Norbert Heger:
Little Snitch 6 offers a new feature: DNS encryption. With DNS encryption enabled, all name lookups are routed through Little Snitch and performed in encrypted form.
For this purpose, Little Snitch registers a DNS proxy. macOS then sends all DNS requests to that proxy, which in turn performs the lookup in encrypted form. The key point here is that all requests must be routed through the proxy.
[…]
There appears to be a bug in macOS Sequoia causing some requests to bypass the installed DNS proxy and be sent unencrypted to the system’s default name server instead.
[…]
After further investigation, we found that this bug has already existed at least since macOS 14.5 Sonoma (maybe even earlier, but we currently don’t have access to an older 14.x system for testing).
For more on the Little Snitch 6 upgrade, see the press release, release notes, MacRumors, and TidBITS.
Previously:
Update (2024-09-18): Norbert Heger (Hacker News):
After further investigation, we found that this bug only affects the DNS proxy of Little Snitch 6.1. It’s not a general problem of DNS proxies in macOS.
[…]
The issue has been fixed in Little Snitch 6.1.1.
Bug Domain Name System (DNS) Extensions Little Snitch Mac App macOS 14 Sonoma macOS 15 Sequoia Networking Privacy
Matt Birchler (Hacker News):
That brings us to the “Chrome devastates your Mac’s battery” claim that is commonly thrown around as fact, although rarely while citing any sources. This is presented as common knowledge. It’s as indisputable as gravity – a fact of the universe – Chrome crushes your battery and Safari sips it.
[…]
About 18 months ago, Google claimed they’d caught up to Safari in battery drain, so I decided to do some testing of my own. Conveniently, I recently had to wipe my MacBook Pro’s internal drive and restore to a clean version of macOS Sonoma (long story, but betas gonna beta) so I have pretty stock version of macOS running right now that would be perfect for some testing.
[…]
In my 3-hour tests, Safari consumed 18.67% of my battery each time on average, and Chrome averaged 17.33% battery drain. That works out to about 9% less battery drain from Chrome than Safari. Yes, you read that right, I found Chrome was easier on my battery than Safari.
While I did experience some variability in each 3 hour test run, Chrome came out on top in 5 of the 6 direct comparisons.
therjaye:
I believe Microsoft engineers contributed a lot of code to the Chromium project in regards to improving battery efficiency. All the Chromium-based browsers benefited from it and so Chrome is nothing like as bad as it used to be.
ksec:
Perhaps the peak of Chrome complaining battery drain was something in between 2018 - 2020. It also happens to be the peak of Safari is the new IE with so many web features missing and bugs unresolved. Both are correct to a certain degree and have been the case for many years before it reached what could be described as a PR crisis.
Since then Safari had twice if not more features and bug fix than usual in the next few Safari releases. While Chrome worked on multi tab memory usage reduction, and efficiency. At the same time Firefox just went into polishing mode because a lot of the efficiency work already came from Servo, E10s and Memshrink over the past 10 years.
In multi tab usage ( ~50 to 80 ) Chrome is already better than Safari simply because Safari still don’t consider lots of Tabs on macOS as one of their usage scenario. And Chrome being better for that for at least 2 years. For 7000 tabs it is still better to use Firefox.
I’ve certainly seen that Chrome handles large numbers of tabs much better than Safari.
Nicolas Magand:
Today, after nearly 20 years of loyalty to Safari, I’m considering switching to another default browser on my personal computer. I mean, why is it so hard to watch a YouTube video without hiccups, and why can I only choose from a selection of 4 search engines, including three Bing-based?
I still like Safari better as an app, but, as I wrote a week ago, I’m increasingly frustrated by compatibility and reliability problems. Maybe it will be better with Sequoia, when I can upgrade.
Mike Rockwell:
The search engine limitation is one of the main reasons I’ve switched from Safari on my iPhone.
Previously:
Update (2024-09-19): Nick Heer:
I cannot understand why Safari’s UI has been so poorly responsive for years now. This is just me toggling between two windows. Look how long it takes for the window to become visually active or inactive.
August Mueller:
Safari has been pretty sketchy for me as well lately. And frequently videos in YouTube will pause until I move my cursor around (though audio will still play). I’ve been contemplating moving to Chrome more and more.
Update (2024-09-25): Daniel Jalkut:
I feel bad for the restaurants who use software that, they probably don’t realize, doesn’t work at all with Safari/Apple clients. I am usually ordering on my Mac so I can switch to Chrome, but …
Battery Life Google Chrome Mac macOS 14 Sonoma Safari
Mark Frauenfelder (via Slashdot):
A SWAT team terrorized an innocent St. Louis County family last May, all due to a pair of stolen AirPods and questionable police tactics. Brittany Shamily and her family, including a three-month-old baby, were terrified when heavily armed officers smashed through their front door screaming searching for evidence related to a carjacking that had occurred earlier that day.
The police relied on the “FindMy” app to track the stolen AirPods to Shamily’s home, despite the app’s known inaccuracies. This led to a search warrant being issued, and the SWAT team descended upon the unsuspecting family with overwhelming force.
Ryan Krull:
“FindMy is not that accurate,” says the family’s lawyer, Bevis Schock. “I actually went to my house with my co-counsel and played around with it for an hour. It’s just not that good.”
[…]
After this had gone on for more than half an hour, the AirPods were located — on the street outside the family’s home.
Previously:
AirPods Find My iOS iOS 17 Law Enforcement Legal
John Gruber (Mastodon, Hacker News):
Last week’s “It’s Glowtime” event was very strong for Apple. It might have been the single strongest iPhone event since the introduction of the iPhone X. All three platforms are now in excellent, appealing, and coherent shape[…]
[…]
But, still, flying home from California on Tuesday, I was left with a feeling best described as ennui.
[…]
My dissatisfaction flying home from last week’s event is, ultimately, selfish. I miss having my mind blown. I miss being utterly surprised. I miss occasionally being disappointed by a product design that stretched quirky all the way to wacky. I miss being amazed by something entirely unexpected out of left field.
I felt that, too, but I disagree with the framing. The product lines are indeed very strong right now, but the event itself was boring. I started multitasking instead of fully paying attention and even then felt I’d wasted my time watching. It just felt too long and too canned. The products themselves seem fine. I’m not tempted to upgrade my iPhone 15 Pro, though after so many years of iPhones I think it would be unreasonable to expect to be after just one year.
Mossberg correctly cites AirPods and Apple Watches as big successes of the post-Jobs era. Not coincidentally, they are two of the three platforms Apple featured in last week’s event — and two of the three that people carry wherever they go.
[…]
What we’re seeing is Tim Cook’s Apple. Cook is a strong, sage leader, and the proof is that the entire company is now ever more in his image. That’s inevitable. It’s also not at all to say Apple is worse off. In some ways it is, but in others, Apple is far better. I can’t prove any of this, of course, but my gut says that a Steve-Jobs–led Apple today would be noticeably less financially successful and industry-dominating than the actual Tim-Cook–led Apple has been.
I think that’s probably right. I bet the software would be better, though. The more interesting question is the long-term state of the company and its products, which of course we don’t yet know.
Cook almost never reveals his true passionate self in public. But at least one time he did. At the 2014 annual shareholders meeting, Cook faced a question from a representative of the right-wing National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR). As reported by Bryan Chaffin at The Mac Observer.
I have a somewhat different take on the famous “bloody ROI” response. Everyone focuses on how Tim Cook stood up for doing things that are right, even if they aren’t profitable. But the context is that Cook himself had started the ROI discussion by stating that Apple’s environmental programs were good for the bottom line. He was then asked a valid question—whether this was only true because of government subsidies. That would be interesting to know, but we never got the answer because he dodged the question and pivoted to accessibility and worker safety.
We know that Tim Cook loves data. But he wants us to believe that Apple has never run the environmental numbers, just like it has no idea whether the App Store is profitable. He’s always on message. And here the message is that Apple has its priorities, which shan’t be questioned.
Whenever an Apple developer or customer complains about something that sucks but could likely be fixed by the application of money, which Apple has, people respond that Apple’s hands are tied. It has to look out for its profitability and shareholders. But a perk of being CEO is that you can ignore smaller asks like these while spending tens of billions on TV content and cars. The ROI only matters when you say it does. You get to decide whether a cost that would make people happy is frivolous or an important investment in the future health of the platform.
Riccardo Mori:
Ever since Apple switched to this pre-packaged delivery format, the novelty has worn down quickly and these events all look like sophisticated PowerPoint presentations and, worse, they all look alike. When I try to isolate one from the last dozen I’ve watched, I can’t. They’re all a blur.
[…]
My impression that Apple is severely removed from how actual people use their phones is reinforced every time they show a short video to illustrate how certain features work. These videos are supposed to showcase how Apple products naturally embed in regular people’s daily lives. What we see are slices from utopia. Impeccable people moving about in their impeccable homes living glossy-magazine lives, everybody fluidly relating to their personal tech devices.
Ben Thompson:
The lack of a price increase for the iPhone 16 Pro made more sense when I watched Apple’s presentation; I found the updates over the iPhone 15 Pro to be pretty underwhelming. The A18 Pro chip is on TSMC’s newest 3nm process, there is a new Camera Control button, and the screen is a bit bigger with bezels that are a bit smaller; that’s really about it from a hardware perspective, although as always, Apple continues to push the envelope with computational photography. And, frankly, that’s fine: last year’s iPhone Pro 15, the first with titanium and USB-C, was for me the iPhone I had been waiting for (and most customers don’t upgrade every year, so these and other previous updates will be new features for them).
What I find much more compelling — and arguably the best deal in iPhone history — is the $799 iPhone 16 (non-Pro). The A18 chip appears to be a binned version of the A18 Pro (there is one less GPU and smaller caches), while the aforementioned bump to 8GB of RAM — necessary to run Apple Intelligence — matches the iPhone 16 Pro. There is one fewer camera, but the two-camera system that remains has been reconfigured to a much more aesthetically pleasing pill shape that has the added bonus of making it possible to record spatial video when held horizontally. The screen isn’t quite as good, and the bezels are a bit larger, but the colors are more fun. It’s a great phone, and the closest the regular iPhone has been to the Pro since the line separated in 2017.
[…]
Software, specifically AI, is what will drive differentiation going forward, and even in the best case scenario, where Apple’s AI efforts are good enough to keep people from switching to Google, the economics of software development push towards broad availability on every iPhone, not special features for people willing to pay a bit more. It’s as if the iPhone, which started out as one model for everyone before bifurcating into the Pro and regular (and SE) lines, is coming full circle to standardization; the difference, though, is its value is harvested through R&D intensive services that need to run everywhere, instead of unit profits driven by hardware differentiation.
Eric Schwarz:
I think this nails what a lot of the tech community has been complaining about for the last few years—Apple is kind of boring now, but in a way that you can safely buy the current iPhone when you feel like it is time to upgrade.
Previously:
Update (2024-09-18): Nick Heer:
This year’s bit of consumerist fun did feel overlong and tedious to me, too — like homework for understanding the lineup rather than an exciting demonstration of tomorrow’s technology available today. Apple’s employees were doing their best onscreen to show excitement. Yet it did not translate so well for me and, it would seem, many others.
M.G. Siegler:
When I originally took issue with the event itself – which is to say, the video presentation of what Apple was presenting “on stage” – it wasn’t about the products themselves. It was simply that the event itself was boring. It completely lacked any sort of pomp and circumstance. Sure, part of this is because the state of Apple leaks (by which I largely mean, Mark Gurman reports, of course) is such that we know almost everything coming at such events not just ahead of time, but often weeks or months ahead of time. But even if we didn’t know such details, I think the event still would have been less than great because it was just far too long. You got the sense that Apple was reiterating – which is a kind way of saying repeating – all of the talking points about Apple Intelligence for Wall Street as much as anyone else. Apple would deny this, of course. But in my mind, there is no denying that Apple is pushing their AI products far earlier than they would like or probably should be in order to “play the game on the field” as it were.
[…]
I believe Jobs would have figured out better ways to present and explain and market the devices Apple is putting out there. And that framing would have yielded more excitement around this year’s devices, rather than just a string of endless numbers.
Eric Schwarz:
I’d almost prefer to see a live iPhone presentation that just owns the fact that the next model is a nice iteration of the prior and keep it short and sweet.
Update (2024-09-20): Riccardo Mori (Mastodon):
Let’s get back to the last bit of the quoted part above. Gruber says: Tim Cook’s Apple doesn’t make mistakes like that. That’s ultimately why Cook’s Apple is more successful.
Selective memory is amazing. Shall we talk about a few duds that happened under Tim Cook’s Apple? Like the 2013 ‘trash can’ Mac Pro? Like the impregnable 2014 Mac mini? Like the 2015 12-inch single-port retina MacBook? — A dud in itself containing yet another dud in the form of the infamous keyboard with butterfly mechanism, one of the biggest blunders in Apple’s history that took the company four years, four years to acknowledge and fix it. Shall we talk about the Touchbar? Or the gold Apple Watch Edition? Shall we talk about the slow but assured deterioration of Mac OS, the user interface and Apple software in general?
[…]
If we’re talking about gut feelings, I’d say that if Steve Jobs were still around, we would have a differently successful and a differently industry-leading Apple. A company that wouldn’t feel so ‘corporate tech’ as other giants in the field. A company that probably wouldn’t be this greedily pushy when it comes to the App Store and its bloody 30% cut. A company that probably wouldn’t want to be involved in everything, everywhere, all the time in all the markets but would instead choose specific markets and bloody excel at those. A company that would probably know what to do with the iPad. A company that would still make excellent software — especially when it comes to the Mac. And that would be capable of differentiating itself in more meaningful ways than just being a giant tech powerhouse.
Matt Birchler:
While the most common upgrade cycle is 2-3 years (40%), and a similar amount (39%) upgrade in 4 or more year cycles, a full 21% of people upgrade their phone at least once per year. Given an estimated 316 million smartphone owners in the US today, that’s 66 million Americans who buy a new phone every year.
AirPods Apple Business Environment iOS iOS 18 iPhone 16 iPhone 16 Plus iPhone 16 Pro iPhone 16 Pro Max Steve Jobs Tim Cook watchOS 10
