I’ve released a new command-line tool called AEQuery. It queries scriptable macOS applications using XPath-like expressions, translating them directly into Apple Events.
The short version: you describe what you want using a slash-delimited path, and AEQuery resolves the SDEF terminology, constructs the Apple Events, and returns the results as JSON.
[…]
The code is on GitHub. There’s also a discussion thread on MacScripter if you’ve got questions or feedback.
Previously:
Time Machine had happily gone that long without backing up or warning me that it had no backup storage. […] I think this results from Time Machine’s set and forget trait, and its widespread use by laptop Macs that are often disconnected from their backup storage.
[…]
If you do just set it and forget it, you will come to regret it.
Today, after a minor disaster with my Obsidian vault, I decided to restore from Time Machine, and… I realized that it had silently broken across both my Tahoe machines.
[…]
It just stopped doing backups, silently. No error messages, no notifications, nothing. Just no backups for around two months.
[…]
After some research, I found out that the issue is with Apple’s unilateral decision to change their SMB defaults (without apparently notifying anyone), and came across a few possible fixes.
Previously:
Using the
logcommand line tool doesn’t require root privileges or require admin authorization, but it needs to be run by a user with admin rights.[…]
What this does is create a
sudoconfiguration which allows all members of thestaffgroup on the Mac, which is a group that has all local users on the Mac as members, to run thelogcommand line tool with root privileges. This removes the need for the account to have admin rights and enables accounts with only standard rights to use thelogcommand line tool to get information from the unified system log on that Mac.
The first bug report, FB21850924, covers a terrible memory leak in SwiftUI’s Table view, a feature our program uses a lot. […] Despite the rapid updates to the data, the sample program only keeps 1000 records in a deque, so the memory usage should bounded. Strangely, switching to another view triggers Swift to reclaim much of the memory.
[…]
The second bug report, FB21860141, covers SwiftUI Table view’s performance degrading quickly. […] Like the memory issue, simply switching to another view or, in this case, (strangely again) even just changing the window size resolves the problem.
Previously:
Apple (RC xip, downloads, Hacker News):
Xcode 26.3 introduces support for agentic coding, a new way in Xcode for developers to build apps, powered by coding agents from Anthropic and OpenAI. With agentic coding, Xcode can work autonomously toward a developer’s goals — from breaking down tasks to making decisions based on the project architecture, and using built-in tools to get things done.
In addition to Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex integrations, Xcode 26.3 makes its capabilities available through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that gives developers the flexibility to use any compatible agent or tool with Xcode.
For more information, see Setting up coding intelligence.
The agent sits in Xcode’s sidebar where developers can use it to plan new features, implement them, and review the results. As developers work, the agent generates a transcript of its actions, which lets developers follow along and interact with it. For example, code snippets will appear in the sidebar that can be clicked to take developers directly to the spot in the file where the agent made a change. Code updates can also be simultaneously previewed.
So Xcode just builds entire apps without you now
Xcode’s Codex support will happily trundle away for half an hour sticking its tendrils into every little corner of your project, touching and changing every file. It’s certainly going to be fun to build new projects with, but ain’t no way in hell I want to let that loose on any of my existing apps 😂
Xcode 26.3 getting official Claude and Codex integration without the usual guardrails is interesting enough, but having MCP in the mix is… unusually open for Apple.
[…]
But at least they seem to have done their homework where it regards the in-editor agent harness–not sure how deep they went into IDE primitives (file graph, docs search, project settings), though, and the apparent lack of skills and other creature comforts that all the VS Code–based tools have is a bit of a bummer.
I don’t know if this is super-duper interesting news, but I think it’s super-duper interesting that Apple saw the need to release this now, not at WWDC in June.
They couldn’t even wait for the final version to be shipping before sending out the press release.
I presume Apple announced these integrations now, and not at WWDC, to capture some of the frenzy surrounding tools like Cursor and Copilot.
As a heads-up, it’s around this time of year that Xcode traditionally goes new-OS-only, i.e. requires macOS 26.
They haven’t done that with Xcode 26.3 just yet, but you might find that this is the last point release to run on Sequoia.
AI models can access more of Xcode’s features to work toward a project goal, and Apple worked directly with Anthropic and OpenAI to configure their agents for use in Xcode. Agents can create new files, examine the structure of a project in Xcode, build a project directly and run tests, take image snapshots to double-check work, and access full Apple developer documentation that has been designed for AI agents.
If you’re an developer for Apple’s platforms and were wondering where you rank in their list of priorities consider that they were apparently capable of writing docs and adding meaningful Xcode integrations all this time but they decided to do it to help AI models instead of you.
This repository contains system prompts and documentation from Xcode 26.3, providing insights into Apple’s approach to AI-assisted coding and comprehensive guides for iOS 26 features and frameworks.
Combine is officially dead. Quote from Xcode 26.3 AgentSystemPromptAddition:
Avoid using the Combine framework and instead prefer to use Swift’s async and await versions of APIs instead.
It’s still not officially deprecated, but it’s obviously not preferred for new development.
Previously:
Update (2026-02-05): Dimitri Bouniol:
512 GB is a rough starting SSD size for development… All I did is install Xcode, my usual git repos, and a few other apps, and I’m already at >50% used before anything iCloud has even been touched…
Apple has honed in their
config.tomlto supercharge iOS development. Notes on Liquid Glass, call outs for Foundation Models — the list goes on. Though Apple blasts the doors off of their “big” stuff at W.W.D.C., you’d be crazy to think they aren’t paying attention. How we develop software is changing, and internally, it’s clear they are humming along with it. The fact that Xcode 26.3 exists, right now, is proof. They didn’t just cut a new branch once Codex’s macOS app shipped.[…]
So, how is the actual experience? Well, pretty nice! This is such a tiny thing, but in Terminal — removing a chunk of text sucks. I’m sure there is some keyboard shortcut I’m missing, or some other app I could use like iTerm or what have you, but not being able to use
Command+Aand then delete it hurts. In Xcode, that’s easily done because the input is not longer running through Terminal, it’s just an AppKit text entry control.[…]
This is a fantastic start for Xcode. If you’re later to the Claude Code or Codex scene, this is a wonderful place to start. There’s simply no going back once you learn how to use these tools. Ideas that you wanted to hack on become doable, those dusty side project folders come alive a bit more, and you get ideas out of your head much faster.
I handed it the classic SameGame codebase, gave it my coding style markdown file, and said “So this is an old ObjC app for iOS. I would like you to completely convert it 1:1 to modern Swift, with the coding style in mind. Leave no ObjC behind”
No other prompts needed; I needed to update a few legacy things in the xcode project settings (min OS version, Swift version, etc), and got this[…] All automatic, not a line of ObjC remains. Deprecated APIs were all modernized. 5,400 lines of ObjC became 2900 lines of Swift 5.
I really hate to say it, but at least on a test project, this Xcode 26.3 coding agent stuff is pretty good. I can see why some are going gaga over it.
My main concern (other than copyright, which for some reason companies seem to ignore) is that it makes it to easy to just trust the generated code. You start reading things line by line and after a few minutes its hard not to skim over the suggested bits that get added.
This scrollbar serves no purpose, so it will become visual noise for a lot of your users. But when you yourself use “shy” scrollbars, you might not even realize.
Of course, the scrollbar is just a symptom of a bigger problem – an accidentally scrolling surface that will be janky to everyone regardless of their scrollbar visibility status.
Always-visible scrollbars make it easier to spot these, not to mention also being helpful in spotting[…]
Previously:
Update (2026-02-05): Jeff Johnson:
Also, Keyboard navigation
We’ve made some improvements to our scheduler to help mitigate some of the Tahoe “stalling during Dark Wake” problems. They’re not 100%, but things are better, and we’re investigating additional improvements for the next update.
Previously:
[When] I scrolled down from the top, the content rows would scroll into the header, making the top messy and unreadable. This sort of overlapping and unreadable text is a feature of the various OS 26s, but in this case, there wasn’t a hint of transparency, so it looked like a bug to me. […] This exact layout worked fine on earlier versions of macOS, but as is often the case with all the OS 26s, things that used to work no longer do.
[…]
I reversed that change and then added space below the table view. Bingo! […] If a table doesn’t stretch from top to bottom of its view controller’s content view, in macOS Tahoe, the content will scroll into the header.
[…]
I ended up spacing the table view 1 point down from the top and 1 point in from the left of its enclosing view. The left spacing is not required but it makes the layout look more symmetrical. This prevents the bug from occurring and allows me to add the content I want underneath the table[…] I don’t think it looks as neat and clean as the original layout, but at least it works.
I just solved something different, but what feels like might have been caused by whatever the same underlying issue is.
In my case, it was a table view inside a sidebar whose content scrolled up underneath the toolbar without the toolbar applying a blur. The culprit was that the enclosing scroll view had a border type chosen. Changing the scroll view to no border made the toolbar render a blur correctly over the table view content. 🤷♂️
Apple (revision history, PDF, Hacker News):
Topics added:
Previously:
Emails released by the Justice Department on Friday appear to show that former Windows boss Steven Sinofsky not only consulted Jeffrey Epstein for help in securing his $14 million “retirement” package in November of 2012, but also in working on future career steps at other companies like Samsung or Apple. One document appears to show that a couple of weeks after Sinofsky’s departure was announced, Epstein wrote to him saying Apple CEO Tim Cook was “excited to meet.”
While apparently excited, Cook allegedly turned down the meeting. Epstein recounts that Cook declined because he was told that Sinofsky was starting a company with “farstall?(sp).”
Tim Cook was actively thwarting Scott Forstall’s business prospects even after Scott was no longer employed by Apple.
Scott played the most significant role in the development of iPhone and iPad save for maybe two or three other people. Did he deserve to be crushed by Tim?
forstall was the guy who led the iphone software - essentially my counterpart. he was actually fired for being mean to people. I called him and we joked. he is from Seattle and his brother works at ms.
was that tim brushing you off?
I could send tim mail but don’t want him to forward to steve.
This was sent more than a year after Steve Jobs died, so I’m not sure who he’s referring to. Was he worried about Ballmer?
Steven Sinofsky, writing to Epstein (via Edward):
The industry is going through a post-hp (post bill, post jobs, post chambers) world where leaders are being picked for being stewards and benign (hopefully). The big tech compnies are all on a path to be mediocre because of that. That’s really driving the bearish views of apple--Tim isn’t the right guy and it started with forstall being fired.
Microsoft going with tony bates. Hp going with meg. People with no views of the industry. Just people who organize and speak about it.
Personally I think apple and google need them, skills, most. Apple has no one. Google killing it now but very fragile.
Update (2026-02-04): Carly Page:
Steven Sinofsky warned Microsoft that its flagship Surface was about to flop in public, then sought exit advice from Jeffrey Epstein as he negotiated his way out of Redmond.
[…]
In an email to CEO Steve Ballmer and COO Kevin Turner, he said the device was “about to catastrophically fail in a very public way,” with sales tracking at roughly one-tenth of even the lowest expectations. Once the numbers escaped, he added, there would be no hiding it. “Word will get out very soon. There is no long term without this.”
Nine days later, Sinofsky was gone.
[…]
The emails also detail Sinofsky’s unease about life after Microsoft. He floated the idea of working at Samsung, then immediately worried about being sued. Microsoft, he noted, had a long history of dragging former executives into court under the theory of “inevitable leakage of trade secrets,” filing public, bruising, and professionally disabling cases even when defendants eventually prevailed.
Matt Gemmell (Mastodon, Hacker News):
Executives, experts, engineers, and designers are all leaving for more lucrative positions at even less scrupulous companies. Apple is currently the GUI laughing stock of the industry, a position once firmly held by Microsoft for decades, and the walking-back of poor decisions in followup point-releases has become normal. Liquid Glass is the sort of folly that was once limited to portfolio pieces and fanciful blog posts, complete with clumsy attempts to replicate Apple’s style of marketing copy; pretty little animations that showed as much inexperience in UX as they did proficiency in Photoshop. Now, these missteps come from the company itself.
[…]
Interface designers must have the same maxim as doctors: primum non nocere, and Apple could previously always be relied upon to remember and demonstrate it. Those days are apparently gone for now, replaced with whim and indulgence; tech demos canonised by whatever shoehorning is necessary. Putting aside the ugliness, and both inaptness and ineptness of the implementation, the largest problem with Liquid Glass is that it is so damned ominous. It portends, or perhaps reveals, a rot; an erosion in the core where Apple has always been distinct and steadfast.
[…]
The thing is, for now at least, none of this seems to matter, because the investors are happy. Apple is the gold standard for hyper-profitability and predatory monetisation. Huge margins, hardware which runs only their own operating systems, operating systems that run only approved software (with even the Mac creeping ever-closer to an iOS-style lockdown), and software which pays its tithe to Cupertino at every stage. Leverage upon leverage, incompatible with our quaint old-world perceptions of ownership, so long as the money flows.
[…]
The company feels like a performance of itself[…]
Unlike him, I think Apple’s hardware is mostly going fine, but I agree with the general thrust that Apple’s success has hidden problems. The last line really resonates. At times, the company seems like a cargo cult, repeating mantras from a previous era without actually following them and applying the same strategies as before even though they no longer make sense.
We are experiencing a period of great angst in the Apple community, and most of it is the result of Tim Cook’s leadership. Cook has done a tremendous job over the years, building on Apple’s success and taking the company to new heights. For years, the Macalope skewered pundits who suggested Cook was a failure for not delivering a product as successful as the iPhone, as if it were reasonable to suggest he deliver another once-in-a-lifetime product. Cook’s tenure has been one of mature, stable stewardship, and over the more than decade and a half he’s led the company, Apple continued to ship hits like the Apple Watch and AirPods.
The problem is that we didn’t get stable stewardship. Apple’s software and developer relations fell apart on his watch.
The Apple indie dev community is undergoing an identity crisis. For decades, whatever Apple said was good, was good. People mostly agreed with their ethics, design priorities, way of doing business.
Now that all of that has, well, severely degraded, it leaves us in the dark. The north star is gone.
See also: Warner Crocker, Dare Obasanjo, Kevin Renskers, Matt Gemmell.
Previously:
Today, we’re introducing the Codex app for macOS—a powerful new interface designed to effortlessly manage multiple agents at once, run work in parallel, and collaborate with agents over long-running tasks.
We’re also excited to show more people what’s now possible with Codex. For a limited time we’re including Codex with ChatGPT Free and Go, and we’re doubling the rate limits on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu plans. Those higher limits apply everywhere you use Codex—in the app, from the CLI, in your IDE, and in the cloud.
The Codex app changes how software gets built and who can build it—from pairing with a single coding agent on targeted edits to supervising coordinated teams of agents across the full lifecycle of designing, building, shipping, and maintaining software.
Skills—basically extensions in the form of folders filled with instructions and other resources—are also supported. The app lets users configure Automations, which follow instructions on a user-set schedule, with Skills support.
Based on my time using Codex, it seems capable, even though OpenAI has been running a few months behind Anthropic on the product side. To help bridge the gap, OpenAI is using a strategy it has used before: higher usage limits at a similar cost.
In addition to the app itself, OpenAI announced a new plan mode for Codex that allows for a read-only review (meaning the AI won’t muck with your code) and selectable personalities. Personally, I’ve had just about enough personality from the human programmers I’ve managed, so I’d prefer a nice, personality-free personality in my coding agent.
Recently, OpenAI also announced that Codex has an IDE extension for use in the JetBrains IDEs. Readers may recall that back in June I moved off of PhpStorm, my favorite JetBrains development environment. I moved to VS Code simply because the AI tools were more available for that environment. It’s nice to see JetBrains IDE availability for those of us who prefer it over VS Code.
[…]
The new Mac app adds a sandbox mode and lets developers set approval levels, including Untrusted, On failure, On request, and Never (meaning the app is never permitted to ask for elevated permissions).
Previously:
This [Apple documentation] is wrong, a discovery that took me about a half dozen attempts to update macOS on an external disk. I have a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 chip, specifically an M4 Pro chip, and the DFU port seems to be the USB-C port on the right side of the Mac, not on the left side.
[…]
Over the past few days, every attempt I made to update the disk volume to macOS 15.7.3 failed inexplicably. I tried both Software Update in System Settings and the
softwareupdatecommand-line tool in Terminal. They went through all the motions, downloading the entire update, rebooting, etc., but afterwards I always ended up right where I started, at macOS 15.2. Thesoftwareupdatetool gave no error message.[…]
By the way, Software Update in System Settings allowed my Mac to go to sleep during the “Preparing” phase, despite the fact that the battery was charged to 99%, so when I returned home from a workout I unhappily found 30 minutes remaining.
Previously:
Update (2026-02-03): Howard Oakley:
I have suggested a way of discovering which is the DFU port by discovering which is listed as Receptacle 1 in System Info.
Mobile networks determine location based on the cellular towers that a device connects to, but with the setting enabled, some of the data typically made available to mobile networks is being restricted. Rather than being able to see location down to a street address, carriers will instead be limited to the neighborhood where a device is located, for example.
According to a new support document, iPhone models from supported network providers will offer the limit precise location feature. In the U.S., only Boost Mobile will support the option, but EE and BT will offer support in the UK.
The feature is only available to devices with Apple’s in-house modem introduced in 2025.
[…]
[Cellular] standards have built-in protocols that make your device silently send GNSS (i.e. GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou) location to the carrier. This would have the same precision as what you see in your Map apps, in single-digit metres.
[…]
A major caveat is that I don’t know if RRLP and LPP are the exact techniques, and the only techniques, used by DEA, Shin Bet, and possibly others to collect GNSS data; there could be other protocols or backdoors we’re not privy to.
Proton’s Tech Fines Tracker (via Ben Lovejoy):
While $7.8 billion in fines sounds substantial, it represents little more than a rounding error for Big Tech. Based on free cash flow, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Amazon could collectively pay off all 2025 penalties in just 28 days and 48 minutes. Alphabet alone — fined more than $4 billion — could wipe out its penalties in about three weeks.
Here’s one that I missed at the time:
During the February 25 meeting with the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), Apple representatives were asked which other countries used Apple’s NSF scores.
[…]
The incident in question stemmed from data collected by Kakao Pay, a mobile payment and digital wallet service based in South Korea. The data was sent to Alipay, a Singapore-based mobile payment platform.
[…]
KakaoPay customers were not being told that their data was being transferred overseas. This sort of data collection is a direct violation of South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA).
Additionally, Apple did not disclose that it had a trustee relationship with Alipay. PIPA required Apple to be transparent about the relationship, but it did not mention Alipay in its privacy policy.
I find this reporting confusing, but it sounds like Apple was partnering with an online payment service (akin to PayPal) that could be used to pay for transactions users made using their Apple account. Apple gave Kakao Pay access to customer information (such as NSF scores), which it then transmitted to its partner Alipay. 40 million users were affected, but the fines only totaled $3.2 million.
Data collection occurred between April and July 2018 and affected roughly 40 million users. According to PIPC, “less than 20% of users registered Kakao Pay with Apple as a payment method, but Kakao Pay sent the information of all users, including not only Apple users but also non-Apple users (e.g. Android users), to Alipay.”
I don’t understand whether this is saying that Apple had 20% marketshare and the rest were Android or that data from iOS users who were not using Kakao Pay was nonetheless shared, too.
Previously:
Apple (transcript, MacRumors, CNBC, Hacker News):
The Company posted quarterly revenue of $143.8 billion, up 16 percent year over year. Diluted earnings per share was $2.84, up 19 percent year over year.
[…]
“iPhone had its best-ever quarter driven by unprecedented demand, with all-time records across every geographic segment, and Services also achieved an all-time revenue record, up 14 percent from a year ago. We are also excited to announce that our installed base now has more than 2.5 billion active devices, which is a testament to incredible customer satisfaction for the very best products and services in the world.”
And now, to help you visualize what Apple just announced, here is our traditional barrage of charts and graphs[…]
Even more interesting, though, is Apple’s suggestion that it’s still selling the iPhone 17 about as fast as it can make them—or to be more specific, about as fast as TSMC can make cutting-edge 3nm chips to power them, per Cook[…]
[…]
Mac revenue was down 7% in the quarter, the poorest performance of all Apple’s categories. But it’s hard to be that down about the results, because not only did the Mac still generate $8.4B in revenue and reach an all-time high in its overall installed base, but this was all happening in a quarter that is the proverbial “tough compare”—since Apple released the M4 MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac in the year-ago quarter, and only the low-end M5 MacBook Pro in this quarter.
[…]
Apple posted a company gross margin of 48.2%, based on a 40.7% products margin and an astounding 76.5% margin on services.
[…]
What really impressed the analysts was his insistence that even this upcoming quarter, where memory price issues are expected to become even more serious, Apple says it feels “pretty good” about its guidance to another 48% to 49% margin quarter.
Apple CEO Tim Cook believes that his company will have opportunities to deliver “innovations that have never been seen before” this year.
[…]
Cook hypes up Apple’s future on every earnings call, but “innovations that have never been seen before” is particularly bold wording compared to his usual comment about how the company’s product pipeline is stronger than ever.
I’m still waiting for the secret Leopard features and for Catalyst to get really good.
It is difficult to get a company to see that certain of its core competencies are in severe decline when the company is making more money than ever.
Previously:
Update (2026-02-03): Horace Dediu (Hacker News):
Apple is quite simply, delivering at the highest gross and net margins in its history.
Richard Lawler (MacRumors, Hacker News, Slashdot):
Apple’s biggest acquisition ever is still its $3 billion Beats buy in 2014, but now the second biggest deal is bringing in Q.ai, a four-year-old AI audio startup. Apple did not disclose the terms, but Financial Times reports that Apple is spending $2 billion on the company. It also mentioned Q.ai patents for optical sensor technology that could be built into headphones or glasses to recognize “facial skin micro movements,” allowing for non-verbal discussions with an AI assistant, for example.
The founders of Q.ai will join Apple, including CEO Aviad Maizels, who founded PrimeSense. Apple bought that company in 2013 and repurposed its Xbox Kinect technology to power the iPhone’s FaceID setup. This time around, tech that understands whispered speech could connect to the generative AI-upgraded Siri or other Apple Intelligence features, and work with future AirPods, Vision Pro, iPhone, or Mac devices.
Israeli technology site Geektime dug into patent details to uncover Q.ai’s work. Here’s the translation:
According to its patent applications, the company appears to be working on reading what is being said, not using voice, but by using optical sensors that detect muscle and skin movements in the face, to translate them into words or commands. Some of the patents indicate the use of a headset that also examines the user’s cheek and jaw, and will apparently allow you to talk to Siri, Apple’s voice assistant, using only lip movements.
[…]
I’m often around other people, whether that’s my family at home or random strangers out on the street or at a coffee shop where I’m working.
As a result, I always type in my AI requests. But using the iOS system keyboard can feel a bit clunky at times and slow me down. It would be so much quicker and easier to just speak my queries, were it not for the social hangup.
Overall, this feels more like a traditional Apple acquisition: a smaller company, more targeted in its use case, with talented staff that it can bring onboard.
Previously:
Sebastiaan de With (Bluesky, MacRumors, The Verge):
Some big personal news: I’ve joined the Design Team at Apple.
So excited to work with the very best team in the world on my favorite products. ✌️
Great news. I wish they’d also hire Mario Guzmán.
Prior to Halide, de With had done other work at Apple, collaborating on properties including iCloud, MobileMe and Find My apps. It’s unclear if his exit will mean any notable changes for Halide, or for the Lux apps Kino, Spectre and Orion.
As we mentioned in the announcement post today, we’ve been working with legendary team at The Iconfactory on Mark III. We’re also super excited to be collaborating with the renowned colorist Cullen Kelly on the new looks in Mark III.
[…]
So in short, Halide is going nowhere. This has been my full time job since 2019, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
I have spent my career leaning on Apple’s excellent design chops when building my own apps.
Now they’ve broken the design language of their operating systems so badly that it’s not possible to build excellent, bug free user experiences.
I’ve lost a north star here, and it’s heartbreaking because there’s no real way for them to turn this around for a very long time.
Here’s the thing about my trepidation around Sebastiaan de With going to Apple is he is but one man. The rest of the company has to give a fuck about design to allow people with taste and capability to make the things.
Last June, just ahead of the introduction of Liquid Glass at WWDC, de With imagined what a new design language from Apple might look like, which he dubbed “Living Glass.”
[…]
After using Liquid Glass for six months, I’ll add one more descriptor for de With’s design concepts: restrained.
See also: The Talk Show and Accidental Tech Podcast.
Previously:
Typical photo-preset apps simply swap a photo’s color palette. Halide’s Looks are capable of much more, virtue of being part of the camera itself. When you select a look, it changes the way the camera captures a photo and interprets the results. For the best results, you should pick the final look at the time of capture.
[…]
Our next look is Process Zero II, the second generation of our acclaimed look we launched it a year and a half ago. The Process Zero disables all computational photography at the time of capture, for photos with stronger contrast, subtler details and an overall more natural feeling.
[…]
In the past, you had to decide between the flexibility of Apple ProRAW or the natural look of Process Zero. Not anymore. With Halide Mark III, you can quickly experiment with ProRAW and Process Zero looks, after the fact.
Previously:
Peter Steinberger (Hacker News):
Two months ago, I hacked together a weekend project. What started as “WhatsApp Relay” now has over 100,000 GitHub stars and drew 2 million visitors in a single week.
Today, I’m excited to announce our new name: OpenClaw.
[…]
I’d like to thank all security folks for their hard work in helping us harden the project. We’ve released machine-checkable security models this week and are continuing to work on additional security improvements. Remember that prompt injection is still an industry-wide unsolved problem, so it’s important to use strong models and to study our security best practices.
See also: Moltbook (Hacker News), CNET, Rui Carmo.
Previously:
Update (2026-02-05): Jake Quist (Hacker News):
If you browse Reddit or HN, you’ll see the same pattern: people are buying Mac Minis specifically to run AI agents with computer use. They’re setting up headless machines whose sole job is to automate their workflows. OpenClaw—the open-source framework that lets you run Claude, GPT-5, or whatever model you want to actually control your computer—has become the killer app for Mac hardware. Not Final Cut. Not Logic. An AI agent that clicks buttons.
This is exactly what Apple Intelligence should have been.
[…]
If Apple owned the agent layer, they could have created the most defensible moat in tech. Because an AI agent gets better the more it knows about you. And Apple already has all your data, all your apps, all your devices. They could have built an agent that works across your iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Watch seamlessly—something no one else can do.
More importantly, they could have owned the API. Want your service to work with Apple Agent? You play by Apple’s rules. Suddenly Apple isn’t fighting with platforms—they’re the platform that platforms need to integrate with. It’s the App Store playbook all over again, but for the AI era.
The question is if Apple could have done it in a safer way.
Sarah Perez (MacRumors, Hacker News, Slashdot):
Creator platform Patreon is taking issue with Apple’s new mandate that forces all creators to move to a subscription billing model, which now has a new transition deadline of November 1, 2026.
[…]
The company said it would switch creators to subscription billing in November 2024, and creators could choose whether to increase their subscription prices to cover Apple’s fees. In addition, creators could opt to delay changes until November 2025 if they needed more time. However, they wouldn’t be able to offer subscriptions in the app until they adopted Apple’s in-app purchases.
Last May, Patreon took advantage of newly loosened App Store guidelines resulting from the U.S. court ruling in Epic v. Apple to offer creators the ability to process web payments from links in Patreon’s app.
Patreon—at least in the US—is now allowed to use external payments, but this is still creating a mess.
In 2024, Apple mandated that Patreon move all creators onto subscription billing by November of 2025, or risk being removed from the App Store. Last May, after a landmark court decision, Apple told us the timeline of that mandate was no longer in effect.
Apple has now reversed course again, reimposing their subscription billing mandate with a new transition deadline of November 1, 2026.
We strongly disagree with this decision. Creators need consistency and clarity in order to build healthy, long-term businesses. Instead, creators using legacy billing will now have to endure the whiplash of another policy reversal – the third such change from Apple in the past 18 months.
Over the years, we have proposed multiple tools and features to Apple that we could’ve built to allow creators using legacy billing to transition on their own timelines, with more support added in. Unfortunately, Apple has continually declined them.
For several years now, they have been trying really hard to get creators to switch to daily billing whether they like it or not, with a series of intrusive nags and dark patterns. E.g., the “Settings” tab always has an “unread” alert on it reminding me that I have not made the “recommended” change.
Now they’re going to force everyone to switch, and they’re blaming Apple for it. And, to be clear, fuck Apple, but also fuck Patreon, this is their choice and it’s going to mean that I can no longer use their service.
[…]
I sell monthly memberships to a physical nightclub. The memberships begin on the first of the month. I fulfill and mail the physical membership cards on the first of the month. If you make me switch to daily billing, that means I will have to do merch fulfillment on a daily basis instead, and I simply cannot do that.
[…]
I know for a fact that none -- zero, 0% -- of my patrons have signed up using the iOS app. I know this because I had to warn them away from it, due to the 30% Apple Tax, and all of them complied. All of them. The iOS app is utterly meaningless to me and to my patrons.
Especially weird when we have just had the stories about Goldman Sachs having to get out of running the Apple credit card because Apple insisted on billing everyone on the first of the month (among other reasons).
For per-creation billing creators: Migration requires manual support from our team. If you’d like to make the switch, contact Support and we’ll help guide you through the process.
Previously:
It appears that each time tethering is enabled or disabled on the iPhone, it disconnects Image Capture.
[…]
Thankfully the workaround is simple – disable tethering, or enable Airplane mode, while you’re using Image Capture.
Previously:
Update (2026-02-02): Jamie Cuevas:
This is not something new, but it is frustrating. Disconnecting the iPhone and camera happened to me with such regularity that I eventually relented and ended up enabling iCloud Photos on my Mac and on my iPhone just so that I could consistently have photos move from one device to another without these disconnections and transfer interruptions.
This is a refinement of my workflows for ingesting files from an iPhone or iPad camera, to move them onto my photo archive drive, and allows the removal of Image Capture from the process, which is good because the macOS USB driver can be flaky, and I’ve had at least one system crash from physically plugging in my iPhone.
[…]
In effect, what this workflow does, is move all Airdropped movies and images to their respective type folders in my home directory, and then, if they’re the original images taken on the devices, shifts them over to the root folder for the respective device on the photo drive, and once they arrive there, they’re processed into a Y/M/D folder hierarchy.
The Irish government is planning to bolster its police’s ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use.
[…]
The Bill will bring communications from IoT devices, email services, and electronic messaging platforms into scope, “whether encrypted or not.”
In a similar way to how certain other governments want to compel encrypted messaging services to unscramble packets of interest, Ireland’s announcement also failed to explain exactly how it plans to do this.
[…]
The government said it will follow the EU Commission’s (EC) roadmap for law enforcement data interception, including a section on encryption issues, which it published last year.
Previously:
Jade (Hacker News):
Cloudflare just published a vibe coded blog post claiming they implemented Matrix on cloudflare workers. They didn’t, their post and README is AI generated and the code doesn’t do any of the core parts of matrix that make it secure and interoperable. Instead it’s littered with ‘TODO: Check authorisation’ and similar.
[…]
Honestly this is almost insulting to me, as someone who has spent a nontrivial amount of effort developing a Matrix homeserver, with how low effort it is. And what’s the point? Marketing? I’m not gonna be trusting anything Cloudflare after this.
This seems out of character for them.
Technical blogs from infrastructure companies used to serve two purposes: demonstrate expertise and build trust. When the posts start overpromising, you lose both.
My charitable read on this is that an individual vibe-coded both the post and repository and was able to publish to the Cloudflare blog without it actually being reviewed or vetted.
That would also raise questions.
This post was updated at 11:45 a.m. Pacific time to clarify that the use case described here is a proof of concept and a personal project.
It does not clarify how AI was used.
Would you be comfortable handing the keys to your identity kingdom over to a bot, one that might be exposed to the open internet?
[…]
Jamieson O’Reilly, founder of red-teaming company Dvuln, was among the first to draw attention to the issue, saying that he saw hundreds of Clawdbot instances exposed to the web, potentially leaking secrets.
[…]
“Of the instances I’ve examined manually, eight were open with no authentication at all and exposing full access to run commands and view configuration data,” he said. “The rest had varying levels of protection.
Within an hour of setting up MoltBot on my Mac, it had already built a fully featured kanban board where I could assign it tasks and track their state.
I have seen other stories that are even wilder. One user shared an anecdote about asking it to make a restaurant reservation, and when it realized it could not do it through OpenTable, it went and got its own AI voice software and just called the restaurant, then secured the reservation over the phone.
[…]
None of those are pre-programmed routines. They are dynamic behaviors born out of an agentic loop that takes a goal and improvises a plan, grabbing whatever tools it needs to execute. It can apply general world knowledge, specific skills, and near-perfect memory into organized action toward objectives you set, and, more sobering, objectives it decides to set for itself.
[…]
That combination is why it feels both a glimpse at the future, but presented as a goal, where between us and the future realized, is a lot of hard work to make it safe.
Got a mac mini for clawdbot. Had a lot of fun setting this up today. Instead of access to my accounts, I gave it:
✅ its own apple account for messages
✅ its own gmail to sign up for stuff
✅ its own github to push code
I’m seeing lots of reports like this.
Everyone buying Mac minis for Clawdbot makes sense but like why did you not already have a Mac mini for AI stuff? Best fucking deal in computing fr.
Please don’t buy a Mac Mini, rather sponsor one of the many contributors of @clawdbot.
You can deploy this on Amazon’s Free Tier.
There are plenty of secure ways to run @clawdbot even on your local machine. Buying a new Mac mini shouldn’t even be an option (Mac studio I can still understand for local LLMs). Better to put that support into tokens or sponsoring the project.
Mysk:
I love buying new hardware as much as the next guy, but you don’t need to buy a Mac mini to try out @clawdbot
Use a virtual machine instead: @UTMapp is open source and supports macOS guests
With a VM you’d isolate clawdbot from your data on the host machine. I still wouldn’t trust LLMs and their providers to run through my data
You’d be one prompt-injection away from leaking all your passwords. Fun! 😬
While the internet was amused, it seems Anthropic wasn’t.
Clawdbot → Moltbot
Clawd → MoltySame lobster soul, new shell. Anthropic asked us to change our name (trademark stuff), and honestly? “Molt” fits perfectly - it’s what lobsters do to grow.
Here’s the new Web site.
This is the story of how fast things fall apart when legal teams, hackers, and viral hype collide.
[…]
During the rename process, Steinberger made a critical mistake. He tried to rename the GitHub organization and X/Twitter handle simultaneously. In the gap between releasing the old name and claiming the new one, crypto scammers snatched both accounts in approximately 10 seconds.
Previously:
Juli Clover (release notes, no security, no enterprise, no developer):
iOS 26.2.1 adds support for the next-generation AirTag that Apple introduced today.
[…]
The update also includes unspecified bug fixes, according to Apple’s release notes.
The iOS 26.2.1 update that Apple released today further addresses an issue preventing some older mobile phones from being able to make emergency calls.
Apple claims there are also bug fixes, but doesn’t deign to clarify what they might be.
More intriguingly, the company also released updates to four older versions of iOS and iPadOS, dating back to iOS 12. The updates include:
- iOS 18.7.4 and iPadOS 18.7.4
- iOS 16.7.13 and iPadOS 16.7.13
- iOS 15.8.6 and iPadOS 15.8.6
- iOS 12.5.8
Usually, when Apple updates much older operating systems, it’s because of a particularly problematic security vulnerability, though even then, the company seldom goes back more than two releases. However, something else is going on this time, as indicated by the security notes, which state that none of the releases have any published CVE entries.
Apple seems to be doubling down on encouraging users to update to iOS 26. These bug fix updates for iOS 18 and earlier are only available for users with older iPhones. If your phone can run iOS 26, you have to update to it or be stuck with known security vulnerabilities.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-28): Mark Gardner:
iOS 26.2.1 update to my iPhone 15 Pro froze before completing, necessitating a factory restore. Currently restoring my settings and content from an iCloud backup. I do not recommend this update to Apple users.
This is the only such report I’ve seen so far.
These updates don’t patch security flaws or add new features. According to Apple’s release notes for the iOS 12 and iOS 15 updates, all they do is update a security certificate to ensure that iMessage, FaceTime, and Apple account sign-in will continue working past January 2027, when the operating systems’ original certificate would have expired.
Does Apple withholding this update to devices that are supported by iOS 26 mean that iMessage and Facetime will break in January 2027 on those iPhones unless you upgrade to iOS 26?
Update (2026-02-04): David Price:
iPhone owners on multiple forums are reporting crashes, freezes and other problems with the latest point update, iOS 26.2.1.
One thread on the Apple Community forum is called “iOS 26.2.1 has rendered my phone unusable” and complains that nearly every app on the user’s iPhone has started to crash or freeze since installing the update.
[…]
Elsewhere, you can read more complaints on a Reddit thread called “iOS 26.2.1 feels like an user experiment” which has plenty of comments.
[…]
But neither are we talking about just one or two cases. There’s yet another thread on Apple Community called “Connectivity failure after iOS 26.2.1 update” that complains that the user’s iPhone can no longer connect to the phone provider’s network. And even the thread discussing MacObserver’s original news story features a lot more commenters reporting the same issues.
Juli Clover (no release notes, no security, no developer):
Today’s update enables Precision Finding for the new AirTag 2 on the Apple Watch Series 9 and later and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later. Prior to now, Precision Finding for the AirTag has been limited to the iPhone.
It is not yet clear if the update enables Precision Finding on Apple Watch for the original AirTag, or if this is a feature limited to the new AirTag 2.
Previously:
A sequence provides access to its elements through an
Iterator, and an iterator’snext()operation returns anElement?. For a sequence of noncopyable elements, this operation could only be implemented by consuming the elements of the iterated sequence, with theforloop taking ownership of the elements individually.While consuming iteration is sometimes what you want, borrowing iteration is equally important, serves as a better default for noncopyable elements, and yet cannot be supported by the existing
Sequence.[…]
Instead of offering up individual elements via
next()asIteratorProtocoldoes,BorrowingIteratorProtocoloffers up spans of elements. The iterator indicates there are no more elements to iterate by returning an emptySpan.[…]
Note that in the case of
Array, the new protocol results in much less overhead for the optimizer to eliminate. Iterating aSpanin the inner loop is a lot closer to the “ideal” model of advancing a pointer over a buffer and accessing the elements directly. It is therefore expected that this design will result in better performance in some cases where today the optimizer is unable to eliminate the overhead of Swift’sArray.[…]
For this reason, it may not be appropriate to switch all
foriteration to useBorrowingSequencewhenSequenceis available. How to determine which cases are better (such asArrayis expected to be) and which are worse (such as theUnfoldSequenceexample above) needs further investigation. […] For now, if aSequenceconformance is available, it will be used even ifBorrowingSequenceis also available.
I haven’t had a need for noncopyable types, but I’m interested in reducing ARC overhead when traversing objects. Most of the time I don’t actually need to retain and release an object just to look at it briefly because I know that it’s not going to be removed from the collection.
Previously:
“AI slop and bad reports in general have been increasing even more lately, so we have to try to brake the flood in order not to drown”, says cURL maintainer Daniel Stenberg to Swedish electronics industry news site etn.se.
Therefore, cURL is terminating the bounty payouts as of the end of January.
[…]
Not all AI-generated bug reports are nonsense. It’s not possible to determine the exact share, but Daniel Stenberg knows of more than a hundred good AI assisted reports that led to corrections.
curl (Hacker News):
We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports.
Previously:
Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors):
Apple’s second-generation Ultra Wideband chip — the same chip found in the iPhone 17 lineup, iPhone Air, Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Apple Watch Series 11 — powers the new AirTag, making it easier to locate than ever before. Using haptic, visual, and audio feedback, Precision Finding guides users to their lost items from up to 50 percent farther away than the previous generation. And an upgraded Bluetooth chip expands the range at which items can be located.
[…]
With its updated internal design, the new AirTag is 50 percent louder than the previous generation, enabling users to hear their AirTag from up to 2x farther than before.
Works better, same price, sounds good.
Update (2026-01-27): Unfortunately, the new AirTags require iOS 26.2.1 or later.
Apple offers a Share Item Location feature in the Find My app that allows you to temporarily share the location of an AirTag-equipped item with others, including employees at participating airlines.
[…]
Below, we have listed most of the airlines that support the feature[…]
Have AirTags made a difference in your life? Do you plan to replace existing ones with these new models?
Update (2026-02-04): Pierre Igot:
It seems obvious to me that the new AirTags still rely on the whole network of existing iPhones, regardless of which version of iOS those phones run. So why did they choose to require iOS 26 for actually using these new AirTags?
Update (2026-02-05): Andrew Abernathy:
Anyone know what exactly “requires iOS 26" means for the new AirTags?
You can’t pair it without iOS 26? What if you pair it on an iOS 26 phone but have an iPad on the same Apple account but still running iOS 18 — can the iPad find the AirTag? Can you use “share an AirTag” with someone who isn’t running iOS 26? And AirTags are registered and reported by random devices — surely that capability remains?
iFixit’s AirTag 2 teardown video that afternoon went under our radar until now.
Cindy Harper (via Hacker News):
The UK House of Lords has voted to extend “age assurance” requirements, effectively age verification mandates, to virtual private networks (VPNs) and a wide range of online platforms under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
The decision deepens the reach of the already-controversial Online Safety Act, linking child safety goals to mechanisms that could have severe effects on private communication and digital autonomy.
[…]
In effect, most interactive online platforms would now need to collect and verify age data from users, even where those services are not primarily aimed at children.
[…]
Two other amendments, both more technologically intrusive, were discussed but rejected.
It’s not yet law.
Previously:
Zac Bowden (via Hacker News):
Microsoft has confirmed in a statement to Forbes that the company will provide the FBI access to BitLocker encryption keys if a valid legal order is requested. These keys enable the ability to decrypt and access the data on a computer running Windows, giving law enforcement the means to break into a device and access its data.
The news comes as Forbes reports that Microsoft gave the FBI the BitLocker encryption keys to access a device in Guam that law enforcement believed to have “evidence that would help prove individuals handling the island’s Covid unemployment assistance program were part of a plot to steal funds” in early 2025.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (Hacker News, Slashdot):
But, by default, BitLocker recovery keys are uploaded to Microsoft’s cloud, allowing the tech giant — and by extension law enforcement — to access them and use them to decrypt drives encrypted with BitLocker, as with the case reported by Forbes.
[…]
Apart from the privacy risks of handing recovery keys to a company, Johns Hopkins professor and cryptography expert Matthew Green raised the potential scenario where malicious hackers compromise Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure — something that has happened several times in recent years — and get access to these recovery keys.
It’s not surprising or improper that Microsoft would cooperate with law enforcement, but it may be surprising to many users that they had shared their recovery keys with Microsoft.
Microsoft has made it increasingly harder for individual consumers to set up a new PC without creating a Microsoft account. Between closing loopholes and fighting users who want to make local accounts, this means most people are unknowingly uploading their BitLocker keys to Microsoft’s servers. Whether intentional or not, the fact that Microsoft hasn’t designed a way to be out of the encryption key business is concerning.
Apple also strongly and repeatedly encourages users to store the FileVault recovery key on Apple’s servers. I was not able to find information about this in their security guide, but the situation should be better than with Windows because the recovery key is now stored in iCloud Keychain, which is end-to-end encrypted.
Previously:
The Swift code above has a very “C” feel to it. It has global function calls with prefixed names like
wgpuInstanceCreateSurfaceand global integer constants likeWGPUStatus_Error. It pervasively uses unsafe pointers, some of which are managed with explicit reference counting, where the user provides calls towpuXYZAddRefandwgpuXYZReleasefunctions. It works, but it doesn’t feel like Swift, and inherits various safety problems of C.Fortunately, we can improve this situation, providing a safer and more ergonomic interface to WebGPU from Swift that feels like it belongs in Swift. More importantly, we can do so without changing the WebGPU implementation: Swift provides a suite of annotations that you can apply to C headers to improve the way in which the C APIs are expressed in Swift. These annotations describe common conventions in C that match up with Swift constructs, projecting a more Swift-friendly interface on top of the C code.
[…]
The problem of needing to layer information on top of existing C headers is not a new one. As noted earlier, Swift relies on a Clang feature called API notes to let us express this same information in a separate file, so we don’t have to edit the header.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-26): Tony Arnold:
I am really happy to see API notes documented here.
I used this on a shared C++/Swift project a few years back, and it massively improved the experience of writing code against the C++ types. It’s well worth the investment of your time to do this if you’re in a similar spot.
David McCabe and Emmett Lindner (MacRumors, The Verge):
TikTok said on Thursday that its Chinese owner, ByteDance, had struck a deal with a group of non-Chinese investors to create a new U.S. TikTok, concluding a six-year legal saga that saw the app banned by Congress and ensnared in politicking between two global superpowers.
Investors including the software giant Oracle; MGX, an Emirati investment firm; and Silver Lake, another investment firm, will own more than 80 percent of the new venture. That list also includes the personal investment entity for Michael Dell, the tech billionaire behind Dell Technologies, and other firms, TikTok said. Adam Presser, TikTok’s former head of operations, will be the chief executive for the U.S. TikTok.
[…]
The agreement, which was hammered out over more than a year, resolves existential questions about TikTok’s future. The app — with its unceasing feed of lip-syncs, political endorsements, conspiracy theories and skin care tutorials — would have had to leave the American market if it did not separate from ByteDance.
The law requires the divestment “to end any ‘operational relationship’ between ByteDance and TikTok in the United States,” critics told the NYT. That could be a problem, since TikTok’s release makes it clear that ByteDance will maintain some control over the TikTok US app’s operations.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-26): Reece Rogers (Hacker News):
Now that it’s under US-based ownership, TikTok potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data.
Whether this represents an actual change in the data collected or merely a difference in description is something it seems Rogers cannot answer.
TikTok already collects similar data from users in the UK and Europe as part of a new “Nearby Feed” feature that lets users find events and businesses near them.
Daniel Kennett (BasicAppleGuy):
An exception to that, however, is Apple’s Aperture. I’m still grumpy that Apple discontinued it back in 2015, and I’m not alone. Start spending time in the online photography sphere and you’ll start to notice a small but undeniable undercurrent of lament of its loss to this day. Find an article about Adobe hiking their subscription prices because they added AI for some reason, and amongst the complaining in the comments you’ll invariably find it: “I miss Aperture.”
[…]
So, I dug out the ‘ol Trashcan Mac Pro I lovingly reviewed here on this very blog over eleven years ago and fired up Aperture to document — at least partially — just why it was so special.
[…]
This sort of design is common in apps like Photos, and especially in “shoebox” apps. Every feature is in its own place, and if you want to use that feature you need to pick up your thing (in this case, a photo) and take it over to where the feature is. In this example, the journey from the map to the editor is through a separate list of images, the fullscreen viewer, then finally to the editor.
In contrast, Aperture comes to you.
[…]
In Aperture, the loupe is a little round zoomy thing you can either drag around to view a zoomed-in portion of the image it’s on top of, or attach to the mouse so you can just point at stuff to zoom in. […] Aperture’s technical brilliance is remarkable in how quiet it is.
The 2015 discontinuation of Aperture continues to break my heart for two reasons: the loss of support for a tremendous piece of software, of course, and also for what it represents. It was, for reasons Kennett writes about and plenty more, a pinnacle of software design and engineering. It felt like it was built by people who took two crafts — software and photography — very seriously.
This week’s announcement of the Creator Studio bundle included no news about the future of Photomator. However, my spidey-sense says this is a case where no news might be good news.
[…]
Perhaps the biggest omission in this first release of Apple Creator Studio is the lack of a Lightroom rival, which is exactly what Photomator is — and Aperture was. My guess is that Apple and the acquired Pixelmator team are hard at work on a new Creator Studio version of Photomator, including a version for iPad, and it just isn’t finished yet.
I doubt this would be a Pro tool like Aperture was, though.
Why not forecast that possibility by telling us what will happen with the multi-platform app Photomator? It’s the direct analog to Lightroom, making it the most obvious missing piece in Apple’s bundle. If it’s because there are no updates to announce for Photomator after over a year, then I would ask, “Why is Apple charging $30 a year for the existing version of Photomator?”
If it’s because Photomator will instead be a $30 a year freemium unlock for the Photos app, then I would ask, “What’s the Creator Studio bundle for if it doesn’t include photography? And why is Apple still charging $30 a year?”
Previously:
Update (2026-01-26): John Gordon:
I have wanted Cook gone ever since 2013. Not so much for killing Aperture without a replacement, but for not giving Aperture users a reliable way to migrate to anything else.
See also: Hacker News.
Nick Hodulik (via Hacker News):
You need to find an email. You type in the sender’s name. Nothing. You try the subject line. Nothing. You try a unique word you know was in the email. Nothing.
[…]
You type a word. Autocorrect changes it. You delete it and type what you meant. Autocorrect changes it again. You fix it AGAIN. It changes it AGAIN. You’ve now manually corrected this word twice, clearly signaling you want it this way. Autocorrect doesn’t care. It will die on this hill.
[…]
You’re checking out and need to change your card. You see a button with a credit card icon and your address. You tap it. It changes your address. Not the card. To change the card, you need the other button that says ‘Change Payment’. The one without the card icon.
[…]
AirDrop is on. They’re in your contacts. Nothing. You both toggle WiFi. Nothing. Toggle Bluetooth. Nothing. Turn AirDrop off and on. Sometimes it works. Usually you just text it instead.
[…]
You took some photos. iCloud says ‘Uploading 847 items’. You wait. Next day: ‘Uploading 847 items’. Week later: ‘Uploading 847 items’. Is it stuck? Is it working? Is there an error?
Previously:
Update (2026-01-26): Rui Carmo:
“Total time wasted by humanity because Apple won’t fix these” is a wonderfully blunt premise, and the math is… lovely: Base Impact is
Users Affected × Frequency × Time Per Incidentwas enough of a zinger, but the Power User Tax (Σ (Workaround Time × Participation Rate)) and the Shame Multiplier (Years Unfixed × Pressure Factor) just pile it on.
It’s not unlike Steve Jobs’ argument about saving seconds off the Mac’s boot time.
The externalities cost estimates might be a little tongue-in-cheek, but honestly, are they all that wrong? One small irritation at the wrong moment can ricochet my happy mood off into the doldrums, and Apple’s products produce a hundred “small” irritations every day – which compound in their irritation when you see them software update after software update, year after year, product after product. It’s hard not to take it personally. Like Apple is deliberately being cruel.
[…]
There is a point at which mere indifference or incompetence transitions into negligence, and it’s long before you become one of the wealthiest companies on the planet with a veritable army of engineers.
Having worked at Apple – among other big tech companies – I can say with confidence that there’s no valid reason why they cannot fix long-standing, infamous bugs.
This was my first thought as well. I get that there’s a huge backlog of bugs. I think that should be prioritized, but I can see why various layers within Apple would prefer to work on new features and redesigns instead. But why not knock off a handful of bugs each year that are longstanding and widespread? This would reliably garner applause at the keynote. Apple can’t or won’t do that, but it had no trouble assigning 2,000 employees to work on the car.
Becky (Hacker News):
I’m trying to get on with the new OS, but there’s so many little bugs that Apple software no longer feels like it just works. It seems less intuitive and like nobody has really tested it thoroughly. Do Apple staff even use their products anymore, or are they all secretly harbouring Android devices?
Here’s a few issues that annoy me regularly, this list is far from exhaustive[…]
People had hundreds or thousands of bugs assigned. But of course they didn’t actually look at them. The assignment didn’t mean anything. A „not assigned“ would at least have been honest and then you could have looked at all the unassigned bugs regularly.
[…]
There were radars assigned to people in a „Future“ Milestone with P1. Which basically says „hey, it’s really important you do this. Well, not now. But some unspecified time in the future.“
Even though there were two „Future“ milestones, a lot of radars simply got moved from the current milestone to the next, when the current milestone was over. Over multiple years!
People who joined Apple got really stressed because they got assigned a lot of radars on the current milestone by their managers and had no way to actually finish them in time. Until someone explained to them „no worries, we don’t actually expect you to finish those, we just need to assign them to someone“.
Update (2026-02-02): See also: Marcus Mendes and TidBITS-Talk.
There was a time when QuickTime was more than just a playback utility; I used it frequently to perform simple video edits, like removing commercials from an off-air recording or tacking the contents of one file on the end of another.
Since those days ended with the deprecation of classic QuickTime, I’ve never really had a go-to utility for these kinds of trims.
[…]
Apple [eventually] added editing features back to QuickTime Player. […] The issue is that the final file you save is a MOV container featuring those clips, which […] means that in the end you have to re-encode the video to get a seamless mp4 file for a video podcast.
[…]
This time, I decided to look for a visual utility (i.e., not something I have to drive from Terminal) that could solve this problem. And I found it: the open-source app LosslessCut, which provides a nice interface atop the powerful FFmpeg command-line app.
Previously:
Clawdbot (Twitter, Showcase, Documentation, GitHub):
Clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in for flights. All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use.
To say that Clawdbot has fundamentally altered my perspective of what it means to have an intelligent, personal AI assistant in 2026 would be an understatement. I’ve been playing around with Clawdbot so much, I’ve burned through 180 million tokens on the Anthropic API (yikes), and I’ve had fewer and fewer conversations with the “regular” Claude and ChatGPT apps in the process. Don’t get me wrong: Clawdbot is a nerdy project, a tinkerer’s laboratory that is not poised to overtake the popularity of consumer LLMs any time soon. Still, Clawdbot points at a fascinating future for digital assistants, and it’s exactly the kind of bleeding-edge project that MacStories readers will appreciate.
Clawdbot can be overwhelming at first, so I’ll try my best to explain what it is and why it’s so exciting and fun to play around with. Clawdbot is, at a high level, two things:
- An LLM-powered agent that runs on your computer and can use many of the popular models such as Claude, Gemini, etc.
- A “gateway” that lets you talk to the agent using the messaging app of your choice, including iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp and others.
[…]
Given the right permissions, Clawdbot can execute Terminal commands, write scripts on the fly and execute them, install skills to gain new capabilities, and set up MCP servers to give itself new external integrations. Combine all this with a vibrant community that is contributing skills and plugins for Clawdbot, plus Steinberger’s own collection of command-line utilities, and you have yourself a recipe for a self-improving, steerable, and open personal agent that knows you, can access the web, runs on your local machine, and can do just about anything you can think of.
Apps will melt away. The prompt is your new interface.
It’s the fact that clawd can just keep building upon itself just by talking to it in discord is crazy. The future is already here.
I can understand why people love @clawdbot so much.
I wanted to automate some tasks from Todoist and clawd was able to create a skill for it on its own, all within a Telegram chat.
Now it:
- Logs my sleep/health/exercise data and tells me when I stay up too late
- Writes code and deploys it
- Writes Ralph loop markdown files that I deploy later
- Updates Obsidian daily notes
- Tracks who visits MenuCapture and where they came from
- Monitors earthquakes in Tokyo
- Researches stuff online and saves files to my desktop
- Manage memory across sessions by remembering my projects, patterns and preferences
- Reminds me of my schedule, including holidays/accommodation
- Checks on me (on Telegram!) if I’m quiet too long
I’m literally on my phone in a telegram chat and it’s communicating with codex cli on my computer creating detailed spec files while out on a walk with my dog.
At this point I don’t even know what to call @clawdbot. It is something new. After a few weeks in with it, this is the first time I have felt like I am living in the future since the launch of ChatGPT.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-28): John Gruber:
This essay from Viticci is the first thing I’ve seen that really helped me start to understand it.
Those tokens aren’t free. I asked Viticci just how much “yikes” cost, and he said around US$560 — using way more input than output tokens.
Had a great chat with Peter Steinberger about @clawdbot, the open-source AI personal assistant with a lobster-sized personality. 🦞
I think part of Clawdbot’s success is from being something a big co would never make.
Too much liability, messy business model, risky to deploy, ecosystem comparability…
That’s why it’s so great: it’s just useful instead of trying to be those other things.
The amount of crap I get for putting out a hobby project for free is quite something.
People treat this like a multi-million dollar business. Security researchers demanding a bounty. Heck, I can barely buy a Mac Mini from the Sponsors.
It’s supposed to inspire people. And I’m glad it does.
And yes, most non-techies should not install this. It’s not finished, I know about the sharp edges.
There’s more discussion on Hacker News and at Mac Power Users.
Mike Swanson (via Brent Simmons):
And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.
I’ve started to think of this as backseat software: the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software as a channel that operates on you. Once a product learns it can talk back, it’s remarkably hard to keep it quiet.
[…]
And that’s when the vocabulary starts to creep in. DAU. MAU. Retention. Funnels. Stickiness. Cohorts. Conversion. Gamification. Oh my!
If you’ve worked inside a modern product organization, you’ve heard these words so often they start to feel unavoidable.
[…]
The analytics didn’t prove the feature was unwanted. The analytics proved that we buried it.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-30): See also: Hacker News and John Gruber.
Addy Osmani (via Hacker News):
User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users, watching users struggle, asking “why” until you hit bedrock.
I wonder how much this happens at Google and Apple these days.
The quest for perfection is paralyzing. I’ve watched engineers spend weeks debating the ideal architecture for something they’ve never built. The perfect solution rarely emerges from thought alone - it emerges from contact with reality. AI can in many ways help here.
[…]
Your code is a strategy memo to strangers who will maintain it at 2am during an outage. Optimize for their comprehension, not your elegance.
[…]
With enough users, every observable behavior becomes a dependency - regardless of what you promised. Someone is scraping your API, automating your quirks, caching your bugs.
This creates a career-level insight: you can’t treat compatibility work as “maintenance” and new features as “real work.” Compatibility is product.
Previously:
Walmart doesn’t accept any form of NFC payment in the United States. It’s not just a limitation on Apple Pay. The retailer doesn’t take Google Pay, Samsung Pay, or even let you tap your contactless physical card to pay.
[…]
When you use Walmart Pay, it’s incredibly easy for Walmart to build that customer profile on you. When you use Scan and Go, all of that same information is handed over.
[…]
One common theory is that Walmart doesn’t support Apple Pay because it doesn’t want to pay fees to Apple. This isn’t true. There are no additional fees for a business to accept Apple Pay. They only pay the standard card processing fees regardless of whether the transaction is contactless or not. Apple’s fee is typically charged to issuing banks.
The article misses the other reason that Walmart has invested in multiple attempts at electronic payments: not paying merchant fees to Visa and Mastercard. That’s why their system requires you hooking up to your bank account directly.
All of Walmart’s attempts at this have been focused on making Walmart’s bottom line better, which is why every one of them has failed, whereas Apple Pay is making my payment experience better, and why I use it all the time.
You can pay via bank or debit card, which Walmart likely prefers, but Walmart Pay does work with credit cards. It seems like the main benefit to them is getting you to install their app.
While TFA is correct that Apple Pay (or Google/Samsung/whatever pay) doesn’t cost WalMart more than a physical credit card - TFA doesn’t mention a highly relevant detail: a phone-app payment company can act as the ‘issuing bank’ and make a tiny fraction of a percent more (like ~0.3%) for being the clearinghouse. Not all phone-pay apps set up as an issuing bank as there’s some overhead but it’s more than worth it if you’re the world’s largest retailer. Note: this fee is not the same as the 2-3% “merchant fee”. The clearinghouse fee is much smaller and never goes back to the merchant - unless the merchant IS is the phone-app company.
Walmart does accept Apple Pay and contactless payments in Canada. I suspect this is because Canadians pretty much expect contactless to be accepted anywhere they shop, compared to in America where there are still many places (restaurants mostly) that have limited support for it.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-23): John Gruber:
I think the situation with Walmart and Apple Pay is a lot like Netflix and Apple TV integration. Most retailers, even large ones, support Apple Pay. Most streaming services, even large ones, support integration with Apple’s TV app. Walmart doesn’t support Apple Pay because they want to control the customer transaction directly, and they’re big enough, and their customers are loyal enough, that they can resist supporting Apple Pay. Netflix doesn’t support TV app integration because they want to control the customer viewing experience directly, and they’re big enough, and their customers are loyal enough, that they can resist supporting Apple’s TV app.
Amazon — which is also very large, whose customers are also very loyal, and which absolutely loves collecting data — does not support Apple Pay either.
My AppleScriptable macOS app is recordable. Occasionally, I have a UI action performed by the user that I handle internally, and I send a corresponding
AppleEventwith theSendOptionsflag.dontExecute(waskAEDontExecute) so that AppleScript recording will see the action and record it.With Sequoia 15.7.3 and Tahoe 26.1, I am seeing events sent with the
.dontExecuteflag delivered back to the application invoking the appropriateAppleEventhandler as if the.dontExecuteflag was not specified.
I wonder how that happened.
Jonathan Borichevskiy (via Peter Steinberger, Hacker News):
In the four months I’ve had it I’ve told at least a dozen people about it, and I’m gonna keep telling people. Being able to take my entire computing environment to places without being worried about glare has expanded the range of environments I can create in. It means I get to be in environments that are more interesting, fun, and in tune with my body.
What follows are some thoughts about how this display has fit into my day to day life in the couple of months I’ve had it.
[…]
fingerprints, splatters, and smudges are mildly annoying indoors but almost fluorescent outdoors
[…]
Closing the MacBook results in slight rubbing on the screen at the bottom of the keyboard / top of the trackpad, leaving scratches on the screen. So far this isn’t detrimental when the brightness is up; it’s only visible with the backlight off
I rarely use mine outdoors, but it even makes a big difference indoors when you don’t have control over windows and other places glare might be coming from. It’s really great on airplanes.
Previously:
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Apple’s announcement of the introduction of code signing, although it wasn’t unleashed until Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard the following year (2007).
[…]
Apple had long maintained that users would remain able to run unsigned code in macOS, but that changed in November 2020 with the first Apple silicon models. Since then, all executable code run on those new Macs has to be signed. What hasn’t been mandatory is the use of a developer certificate for the signature.
[…]
Unlike some other operating systems, the only developer certificates recognised by macOS are those issued by Apple, but they’re provided free as one of the benefits of its $99 annual subscription to be a registered developer, as are unlimited notarisations.
Code signing makes a lot of sense in theory, but the developer experience still leaves a lot to be desired. It’s a constant source of annoying errors and failures, even when you aren’t changing things or doing anything non-standard. Last week, my apps stopped building because all the Developer ID certificates were expired. I have no idea why; I previously had a certificate installed that was good until June of this year.
Opening Keychain Access (which the alert at launch tries to discourage me from using) showed that that certificate was nowhere to be found. I used to keep a separate keychain file with just my developer certificates, but I’ve had to give up on that recently because Keychain Access will no longer copy items into it. It’s been unreliable at that sort of thing for years but now no longer seems to work at all.
The general rule with security certificates is that they’re only valid until their expiry date. When the certificate for a website expires, your browser should warn you if you try to connect to that site, and it will normally refuse to make the connection as a result. Thankfully, Apple’s signing certificates generally work differently.
When Apple adopted code signing using certificates that it issues, it recognised that applying that policy would result in apps having expiry dates enforced by their certificates, so applies a different rule. When a developer signs an app using their Developer ID Application certificate, a trusted timestamp is included to verify when that signing took place. Provided the certificate was valid at that time, and hasn’t been revoked since, the certificate is deemed valid by macOS.
Apple changed that several years ago, since when installer packages have normally been given trusted timestamps, so they now work the same as Developer ID Application certificates, and can still be run successfully after their certificate has expired, provided that it was valid at the time in their trusted timestamp, and hasn’t been revoked since. However, this has only recently been reflected in Apple’s guidance to developers, and is different from the account I gave here last week.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-22): Jeff Johnson:
Worst. Anniversary. Ever.
“Unlike some other operating systems, the only developer certificates recognised by macOS are those issued by Apple, but they’re provided free as one of the benefits of its $99 annual subscription to be a registered developer, as are unlimited notarisations.”
Wow is that an Orwellian sentence.
For reasons unknown, Apple doesn’t sign App Store apps with trusted timestamps. As a result, when its certificate expires, that app’s signature should no longer be valid, and macOS should refuse to run it on that basis. What happens in practice is that it turns a blind eye to the certificate expiry, and runs the app regardless.
I think I figured out my code signing problem:
Normally I have Little Snitch deny Xcode connections to developerservices2.apple.com, except when I’m uploading a build to App Store Connect. However, I allowed connections in order to renew my expired Apple Developer certificate.
With those connections allowed, Xcode seems to update the provisioning on every build, which for some damn reason is deleting the provisioning profiles and breaking non-clean builds.
Apple is testing a new design for App Store search ads on iPhone. Some users on iOS 26.3 are noticing that the blue background around sponsored results is no longer shown, blurring the line between what paid ad results look like and the real search results that follow.
This means the only differentiator between organic results and the promoted ad is the presence of the small ‘Ad’ banner next to the app icon.
[…]
Of course, this also has the effect of making it harder for users to quickly distinguish at a glance what is an ad and what isn’t, potentially misleading some users into not realising that the first result is a paid ad placement.
“Phenomenal customer experience.”
Previously:
I’d been anticipating the Apple Watch SE 3 for a while because I wanted:
I was pleased to see that it delivered on all of these. Everything feels so much faster, even Siri. Battery life is no longer a concern at all, even when using the Always On display (though I prefer to turn that off). And complications for third-party apps seem to work better.
Some scattered early impressions:
The main downside is that using the new hardware required me to update my old iPhone to iOS 26.
The new wrist flick and double tap gestures seem like good ideas, but I haven’t found myself using them.
Find My, which had stopped working on my old watch—it would just never update anyone’s location—works again.
This is the first watch I’ve had that supports sleep tracking. I tried it out for several days, and it seemed to be accurate, but I don’t see that it’s actually helping me in any way.
It still often fails to unlock my iPhone when my face is covered.
Timers in watchOS 26 still seem worse than the old design.
Using a complication to invoke my dictation shortcut now takes about 2 seconds instead of 6–10. It still seems much slower than it should be, but this is a huge improvement.
The Weather app is still frustratingly limited, with no way to change the default metrics shown.
The OmniFocus complication still doesn’t update promptly. I can tell from other devices that the app itself has synced, but often the complication doesn’t update until I open the app on the watch, defeating the purpose of it.
I generally like the direction of watchOS. I haven’t really found any must-have changes since version 10, but there are a lot of little things that seem subtly better. This is sort of the opposite of macOS and iOS where each new version seems to make a bunch of little things worse. I’m not sure whether this is really what’s happening or whether it’s due to a difference in perspective, due to my not being a longstanding or power user of watchOS.
Liquid Glass is less annoying on watchOS.
There are two main problems I’ve encountered so far: charging and the setup/backup/restore process.
When I first got the watch, it worked great. But after several days (without any software update during that time) it would no longer charge using a third-party charger. (I tried four different chargers from multiple brands.) The watch would show that it was charging, and it would seem to for a while, but no matter how long I left it on the charger it would always plateau at somewhere between 41% and 69%. It’s as if it would reach a certain point and then stop charging. The watch would show its normal face instead of the green Nightstand Mode, and the iOS battery widget would show that it was no longer charging. Then it would occasionally charge a little bit to get back up to that point but never go beyond it. It continued to charge normally with multiple Apple charging cables.
At first, restarting the watch would help. It would then charge normally for a few days, at which point I’d have to restart it again. But then this workaround stopped working. Because restarting had helped, this seemed to me like a software issue. Around this time, Apple released a software update, but unfortunately it didn’t help. At this point I decided to contact AppleCare.
The Apple support person ran some diagnostics which showed no problems. But he said the diagnostics did not include the history shown in the battery settings, which clearly demonstrated the problem I was having. He wanted me to unpair and re-pair the watch to my phone, assuring me that everything would be backed up and restored. I was skeptical because updating to the SE 3 had lost my app icon arrangement in Springboard and required a long process to activate all my credit cards with Apple Pay. He assured me not to worry.
The first sign of trouble was that the auto-pairing banner didn’t pop up. It hadn’t done so when the watch was new, either. I had to go to the Watch app to initiate the process.
When I did so, sure enough, the promised settings were lost when restoring the watch. It didn’t even remember the watch’s name. He said there would be an option to choose to restore from backup and that I would be able to choose the backup for either my old watch (which was still paired with the phone) or my new one. It never gave me this choice and just restored something. It remembered the apps and complications and most settings but lost Apple Pay (which I think is as designed, despite what I was told) and my home screen. It also lost my shortcuts, which I restored by going to the iOS app and toggling (for each one) that it should be shown on the watch (even though that was already selected).
Another frustrating part of the restore process is that there’s no indication of progress. You see blank spaces where complications or apps should be, and they gradually fill in. At no point does it report that it’s done.
More talking with AppleCare. I explained the backup/restore situation and wondered if there was a way to preserve my old backup so that it wouldn’t get overwritten by a new backup of the restored watch (where the settings are wrong). He told me that the Apple Watch is backed up to iCloud (rather than to my phone) and that the backup should appear in my device list on the Apple Account Web site. I can have multiple backups per watch. These are also shown in Settings ‣ General on the watch and I can choose which to restore from after unpairing my watch. As far as I know, none of this is true.
Actually, it seems like we have virtually no control over watch backups. I don’t see any way of accessing an old watch backup other than by wiping my phone and restoring it from an old backup. With a Mac, if my Dock layout were messed up, perhaps I would have been able to find and restore an individual plist file, but there’s no such access on watchOS.
AppleCare continued to insist that my home screen would be restored but that there was no way to know how long this would take (there being no progress indicator). I should just wait several more hours. I did, but nothing happened. It was also clear by this point that the charging problem wasn’t fixed. They wanted to set up a call with a senior advisor who they assured me would be up to speed on my case and know how to fix all this. This seemed doubtful, but it was worth a try.
The senior advisor started out by asking what the problem with the watch was. She had not read any of the case history but—in possibly a first in my interactions with AppleCare—she did have access to it. After reading the notes, she had no idea what was going on with the icons or the charging. It must be a hardware problem, so I should send the watch in for service.
The first step, I was told, was to remove my iPhone from Find My. I confirmed that she didn’t mean the watch. That didn’t seem right, but it also seemed harmless, so I did it. Then it was time to erase the watch. This took a really long time—more than 5 minutes. I thought the watch was encrypted and so it only had to delete the encryption keys?
I mailed in the watch and soon received an e-mail saying that Apple had received it and found nothing wrong. I had doubted there was a hardware problem, anyway. Apple said that when I received my watch back there would be a letter explaining in detail what the repair depot had done. The actual letter was non-specific. It did not say whether Apple had actually tested the watch with third-party chargers. And it said that they might have updated the software. Judging from the the version number, they hadn’t.
I went through the pairing and restore process again, which again lost my home screen layout. By this time I had realized that you can also move the icons around using App View in the Watch app on the iPhone, which is much faster. But the big surprise was that, even though Apple seemingly hadn’t repaired anything, charging now worked. I still don’t know why it works. My only guess is that it was caused by a software problem and that fully erasing the watch was a deeper reset than just unpairing. I keep wondering whether the charging problem will come back, but so far it’s been working properly for almost two weeks, far longer than the honeymoon period when the watch was new. If it recurs, I guess I’ll try erasing it again.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-22): A significant difference between the Apple Watch SE and the Series 11 is that the SE doesn’t have an on-screen keyboard. Strangely, this isn’t mentioned in Apple’s comparisons or in most of the reviews that I’ve seen. I’m not sure how well it works, so I don’t really know what I’m missing. I usually use dictation because I find that Scribble often misinterprets what I was trying to “type.” I wish it worked more like Graffiti.
The service will officially cease operating on February 16, 2026. Setapp Mobile launched in open beta in September 2024.
In a support page, MacPaw said Setapp Mobile is being closed because of app marketplaces’ “still-evolving and complex business terms that don’t fit Setapp’s current business model,” suggesting it was not profitable for the company.
[…]
These alternative app marketplaces, as Apple calls them, are a relatively new frontier for app distribution on iOS, but they face hefty challenges, such as navigating Apple’s controversial Core Technology Fee, and competing with its established App Store ecosystem.
Epic Games currently pays the Apple fees that EU developers incur when distributing their apps through the Epic Games Store. However, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has said it is “not financially viable” for Epic Games to pay Apple’s fees in the long term, but it plans to do so while it waits to see if the European Union requires Apple to further tweak its rules for third-party marketplaces under the DMA.
Clear indicator that Apple’s DMA implementation never actually met its obligations under the DMA in the first place. Apple scared developers away from ever signing up to their poison pill Core Technology Fee terms, so alternative app stores simply have no apps to offer.
It’s kind of the same situation as BrowserEngineKit. Apple is going to say that they did all this work and there was no adoption, so that proves the EU was wrong; there’s no demand because customers prefer Apple’s “protections.” The developers will say that Apple designed third-party browsers and marketplaces to fail, or at least didn’t care very much about solving the reported problems; they tried their best in spite of this, but it wasn’t enough. I guess at some point the EU will decide whether it thinks there was malicious compliance.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-22): Guy English:
A third party App Store closes shop and everyone wants to read the tea leaves to confirm their priors.
The core problem with these mandates from the EU is that they’re not based on demand from users. Users don’t care about third-party browser rendering engines. Users don’t even know what third-party browser rendering engines are. Users, by and large, not only are not asking for third-party app marketplaces for iOS, they in fact prefer the App Store’s role as the exclusive source for third-party software.
I think this is true in the narrow sense that there really isn’t much demand right now. But that could be because the users don’t know what they’re potentially missing. They have no basis for comparison. It’s like the apocryphal Henry Ford quote; they think a faster horse is just great. Users initially weren’t clamoring for something like the iPhone, either, because they didn’t imagine that such a thing could even be possible.
But if you look at a platform like the Mac, where there’s choice, Chrome has more market share than Safari even though Safari is bundled with the operating system. The Mac also had massively popular, innovative apps like Dropbox that would not have been possible in an App Store–only world. I think the App Store monopoly is holding back all sorts of innovation on iOS and long-term pushing more development to the Web.
If users don’t care about alternative app distribution methods and things like third-party web browsers, we should remove them from macOS too, see how that goes
The fact of the matter is Apple’s rules precluded any chance of a mainstream alternative marketplace people might care about, like Steam, from ever existing.
If iOS were as open as macOS to app stores like Steam, enabling things like cross-buy and save sync of all your favorite games between Windows, Mac, Steam Deck and iOS, you bet your ass millions of people would want to use it
Removing Chrome support in macOS may just kill the Mac
Which really just proves how insane it is that they’ve managed to go this far without expanding past WebKit on iOS
Previously:
Update (2026-01-23): Juli Clover:
The European Commission is gearing up to blame Apple for Setapp’s EU shutdown, according to information viewed by Bloomberg. “Apple has not rolled out changes to address the key issues concerning its business terms, including their complexity,” the EC reportedly plans to say.
Apple says that it has not simplified its EU business terms as expected because of the European Commission’s refusal to let it implement the changes.
At the bottom of each column is a resizing widget that you can use to change the width of the columns. Or rather, you could use it to change the width of the columns. On macOS Tahoe, the horizontal scroller covers the resizing widget and prevents it from being clicked! Compare with macOS Sequoia, where the horizontal scroller and scroll bar are below the column and allow access to all of the resizing widgets.
[…]
Notice what happens when you use the default value: not only do the scrollbars disappear, the resizing widgets also disappear.
You can still resize the columns, though, by hovering over the horizontal column border lines. Thus, it appears that the Finder team did not even test with the combination of columns view and always show scroll bars.
That’s the problem with settings like Show Scroll bars: Always and the accessibility display options. They’re there because a vocal minority wants them and Apple feels it has to offer them in order to check a box, but it’s clear that its heart isn’t in making them great. Another one I’d put in this category is Natural scrolling. There’s nothing wrong with its behavior, as far as I know, but you can tell from the name that Apple doesn’t want you to turn this off. The Smooth scrolling checkbox was removed long ago, though thankfully the user default to turn it off still works in most cases.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-23): John Gruber (Mastodon):
I joked last week that it would make more sense if we found out that the team behind redesigning the UI for MacOS 26 Tahoe was hired by Meta not a month ago, but an entire year ago, and secretly sabotaged their work to make the Mac look clownish and amateur. More and more I’m wondering if the joke’s on us and it actually happened that way.
Another change from Sequoia to Tahoe, brought to my attention by Gruber, is that the Finder scrollbar on Tahoe is darker than on Sequoia, the latter shown below.
I believe the difference is due to the lack of a scroller hover state on Tahoe. On Sequoia and earlier, the scroller becomes darker when you hover the mouse pointer over it.
[…]
Both Gruber and the tipster mentioned to me that my inaccessible column resizing widget bug is “fixed” on macOS 26.3.
[…]
Returning to the inaccessible resizing widget issue, on further investigation it turns out that the issue does not occur on macOS 26.2 if you hide the path bar and hide the status bar in Finder.
He also discusses the new Resize columns to fit filenames option, which unfortunately only considers the filenames that are currently in view, not all the ones in the folder.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-26): John Gruber (Mastodon):
This new feature in the Tahoe Finder attempts to finally solve this problem. I played around with it this afternoon and it’s … OK. It feels like an early prototype for what could be a polished feature. For example, it exacerbates some layering bugs in the Finder — if you attempt to rename a file or folder that is partially scrolled under the sidebar, the Tahoe Finder will just draw the rename editing field right on top of the sidebar, even though it belongs to the layer that is scrolled underneath.
[…]
I wish I could set this new column-resizing option only to grow columns to accommodate long filenames, and never to shrink columns when the visible items all have short filenames. But the way it currently works, it adjusts all columns to the width of the longest visible filename each column is displaying — narrowing some, and widening others. I want most columns to stay at the default width. With this new option enabled, it looks a bit higgledy-piggledy that every column is a different width.
Also, it’s an obvious shortcoming that the feature only adjusts columns to the size of the longest currently visible filename. If you scroll down in a column and get to a filename that is too long to fit, nothing happens. It just doesn’t fit.
Update (2026-01-27): John Gruber notes that there’s a hidden preference to auto-resize columns on macOS 14 and 15.
Update (2026-01-30): Adam Engst:
It’s not quite “currently visible,” since the column will resize appropriately for long-named items that are one or two items outside the current view, but I think I understand why the feature works this way.
You have long been able to drag a column divider manually to expand it enough to read a heavily truncated filename, and if you Control-click a column divider, you can choose from Right Size This Column, Right Size All Columns Individually, and Right Size All Columns Equally. Even better, double-clicking any column divider is the same as choosing Right Size All Columns Individually. That command has no limit on column width, and it too expands columns only enough to display the currently visible items without truncation. This approach makes perfect sense, since the user is invoking the command to adjust what they’re looking at.
However, when “Resize columns” is working globally on all column-view windows, limiting column expansion to the visible items makes less sense.
[…]
I think Apple is trying to thread the needle between a global feature that works automatically and one that users can trigger on demand. When applied globally, it makes some sense to tread carefully around unknown extremes; when invoked manually, it should just do what the user expects.
Update (2026-02-05): Marcin Wichary:
Apple decided not to ship the auto-sizing columns a few years ago, hiding it under a “defaults write” incantation as a sort of a beta, but then seemingly just launched it this year without any changes. There are some charitable explanations – perhaps the beta was hard crashing Finder and the released one no longer does? – but in the current zeitgeist I’m feeling that it’s something more like this: the people with taste who were stopping it from getting launched in the bad state were either sidelined or are no longer there.
Anil Dash (Hacker News, Mac Power Users):
If mark_up_ is complicated, then the opposite of that complexity must be… mark_down_. This kind of solution, where it’s so smart it seems obvious in hindsight, is key to Markdown’s success. John worked to make a format that was so simple that anybody could pick it up in a few minutes, and powerful enough that it could help people express pretty much anything that they wanted to include while writing on the internet.
[…]
After being nagged about it by users for more than a decade, Google finally added support for Markdown to Google Docs, though it took them years of fiddly improvements to make it truly usable. Just last year, Microsoft added support for Markdown to its venerable Notepad app, perhaps in attempt to assuage the tempers of users who were still in disbelief that Notepad had been bloated with AI features. Nearly every powerful group messaging app, from Slack to WhatsApp to Discord, has support for Markdown in messages. And even the company that indirectly inspired all of this in the first place finally got on board: the most recent version of Apple Notes finally added support for Markdown.
Alas, Apple Notes’ Markdown support does not extend to AppleScript. So there’s still no built-in way to automate getting your data out of the app in a good format.
But it’s not just the apps that you use on your phone or your laptop. For developers, Markdown has long been the lingua franca of the tools we string together to accomplish our work.
[…]
Because Markdown’s format was frozen in place (and had some super-technical details that people could debate about) and people wanted to add features over time, various communities that were implementing Markdown could add their own “flavors” of it as they needed. Popular ones came to be called Commonmark and Github-Flavored, led by various companies or teams that had divergent needs for the tool. While tech geeks tend to obsess over needing everything to be “correct”, in reality it often just doesn’t matter that much, and in the real world, the entire Internet is made up of content that barely follows the technical rules that it’s supposed to.
I’m pleasantly surprised at how ubiquitous Markdown has become, though strangely it’s still not built into WordPress. I actually don’t love it for blogging—since it can’t express a cite attribute and also I’m starting with chunks of text that are already HTML. I don’t see much benefit in mixing the two, so I continue to use plain HTML. I also continue to use reStructuredText for my product manuals. But pretty much everywhere else I use Markdown.
Previously:
It turns out that one of my favorite new features in OmniFocus 4.7 is the Catch Up Automatically option for repeating actions:
With this setting turned off, completing an item will create the next occurrence following the schedule you have set, even when the next occurrence is in the past.
With this setting turned on, completing an item will create the next occurrence following the schedule you have set, skipping any occurrences in the past.
I have lots of repeating actions (e.g. for grocery shopping) that I want to do once every week or two. After I complete an action, I want it to disappear temporarily, but then I want it to reappear the next day for planning purposes. Setting the Defer Date to tomorrow and the repeat interval to just one day will make the action reappear as desired, but then when I complete it a week later I’ll have to tap it six times, because a new action will be created for each intervening day.
With Catch Up Automatically, only one new action will be created, and it will again be deferred until the next day. This exactly what I want. I can control which actions are available by bumping the Defer Date by one or two days, or a week, complete an action with a single tap, and have it come back the next day. (I suspect there may also be a way to solve this problem using the new Planned Date feature and a custom perspective that filters based on that, but I like the Defer Date because it works consistently across views.)
The problem with Catch Up Automatically is that it’s awkward to set. There’s no menu command. You have to open the inspector, open a popover, and click a checkbox. This does not work with a multiple selection (unless, I guess, the repetition parameters are identical) so it has to be repeated for each action. What I wanted was a way to set Catch Up Automatically in bulk, with just a keyboard shortcut. Naturally, I thought of writing an AppleScript and invoking it with FastScripts. Here’s the script I ended up with.
There’s a bunch of boilerplate in order to iterate over the selected actions. The meat of the script is just setting the catch up automatically property to true. Unfortunately, there’s a bug where this change doesn’t get saved. Fortunately, an Omni support person showed me that it does get saved if you set it using the JavaScript API (a.k.a. Omni Automation). I should probably start writing all my scripts in JavaScript, anyway, because then they’d work on iOS, too. But it’s cool that on the Mac you can mix and match, calling JavaScript from within an AppleScript, as shown in this script.
In some ways, e.g. iterating over the selection, the JavaScript API is much more compact, but AppleScript is nicer in that you can just mutate a property of the repetition rule. With JavaScript, you have to create a new rule and pass in all the properties as unlabeled parameters.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-23): I have to advise against using this script for now, because it seems to trigger a bug in OmniFocus that will add a due date to the action where there was none before.
Update (2026-01-25): I’ve fixed the script to avoid that bug.
Apple and other smartphone manufacturers are resisting an Indian government proposal that would require them to hand over source code for security review, reports Reuters.
[…]
Apple, Google, Samsung, Xiaomi, and industry group MAIT have all reportedly objected, citing a lack of global precedent and concerns about revealing proprietary details.
[…]
The country’s IT ministry also said it “refutes the statement” that it is considering seeking source code from smartphone makers, despite the requirement appearing in the government documents reviewed by Reuters.
India has had similar fights with big tech companies in the past, and nearly always backed down.
Last December India’s Department of Telecommunications demanded that smartphone makers pre-install government apps on all handsets. Civil rights groups and tech industry lobbies both opposed the measure, leading India’s government to first water down the proposal and then abandon it in less than a week.
In 2022, India introduced a directive requiring organizations operating locally to disclose any cybersecurity incidents within six hours of detection, and framed it so cloud operators would have to report on activities conducted by their tenants. Vendors and tech lobby groups pushed back, India’s government eased the requirement, and has scarcely mentioned it since the 2023 revelation that compliance with the law was very low.
Previously:
Apple (Hacker News, ArsTechnica, MacRumors, 9To5Mac, MacStories, Reddit, Mac Power Users):
Apple today unveiled Apple Creator Studio, a groundbreaking collection of powerful creative apps designed to put studio-grade power into the hands of everyone, building on the essential role Mac, iPad, and iPhone play in the lives of millions of creators around the world. The apps included with Apple Creator Studio for video editing, music making, creative imaging, and visual productivity give modern creators the features and capabilities they need to experience the joy of editing and tailoring their content while realizing their artistic vision. Exciting new intelligent features and premium content build on familiar experiences of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform to make Apple Creator Studio an exciting subscription suite to empower creators of all disciplines while protecting their privacy.
Apple Creator Studio will be available on the App Store beginning Wednesday, January 28, for $12.99 per month or $129 per year, with a one-month free trial, and includes access to Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad; Motion, Compressor, and MainStage on Mac; and intelligent features and premium content for Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. College students and educators can subscribe for $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. Alternatively, users can also choose to purchase the Mac versions of Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage individually as a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store.
[…]
For the first time, Pixelmator Pro is coming to iPad, bringing an all-new touch-optimized workspace, full Apple Pencil support, the ability to work between iPad and Mac, and all of the powerful editing tools users have come to appreciate on Mac.
[…]
In addition to Image Playground, advanced image creation and editing tools let users create high-quality images from text, or transform existing images, using generative models from OpenAI.
It does not seem to include Photomator. I don’t really use any of these apps—preferring Microsoft Office and Acorn—and nothing announced here sounds like it would change that.
As for the productivity apps, the Apple Creator Studio adds a Content Hub for what Apple describes as “curated, high-quality photos, graphics, and illustrations.” There are also new premium templates and themes for Keynote, Pages, and Numbers and integration with image-generation tools from OpenAI. Apple is also, in an unusual move, including beta features as part of the bundle: the company mentions one that can create a draft of a Keynote presentation from a text outline and one called “Magic Fill” for Numbers with lets you “generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition.” Freeform’s premium features aren’t yet ready to roll out but will come later this year.
This means that if you bought Final Cut Pro or Pixelmator Pro via one-time purchase, which will still be an option going forward, you will no longer have access to all new features. However, Apple promises the apps will continue to receive updates.
Apple is becoming Adobe. There are two types of apps in this suite: pro media apps and office apps. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are not used by the same people as Logic and Final Cut. There should be a separate iWork subscription.
On the one hand, I fully understand why Apple is finally going Adobe and doing a subscription for the creative apps. On the other hand, I don’t know if I can see this as having enough value for me to want to pay $130 a year when I use these apps almost entirely on the Mac.
My hope is that the UI shown today for Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, and MainStage is a flat-out rejection of Liquid Glass for “serious” apps. My fear is that it’s only a result of their continued support for MacOS 15 Sequoia. (But I think they need to continue supporting MacOS 15 Sequoia because so many pro users are rejecting MacOS 26 Tahoe.)
But… how viable is it, really? I have my doubts, especially given that I recently tried Final Cut Pro and found it lacking in several areas compared to freemium competitors like DaVinci Resolve. And I have been using Logic Pro for years. It’s a solid DAW, but it faces stiff competition from Ableton Live and an increasing number of free or low-cost alternatives. But that’s my personal experience; I wonder how this will play out for the broader market, where there’s stuff like Affinity Suite, which has recently surfaced after the Canva acquisition as a free alternative Pixelmator Pro (with paid add-ons).
Icon History
The Logic Pro app icon, before and after being part of Apple Creator Studio.
Look at how they massacred my boy...😭
We lost something here
the ultimate icon downgrade
Previously:
Update (2026-01-14): Joe Rossignol:
Alongside the news that Pixelmator Pro is coming to the iPad, Apple has confirmed that the more basic Pixelmator app for the iPhone and iPad will no longer be updated.
I’m just calling this out because I think it speaks to the massive influence the AI industry has had over the past three years. A couple years ago, many of us thought that Apple would never use the word “AI” to describe what they were doing. It would be “machine learning” or stuff like “Apple Intelligence”, but they’re just calling it AI now like everyone else.
[…]
These new icons remind me of when Google normalized all their icons to the point that they all look the same…no soul…no joy…just the same icon with a few shuffled pixels.
Today’s app icons look as if they came out of an assembly line. All looking the same, designed for maximum scale, and devoid of any identity or soul.
If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design.
See also: Apple Design and BasicAppleGuy.
Final Cut Studio used to cost $1,300 at one point, and now it’s available to students for $2.99 a month. That’s a huge win in my books.
Update (2026-01-15): Michael Flarup (Mastodon):
When everything looks the same, nothing feels loved.
Update (2026-01-20): Adam Chandler:
It’s been like this for a year and I still absolutely HATE that Final Cut Pro just doesn’t open an import dialogue box anymore and thinks there’s a universe where a video editor would want to import an image from Image Playground into Final Cut Pro.
Someone actually fixed the terrible Apple Creator Studio icons
The problem isn’t with these icons in and of themselves. The problem is with the rules Apple has imposed for Liquid Glass app icons, along with their own style guidelines for how to comply with those rules. Given Apple’s own self-imposed constraints for how icons must look (with the mandatory squircle) and how Apple has decided its own app icons should look (a look which can best be described as crude), I actually think the icons in the Creator Studio are pretty good, relatively speaking. But that’s like saying one group of kids has pretty good haircuts, relatively speaking, at a summer camp where the rule is that the kids all cut each others’ hair using only fingernail clippers.
[…]
What Ive told me is that Apple didn’t change things just for the sake of changing them. That Apple was insistent on only changing things if the change made things better. And that this was difficult, at times, because the urge to do something that looks new and different is strong, especially in tech. “New” shows that you’re doing something. “The same” is boring. What’s difficult is embracing the fact that boring can be good, especially if the alternative is different-but-worse, or even just different-but-not-better.
[…]
I don’t think it makes sense to gate useful new features of these apps behind the Creator Studio subscription. Smarter autofill in Numbers, generating Keynote slides from a text outline, and Super Resolution image upscaling all sound like great features, but they sound like the sort of features all users should be getting in the iWork apps in 2026. Especially from on-device AI models. I could countenance an argument that AI-powered features that are processed on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers should require a subscription. But it feels like a rip-off if they’re running on-device. […] But it seems wrong for someone who just wants the new AI-powered features in Numbers and Keynote to need to pay for a subscription bundle whose value is primarily derived from Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, and Pixelmator Pro — apps that many iWork users might never launch.
Update (2026-01-23): Joe Rosensteel (post):
- It’s weird that a software bundle aimed at “Creators” has no iPhone apps at all.
- It’s even weirder when Apple acquired a software company that made creative apps for the iPhone.
- Weirder still when you consider they end-of-lifed a piece of that software with no hint it will be replaced
- The weirdest part of all is that one piece of software has received no updates, and is not part of the bundle, but you can still pay $30 a year to use separately.
Google (via Adam Engst):
Starting in January 2026, Gmail will no longer provide support for the following features:
- Gmailify: This feature allows you to get special features like spam protection or inbox organisation applied to your third-party email account. Learn more about Gmailify.
- Check mail from other accounts: Fetching emails from third-party accounts into your Gmail account, with POP, will no longer be supported.
Previously:
2025 was a record-breaking year for Apple services, marked by remarkable growth, global expansion, and continuous innovation. From Apple TV, Apple Music, and Apple News, to daily essentials like Apple Pay and iCloud, we delivered enriching experiences to users worldwide. Reflecting on 2025, we remained committed to enhancing our users’ daily lives, with incredible engagement during the holiday season.
[…]
As we look ahead, we’ll continue to bring innovation and intelligent enhancements to Apple services, always guided by our commitment to privacy and a phenomenal customer experience.
I’m not sure any Apple service has a phenomenal customer experience these days. Looking at the ones he mentioned, I was thinking maybe Find My. But then I remembered how it pretty much no longer works at all on my Apple Watch SE that’s limited to OS 10. And how the Mac version doesn’t let you open more than one window.
Apple Pay does “just work” except that it often doesn’t work at gas pumps, and it’s a major pain to upgrade your watch or phone, with each card taking multiple steps (and often a phone call). Apple Cash remains less convenient than Venmo, requiring more steps to transfer funds and without e-mails for reliable notifications and record keeping. You can request a PDF statement via e-mail, but it doesn’t include the names of the people, nor any descriptions of what the transactions were for.
See also: John Gruber:
Previously:
Update (2026-01-22): Nick Lockwood:
The problem with Cook is that he seems hell bent on turning the world’s best product company into a mediocre service company.
Apple and Google will soon be “encouraged” to build nudity-detection algorithms into their software by default, as part of the UK government’s strategy to tackle violence against women and girls, reports the Financial Times.
If the UK gets its way, operating systems like iOS and Android would “prevent any nudity being displayed on screen unless the user has verified they are an adult through methods such as biometric checks or official ID. Child sex offenders would be required to keep such blockers enabled.” The Home Office “has initially focused on mobile devices,” but the push could be expanded to desktops, the FT said. Government officials point out that Microsoft can already scan for “inappropriate content” in Microsoft Teams, the report said.
[…]
The push for device-level blocking comes after the UK implemented the Online Safety Act, a law requiring porn platforms and social media firms to verify users’ ages before letting them view adult content. The law can’t fully prevent minors from viewing porn, as many people use VPN services to get around the UK age checks. Government officials may view device-level detection of nudity as a solution to that problem, but such systems would raise concerns about user rights and the accuracy of the nudity detection.
Maybe this explains why Apple is hesitant to add age verification at the OS level if it opens the door to requests like these.
In his initial announcement, Starmer stated: “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.” Since then, the government has been forced to clarify those remarks: digital ID will be mandatory to prove the right to work, and will only take effect after the scheme’s proposed introduction in 2028, rather than retrospectively.
The government has also confirmed that digital ID will not be required for pensioners, students, and those not seeking employment, and will also not be mandatory for accessing medical services, such as visiting hospitals. But as civil society organizations are warning, it’s possible that the required use of digital ID will not end here. Once this data is collected and stored, it provides a multitude of opportunities for government agencies to expand the scenarios where they demand that you prove your identity before entering physical and digital spaces or accessing goods and services.
[…]
Digital ID systems expand the number of entities that may access personal information and consequently use it to track and surveil. The UK government has nodded to this threat. Starmer stated that the technology would “absolutely have very strong encryption” and wouldn’t be used as a surveillance tool. Moreover, junior Cabinet Office Minister Josh Simons told Parliament that “data associated with the digital ID system will be held and kept safe in secure cloud environments hosted in the United Kingdom” and that “the government will work closely with expert stakeholders to make the programme effective, secure and inclusive.”
But if digital ID is needed to verify people’s identities multiple times per day or week, ensuring end-to-encryption is the bare minimum the government should require. Unlike sharing a National Insurance Number, a digital ID will show an array of personal information that would otherwise not be available or exchanged.
Under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom has been handed something called Section 121, which sounds like a tax loophole but is actually a legal crowbar for prying open encrypted messages.
It allows the regulator to compel any online service that lets people talk to each other, Facebook Messenger, Signal, iMessage, etc to install “accredited technology” to scan for terrorism or child abuse material.
The way this works is by scanning all your messages. Not just the suspicious ones. Not just the flagged ones. Every single message. On your device. Before they’re encrypted.
[…]
“We have set a date of April 2026,” [Lord Hanson] said, presumably while polishing his best ‘nothing to see here’ smile, “and we expect to act extremely speedily once we have had the report back.”
The government’s new Online Safety Act 2023 (Priority Offenses) (Amendment) Regulations 2025, which came into force on January 8, 2026, designates “cyberflashing” and “encouraging or assisting serious self-harm” as priority offenses, categories that trigger the strictest compliance duties under the OSA.
This marks a decisive move toward preemptive censorship. Services that allow user interaction, including messaging apps, forums, and search engines, must now monitor communications at scale to ensure that prohibited content is automatically filtered or suppressed before users can even encounter it.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-15): Lindsay Clark (BBC):
The UK government has backed down from making digital ID mandatory for proof of a right to work in the country, adding to confusion over the scheme's cost and purpose.
Policymakers and the UK public expressed privacy and civil rights concerns following the announcement, with a parliamentary petition opposing the introduction of digital ID attracting almost three million signatures.
Google (CNBC, MacRumors, AppleInsider, Hacker News):
Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.
After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.
How much did Apple have to pay to get Google to say, “Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards”?
Gurman has also previously reported that those delayed Apple Intelligence features are likely to make their debut in iOS 26.4 this spring.
It’s unclear exactly where in the timeframe we are. Given that 26.3 is already in beta, and 26.4 is expected in a few months, it’s possible that work has long since started on this, even if it’s only being officially announced now. Even with the leg-up provided by Google’s models, it seems unlikely the company could simply roll in that tech for a feature due out in short order.
Sort of weird that they would announce such a big deal this way rather than official releases/interviews/etc, then again, the talk has been – at least on Apple’s side – to downplay the partnership. We get it, it’s sort of embarrassing to have to outsource your work in such a key aspect of technology, let alone one you believed you were at the forefront of not that long ago, at least with regard to Siri.
The Google deal is now necessary because of past mistakes but it is far from ideal—Apple needed this all in-house for years. It will be very difficult to compete with Google on integrated, optimized software products, and they will be paying Google for the opportunity to compete with them at all. Knowledge work is going to look fundamentally different once Google does Claude Code for Google Workspaces.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-13): John Gruber:
This phrasing, in both Apple’s statement to Cramer and the joint Apple/Google statement released by Google, is, I think subtly telling about how significant this news is: “Google’s AI technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models”. There’s a slight redundancy with foundation appearing twice in the span of four words. Imagine if WebKit had been named “Safari Rendering Engine” — there would be times when one might need to write “the rendering engine is Safari Rendering Engine”, because that’s what it is, and that’s the name. But in this case, it’s a bit incongruous. A foundation is a foundation; it doesn’t have a foundation. So this brief bit of phrasing reveals the obvious, awkward truth that Apple Foundation Models didn’t actually have a foundation.
I wonder whether the behavior of existing code that relies on the foundation models will change significantly.
Update (2026-01-22): Hartley Charlton:
Apple is considering a significant shift in how it operates Siri by potentially running its next-generation chatbot on Google’s cloud infrastructure rather than entirely on its own Private Cloud Compute servers, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Norbert Heger (Mastodon, Hacker News):
Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.
This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden?
It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn’t respond to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19 × 19 pixels, located near the window corner.
[…]
But due to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it – about 75% – now lies outside the window[…]
That’s right, folks, the solution to resizing the corner of a window in Tahoe is to click outside the edge of the window. I can’t even.
The accompanying gif of him grabbing a plate captures the experience perfectly.
The annotated images (green “expected” area, blue dot, and the “accepted target area” sitting in empty space) make the point better than any amount of hand-waving, and we need more of this to make it obvious that Apple needs to reverse course on the whole thing.
Yes! All the time. The opposite also occurs: trying to click something behind a window and accidentally resizing the front most window instead.
I’ve noticed that resizing windows on macOS Tahoe seems to fail 2-3 times each time I perform the action. How did Apple break so many interactions in a single release?
I have struggled with this every single day since Tahoe was released. I fail on nearly every first attempt at resizing a window.
[…]
Imagine taking one of the most core, we-take-this-for-granted features of a windowing system and throwing it away. And why? Oh, because iPhones have rounded corners and therefore so should all windows on every Apple platform.
Things like this make me want to switch to Linux and build my own Desktop environment and window manager.
Like, gather all the macOS devs who still understand how desktop UX is supposed to work, take an Apple HIG from the 90s or and let’s build ourselves a new home.
And when we are done with that (shouldn’t take longer than a couple decades, right?), we fork the open source component from Android and do the same for mobile UX.
ugh this is one of the things that drives me most insane in #macOSTahoe. Basic desktop-isms are just so broken. I fear that more and more folks who don’t understand the history of the desktop are running the show at Apple. I hope I am wrong but then what explains this mess?
One can argue with the logic behind these changes, 15 years ago. I’ll repeat that I think it was a grave error to make scrollbars invisible by default. I would argue that while the visible grippy-strip isn’t necessary, it’s nice to have. (As noted above, its presence showed you whether a window could be resized.) But there was, clearly, logic behind the decisions Apple made in 2011. They were carefully considered. The new logic was that you no longer look for a grippy-strip to click on to resize a window. You simply click inside the edge of a window. And of course Apple added a small affordance to the hit target for those edges, such that if you clicked just outside the window, that would count as “close enough” to assume you intended to click on the edge. Most users surely never noticed that. A lot of nice little touches in UI design go unnoticed because they’re nice little touches.
Until MacOS 26, most of the hit target for initiate the resizing of a window was inside the window. Because, of course, right? Even though MacOS (well, Mac OS X) stopped rendering a visible resize grippy-strip 15 years ago, the user could simply imagine that there was still a grippy area inside the lower right corner of every resizable window. It would make no sense whatsoever for the click target to resize a window to be outside the window. Why would anyone expect that? It would work against what our own eyes, and years of experience, are telling us. You pick up a thing to move it or stretch it by grabbing the thing. Not by grabbing next to the thing.
I worked on Finder/TimeMachine/Spotlight/iOS at Apple from 2000-2007. I worked closely with Bas Ording, Stephen Lemay, Marcel van Os, Imran Chaudry, Don Lindsey and Greg Christie. I have no experience with any of the designers who arrived in the post-Steve era. During my time, Jony Ive didn’t figure prominently in the UI design, although echoes of his industrial design appeared in various ways in the graphic design of the widgets. Kevin Tiene and Scott Forstall had more influence for better or worse, extreme skeumorphism for example.
[…]
Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don’t you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn’t push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago.
I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen’s ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve’s death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-13): John Gruber:
If you turn on always-visible scrollbars (which you should) and scroll to the bottom, they look like this[…]
Here are the unique features that keep me using multiple apps for my screenshots.
[…]
Most of the time, I dismiss floating shot windows immediately, but they can be useful for referring to a screenshot—such as the contents of a menu that I can’t keep open—while writing. Floating shots are also handy for making simple edits and annotations without opening the file in Preview. The feature I value most, though, is one that ScreenFloat developer Matthias Gansrigler added last year—the option to export an image with an added border.
[…]
CleanShot X is a thoroughly capable screenshot utility with editing and annotation features, but it also offers a feature I haven’t seen elsewhere: the ability to combine screenshots.
[…]
I still occasionally press Command-Shift-5 and use the built-in macOS screenshot utility to create a screenshot of a window with an open menu. In these screenshots, I don’t want shadows around the window, but I do want them around the menu, which otherwise looks weird. This requires a multi-step process that involves capturing two separate screenshots and compositing them in Preview[…]
Previously:
Update (2026-01-13): Jack Brewster:
Shout out for Shottr, which I switched to from CleanShotX a few years ago.
Italy fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros for refusing to block access to pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, the country’s communications regulatory agency, AGCOM, announced yesterday. Cloudflare said it will fight the penalty and threatened to remove all of its servers from Italian cities.
AGCOM issued the fine under Italy’s controversial Piracy Shield law, saying that Cloudflare was required to disable DNS resolution of domain names and routing of traffic to IP addresses reported by copyright holders. The law provides for fines up to 2 percent of a company’s annual turnover, and the agency said it applied a fine equal to 1 percent.
The fine relates to a blocking order issued to Cloudflare in February 2025. Cloudflare argued that installing a filter applying to the roughly 200 billion daily requests to its DNS system would significantly increase latency and negatively affect DNS resolution for sites that aren’t subject to the dispute over piracy.
Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed against their interests. No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency. It required us to not just remove customers, but also censor our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver meaning it risked blacking out any site on the Internet. And it required us not just to censor the content in Italy but globally. In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online.
[…]
In addition, we are considering the following actions: 1) discontinuing the millions of dollars in pro bono cyber security services we are providing the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics; 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; 3) removing all servers from Italian cities; and 4) terminating all plans to build an Italian Cloudflare office or make any investments in the country.
Ernesto Van der Sar (Slashdot):
Launched in 2024, Italy’s elaborate ‘Piracy Shield’ blocking scheme was billed as the future of anti-piracy efforts.
To effectively tackle live sports piracy, its broad blocking powers aim to block piracy-related domain names and IP addresses within 30 minutes.
While many pirate sources have indeed been blocked, the Piracy Shield is not without controversy. There have been multiple reports of overblocking, where the anti-piracy system blocked access to legitimate sites and services.
Previously:
Usage data published by StatCounter (via Cult of Mac) for January 2026 indicates that only around 15 to 16% of active iPhones worldwide are running any version of iOS 26 . The breakdown shows iOS 26.1 accounting for approximately 10.6% of devices, iOS 26.2 for about 4.6%, and the original iOS 26.0 release at roughly 1.1%. In contrast, more than 60% of iPhones tracked by StatCounter remain on iOS 18, with iOS 18.7 and iOS 18.6 alone representing a majority of active devices.
Historical comparisons highlight how atypical this adoption curve appears. StatCounter data from January 2025 shows that roughly 63% of iPhones were running some version of iOS 18 about four months after its release. In January 2024, iOS 17 had reached approximately 54% adoption over a similar timeframe, while iOS 16 surpassed 60% adoption by January 2023.
[…]
In the first week of January last year, 89.3% of MacRumors visitors used a version of iOS 18. This year, during the same time period, only 25.7% of MacRumors readers are running a version of iOS 26 . In the absence of official numbers from Apple, the true adoption rate remains unknown, but the data suggests a level of hesitation toward iOS 26 that has not been seen in recent years.
I want to believe this is because people are choosing to avoid Liquid Glass, but the difference in curves is so stark that I assume it must be due to a measurement problem or a change in how strongly iOS’s Software Update is pushing new versions.
This, even given that Apple has made the 18.7.3 installer [and its security fixes] unavailable for anyone not an Apple Developer and in the beta program.
Previously:
Update (2026-01-12): Jeff Johnson (Mastodon):
The MacRumors stats appeared to provide some independent support for the StatCounter data. I made the mistake of starting to believe the story based on this, without checking the facts myself. In my defense, I’m not a news media outlet, so that’s not my job, and moreover I didn’t publish an article about iOS 26 adoption, until now.
The only site that got it right, eventually, is Pixel Envy by Nick Heer, who pointed out that the Safari browser User-Agent was partially frozen on iOS 26, as discussed in a September WebKit blog post[…]
[…]
Although Apple forces all web browsers on iOS to use WebKit, the User-Agent OS version is frozen only with Safari, not with other browsers, so third-party browsers still accurately report the iOS version.
[…]
By the way, I’m a bit puzzled by Apple’s partial freezing of the Safari User-Agent on iOS, because Safari is always inseparable from the OS, so it’s possible to derive the iOS version from the Safari version, which continues to be incremented in the User-Agent.
I was curious about iOS 26 adoption for NetNewsWire. I looked at the 30-day-active-users numbers, separated by iOS version.
Current adoption is 84% for iOS 26.
I’m slowly getting to the point where I realize that it’s close to impossible to have an app that works reliably both on iOS 18 and 26. Something is always broken. You fix one thing, it breaks something else. Apple’s solution is obviously to support 26 only, but I’m not doing them this favor.
Update (2026-01-14): Nick Heer:
Even though third-party browsers are available on iOS, most users browse the web through Safari. And that means StatCounter is almost certainly counting the vast majority of people on iOS 26 as iOS 18.7 users. I retrieved those user agent strings using StatCounter’s detection utility, which is how it says you can validate the accuracy of its statistics. And it seems they are not. (I asked StatCounter to confirm this but have not heard back.)
The actual rate of iOS 26 adoption is difficult to know right now. Web traffic to generalist websites, like the type collected by StatCounter, seems to me like it would be a good proxy had its measurement capabilities kept up with changes to iOS. Other sources, like TelemetryDeck, indicate a far higher market share — 55% as I am writing this — but its own stats reported nearly 78% adoption of iOS 18 at this time last year, far higher than StatCounter’s 63%. TelemetryDeck’s numbers are based on aggregate data from its in-app analytics product, so they should be more accurate, but that also depends on which apps integrate TelemetryDeck and who uses them. What we can see, though, is the difference between last year and this year at the same time, around 23 percentage points. For comparison, in January 2024, TelemetryDeck reported around 74% had updated to iOS 17 — iOS 26 is 19 points less.
If its reporting for this year is similarly representative, it likely indicates a 20-point slide in iOS 26 adoption. Not nearly as terrible as the misleading StatCounter dashboard suggests, but still a huge slide compared to prior years. Apple will likely update its own figures in the coming weeks for a further point of comparison.
I don’t think 15% is remarkably high for third-party browsers on iOS 26. Heer pointed me toward the Cloudflare statistics for market share by OS, which put Safari at 78%, leaving 22% for other browsers, led by Chrome. If 68% of those users have updated to iOS 26, that would amount to a 15% market share for third-party browsers on iOS 26.
Update (2026-01-23): Nick Heer:
On Friday, I received an email from Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, confirming iOS 26 users had been incorrectly counted as iOS 18.x in its analytics software and, accordingly, in its public trends. Cullen said the company was working on a patch. According to a note pinned today to the top of its iOS version chart, corrected reporting only began rolling out yesterday. However, because this chart represents a version share breakdown for a month that is mostly behind us, more accurate figures will start becoming noticeable in February.
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The second is by way of Timo Tijhof, principal engineer at Wikimedia, who points me to Wikimedia’s network-wide stats showing, as of 11 January, around 50% of “Mobile Safari” visitors were using iOS 26, compared to 41% using iOS 18. […] In the week of 12 January 2025, for example, nearly 72% of visitors were using some version of iOS 18, then the most recent. The week of 14 January 2024, over 65% were using iOS 17.
Update (2026-01-26): John Gruber (Mastodon):
Statcounter completely dropped the ball on this change, and it explains the entirety of this false narrative that iOS 26 adoption is incredibly low.
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iOS 26 adoption isn’t at just 15 percent, which only a dope would believe, but it’s not as high as previous iOS versions in previous years at this point on the calendar. Something, obviously, is going on.
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What’s going on, quite obviously, is that Apple itself is slow-rolling the automatic updates to iOS 26. For years now Apple has steered users, via default suggestions during device setup, to adopt settings to allow OS updates to happen automatically, including updates to major new versions. Apple tends not to push these automatic updates to major new versions of iOS until two months after the .0 release in September. This year that second wave was delayed by about two weeks, and there’s now a third wave starting midway through January. It’s a different pattern from previous years — but it’s a pattern Apple controls. A large majority of users of all Apple devices get major OS updates when, and only when, their devices automatically update. Apple has been slower to push those updates to iOS 26 than they have been for previous iOS updates in recent years. With good reason! iOS 26 is a more significant — and buggier — update than iOS 18 and 17 were.
Apple already intentionally discontinued iOS 18 security updates for devices that support iOS 26, so if Gruber’s claim is true, then Apple is also slow-rolling the security updates included in iOS 26, thereby 0daying its own customer base.
In the last week or so, I’ve been getting pop-ups to upgrade to iOS 26 with nearly every interaction with my iPhone. Pick it up: pop-up. Swipe up to go to the home screen: pop-up. […] It really was quite importunate, to the point that it felt like spam. I can’t recall that happening before. Maybe in the past it would have popped up once a day, or every two days, but not with every single interaction.
This is the first time I can remember that I’ve heard multiple non-technical people complain to me about the iOS upgrade. Top complaints are, my battery life sucks now, it’s really slow, they moved everything around and it looks weird.
Update (2026-02-02): John Gruber:
A year prior in early 2024, Apple updated the numbers at some point between 23 January and 6 February. I presume, or at least hope, that they’ll update these numbers for iOS 26 any day now.
