI (useless for me), new OS, indexing) that has increased in comparison to Tahoe. This is expected, I know. The thing is that this does not stop, even after more than a week. It has gotten so much worse that the MacBook’s battery is being depleted even while sleeping to zero within hours. It is so bad that it even struggles to get beyond the point of being able to boot when connected to a charger. Eventually, it works, but it is a struggle.

Juli Clover:

According to pdfu, HomePod Software 27 includes the system behind Siri AI, called “Linwood,” along with new status lights in the Siri AI colors. […] Since HomePod Software 27 is out and Siri AI isn’t available on existing HomePods, it’s possible support will be limited to new HomePod models.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-28): David Pogue:

But there’s also a Siri app (on iPhone, iPad, Mac) whose primary function is keeping a running log of your requests. Today, I thought maybe I’d share mine, so you can see what Siri is like in practice.

I’ve deliberately picked a hectic 24-hour period from last week so that you can see the potential. The takeaway is that I’ve largely stopped opening apps. When I need something, I hold in the side button, ask my question, get the answer, and put the phone away. Often, people who witness it can’t believe what they’ve just seen.

Update (2026-10-09): John Gruber:

I feel like Siri AI has gotten worse since iOS 27.0 was officially released. It feels a bit slower and I seem to get worse answers, sometimes. I asked it for a word today, using it as an interactive thesaurus, and it simply told me it couldn’t. It never did that over the summer.

OmniFocus 4.9

Ken Case:

OmniFocus 4.9 adds support for Siri AI, optional new date parsing assistance via Apple Intelligence, and a range of new and updated App Intents exposed as Shortcuts actions.

[…]

In our testing we’ve found that the new Siri AI hasn’t yet learned how to work with app capabilities that it hasn’t specifically been trained on, even for App Intents that are available in Shortcuts and Spotlight. For example, its understanding of how to work with OmniFocus is based on how it’s been trained to work with the Reminders app. Our work in OmniFocus 4.9 means that Siri now knows about “reminders” in OmniFocus (i.e. actions and Inbox items), “lists” (i.e. projects) which contain reminders, and any “groups” (i.e. folders) that lists have been organized into. Siri can assign and edit reminder due dates, flags, repeat schedules, and notes and image attachments in OmniFocus. This is another great leap forward! But as soon as you try to go beyond what Reminders can do, you find its limits: for example, it doesn’t understand the distinction between due dates, planned dates, and defer dates.

Siri also doesn’t really understand much about how our document-based apps work, because Apple hasn’t trained it on our specific apps or anything equivalent. So, Siri doesn’t know how to make an outline, or a diagram, or a Gantt chart. We expect this to improve over time—after all, we’ve worked with other language models that do understand how to make those things—but it’s important to understand Siri’s current limits.

[…]

With Siri AI, Spotlight becomes even more important as a source for personal context. You can ask Siri about content in your OmniFocus database, so Siri can summarize the actions you’ve completed this week, or tell you what items you might consider working on soon.

My favorite change in OmniFocus 4.9 seems less exiting, but I’m irrationally happy about it. Last year, as part of the Liquid Glass update, they redesigned the Perspectives Bar on iOS to automatically collapse and expand as you scroll. I found the animations distracting, it messed up my muscle memory, and it required lots of extra taps. In 4.9, there’s a new Show Perspective Bar option, which you can set to Automatically (the 4.8 behavior), Manually (stay collapsed but expand when you tap), or Always (show the expanded state all the time, nothing moves). This is, of course, what I chose.

I’m still seeing the previously mentioned glitches in the Mac app with tabbing, spontaneous tag collapsing, and the window moving itself between spaces. The iOS app sometimes still shows an out-of-date list of flagged actions.

Previously:

iPhone Handoff

Apple:

iPhone Handoff lets you use one phone number between two devices, so you can switch between them whenever you want. It makes it easy to move back and forth between devices optimized for the moment — like weekday business or weekend adventures.

[…]

After iPhone Handoff is set up, one iPhone becomes the main iPhone and the other iPhone becomes the secondary iPhone that shares the number. Your main iPhone should be the one you use most often. Some carrier services, like Call Forwarding and Caller ID, and carrier account management can only be managed on your main iPhone. Contact your carrier for more details.

To move between your main iPhone and secondary iPhone, simply unlock the device that you want to start using — your phone number will automatically become active on that device.

[…]

iPhone Handoff works with Dual SIM as long as both eSIMs are from carriers that support iPhone Handoff. Once set up, both eSIMs switch together simultaneously when you unlock your iPhone.

They say you need to have Messages in iCloud enabled.

Joe Rossignol:

In addition to needing two iPhones running iOS 27, “iPhone Handoff” will seemingly require carrier support. The forum post mentions that T-Mobile in the U.S. and Deutsche Telekom in Germany might be among the first carriers to offer the feature.

T-Mobile:

T‑Mobile is introducing the feature at $5/month.

John Gruber:

This seems like a ridiculous thing to charge for. It’s not adding a separate device to your plan, like adding a cellular iPad or even an Apple Watch. It’s just switching your active eSIM between two iPhones. You can do this for free, now, on any carrier via Settings → Cellular — but it takes a bunch of taps, confirmation on both iPhones, and a few minutes for the carrier to register the eSIM transfer. iPhone Handoff just eliminates all the annoying friction and waiting.

Chance Miller:

As reported by CNET, AT&T seemingly has no plans to support iPhone Handoff.

Previously:

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Two-Tier Encryption in the UK

Alexander Cohen:

The Post reported that UK security officials had issued such a TCN, in secret, in January 2025, requesting that Apple create a way to access encrypted iCloud data belonging not just to UK users, but to Apple users worldwide. The chutzpah of it all was astonishing.

Apple’s position (privately, since they were prohibited from commenting publicly on the reported TCN) showed fidelity to its previous stance: deliberately weakening end-to-end encryption, for whatever purpose or for whomever the intended beneficiary, would make every user less secure. So the dispute became the UK government saying it needed access, Apple saying it couldn’t decrypt the data, and the UK effectively replying: then change the system so that you can.

[…]

Faced with a legal order that would have required it to change the security architecture on which ADP depended, Apple found a third option: stop offering the feature that made this dilemma exist in the first place. It reverted affected UK iCloud data to Standard Data Protection, where Apple does hold the keys and can respond to lawful legal process (except the baseline categories that stay end-to-end encrypted either way). This satisfied the underlying legal requirement without ever building a ‘backdoor’.

Apple said the decision to withdraw ADP in the UK left them “gravely disappointed”. There was, however, an important disclaimer. Apple only stopped allowing new UK users to turn on Advanced Data Protection.

Apple:

For users in the UK who have already enabled Advanced Data Protection, Apple will soon provide additional guidance. Apple cannot disable ADP automatically for these users. Instead, UK users will be given a period of time to disable the feature themselves to keep using their iCloud account.

I wonder whether Apple will actually lock users out of their accounts if they don’t turn off ADP or whether they’ll quietly not enforce it like with Emergency SOS via satellite.

Cohen:

In July 2026, Apple lodged a fresh complaint at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which became public the following month. Then, on the 11th of September 2026, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (a Democrat) and Republican Congressman Warren Davidson called on the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal to open up its proceedings concerning Apple’s encrypted-data dispute.

[…]

On the 17th of September The Daily Telegraph reported that Apple had asked the Investigatory Powers Tribunal to remove restrictions that gag them from confirming the existence of the reported TCN.

Previously:

Persistent Ads in iOS Settings

Alex Blake (Hacker News):

The ‘ads’ in question appear in the Settings app in iOS. They can be found near the top of the iPhone’s display and promote several products to the user, including paid-for iCloud+ storage, free trials for services like Apple Music and Apple TV, and the AppleCare+ extended warranty.

Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered. There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work.

Previously:

“Prepare to Ship” Battery Drain and Limit

Juli Clover:

The iPhone 18 Pro Max has a battery capacity over 20 watt-hours, which means there are additional shipping requirements. If an iPhone 18 Pro Max needs to be shipped somewhere, its maximum battery capacity has to be limited through firmware.

[…]

Customers who need to ship the iPhone 18 Pro Max for repair, trade-in, or other purposes have to use a new Prepare to Ship feature. Prepare to Ship discharges the battery to below 20Wh and sets a charge limit so the iPhone stays below the threshold during the shipping process.

Laptops, of course, have larger batteries, but they aren’t affected because each cell is below the limit.

Carbon Copy Cloner 7.2

Mike Bombich:

I remember seeing this one way back in Big Sur; you’d create a perfectly functional bootable copy of the system, but it wouldn’t show up in the Startup Disk Preference Pane. Apple ultimately resolved that issue in macOS Monterey, but now we’re seeing it again — unfixed in the Golden Gate release candidate.

The new CCC has a workaround, as does SuperDuper.

CCC 7.2 introduces a hybrid approach for bootable backups: as long as the source and backup OS versions are the same, CCC will update the backup incrementally without requiring any task configuration changes. This new approach will make many of the CCC-specific features available for bootable backup tasks, e.g. backup versioning, Quick Update, insight into what changes were made to the source between events. For the long stretches of time where your Mac’s OS isn’t getting updated every day, now you can enjoy the full benefits of the CCC backup solution.

These are great benefits for anyone that requires a bootable backup, but this isn’t a panacea. If the OS versions don’t match, the destination (and all backup versions) still must be erased and recloned; again, to offer the most reliably-bootable copy of macOS. We made improvements here, too. By default, CCC will ask for your approval before erasing the destination — this allows you to schedule your backup task without the fear of the backup getting automatically erased whenever the source OS is updated. That also allows you to retain the option of downgrading the source volume’s macOS, which you might want a day or so to assess.

Previously:

Monday, September 21, 2026

Shop Different

HarperCollins (Amazon):

When Steve Jobs hired Ron Johnson to create the Apple Store in 2000, conventional wisdom said that the internet would put stores out of business. By the time he left Apple in 2011, Johnson and his team had created the most respected and profitable retail stores in the world. And even then, skeptics were still predicting the death of physical retail.

In Shop Different, Johnson reveals how it happened: how he earned Jobs’s trust, how they developed a vision for a store that would win not by selling but by serving, and how he convinced Jobs that the store’s service philosophy should be rooted in something as intangible as love. Johnson then gives readers a new look at Apple’s ascent to the most valuable company in the world; offers an inspiring vision for a future in which retailers win on connection, service, and experience; and shares an honest look at what leads to success—and what can follow.

I enjoyed this interview that Jeff Benjamin and Fernando Silva did with Ron Johnson.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-25): Ron Johnson:

I told Steve, we’re going to get these people who are really good at technology, but they love people and are [good at conversation]. […] And he said, they don’t exist. Everyone who knows technology is kind of geeky. Maybe you call it the geek bar. […] But then I’d seen Apple’s genius campaign, and I felt like if we called a Genius Bar, People would come out of the woodwork wanting that job. Because who wouldn’t want to be the smartest Apple person in every city?

[…]

I said, you know, if the Mac’s a success, it’ll be the center of your digital life. And he came into the executive team meeting the next Monday, and I’m not saying it was solely that conversation, he probably had a lot of conversations about similar things, but he got all excited and stood at the whiteboard and drew a picture.

[…]

After I heard that, that night I was thinking about it, I woke up and I thought, well, if Steve’s going to market the Mac as the digital hub, our store’s [need to do that]. Our store was like any retail store, it was is built around products. We had portables and desktops.

I told Steve, well, maybe we ought to organize a store on movies and music and photos and the things you do.

Airmail 26.037

Today, Apple sent me an e-mail about the Airmail Mac e-mail client:

Thank you for subscribing to Airmail Pro Yearly. We wanted to let you know about an upcoming change to this subscription.

The developer, Bloop S.R.L, is raising the price of this subscription from $9.99 per year to $49.99 per year.

This is a big increase in percentage terms, but the new price is actually not out of line with subscriptions for other e-mail clients these days. There remains a free version that supports a single mail account.

They recently added an MCP:

Airmail now connects to AI assistants like Claude, Codex, and other compatible chatbots — so you can manage your email just by asking, in plain language.

Ask your assistant to find messages, summarize long threads, draft replies, tidy up your inbox, and organize folders. Airmail stays in control: everything runs on your Mac, and you decide what the assistant is allowed to do.

Most relevant to recent discussions here: does Airmail access Exchange accounts via the moribund EWS or the newer Graph API? They told me that it does not currently support Graph but that they will add that in a future update.

Previously:

Friday, September 18, 2026

SpamSieve 3.3.2

SpamSieve 3.3.2 is an update of my Mac e-mail spam filter that improves remote training, can export more rule information, and improves uninstallation, help, and more. The most significant news is that Microsoft has changed plans again. They will no longer be preventing users from continuing to use Legacy Outlook and in fact will keep it available for download as part of the combined Outlook app. This gives more time to adapt to their change in plans for AppleScript. Exchange (EWS) support remains an issue. Microsoft is still planning to cut off Legacy Outlook users, and Apple has yet to announce when Mail will support Graph. So far, I’ve not heard that it’s enabled in the macOS 27.2 beta.

We’re participating in a seasonal festival of artisanal software called SummerFest. For a limited time, you can get a 25% discount on new purchases of SpamSieve, EagleFiler, and other top Mac apps from our indie developer friends.

Some interesting engineering issues were:

Previously:

Golden Gate Liquid Glass

Andrew Cunningham:

The Golden Gate update to Liquid Glass solves a fair number of the most common criticisms through both design changes and customizable settings. It doesn’t fix everything, and the changes are primarily iterative—if your quarrel is with the overall design direction, this update won’t help you.

[…]

The net effect of all of Golden Gate’s design changes isn’t huge, and Golden Gate still looks more like Tahoe than like any previous version of macOS. Some controversial decisions remain in effect, like putting any non-squircle icons into “squircle jail” so they can think about what they’ve done.

[…]

But based on reactions I’ve seen during the betas, I expect these tweaks will be just enough to quell the loudest complaints, at least for people who were using Liquid Glass as an excuse not to upgrade.

It’s better than before but doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. Every time I do testing on a pre–Big Sur Mac (or even on Sequoia) I get sad about what we’ve lost.

Howard Oakley:

The most obvious improvement in Liquid Glass from Tahoe is the change from a choice between Clear or Tinted to a replacement slider. This also features one of the new Easter Eggs, a beautifully rendered image of Clarus the Dogcow.

[…]

Quite why Apple has pushed this decision so far forward I don’t understand, though. As with the previous options, for this slider to work, Accessibility settings like Reduce transparency must be turned off, on the basis that you can’t have too much of a good thing.

Basic Apple Guy (Bluesky):

Nature is healing

Jesse Grosjean:

I do appreciate some of the fixes in macOS 27. But this work ain’t done yet. What is even happening in this inspector[…]

TanglyConstant9:

macos 27 system settings graphical bug

Jeff Johnson:

Everyone is going to pretend that Liquid Glass is fine now, “nature is healing”, and such total bullshit.

The Overton NSWindow had shifted so far that nobody even knows what’s good and bad anymore.

macintog:

I skipped macOS 26 entirely out of utter contempt for the criminally bad UI. I’ve lived on macOS 27 since the first Developer Beta. It’s in great shape, the most mature x.0 in many years (unsurprisingly considering they began its development two months earlier than usual).

Jeff Johnson:

The widget only appears only when hovering over a certain area, and the only item in its popup menu is Show App in Finder…

Jim Chaffin:

Opened the new version of Mail in the just ‘upgraded’ Golden Gate and immediately went searching for a fix! Included is what the Mailboxes Sidebar looks like in my few months old iMac.

Benjamin Mayo:

I know they did it purposefully to add more contrast to selected items, but I don’t really like the changing font to bold on Golden Gate sidebars. It changes the text size which looks awkward, particularly when it has to truncate.

Steven Woolgar:

Even with Apple’s OS 27 release, Liquid Glass is the software equivalent of super gluing tacky gold gewgaws all over the place.

Peter Witham:

I don’t think Apple did enough testing on Notes in Golden Gate, those group and sort options are empty?

Dominik Wagner:

Oh, what fresh hell of indistinguishable came this new preview app icon’s choice?

Jeff Johnson:

They totally fixed Liquid Glass on Golden Gate.

Rui Carmo:

And, yes, liquid glass is still there. I don’t care about how many sliders they put in, every time I see that I am reminded that if they needed to add it, they blew it.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-23): Kevin C:

I had the run the betas in a VM, and thought the UI was a great improvement over Tahoe. However, it left me unprepared for the new bright edge highlights around buttons and input fields, etc. on HDR displays when actually updating my MacBook. I was glad I could fiddle around with BetterDisplay and disable XDR settings, which removed them. But I would prefer that an accessibility setting like Reduce Bright Effects considered them to be bright enough to reduce.

Update (2026-09-28): Jeff Johnson:

First, on Sequoia the background of the status bar is gray, distinguishing it and the link URL from the web page content it covers, whereas on Tahoe and Golden Gate the background of the status bar appears to be the same color as the web page.

[…]

The second difference between Sequoia and Liquid Glassy versions is that the Safari status bar appears higher on the page with Liquid Glass, presumably due to the exaggerated window corner radius. Thus, going back to the screenshots of my blog post, Liquid Glass can make the status bar text appear almost as if it were part of the web page text. Notice if that if the scroll position is just right, the status bar text fits vertically between two paragraphs, a situation that I could not reproduce on Sequoia, because the status bar text is closer to the bottom of the Safari window.

Mario Guzmán:

Why does my Apple Music sidebar keep doing this!? It is like the top blur-fade mask will extend to the bottom of the sidebar… I have to then quit the app every time…

Update (2026-10-05): Pierre Igot:

In macOS Golden Gate, when you enable the option to “Increase contrast”, the contrast between the button text label and the button background in standard macOS buttons actually… decreases, since the text label stays black and the background gray gets darker.

Update (2026-10-09): Nico Reese (Mastodon):

macOS does adopt some of Liquid Glass’s physical behavior this year, including subtle click animations and springy, bouncy interactions. One major piece is still missing, though: the fluid morphing between button shapes and interface elements that gives iOS much of its distinctive character.

[…]

Overall, Apple’s 2027 design updates are a mixed bag. macOS benefits enormously from the refinements to Liquid Glass and now delivers the most convincing implementation of the material across Apple’s platforms. watchOS also moves in the right direction, while iOS and iPadOS surprisingly lose much of the depth that made Liquid Glass feel truly physical. tvOS and visionOS, meanwhile, remain strangely inconsistent with the rest of Apple’s ecosystem.

D. Griffin Jones:

Preferences aside, you can clearly see on both platforms that dark mode looks much richer. Light mode can only show the cool new lighting effects on an HDR display, because they’re on a 100% white background. They can’t get any brighter unless you have an HDR screen that can go to eleven. There’s just a hint of gray shading to suggest depth.

We had a solution to this in Aqua, starting with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Toolbars and titlebars were gray, not pure white. It’s true that nothing can be higher contrast than white on black, but literally anything has more contrast than white on white.

Megabits:

Although Liquid Glass has been around for one year, the compatibility issues it introduced haven’t completely disappeared. Drawing on a real-world project, SLIT_STUDIO developer Megabits summarizes several common UIKit adaptation pitfalls and the solutions he used to address them.

Gavin Anderegg:

For most of the past week, I tried living with the default mid-point on the slider. I gave up almost immediately on macOS and iPadOS. I lasted much longer on iOS, but I found the glass to have an unpleasant milky hue. Now I’m back to full tinted, mostly because it’s the only way I can stand looking at notifications.

With the previous version of “tinted”, especially in dark mode, there was a nice amount of contrast. The material looked glassy and translucent, but it was pleasantly dark. In the 27 OSs, the tinted mode looks dull, matte, and significantly lighter. The worst part: it still uses white text, leading to universally worse contrast. So now I get worse readability and effectively none of the refractive effects. That sucks!

Gavin Anderegg:

First up, let’s talk tab bars. I think these looked awful in the original Liquid Glass redesign, and in 27.0 they look even worse. Below is an example of three tab bars from Safari in macOS.

[…]

In macOS 26’s dark mode, I had no problem with system menus even when Liquid Glass was set to clear. In macOS 27, even in the fully tinted mode, the menus have much lower contrast.

Mario Guzmán:

Golden Gate UI is miles better than what Tahoe brought us but at the same time, that’s not saying much because Tahoe set the bar so low…

Thursday, September 17, 2026

Xcode’s New .xcproj Files Are JSON

Apple:

Xcode now supports a JSON-based project format (.xcproj) that’s more readable, merge-friendly, and easier for coding agents to edit. Enable it in the file inspector. Projects using .xcproj also open in earlier versions of Xcode 27. Learn more in Updating your Xcode project configuration file format.

Fatbobman:

[The] new project.xcproj caught my eye. What it replaces is project.pbxproj, the build graph inside the .xcodeproj bundle, not the bundle itself.

[…]

In the age of agents, the drawbacks of pbxproj are amplified further. A great many IDs carry both object identity and cross-references, so an agent modifying a project usually has to locate the right object in a flat table, then update several mutually referencing places in step, all while trying to keep the serialized output faithful to Xcode’s conventions.

[…]

From a flat ID table to a tree that mirrors the UI: instead of dumping everything into objects, it unfolds into structures like files / targets / build-settings, so diffs look closer to the operations you actually performed in the interface;

The direction of relationships is reversed: a file can declare which targets it belongs to via target-membership, so adding a file no longer means editing several mutually referencing places at once;

Simon B. Støvring:

Developers have been screaming for a friendlier Xcode project format for years. I’m one of them.

Tony Arnold:

I’ve been waiting for something like this for most of my career! 🎉

Rob Napier:

It does feel like another case of “we’ve quickly done a thing to help AI that we’ve been unwilling to do for years to help humans.” I’m seeing that happen across the industry.

It is very welcome and appreciated, and lots of thanks to the teams involved. It’s also frustrating that it took “it can help AI” to make it happen.

Apple:

xcode-project-format is a Swift library for reading, writing, and manipulating Xcode’s JSON-based project.xcproj format. It models the format as a rich set of value types nested under a single namespace, XCSchema, so consumers get precise, typed access to a project’s structure instead of hand-parsing JSON.

The goal is to give the ecosystem a shared, accurate model of the Xcode project format — so tools like generators, linters, verifiers, and validators don’t each have to reverse-engineer the format from scratch.

Helge Heß:

Didn’t most people switch to local SPM projects anyways? Those are the new xcproj that have to be replaced with sth sensible 🙃

Fatbobman:

What the community has actually been waiting years for is a project manifest along the lines of Package.swift: something written by people, read by people, and reviewed by people, rather than a more modern encoding of the IDE’s internal database.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-23): John Gruber:

The old .pbxproj project format was not XML; it was an old NeXT-style “ASCII” property list — a file format that is surprisingly JSON-like considering that it predates not only JSON, but JavaScript (JSON = JavaScript Object Notation).

Jumping to 27.2

Joe Rossignol:

Apple just seeded the first beta of iOS 27.2 to developers for testing. Yes, you read that correctly: iOS 27.2, not iOS 27.1.

[…]

Apple previously announced that the iPhone Duo will ship with iOS 27.1, which means that software version will contain all sorts of references to the device hidden within the code. If an iOS 27.1 beta were to have been released today, it could have spoiled some smaller iPhone Duo details that did not make it into Apple’s event.

John Gruber:

So, putting beta releases aside, we’ll see the versions hit the public in numeric order:

  • All OS 27.0 releases: two days ago.
  • iOS 27.1: October 23, exclusively on the iPhone Duo.
  • All OS 27.2.0 releases: probably in late October, after the 23rd, but with the Duo remaining on its own 27.1 branch.

[…]

Maybe Duo convergence will wait for 27.3, but I think it’ll be a 27.2.x update.

[…]

Something similar happened back in 2010 with the original iPad, which launched in April 2010 running what was then still called iPhone OS, version 3.2.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

iPhone Duo being completely disconnected from the iOS update cycle is very likely why its software features didn’t leak — wouldn’t surprise me if iOS 27.1 is unique to that device, and the rest of the lineup skips it (or gets some security updates, iOS 27.1 in name only)

Xcode 27.2 Beta Release Notes:

The iOS SDK and simulator support for iPhone Duo will be available later this month in an upcoming release of Xcode 27.1.

John Gruber:

Developers wanted this SDK a week ago. And when day one preorder buyers start using their Duos on October 23, they’re going to wish Apple had shipped this SDK last week too.

Der Teilweise:

What annoys me about Apple releasing Xcode 27.2 Beta 1 before they release Xcode 27.1 Beta 1 is that there was absolutely no need to release 27.2 Beta 1. They could just have postponed it. Nobody asked for 27.2 Beta 1. What version are we supposed to use? One for releasing, one for Duo, one for fun?

Previously:

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Apple Reference Image

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors):

Our solution hinges on splitting the Apple Reference Image process into two phases: creating a secure digital negative, and developing that negative into a reference image. Each phase receives our strongest protections.

[…]

Apple Reference Image provides both a lower bound and an upper bound on capture time from Apple’s cryptographic timestamp service, and we guarantee the photo was taken between the two bounds. On a regular heartbeat, the device requests a cryptographic timestamp token, and retains the most recent one it has received. Globally this happens on average every 15 minutes, though the interval depends on local network conditions. This provides a proven lower bound timestamp for the photographic capture. After capture, the device requests a second timestamp to use as an upper bound, and both timestamps are embedded and signed with the sensor data.

[…]

When the user chooses to create a reference image, the device uploads the digital negative to PCC, which runs the processing steps needed to render the image — including demosaicing, tone mapping, and compression — in a highly secure, private, and verifiable environment. Experts can verify that PCC doesn’t alter a digital negative during development: they can examine the software that does the work.

[…]

Finally, as no security system is perfect, we created a revocation system that can revoke individual photos, as well as all photos from a specific sensor.

[…]

We built Apple Reference Image to avoid using an explicit, public credential for photographers, and to avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor. The final reference image is instead signed by Apple’s signing service, after validation by PCC.

Previously:

Update (2026-10-08): See also: Bruce Schneier.

CarPlay in GM Trucks

Jonathan M. Gitlin:

GM made the decision to drop Apple CarPlay and Android Auto phone casting from its newer EVs, and it’s one we’ve been pretty critical of. Although the automaker told us it made that decision in order to offer a better, more unified experience to its customers, that may well have changed: here, customers still have the choice to just cast their phone to the center screen.

And it has done a better job of integrating CarPlay and Android Auto into the experience, putting the casting apps in a large window or tile that takes up most but not all of the infotainment screen. To the left is another card that allows you to access other native apps, like towing or music (although you can still have CarPlay as the source for that native music app, should you start feeling a little Inceptionish). Porsche took a similar approach to working with, rather than against, users who enjoy CarPlay, and this looks like a welcome step from GM.

GM’s spokesperson wouldn’t be drawn on whether this means we’re going to see a corporate retreat from the previous stance on EVs, but I will note that the press release it sent Ars does say that the system was built “as a single scalable foundation across electric, gas and diesel-powered vehicles, it transforms time spent behind the wheel into an effortless, personalized journey,”—emphasis mine.

Matthew Haughey (via John Gruber):

The car industry accidentally did something I’ve always wanted to see, which was to release basically the same car under two brands and models, with one major consumer-facing difference. It’s kind of remarkable how good of a experimental design this is, since the performance and driving characteristics of both cars are identical, but drivers in one model get a major phone integration the others do not.

[…]

For the years these cars were sold together, the Honda outsold the Blazer by 43%, 73%, and 166% in each time period. Today in 2026, people are buying a Honda Prologue over one and a half times more often than the Chevy Blazer EV the Prologue is based on.

Marco Arment:

My favorite CarPlay feature is when it’s reading a text message to me and I go to tap the “Done” button and it suddenly turns into a “Call” button underneath my finger and I have to wait for all of the animations to finish before I can actually end the call and then I wonder (a) did the person notice that I called them for a few seconds and (b) do I need to explain that now and (c) are they going to call me back now and (d) HOW DID THIS INTERFACE EVER SHIP oh my god

Previously:

Update (2026-09-22): Joe Rossignol:

All in all, GM really wants you to know that it is committed to ditching the extremely popular feature that you probably want in your next EV.

It will only offer the choice in gas vehicles.

iPhone 17 Model Popularity

David Smith:

Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith.

Generally they followed the usual adoption pattern, and overall did very well ending at around 20% of total usage.

With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison the 16 Plus ended its first year at around 1.4% (vs the Air’s 0.3%).

Matt Birchler:

This works out to about 6% of my iPhone users using the iPhone Air, or about 20x more proportionally than David's more mainstream app. Honestly, the numbers are pretty striking here, with David showing a pretty even split between the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max, slightly decreasing in that order. Meanwhile, almost half of my users are on the Pro Max, another quarter are on the Pro, and the 17 is neck and neck with the Air. Clearly, my customers lean more enthusiast and are higher end buyers on average.

Nick Heer:

The apparent unpopularity of the iPhone Air is not what caught my eye. Instead, it is the percentage of iPhone 17e users: 0.5% of Widgetsmith users, and something like 1–2% of the total iPhone 17 generation in Birchler’s.

The iPhone 17e hasn’t been on sale for as long, though.

John Gruber:

In the entire year since the iPhone Air was announced, I’ve never seen Apple advertise it. No billboards, no commercials. It raises a chicken/egg question: did no one buy it because Apple didn’t market it, or did Apple not market it because no one wanted it?

[…]

But the shame of these low iPhone Air sales reminds me, very much, of the late great iPhone 12 and 13 Mini — also a truly great design, also terribly disappointing sales numbers.

Previously:

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Opting Into Training Siri AI and Apple Foundation Models

Amber Neely:

A new section in the iOS 27 privacy policy shows that Apple has reversed its stance on using customers’ data to train its AI models. Previously, the company assured customers that it had no need for customer data, and would figure out how to make Siri AI work well without it.

Apple maintains that it “takes steps to ensure that personal data is not stored or used by Apple.” But as Heise points out, and Apple has said in the terms of service for a few years now, the audio material may be listened to by Apple employees after anonymization.

[…]

It also admits that data collected may be reviewed by “review personnel.” It is unclear if “review personnel” are Apple employees or a third-party company contracted to read conversation transcripts, as it has historically been.

Chance Miller:

Starting today, when a user enables Siri AI, they will see a setup screen asking whether they want to opt in to “improve Siri and Apple Intelligence,” with two options: “Share Audio and Text” or “Not Now.”

[…]

What’s important to note here is that nothing is changing about the type of data Apple collects if you opt in to this setting. What’s changing is that Apple will now use the data to train and refine its Foundation Models, as well as Siri and Dictation like before.

nunez:

iOS 26 had a toggle you could select to disable all Apple Intelligence features.

That toggle was removed for iOS 27. Every AI feature has to be turned off individually.

Previously:

Xcode 27

Apple (xip, downloads):

Xcode 27 includes Swift 6.4 and SDKs for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, tvOS 27, watchOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27. Xcode 27 supports on-device debugging in iOS 17 and later, tvOS 17 and later, watchOS 10 and later, and visionOS. Xcode 27 requires a Mac running macOS Tahoe 26.6 or later.

Peter Witham:

Is this new in Xcode 27? Pretty sure it as and I approve whole heartedly! I really hate setting up Xcode settings more than once.

Christian Beer:

Building with Xcode 27 doesn’t work because of some intransparent XCStrings error… and I even can’t check with Xcode 26 anymore because Apple decided to not let me run it on macOS 27…

Steven Woolgar:

After all these years Apple has finally broken cmd-e in Xcode 27.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-18): Jesse Squires:

Xcode 27 seems to have broken UI appearance vs Editor appearance. They used to be separate settings.

For example, previously, the app could be light mode while the editor theme was dark.

But now, you choose a dark editor theme and the whole app goes to dark mode.

I hate this.

Me, too.

Update (2026-09-24): Christian Beer:

  • generate stubs for protocol: uses wrong class names
  • fix for missing parameter: inserts it at the wrong position
  • generating init with Bindings, State, etc.: mostly wrong

Update (2026-10-01): Steve Troughton-Smith:

AI code completion was such a nothingburger, for all of that investment. I don’t even have it turned on in Xcode anymore. If you’re into code completion, you’re into using Codex and Claude, so why would you ever use it now.

The built-in Xcode stuff has pretty much never worked at all for me. I either get errors or it does nothing.

macOS 26.7 and macOS 15.8

macOS 26.7 (security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer):

This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users.

macOS 15.8 (security, full installer):

This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users.

See also: MacRumors, Mr. Macintosh, and Howard Oakley.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-22): Wade Tregaskis:

Yesterday I tried doing the 15.8 update (from 15.7.9) inside one of those VMs. It hanged, midway through the post-reboot install process. I had to ‘power-cycle’ the VM. Which booted it back into 15.7.9, except… shockingly slow. Like, I can watch the individual elements of the GUI render like it’s the 1980s again.

I eventually figured out that my 16 GiB VM could only “see” 1.75 GiB of RAM, and was therefore swapping all to hell.

[…]

In hindsight, the simplest solution might be – I have not tested it – to just run:

sudo nvram -d boot-args

That should clear the boot args, eliminating whatever insane stupidity Apple’s updater enacted there.

me22 (via david_blanchard):

Apple’s camera raw support seems to be broken here since updating to macOS 15.8.0.

Update (2026-09-23): Brian Webster:

I can corroborate there being a problem with RAW files on macOS 15.8. I’ve had two customers run into problems trying to copy RAW images with PowerPhotos, it appears that photolibraryd ends up deadlocked somewhere in the RawCamera library, and you have to kill it to get things moving again.

Update (2026-09-25): Norbert M. Doerner:

Apple was able to completely break the essential RawCamera system framework, and macOS 15.8 is now unable to use Nikon, Canon, and other RAW files anymore.

[…]

Spotlight will hang for CR2, NEF, or DNG and other files, Preview.app can no longer open RAW files and will hang forever. The Finder can no longer display thumbnails of RAW files and will hang trying to do so. As will all other applications that can open these RAW files directly, like Apples own Pages.

iOS 26.7 and iPadOS 26.7

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

According to Apple’s release notes, iOS 26.7 includes security fixes, but it does not have any other features.

Apple will eventually show iOS 27 as the main update for the iPhone, but that likely won’t happen for a few weeks. Users who want to stay on iOS 26 for the time being can do so by opting for iOS 26.7 instead of iOS 27 .

Mysk:

The iCloud Private Relay bug that leaks the IP isn’t mentioned, although it had been fixed.

Previously:

Monday, September 14, 2026

macOS 27 Golden Gate

Apple (release notes, security, enterprise, developer, full installer, IPSW):

Explore what’s new for macOS 27.

The page is designed in an annoying way that requires sideways scrolling, and there doesn’t seem to be a PDF list of the new features like in previous years.

See also:

Jeff Johnson:

There’s also a DEPRECATION NOTICE at the top of the man page that lists the diskutil replacements for hdiutil subcommands.

Patrick Wardle:

Fixed: launchd no longer supports loading launchd property list files with the quarantine extended attribute.

Dave Nanian:

[Even] though a bootable backup is properly configured to boot, they aren’t showing up as choices in either the startup disk preference pane or the startup picker. (FB24210103, reported quite a while ago, Apple friends.)

Previously:

Update (2026-09-17): See also: Hacker News.

Andrew Cunningham (Hacker News):

Generative AI is unavoidable if you install macOS 27 Golden Gate. I’m being very literal: There used to be a toggle you could hit if you wanted to turn off Apple Intelligence and delete the gigabytes’ worth of AI models it would download to your disk, and now there isn’t. Apple Intelligence defines the Golden Gate release, in everything from its marketing to its features to the chips it runs on to the amount of space it takes on your disk.

[…]

More impressively, for apps that support it, the iPhone Mirroring window can now be resized dynamically while running apps. Apps will resize themselves to take up all the available space, and once the window is wide enough, you can even take advantage of multi-column iPad-style views for the apps that offer them.

[…]

For most Mac users, though, Golden Gate is a no-brainer update with few major downsides. It won’t hurt anything to wait until the 27.1 or 27.2 release if you’re already on macOS 15 Sequoia or macOS 26 Tahoe and you’re not in a hurry.

Juli Clover:

macOS Golden Gate: 10 Features to Try First

Paul Haddad:

Did Virtualization under 27 get hit with the slow stick? Trying to run a Mac VM on my M1 Ultra and it feels basically unusable. Getting Intel flashbacks.

Jeff Johnson:

In System Settings Privacy & Security, the Accessibility pane has been renamed to Device Control and Data Access.

Avi Drissman:

Have you been noticing that, starting with macOS 27, you have been consistently failing to SSH to a remote machine? Is it the case that the remote machine’s password ends with a shifted character?

There is a new setting: “Shift Return sends Meta Return” under Settings > Profiles > (profile) > Keyboard. This setting (enabled by default!) will cause a shift-return keypress to insert an ESC before the return is sent.

Rich Trouton:

As part of testing macOS Golden Gate, it was discovered by myself and others that MDM enrollment does not appear to completely work.

Adam Maxwell (tweet):

Golden Gate broke AuthorizationExecuteWithPrivileges such that spawned tasks no longer inherit PATH of the calling process[…]

Daniel Compton:

After upgrading to macOS 27 Golden Gate, my beloved copy of 1Password 7 started crashing every time I unlocked it.

[…]

If you’re planning ahead, you can disable Watchtower from Settings before you upgrade to macOS 27, but if you’ve already upgraded, then you’ll need to disable it with the following terminal command[…]

Update (2026-09-21): Benjamin Mayo:

Ever since updating to Golden Gate, my Mac now periodically makes a scratchy paper alert sound. No idea from what.

Chris Pepper:

Hopefully 1Password will upgrade v7 for OS 27 compatibility, but I can’t count on them fixing bugs in v7 — they’re pushing users to v8.

I found a ‘fix’ for this crash, but that command didn’t work (even after enabling Full Disk Access for Terminal so it could actually execute), and isn’t available on iPhone or iPad.

Nicholas Riley:

Golden Gate status: wow, the new menu extra/Control Center area is rough. Not just unpolished UI behaviors but multiple crashes. Hidden Bar is no longer functional and none of the replacements I found actually worked, while having about 100 features I don’t want.

System keyboard shortcuts also seem to be an area that weren’t well tested. My preferred screenshot shortcuts were ignored until I opened that section of System Settings, and some Siri thing created a conflict with Spotlight so I get both of them when I press ⇧⌘Space.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-23): Jesse Squires:

macOS golden gate is still shockingly terrible in unexpected ways.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I’m no math expert, but I’m pretty sure this doesn’t add up to anywhere near 16GB. I’ve only started seeing this dialog in the release build of macOS 27.0, despite running the betas all summer, so clearly there are some ghosts in this build

Mario Guzmán:

Okay… how do you

  1. make everything super huge like the text and pictures… while
  2. having way more empty space than you need AND STILL have to
  3. truncate your text labels?

8 of the 9 text labels are truncated.

Can we please have designers who know how to design for DESKTOP software and NOT magazines/print?

Jeff Johnson:

There are a surprising number of behavioral bugs in Golden Gate. It's not just a superficial update. Apple is basically breaking AppKit.

Mark Lilback:

I reported a bug to Apple in May, found while building Alcove. Two OS releases later it still isn’t fixed. It has gotten worse with each one.

[…]

On the betas the whole window went blank after the Cmd-Tab: sidebar, content, detail pane, status bar, everything but the toolbar. On the 27.0 release it usually doesn’t wait for the Cmd-Tab. In 5 of 6 clean launches the window came up with only the toolbar drawn. Cmd-Tabbing away and back doesn’t fix it. It moves the sidebar’s first row up under the traffic-light buttons and leaves the rest of the window empty[…]

Jeff Johnson (Reddit):

Golden Gate Finder bug:

If you start dragging a file, the mouse scroll wheel stops working.

Jeff Johnson:

I’m seeing a bug on Golden Gate where main menu item titles are not displayed if the item is added to the menu after launch. Examples: the Safari Develop menu and the Profile menus of Chrome and Firefox.

Update (2026-09-24): Avi Drissman:

It’s bizarre that hiding a main menu item would hold the space rather then shift things over.

Jeff Johnson:

Search on Golden Gate is twice as good.

Update (2026-09-25): Ric Ford:

Randy Singer emailed us about printer and scanner failures following macOS 27 installation. Fortunately, there’s a fix: reinstalling Apple’s deprecated and removed Rosetta 2 emulation code[…]

Paul Kafasis:

We’re also already recommending upgrading your Mac to Golden Gate. The new OS includes several important audio improvements, and as a result, Golden Gate provides the best experience when using our apps. Below, you’ll find details on key bug fixes Apple included in MacOS 27.

pdfu (via Jeff Johnson):

Hidden behind a feature flag, the System Settings app can now be resized in any direction. You can make the app window narrower than the default too, or adjust the sidebar to get even more space.

Update (2026-09-28): Matt:

Steve Jobs would fire the entire company and replace them with AI if he was alive to see this

Collin Allen:

Turns out, Backblaze is half busted on macOS 27 and there’s no fix yet. Have to launch /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzbmenu.app manually for now, it seems.

Update (2026-10-05): Karsten Kusche:

Kudos to 1Password for providing an update for version 7 on iOS and macOS to restore compatibility with this year’s operating systems!!

iOS 27

Apple (release notes, guide, security, enterprise, developer):

Explore what’s new for iOS 27.

See also:

Devon Dundee:

The reason you should update your Apple devices today is performance.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-17): Christopher Lawley (via Matt Birchler):

Let’s talk about iOS and iPadOS 27 and all the new features, including Siri AI, Apple Intelligence, and changes to the iPad and system apps.

iPadOS 27

Apple (release notes, guide, security, enterprise, developer):

Explore what’s new for iPadOS 27.

See also:

Previously:

watchOS 27

Apple (release notes, security, developer):

Explore what’s new for watchOS 27.

See also:

Previously:

Update (2026-09-16): Sarah Reichelt:

If anyone like me is struggling to update their Apple Watch, the Install button in the Watch app scrolls almost off the bottom of the screen on my iPhone 17 Pro. You can just see a few orange pixels. Try to tap them and it should work.

Update (2026-09-22): Tim Hardwick:

Fortunately, there’s still a way to force quit apps in watchOS 27.

From the app you want to quit, press and hold the Side button until the sliders appear. Then simply press and hold the Digital Crown until the watch face appears.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-25): Juli Clover:

Apple’s release notes [for watchOS 27.0.1] say the update fixes bugs, including an issue that could cause the Apple Watch to restart unexpectedly.

visionOS 27

Apple (release notes, security, enterprise, developer):

Explore what’s new for visionOS 27.

See also:

Previously:

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