Archive for March 2025

Thursday, March 6, 2025

Alexa Plus

Ina Fried:

Amazon on Wednesday showed off Alexa+, a generative AI version of its digital voice assistant that draws on a variety of models and works with many of the company’s older Echo devices.

[…]

Alexa+ will be available in late March and cost $19.99 per month on its own — but it’s free for Amazon Prime customers.

[…]

In demos at a press event in New York, Amazon executives showed Alexa+ doing a variety of tasks, including ordering groceries, analyzing documents and making up stories.

Alexa+ will also be able to navigate the web on its own to handle some tasks, Amazon said.

Via Nick Heer:

These voice-controlled assistants seem like a natural fit for large language models and, if Amazon’s ad is anything to go by, this looks impressive. Something I think about a lot is an accessibility spectrum I first saw from Microsoft. I am not someone with a permanent physical disability, for example, but I cook often and do not want to touch my phone. Voice controls are a situational boon.

M.G. Siegler:

But after listening to Amazon’s head of devices and services, Panos Panay, on Nilay Patel’s Decoder podcast, I’m actually even more skeptical now.

Previously:

Lightroom Classic 14.2

Adobe:

The Adaptive profiles help with image-adaptive adjustments in color, tone, and contrast of raw images.

[…]

The Lightroom Classic 14.2 update introduces substantial performance improvements for interactive editing tasks, delivering a smoother, faster, and more responsive experience.

[…]

Better manage your catalog backups with a new backup panel in Catalog Settings > Backup. You can now easily open backup locations, check backup size, or delete older backups. Additionally, you can remove single or multiple backup catalog entries from the list without deleting the actual backup files from their location. View Manage Backup Catalogs to learn more.

Previously:

Chrome Warning About Manifest V2 Extensions

Thomas Claburn:

This story starts in 2019 when Google detailed its plans to improve extensions’ security and privacy features with a project it called Manifest V3 (MV3) that changes the way extensions use various APIs. MV3 is currently being rolled out, and Google looks set to stop supporting extensions that use its predecessor MV2 this year. Back in 2019 Google insisted it was not trying to kill content blockers.

[…]

The search and ad giant’s privacy and security concerns are legitimate. Extensions written under the legacy Manifest V2 API have broad access to the browsing activities of users and have long been abused by miscreants to steal data and compromise systems.

[…]

MV3, however, appears not to be meeting Google’s stated goals.

AdGuard, a privacy service that makes an ad blocking extension for Chrome and related applications, recently complained that MV3 is making it hard to deliver its desired features.

[…]

Miagkov described an unresolved problem that means Privacy Badger is unable to strip Google tracking redirects on Google sites. “We can’t do it the correct way because when Google engineers design the [chrome.declarativeNetRequest API], they fail to think of this scenario,” he said.

Raymond Hill (via Hacker News):

uBO is a Manifest v2 extension, hence the warning in your Google Chrome browser. There is no Manifest v3 version of uBO, hence the browser will suggest alternative extensions as a replacement for uBO[…]

Zalaphyr (via Hacker News):

Ublock Origin extension got removed from my Chrome browser by force, with a message saying that it was not supported anymore.

Jeff Johnson:

Chrome version 134, which started rolling out yesterday, has added a new restriction: unpacked extensions can no longer be used while developer mode is disabled. There’s a new warning, “Turn on developer mode to use this extension, which can’t be reviewed by the Chrome Web Store.”

[…]

Thus, you’ll now need to keep developer mode enabled permanently to use StopTheMadness Pro in Chrome.

Previously:

Ladybird Browser

Joe Brockmeier (via Hacker News):

Ladybird is an open-source project aimed at building an independent web browser, rather than yet another browser based on Chrome. It is written in C++ and licensed under a two-clause BSD license. The effort began as part of the SerenityOS project, but developer Andreas Kling announced on June 3 that he was “forking” Ladybird as a separate project and stepping away from SerenityOS to focus his attention on the browser completely. Ladybird is not ready to replace Firefox or Chrome for regular use, but it is showing great promise.

Kling started working on SerenityOS in 2018 as a therapy project after completing a substance-abuse rehabilitation program. The SerenityOS name is a nod to the serenity prayer. Prior to working on the project, he had worked on WebKit-based browsers at Apple and Nokia. Eventually he made SerenityOS his full-time job, and funded the work through donations, sales of SerenityOS merchandise, and income from YouTube.

[…]

Comparing the README file in the standalone Ladybird repository against the README file in the SerenityOS repository, the goal has evolved from creating a standards-compliant, independent web browser with no third-party dependencies to developing an independent browser using a novel engine based on web standards.

Tim Anderson (Hacker News):

According to a post this week, the new 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, with initial directors being lead developer Andreas Kling and GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath, is funded entirely by sponsorships from those who “care about the open web” and will only accept “unrestricted donations.”

The software is open source on GitHub and uses the permissive BSD-2-Clause License which is means it is free software and approved by the open source initiative.

Jack Kelly (Hacker News):

Chrome is eating the web. I have wanted to help fund a serious alternative browser for quite some time, and while Firefox remains the largest potential alternative, Mozilla has never let me. Since I can’t fund Firefox, I’m going to show there’s money in user-funded web browsers by funding Ladybird instead.

Robert O’Callahan:

If you’ve done all that and implemented all the Web specs, you might still only be a less-Web-compatible Firefox or Chromium. What can you do better? My knowledge is a bit out of date, but here are a few guesses.

Go parallel from the ground up. You’ll get more and more E-cores, so you should try to use them. Parallel parsing and layout seem like endless opportunity.

Use a programming language that lets you write clean, fast, memory-safe, parallel data-race-free code — probably Rust.

Andreas Kling (Hacker News):

We’ve been evaluating a number of C++ successor languages for @ladybirdbrowser, and the one best suited to our needs appears to be @SwiftLang 🪶

[…]

Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has first-class OO support, in many ways even nicer than C++.

The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there’s a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites.

Previously:

Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Mac Studio 2025

Apple (Hacker News):

Mac Studio with M4 Max is up to 3.5x faster than Mac Studio with M1 Max, and is up to 6.1x faster than the most powerful Intel-based 27-inch iMac.

[…]

Mac Studio with M3 Ultra pushes demanding workflows to a whole new level. It delivers nearly 2x faster performance than M4 Max in workloads that take advantage of high CPU and GPU core counts, and massive amounts of unified memory. Mac Studio with M3 Ultra is up to 2.6x faster than Mac Studio with M1 Ultra, and up to 6.4x faster than the 16-core Intel Xeon W-based Mac Pro.

[…]

Mac Studio with M3 Ultra starts with 96GB of unified memory, which can be configured up to 512GB — the most unified memory ever in a personal computer — and up to 16TB of ultrafast SSD storage, so content and data can be kept locally.

[…]

The new Mac Studio features Thunderbolt 5 ports that deliver transfer speeds up to 120 Gb/s, up to 3x faster than the prior generation, enabling faster external storage, expansion chassis, and powerful hub solutions. For those who rely on PCIe expansion cards for their workflows, Thunderbolt 5 allows users to connect an external expansion chassis with higher bandwidth and lower latency. And with M3 Ultra, Mac Studio now drives up to eight Pro Display XDRs at the full 6K resolution.

The only Xcode benchmark mentioned is that the Mac Studio with M4 Max is 2.1× faster than with M1 Max, so perhaps it doesn’t scale as well as other tasks.

Joe Rossignol:

This is the first Mac Studio refresh since it was updated with M2 Max and M2 Ultra chip options in June 2023.

The overall design of the Mac Studio has not changed.

Jason Snell:

It seems like a few things are going on here: first, that the development of the Ultra chip takes longer and that Apple won’t commit to shipping an Ultra chip in every chip generation. Second, that the first-generation three-nanometer chip process of Apple’s chipmaking partner, TSMC, isn’t as dead and buried as generally thought. Just this week Apple also introduced an iPad Air with an M3 processor, and of course the new iPad mini shipped with an A17 Pro processor based on the same process.

[…]

Though the prices for the two base models remain the same at $1999 and $3999, there’s one wrinkle: more memory. The M4 Max Mac Studio starts at 36GB of RAM, up from 32GB on the same-priced M2 Max model. And the M3 Ultra Mac Studio starts at 96GB, up from 64GB on the same-priced M2 Ultra.

Previously:

Apple M3 Ultra

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors):

M3 Ultra is built using Apple’s innovative UltraFusion packaging architecture, which links two M3 Max dies over 10,000 high-speed connections that offer low latency and high bandwidth. This allows the system to treat the combined dies as a single, unified chip for massive performance while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading power efficiency. UltraFusion brings together a total of 184 billion transistors to take the industry-leading capabilities of the new Mac Studio to new heights.

[…]

It features up to a 32-core CPU with 24 performance cores and eight efficiency cores, delivering up to 1.5x the performance of M2 Ultra, and up to 1.8x that of M1 Ultra. It also has the largest GPU in any Apple chip, with up to 80 graphics cores that bring up to 2x faster performance than M2 Ultra, and up to 2.6x faster than M1 Ultra.

[…]

The unified memory architecture of M3 Ultra integrates the most high-bandwidth, low-latency memory ever available in a personal computer. Starting at 96GB, it can be configured up to 512GB, or over half a terabyte.

Previously:

MacBook Air 2025

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors, ArsTechnica):

Apple today announced the new MacBook Air, featuring the blazing-fast performance of the M4 chip, up to 18 hours of battery life, a new 12MP Center Stage camera, and a lower starting price. It also offers support for up to two external displays in addition to the built-in display, 16GB of starting unified memory, and the incredible capabilities of macOS Sequoia with Apple Intelligence — all packed into its strikingly thin and light design that’s built to last. The new MacBook Air now comes in an all-new color — sky blue, a metallic light blue that joins midnight, starlight, and silver — giving MacBook Air its most beautiful array of colors ever. It also now starts at just $999 — $100 less than before — and $899 for education, making it an incredible value for students, business professionals, or anyone looking for a phenomenal combination of world-class performance, portability, design, and durability.

The previous model started with only 8 GB of memory and went up to 24 GB. Between the RAM increase and the price decrease, the base model is much better than before. Upgrading to 32 GB of memory costs $400, though, and of course the SSD prices are still outrageous.

Howard Oakley:

In Apple’s current M4 models, the smallest internal storage on offer is 256 GB. For the great majority, that’s barely adequate if you don’t install any of your own apps.

[…]

Don’t be tempted to skimp with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 external SSD if that’s going to be your main storage. While it might seem a reasonable economy now, in 3-5 years time you’ll regret it. Besides, it may well have severe limitations in not Trimming as standard, and most don’t support SMART health indicators.

Thus, your expected saving by buying a Mac with only 512 GB internal storage, and providing 2 TB main storage on an external [Thunderbolt] SSD, is around $/€/£ 200-220, and that’s really the only advantage in not paying Apple’s high price for an internal 2 TB SSD.

Using an external boot drive just doesn’t work very well these days, in my experience, especially with a laptop and if you want to put the Mac to sleep. On the other hand, if you mostly need the storage for a media library, USB is fine and much less expensive. A 2 TB Samsung T7 is currently only $130 vs. $800 for Apple’s 2 TB upgrade.

Many noticed rapid changes in their SSD wear indicators, and some were getting worryingly close to the end of their expected working life after just three years. Users also reported that SSD performance was falling. The reasons for those are that SSDs work best, age slowest, and remain fastest when they have ample free space. One common rule of thumb is to keep at least 20-25% of SSD capacity as free space, although evidence is largely empirical, and in places confused.

Jason Snell:

The M4 also completely unlocks a feature that some MacBook Air fans have been clamoring for since the Apple silicon era began: The ability to drive two external displays and its own display, simultaneously.

[…]

A big quality-of-life upgrade in this model is the addition of a new 12-megapixel camera that supports Center Stage. These specs are identical to those found in the recently upgraded M4 iMac and M4 MacBook Pro. If this upgrade is anything like those, it’ll be a major improvement.

Christian Selig:

New MacBook Airs look great but Apple really needs to R&D the tech to add an extra USB-C port so you can charge from either side

Basic Apple Guy:

The Apple Color Czar needs to get Apple’s Blue Accessory Department under control. 11 current products, all with different blues…

Previously:

Leitmotif Acquires Taska

Florian Albrecht:

Taska is a beautiful and versatile Mac native app for issue tracking.

Since working on issues typically is a team effort, it’s not an isolated or proprietary app. Instead, it acts as a frontend to the popular services GitHub and GitLab, maintaining full compatibility with other users of those services, whether they are using Taska or not.

[…]

We are celebrating our acquisition of Taska by providing 50% on all our products. We even set up a promotion page for that.

Zac Hall:

The app is available as a free download from the Mac App Store with a 14-day free trial and an unlimited read-only mode. Users can purchase the full app for a single $119.99 charge, or subscribe annually for $39.99/year.

Previously:

Tuesday, March 4, 2025

iPad Air (M3, 7th Generation)

Apple (Hacker News):

iPad Air with M3 empowers users to be productive and creative wherever they are, from aspiring creatives using demanding apps and working with large files, to travelers editing content on the go. The powerful M3 chip offers a number of improvements over M1 and previous-generation models. Featuring a more powerful 8-core CPU, M3 is up to 35 percent faster for multithreaded CPU workflows than iPad Air with M1.

Though note that the model it replaces had an M2.

Joe Rossignol:

With the M3 chip, the new iPad Air should offer up to 20% faster performance compared to the previous-generation model with the M2 chip, which was released in May 2024. In addition, the M3 chip brings hardware-accelerated ray tracing to the iPad Air for the first time, providing improved graphics rendering in games.

[…]

We have yet to discover any other changes for the new iPad Air beyond the M3 chip and the updated Magic Keyboard.

[…]

In the U.S., the 11-inch model continues to start at $599, and the 13-inch model continues to start at $799. The device remains available in the same Space Gray, Starlight, Blue, and Purple color options that were offered for the previous model.

Dan Moren:

It’s definitely a muted update, which is no surprise as it comes just nine months after the introduction of the M2 iPad Air last May. The use of the M3 processor is also somewhat surprising, given that it’s based on an outdated manufacturing process that Apple has otherwise been aggressive about transitioning away from on the rest of its product line.

Matt Birchler:

My Mac does everything I could imagine, so when you show me a Mac that looks exactly like what I already have but is way faster, then I go “hell yeah, gimme that!” But when you show me a faster iPad, I largely go, “well, speed isn’t what I feel holds me back on the iPad, it’s the software.” My evidence is literally every iPad review in the past 10 years.

Hartley Charlton:

The new keyboard features a larger built-in trackpad, a 14-key function row, and a new aluminum hinge.

Devon Dundee:

It’s great to see these features from the iPad Pro’s Magic Keyboard make their way to the iPad Air. At the same time, the Air version does include some compromises, most notably its omission of backlit keys. It also lacks the aluminum palm rest and trackpad haptic feedback found on the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, and it only comes in a single color option: white.

The iPad Air’s Magic Keyboard is marginally cheaper than the iPad Pro version (and the Magic Keyboard for last year’s iPad Air), costing $30 less at $269 for the 11-inch version and $319 for the 13-inch version.

Previously:

Update (2025-03-05): John Gruber:

$269 feels like a crummy deal. The new-from-last-year $299 Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, with an aluminum top, feels way more than $30 better than the old-style silicone-covered ones like this new Magic Keyboard for iPad Air. It kind of feels like a design failure of some sort that these new iPad Airs can’t use the same Magic Keyboards as the iPad Pros of the same size.

iPad (11th Generation)

Apple:

Apple today also updated iPad with double the starting storage and the A16 chip, bringing even more value to customers. The A16 chip provides a jump in performance for everyday tasks and experiences in iPadOS, while still providing all-day battery life. Compared to the previous generation, the updated iPad with A16 is nearly 30 percent faster.

Hartley Charlton:

The new iPad starts with 128GB of storage, and is also available in 256GB and a new 512GB configuration. The previous model was only available in 64GB and 256GB configurations.

It is available in blue, pink, yellow, and silver, and continues to start at $349.

Craig Grannell:

Given how important Apple Intelligence seemingly is to Apple, I’m floored that the new iPad doesn’t support it. Baffling.

Adam Engst:

Frankly, I can’t see that many people with functional iPads purchased in the last four or five years will benefit greatly from upgrading to a newer model. Either their current iPad still works well enough, or performance issues will push them towards the iPad Air.

However, as an affordable entry point to the lineup, the 11th-generation iPad becomes even more appealing with the A16 chip and 128 GB of storage (up from 64 GB) for the $349 base model.

[…]

Although the screen size has not changed—it still measures 9.79-by-7.07 inches, with a 2360-by-1640-pixel resolution at 264 ppi—Apple is now referring to it as “11-inch” instead of “10.9-inch.”

Previously:

Premium Hardware, Subpar Software

Eliseo Martelli (via Hacker News, Reddit):

As a long-time Apple user, I’ve always appreciated the integration of hardware and software, signature of the Apple ecosystem. However, recent experiences with my iPad Air 11" M2 has left me questioning whether Apple has lost sight of what once made their products great.

[…]

The performance issues don’t stop at sluggish response times. During these use cases, my iPad overheated, making it uncomfortable to hold or even rest the palm on, raising concerns about potential long-term hardware damage.

What made this particularly frustrating is that these aren’t third-party applications pushing the hardware to its limits. These are Apple’s own applications that should be theoretically optimized for their hardware.

[…]

Since my original complaint, I’ve discovered numerous forum threads and social media discussions from iPad users experiencing similar issues. This suggests a systemic problem rather than isolated incidents.

Francisco Tolmasky:

This is such a funny way of saying

“The Apple Store’s first and only troubleshooting step for Apple Notes being slow on my iPad was to give me a brand new iPad, but Notes just overheated that iPad too, so we realized that Notes is just crap.”

yalok:

This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality.

Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps.

Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they lived with a bug where a text note may just become blank - and only restarting Notes app makes it visible again.

Or AppStore - if an app has to be updated (I have auto updates off) - and I press Update - it gets downloaded, installed - and then AppStore is back to showing “Update” button! If you just go to the app, it’s a new version. But if you press that “Update”, it will redo update from scratch.

Sometimes I’m so frustrated, and thinking of my options - it’s either move to Android, or go get hired at Apple with a mandate to fix bugs in various products… but knowing Apple secrecy culture/silos, it’s not going to work, and requires change in their hiring process/perf review/QA.

RIPreason:

Chamath’s new iPhone bricks constantly and he has difficulty performing basic functions like calling his wife.

In 2024, the way to get bugs fixed on an iPhone is to be a billionaire and rant about it in a top podcast.

[…]

I disagree with Chamath about the problem. The problem is not due to a lack of testing, but a bloated culture infected with careerism and empire-building. And unfortunately, nobody climbs the ladder for shipping quality. You can’t point to quality like you can point to the useless new button they added, or the touchbar, etc.

Dave B.:

Apple used to be a UX company. The entire foundation of the company was “How can man interact with machine to improve all our lives?” and that was done via intuitive software and clever hardware input mechanisms. Supply chain, marketing, and even engineering were all done in service of that goal.

Today, that has utterly flipped.

Design and UX feel like they’re just a department off to the side somewhere, while the crux of the company’s existence is “How can we build efficient supply chains and sell many SKUs via effective marketing?”

Previously:

Linus Sebastian Switches to iPhone for 30 Days

Linus Tech Tips:

Linus takes a long-overdue trip back into the iOS ecosystem. Will daily-driving a shiny new iPhone 16 Plus for an entire month convert him into Apple’s newest fan?

[…]

“I started to look a little differently at the Apple users in my life. They describe Apple products with market slogans like, ‘It just works,’ as though they actually believe them. And it made me wonder does Apple have one version of their products for the True Believers and then a different one for the scrubs like me? Because my time with the iPhone 16 plus has been absolutely riddled with unintuitive design choices unnecessarily limited functionality and some of the weirdest bugs that I’ve have encountered on a supposedly finished product[…]”

Via John Gruber (Mastodon):

Sebastian is a long-time Android user, but he’s not really a phone guy at all. He doesn’t review phones, typically. His own personal Android phone is several years old. His interest and renown is entirely in the field of PCs. So his video isn’t really “Android power user reviews iOS”, but more like “PC power user who is also an Android user tries an iPhone for a month”.

[…]

He complains repeatedly about iOS’s animated transitions making everything feel slow. That’s 100 percent true. As an everyday iPhone user I’m just completely used to that. But those animations really do make iPhones feel slower than they are. In terms of tech specs iPhones are literally the fastest phones on the planet. Apple’s A-series silicon is, and always has been, years ahead of the best silicon money can buy in an Android handset. But a lot of aspects of iOS feel slower than Android because of animated transitions for which iOS offers no option to speed up. It should. And the Accessibility setting to completely turn off animations doesn’t solve the problem; what I want, and I think what Sebastian wants, is faster animations.

[…]

Again, it didn’t leave me with an iota of envy for life on the Android side of the fence, but it reminded me about a bunch of things on iOS that don’t make sense, and seemingly are the way they are only because that’s how they always have been.

Kirk McElhearn:

When was the last time Apple used the phrase “It just works” in marketing? More than a decade ago? If anything, people used that to Mark Apple. Citing that as an apple marketing term it’s just wrong. It’s more a meme than anything else now.

I recently set up a brand new iPad for my father, and we ran into a dozen or so bugs just between plugging it in and getting the built-in apps working. (The impetus for the iPad was that he needed a backup device for travel because Mail on his iPhone was unreliable. Messages were displayed incompletely, and after trying to fix this by deleting and re-adding the account, he was unable to re-add it because the settings screen kept going blank. Webmail in Safari didn’t fully work because the screen was too small. Eventually Mail did re-add the account but would only load a few of the mailboxes, until a month later when everything suddenly worked again.)

Anyway, with the iPad, the first problem was that the proximity pairing to copy the settings from his iPhone didn’t work. The iPad offered it, but then it wouldn’t actually start the process. We finally had to cancel, and then no amount of waving the devices together would get it offer the option again.

In configuring the settings manually, a variety of buttons just didn’t respond. Some controls that were supposed to be enabled weren’t. The account setup sheet in Mail kept spontaneously closing, and then we would have to re-open it and type in everything again. App icons wouldn’t drag out of the search onto the home screen. Various iCloud services would neither sync nor show why they weren’t syncing and then spontaneously turned themselves off. It took several hours to activate the cellular service. On the plus side, Safari is really really fast compared with his Intel MacBook Air, and the AT&T plan is only $21/month for unlimited data.

The old 1Password stopped Dropbox-syncing on his iPhone and couldn’t be installed on the iPad, so this seemed like a good time to switch to Apple’s password manager. The MacBook Air can’t run Sequoia, so the Passwords app is unavailable, but we were able to update it to Sonoma, which has the password manager in Safari’s Settings. Right after updating, the Mac kept getting stuck at the login screen: it would accept the password but then sort of half-reboot and end up at the login screen again. After four cycles of this it just started working.

In order to use the latest importer, I set up temporary account on a Sequoia Mac to import from 1Password to the Passwords app. It reported lots of errors because of items that didn’t have the URL entered properly and because sometimes there were multiple accounts for the same site. There was no way to copy or export the list of errors to go back to 1Password and fix them. I wish it had just imported everything, sticking any unknown or error information into the notes, so that I could fix it up later in the Passwords app. Instead, I had to keep going to 1Password to fix things and retrying the export until all the errors were fixed. Then I realized that the 1Password CSV export doesn’t include the notes, so I copied and pasted those individually via screen sharing. We also backed up all the 1Password stuff to a giant PDF in case it turns out that something didn’t import properly.

The next problem was that Photos on the Mac wouldn’t sync with iCloud. It would just say “Syncing with iCloud paused. Mac needs to cool down.” I don’t know what that means or what I was meant to do. The MacBook Air was plugged in and did not seem to be overheated—the fan was not running, and Activity Monitor did not show high CPU use. Why would syncing cause overheating, anyway? Isn’t that primarily a network task?

Lastly, we ran into trouble seeing up a new flash drive for Time Machine. The drive came formatted for Windows. I thought macOS used to offer to use a newly attached drive for Time Machine, but it didn't. There was no option to erase it as APFS. I was able to format it as HFS+, but Disk Utility’s Convert to APFS command kept failing with an error. Eventually I remembered that you have to use View ‣ Show All Devices before you can change the partition scheme from Master Boot Record to GUID Partition Map. Then I was able to Erase it as APFS.

The final part of the story is that, some days later, his iPhone updated to the latest version of iOS. Mail auto-enabled the new categories feature, and he was completely confused as to why the number of messages shown in each mailbox was suddenly different and couldn’t figure out how to get it to show all the messages. I was able to explain how to swipe sideways to show the hidden All Messages button. But I was confused myself because I thought this was an Apple Intelligence feature and so it was only available on iPhone 15 Pro and later, not on an iPhone SE.

Previously:

Monday, March 3, 2025

Citibank’s $81 Trillion Error

Doloresz Katanich:

An error almost led to a Citigroup account being credited with $81tn (€77.8tn) - an amount that is about 5 times the total wealth of the UK, which was estimated at €14.7tn in 2023 by ONS.

[…]

The erroneous internal transfer, which occurred last April, was initially missed by two employees, one of whom was assigned to check the transaction.

[…]

The first employee had to go through a rarely-used back-up screen following another system’s fault to send $280 (€269) to a client’s account. One quirk of the rarely-used screen was that the amount field came pre-filled with 15 zeros, something that would have to be deleted but that did not happen[…]

Pre-filling the field sounds like such a terrible design that wouldn’t happen by accident, so there must be an interesting reason why that was done.

Stephen Gandel and Joshua Franklin:

A third employee detected a problem with the bank’s account balances, catching the payment 90 minutes after it was posted.

[…]

The bank said its “detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts and we reversed the entry” and that these mechanisms “would have also stopped any funds leaving the bank”.

[…]

A total of 10 near misses — incidents when a bank processes the wrong amount but is ultimately able to recover the funds — of $1bn or greater occurred at Citi last year, according to an internal report seen by the FT.

In the financial world, fractions of a second matter, but somehow 90 minutes after the fact is considered prompt. A good Mac app will preemptively warn the user if they do something that’s probably an error, like try to open 100 documents at a time. The G-SIB’s “detective controls” sound like the equivalent of killing the process after it’s used up all the RAM but before it brings down the whole machine. OK, that’s a good thing, but there’s really no input validation or sanity checking earlier in the process? I suppose that’s not actually necessary when there are legal means of undo.

Previously:

Swift 6.1

Mishal Shah:

This post describes the release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 6.1.

Donny Wals:

The Xcode 16.3 beta is out, which includes a new version of Swift. Swift 6.1 is a relatively small release that comes with bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and some features.

[…]

Starting in Swift 6.1, Apple has made it so that we no longer have to explicitly define the return type for our child tasks. Instead, Swift can infer the return type of child tasks based on the first task that we add to the group.

[…]

However, it’s kind of strange in a way that the compiler is using an extension on Int that’s defined in a module that I didn’t even import in this specific file.

[…]

In Swift 6.1, we can opt into a new member visibility mode. This member visibility mode is going to work a little bit more like you might expect.

Matt Massicotte:

I really like proposals that make things work more intuitively. What this one does is expand the use of nonisolated so you can better control global isolation inference.

[…]

I completely missed this one when it was pitched! It’s just a great little quality-of-life improvement for the with*TaskGroup family of APIs.

[…]

Another area that has seen attention is around the sending keyword. There were a number of situations where the compiler was too conservative with sending and 6.1 has gotten a lot better!

Previously:

StopTheMadness for Safari Web Apps?

Jeff Johnson:

There’s now a Safari web extension version of Noir specifically for Safari web apps, in addition to the Safari app extension version of Noir for Safari. Of course, this solution is non-ideal, because it’s confusing to users, and you’ll notice in the above screenshot that Noir for Web Apps has to warn users—with red exclamation points!—not to enable it for regular Safari. You don’t want two different versions of the same extension running simultaneously in Safari.

[…]

In theory, I could follow Noir in creating a Safari web extension version of StopTheMadness specifically for Safari web apps on macOS. The question is, should I, and why? The project would be a lot of work, which I’m not opposed to, but the work needs to be worth it. Some StopTheMadness customers have requested Safari web apps support, but not a lot of customers so far.

Besides the work involved, another problem is that Safari web apps are… weird. They have no address bar. They have no tabs. They lack some of the standard contextual menu items. They open cross-origin links in Safari rather than in the web app—unless you select Open Link in New Window! In general, the weirdness of Safari web extensions would break some of the crucial features of StopTheMadness, such as protecting ⌘-click to open links in a new tab, the Tab Rules, and the contextual menu options.

Previously:

2024 Apple Vision Accessibility Report Card

AppleVis:

Overall, survey participants expressed satisfaction with the VoiceOver features available on iOS. Several participants expressed a desire for deeper AI integration for functionality like image description, photo labeling, voices, and screen recognition. Multiple participants expressed dissatisfaction with the VoiceOver features available on macOS, particularly when compared to iOS. People who use devices in languages other than English reported particular issues with VoiceOver unique to their language. Multiple participants expressed a desire for Apple to prioritize fixing existing bugs before introducing new features.

[…]

As with the comments on VoiceOver features, participants spoke most favorably about the VoiceOver user experience on iOS; however, long-standing bugs, like the issue with focus jumping, remain and detract.

[…]

Apple received high praise from participants for the new Braille Screen Input features introduced in iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. Several participants reported issues with the cursor jumping when using a braille display, and others reported issues when using particular displays and concerns about overall ease-of-use of braille display functionality.

[…]

While opinions on the utility of the new accessibility features introduced in 2024 were not universal, a large number of users praised Apple's efforts in this regard. In particular, participants expressed appreciation for the improvements to Braille Screen Input (including Command Mode); Live Recognition; the Voices Rotor; the customizable Commanders in macOS; Audio Ducking enhancements; and the VoiceOver Tutorial on iOS. Some users reported difficulty using the Vocal Shortcuts feature. Some expressed that VoiceOver is stagnating, while others expressed a wish for Apple to prioritize fixing bugs and existing features before implementing new ones. Multiple participants expressed a desire for Apple to improve image descriptions using artificial intelligence.

Previously:

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