Multiple Windows! See your schedule from different views or dates at the same time. Open new windows at File > New Window
Finally. The main use case for me is to compare the same month for different years. I have been doing this by opening one of them using the macOS Calendar app, but it will nice to be able to use Fantastical for both.
Previously:
Over the weekend, users noticed their Timelines went missing.
Google seems to have noticed, too, as The Register has seen multiple social media posts in which Timelines users share an email from the search and ads giant in which it admits “We briefly experienced a technical issue that caused the deletion of Timeline data for some people.”
The email goes on to explain that most users that availed themselves of a feature that enables encrypted backups will be able to restore their Maps Timelines data.
Users who did not make those backups can’t restore their data. Those who did make backups need to manually restore their info using a procedure Google included in its email.
Via Nick Heer:
Once again, Google provides no explanation for why it is incapable of reliably storing user data, and no customer support.
It seems this was the data that Google was trying to get users to move to their own devices. Originally, it said it would keep the data in the cloud until December 2024. But then the date was changed to May 18, 2025. Now, in March, some of the data has been deleted from the cloud and from users’ devices.
This non-apology is such a joke. I switched to local device storage in December after receiving the email even though it said I had until May to do it. Apparently I didn’t turn on cloud backup. Probably because I figured it would be fine to do it later as long as it was before the May deadline. But it seems they deleted my data from their servers straight away? How have they managed to delete data stored on my phone? This sucks so much and is concerning given how much I rely on other Google products. Shocking mistake to make and then just say “oopsie.”
Previously:
It’s one thing for Apple’s AI product offerings to be non-competitive. Perhaps even worse is that as Apple stands still, software development is moving forward faster than ever before. Like it or not, LLMs—both through general chat interfaces and purpose-built developer tools—have meaningfully increased the rate at which new software can be produced. And they’ve done so both by making skilled developers more productive while also lowering the bar for less-experienced participants.
Barring a sharp correction, Apple looks increasingly likely to miss out on a generation of developers conditioned to first reach for tools like Cursor, Replit, or v0—especially as Apple’s own AI tooling remains notably absent. This goes well beyond enabling new entrants to “vibe code”—experienced mobile developers who, despite history with Xcode and a predilection for building native apps, are begrudgingly swapping out their tools in acknowledgement of the inarguable productivity benefits.
Sure, AI-assisted developer tools can be used to generate native iOS apps, but they’re not nearly as good at this as they are at generating e.g. React, whose developer experience advantage predates the LLM wave and has only since accelerated.
[…]
App Review has always long been a major source of developer frustration. Authoritarian yet inconsistent policy enforcement aside, it’s simply too hard to distribute software even to your own Apple devices, let alone someone else’s. This isn’t new by any means, but as the time to build an app shrinks from weeks/months to hours/days, it feels more egregious—and thus like more of a liability—than ever before.
Basically, the threat to Apple the App Store poses is NOT regulators coming for it. That’s a distraction. The threat, as I’ve always tried to argue, perhaps unsuccessfully, is that market forces will work against it eventually. The App Store should have been making developers (mostly) happy all along, not mostly miserable.
And AI might be the disruption that brings about the “eventually”.
The speed with which I abandoned a decade of manicured Xcode project & window management muscle memory in favor of a mess of VS Code clones taught me something about myself and my work and what is important.
In normieland, where I still spend plenty of time both online and IRL, software’s newfound ability to write, draw, and speak like we humans is often taken as evidence that the machines are about to remake our entire society (again) and totally change the nature and value of labor (again). I don’t think the normies are wrong about this, but as flashy as Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT are, old heads know that the Robot Apocalypse has exactly one and only one horseman: computer programs that can write computer programs.
[…]
If you were going to design a platform for the express purpose of teaching machines to code, it would probably be a cloud-hosted IDE plus execution environment that looks a lot like Replit. So while most of what you’ll read in this article and followups is applicable to all AI code generation tools more generally, I’ll be focusing on Replit’s toolset because right now it’s the richest and most advanced, and has the most potential for advancing the state-of-the-art.
Previously:
Scharon Harding (Hacker News):
If you’re frustrated by some of your favorite apps pestering you to sign up for a subscription, some new data may help you empathize with their developers more. According to revenue data from “over 75,000" mobile apps, the vast majority have a hard time making $1,000 per month.
The data is detailed in RevenueCat’s 2025 State of Subscription Apps report. RevenueCat makes a mobile app subscription tool kit and gathered the report’s data from apps using its platform.
[…]
Some app categories with the smallest percentage of newly launched apps hitting the $1,000 mark are shopping, travel, and utilities. Photo, video, and gaming apps are the most likely to hit $1,000/month within two years.
The gap between winners and the rest is growing – At $8,880 the top 5% of newly launched apps make over 400x as much money after their first year, compared to the bottom 25% who make no more than $19. This gap has grown significantly since last year’s 200x.
However, they are also analyzing more than twice as many apps as last year. Presumably, most of the apps new to the list are towards the bottom in revenue.
Churn hits hard and fast – Nearly 30% of annual subscriptions are canceled in the first month. If you don’t win them back over, at the end of that first year, they’re gone. Retention starts on day one.
Low prices keep users locked in – Most apps with cheap annual plans keep up to 36.0% of users subscribed after a year. High-priced monthly plans? Just 6.7% stick around.
But even 36% retention sounds terrible.
The CPI gap between iOS and Play Store in North America is striking, with iOS CPIs reaching nearly 3x those of Play Store in some categories.
Does this mean that iOS users don’t want more apps? Or that the ad system doesn’t work very well?
Previously:
One of the first enhancement requests we received for Swift Testing was the ability to test for precondition failures and other critical failures that terminate the current process when they occur.
[…]
This proposal introduces new overloads of the
#expect()and#require()macros that take, as an argument, a closure to be executed in a child process. When called, these macros spawn a new process using the relevant platform-specific interface (posix_spawn(),CreateProcessW(), etc.), call the closure from within that process, and suspend the caller until that process terminates. The exit status of the process is then compared against a known value passed to the macro, allowing the test to pass or fail as appropriate.
I had heard talk about changing the behavior of preconditions and assertions during tests so that they would signal back to the testing system instead of actually terminating the process. This is a much more ambitious solution and should be more widely useful. For example, I’ve written tests to reproduce crashes that are triggered by a bug, but I can’t leave these enabled with XCTest because they’ll crash the whole testing system.
Exit tests cannot capture any state originating in the parent process or from the enclosing lexical context.
This is an unsurprising limitation. I’m guessing that it won’t be much of a problem, but I’m not sure without trying it.
It is often interesting to examine what is written to the standard output and standard error streams by code running in an exit test. Callers can request that either or both stream be captured and included in the result of the call to
#expect(exitsWith:)or#require(exitsWith:).[…]
The technical constraints preventing recursive exit test invocation can be resolved if there is a need to do so. However, we don't anticipate that this constraint will be a serious issue for developers.
Previously:
This book distills the core principles and foundational concepts behind SwiftUI, the modern UI framework for building apps across Apple platforms. My goal is to help you go beyond surface-level understanding and develop a deep, practical knowledge of how SwiftUI works under the hood.
SwiftUI provides a simple, declarative way to build user interfaces, but behind that simplicity is a carefully designed architecture that can be tricky to grasp without the right perspective. In this book, we’ll explore the key APIs and design patterns that power SwiftUI, giving you a solid foundation to write more efficient, maintainable, and expressive code.
I’ve been working with SwiftUI since it was first released and later had the privilege of contributing to its development as a member of the core SwiftUI team at Apple, where I helped design and build some of the framework’s most widely used APIs. I wrote this book to share the insights I gained during that time, insights that will help you better understand how SwiftUI is built and how you can use it more effectively in your own projects.
Previously:
Whole Reddit thread examining this simple question: “What month is it?” and Siri’s “I’m sorry, I don’t understand” response (which I just reproduced on my iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.4b4). One guy changed the question to “What month is it currently?” and got the answer “It is 2025.”
I’d like it to be known that I hated Siri before it was cool. I’ve writtennumerousarticles on the subject. I’m an anti-Siri hipster. But when a bandwagon comes along, you better believe I’ll be sitting up front.
[…]
What is surprising is that it’s actually getting worse. And people are noticing. This needs to change, and soon.
I’m not sure whether it’s getting worse for my purposes, but after so many years it doesn’t seem to be getting better. I personally don’t care that much about the world knowledge questions. What bothers me is the service itself. It still feels slow in the normal case and sometimes takes 10 or more seconds to fail and do nothing. After a sequence of commands when controlling it with AirPods, it still sometimes stops working, saying that I need to unlock my iPhone (which is not easily reachable—that’s why I was using the AirPods). Reminders still get split, with words lost, or mangled as it tries to parse what was meant to be literal text. Music controls still seem worse than pre-Siri.
Mark Gurman (article, MacRumors):
Apple Vision Pro Chief Mike Rockwell will take over Siri, which is being removed from AI Chief John Giannandrea, I’m told. Rockwell & Siri will report to Craig Federighi. Giannandrea is staying in larger AI role.
The moves have been several months in the making and were planned before Apple confirmed the Siri AI delays earlier this month.
Told ya.
Tim didn’t “fire” JG “immediately”. Just took away his team.
(Followed by mutually parting ways in a few months.)
I would have assumed they’d keep him around running AI research, but Jones has good instincts on this stuff.
Siri — the AI division’s main consumer product — has had a number of bosses over the years. When Apple first launched the voice assistant in 2011, it was overseen by software executive Scott Forstall. It was then given to services chief Eddy Cue in 2012 and transferred to the current software head, Federighi, in 2017. Giannandrea took it over a year later. Now it will be led by Rockwell, with oversight returning again to Federighi.
My quick take on this is that it’s a turf battle that Craig Federighi just won. It’s not just putting a new executive in charge of Siri, it’s moving Siri under Federighi’s group.
Somehow, Teflon Federighi never seems to get blamed for Apple’s software failures, even though they extend way behind Siri and seem to coincide with his tenure. Siri has always been a mess, but macOS used to be really solid and better designed.
Mike Rockwell (not the one above):
It’s wild to me that there are so many people that see the Apple Intellegence thing as the indication that Apple fell off.
The volume of Apple bugs I encounter continues to increase. I think it is going exponential.
I think the question Gruber didn’t explore is, why doesn’t Mike Rockwell now report directly to Tim Cook, when John Giannandrea ran Siri and reports directly to Tim Cook?
To me it looks like a tacit admission that Tim Cook failed in directly overseeing the Siri group.
Fascinating how certain people are just 10x. Rockwell has lead AR, VR, Vision Pro, and now Siri.
Rockwell (53) is the new Mansfield (65).
The anecdotes I’ve been told about Mike Rockwell don’t bode well for third party developer support and Siri’s AI efforts
First and foremost, while I made the quick, cheap, and obvious joke yesterday that Apple was putting the person in charge of the Vision Pro in charge of Siri, this does actually seem like good news for all involved – including us, the end users. While these two projects are linked as two largely unsuccessful ones for Apple, they’re really almost the opposite of one another. Vision Pro isn’t a huge hit for Apple because the strategy around the device was a mess. But the product itself does everything it aims to do and does it increasingly well. Siri, meanwhile, has a strategy that makes sense, especially in our age of AI. But the product is a complete and utter mess. And has been for 14 years running.
[…]
Rockwell doesn’t have the clout needed to recruit (and retain) the top AI talent that Apple will need here, but JG still does. The mistake seemed to be putting him in charge of the entire org, including the AI user-facing products, when he should have probably been more behind-the-scenes, managing the more technical aspects. He’ll apparently now be able to do that.
Unlike the Siri feature delay, I do not think the Vision Pro’s launch affects the company’s credibility at all. It can keep pushing that thing and trying to turn it into something more mass-market. This Siri stuff is going to make me look at WWDC in a whole different light this year.
There’s no doubt that Apple sacrificed the Vision Pro’s launch in favor of putting all its effort and energy into Apple Intelligence — that pull-back was clear in the months leading up to it shipping to stores as the company got cold feet.
There was an awful lot of hubris, arrogance in how Apple treated developers and potential partners (no surprise), but a complete lack of buy-in from the rest of Apple’s engineering.
Also, of note, Apple’s Vision Pro group has lost its leadership in the change, which underscores what I was saying earlier. Apple made a decade-long bet on AR/VR then threw it all away for some snake oil.
Previously:
There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it. I “Accept All” always, I don’t read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I’d have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can’t fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I’m building a project or webapp, but it’s not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
Via Simon Willison:
I’m concerned that the definition is already escaping its original intent. I’m seeing people apply the term “vibe coding” to all forms of code written with the assistance of AI. I think that both dilutes the term and gives a false impression of what’s possible with responsible AI-assisted programming.
Vibe coding is not the same thing as writing code with the help of LLMs!
[…]
Andrej is an extremely talented and experienced programmer—he has no need for AI assistance at all. He’s using LLMs like this because it’s fun to try out wild new ideas, and the speed at which an LLM can produce code is an order of magnitude faster than even the most skilled human programmers. For low stakes projects and prototypes why not just let it rip?
When I talk about vibe coding I mean building software with an LLM without reviewing the code it writes.
vibe coding, where 2 engineers can now create the tech debt of at least 50 engineers
But I just want to quickly recommend; do not hire anyone (a person or an agency) that thinks vibe coding is a good idea for production level products.
Experimenting? Playing? Thinking through ideas rapidly? Absolutely.
Think I’m crazy? Look at this email I just received from “Ian Foster” of Grayphite – a supposed “Cutting-Edge Software & AI solutions” business.
Previously:
For most, Console isn’t the right tool. It only offers the options of viewing its live stream, or making an archive of the whole log and wading through that when you need to look at an event in the past. Although my log browser Ulbow gives much better access, for many it’s still a daunting task. I’ve now switched almost entirely to using my new lightweight log browser, LogUI, and here explain how you can use it.
[…]
Before opening LogUI, generate an event that you can examine in the log.
Whereas with Console it’s important to generate the event after.
In the beginning, Bjango was just a couple of friends making free OS X Dashboard widgets. We started working on those widgets prior to OS X 10.4 Tiger’s release on 29 April 2005, so my best guess is we started working together some time in March 2005.
After releasing a few successful widgets, we moved on to what we really wanted to create — full Mac apps. iStat Menus 1.0 was released May 2007, and has seen constant updates since. I can’t believe we’ve been working on iStat Menus for almost 18 years.
Previously:
The judges on Tuesday said the Federal Cartel Office was right to find that the iPhone maker’s footprint across markets meets the threshold for more oversight.
[…]
Apple was attempting to topple a May 2023 decision by the German antitrust watchdog, which subjected it to the so-called 19a rules on the grounds that its strong position in digital markets could threaten competition.
With that, Apple joins Google parent Alphabet, and Facebook owner Meta, on Germany’s growing list of tech giants subject to possible measures curbing their dominance.
[…]
“Our ongoing review of Apple’s tracking regulation for third-party apps is therefore on a solid footing, and we are working flat out on this case and other cases against the major internet companies,” [Mundt] added.
Previously:
SE-0446 added basic language support in Swift for non-escapable types, whose values are restricted in scope. However, it intentionally left out the ability for functions and properties to return values of these types, pending a future proposal to add lifetime dependencies. The design and implementation of that proposal is still in progress. In the meantime, SE-0456 added multiple properties to the standard library which return
Span, a non-escapable type. These properties have been defined using a feature,@lifetime, that is not yet officially in the language.[…]
However, we’re conscious that the development of that feature may take a few releases, and we want developers to be able to take advantage of non-escapable types like
Spanin their own code and APIs in the meantime.[…]
The Language Steering Group is therefore considering introducing
@lifetimeas a supported experimental feature in Swift 6.2.
Previously:
The EU has followed up on its Digital Markets Act specification procedures for Apple regarding the iPhone’s interoperability with third-party connected devices like smartwatches and headphones, as announced last fall.
Today’s announcement details exactly what third-party integrations the EU commission expects Apple to implement. This includes giving third-party devices access to iOS notifications, as well as way for companies to make like-for-like competitors to AirDrop file sharing, AirPlay streaming, and much more.
The list of features that the EU commission has ordered Apple to implement is vast, as well as signalling that any future Apple features with first-party hardware integrations must also be made available to third-party companies.
[…]
Headphone makers will be given access to system features that support AirPods, like proximity auto-pairing and automatic audio switching.
“Today’s decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple’s ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don’t have to play by the same rules,” said Apple in a statement given to MacRumors. “It’s bad for our products and for our European users. We will continue to work with the European Commission to help them understand our concerns on behalf of our users.”
“Europe forces Apple to compete by actually innovating, rather than holding back competitors through their monopoly” doesn’t make as good a sound bite, I guess.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-24): See also: Hacker News.
Why should Apple, a platform maker, have to do all the work of making a platform?
My interpretation of the adopted decision is that the EU is requiring Apple to treat iOS like a PC operating system, like MacOS or Windows, where users can install third-party software that runs, unfettered, in the background.
There is a free market argument that can be made about how Apple gets to design its own ecosystem and, if it is so restrictive, people will be more hesitant to buy an iPhone since they can get more choices with an Android phone. I get that. But I think it is unfortunate so much of our life coalesces around devices which are so restrictive compared to those which came before.
[…]
The iPhone repositioned that in two ways. First, the introduction of iCloud was a way to “demote” the Mac to a device at an equivalent level to everything else. Second, and just as importantly, is how it converged all that third-party hardware into a single device: it is the digital camera, the camcorder, and the music player. As a result, its hub-iness comes mostly in the form of software. If a developer can assume the existence of particular hardware components, they have extraordinary latitude to build on top of that. However, because Apple exercises control over this software ecosystem, it limits its breadth.
[…]
Even if you believe Apple is doing this not out of anticompetitive verve, but instead for reasons of privacy, security, API support, and any number of other qualities, it still sucks. What it means is that Apple is mostly competing against itself, particularly in smartwatches.
It’s like I said. What matters to Apple isn’t the products. What’s matters to Apple… is Apple.
[…]
Then they should make it a standard, document it and build it in, because that’s what it means to be a platform. That’s what it means to care for and about the user. That’s what it means to be a technology company working not for technology’s sake, but for the betterment of the world.
But they sat on their hands and acted like a monopoly. They let sales and marketing make product decisions. They listened to users and developers ask for the same thing more evenly distributed, and they called them names, or dismissed their wishes as lunacy.
[…]
As a user, I would have preferred that Apple would just have done the right thing from the beginning. As a user, I do not prefer that this is what happened. Much like, as a user, I do not prefer that car manufacturers are legally held to emission standards, or that factories are forced by regulation instead of driven by ideals to not pollute – or that governmental agencies step in, in the face of monopolistic practices screwing the customer. The world would be much better if there would have to be no intervention at all. Compliance is seldom as passionate and genuine as drive and goals.
Eric Migicovsky (via Dare Obasanjo, Hacker News):
During Pebble v1, I learned how much harder it is to build a great smartwatch experience on iPhone than it is on Android. It sounds like things have actually gotten worse over the last 8 years.
I want to set expectations accordingly. We will build a good app for iOS, but be prepared - there is no way for us to support all the functionality that Apple Watch has access to. It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.
Here are the things that are harder or impossible for 3rd party smartwatches (ie non Apple Watches) to do on iPhone[…]
[…]
Apple closed off the ability of smartwatches after Pebble to negotiate with carriers to provide messaging services, and now requires users to turn off iMessage (disabling iOS’s core messaging platform) if they want to take advantage of such contracts between a third-party smartwatch maker and cellular carriers.
Recall that, in addition to restricting the actual integration between Pebble and iPhones, Apple rejected third-party iPhone apps from the App Store for mentioning that they were compatible with Pebble watches.
The Apple Watch is great. There isn’t another smartwatch that I’ve even been tempted to try in recent years, but is that because no one has been able to make a good alternative or hasn’t because the disadvantages third-party wearables face are too great?
I’d like to see Apple focus on finding ways to better integrate other devices with the iPhone. There are undoubtedly security and privacy issues that need to be carefully considered, but figuring those things out should be a priority because choice and competition are better for Apple’s customers in the long run.
Have we gotten to the point yet where it’s quaint to argue that Apple should do something because it’s better for customers? In what universe would they choose to better integrate with third-party hardware (thus helping either a small startup or Google/Samsung) when they’ll hide the default maps app setting if you live in the wrong country?
Would those first few versions of Apple Watch have driven Pebble and FitBit out of the market without Apple’s lock-in? I think the Watch’s later success has made folks forget what a product design misfire that first Watch was.
We’re excited to announce two new smartwatches that run open source PebbleOS and are compatible with thousands of your beloved Pebble apps.
- Core 2 Duo has an ultra crisp black and white display, polycarbonate frame, costs $149 and starts shipping in July.
- Core Time 2 has a larger 64-colour display, metal frame, costs $225 and starts shipping in December.
I love these, and reading past the watch specs it’s clear that the project is driven by personal passion more than commercial polish, with the reasoning behind each design choice – from sensor selections to display trade-offs – in a refreshingly candid manner.
These cute little pebbles have 30 day battery life!
I loved my Pebbles and backed a couple of them on Kickstarter. I’m an Apple Watch convert now but the idea of a 30 day battery life sure is tempting as daily charging is a pain. PebbleOS was/is lovely too
Previously:
Update (2025-03-24): John Gruber:
If the experience as a Pebble owner can be a lot better paired with an Android phone than an iPhone, lean into that. Show how much better it is on Android than iOS.
Arin Waichulis (Hacker News, MacRumors):
It’s now been revealed that a serious HTTP bug left Passwords users vulnerable to phishing attacks for nearly three months, from the initial release of iOS 18 until the patch in iOS 18.2.
Security researchers at Mysk first discovered the flaw after noticing that their iPhone’s App Privacy Report showed Passwords had contacted a staggering 130 different websites over insecure HTTP traffic. This prompted the duo to investigate further, finding that not only was the app fetching account logos and icons over HTTP—it also defaulted to opening password reset pages using the unencrypted protocol. “This left the user vulnerable: an attacker with privileged network access could intercept the HTTP request and redirect the user to a phishing website,” Mysk told 9to5Mac.
[…]
However, it becomes a problem when the attacker is connected to the same network as the user (i.e. Starbucks, airport, or hotel Wi-Fi) and intercepts the initial HTTP request before it redirects.
[…]
While this was quietly patched in December of last year, Apple only just disclosed it in the last 24 hours.
Mysk:
“Unfortunately, this issue didn’t qualify for a bounty because it didn’t meet the impact criteria or fall into any of the eligible categories”
Mysk:
Yes, it feels like doing charity work for a $3 trillion company. We didn’t do this primarily for money, but this shows how Apple appreciates independent researchers. We had spent a lot of time since September 2024 trying to convince Apple this was a bug.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-24): Ricky Mondello:
The icons issue was present for some time and affected all platforms. The “Change Password” bug only appeared in the Passwords app for iOS, and was quickly fixed.
Some of the discussions I’ve seen around both of these promptly fixed bugs are mixing up details.
Apple’s exhorbitantly-priced Mac storage comes with impressive benchmark claims but has some serious, hidden bottlenecks in certain scenarios, as do other SSDs. David Harry illustrated this clearly in a video, using Activity Monitor as a novel window into dramatic SSD slowdowns when moving large amounts of data to an Apple internal SSD from a third-party Thunderbolt 5 SSD.
He actually finds that the external SSD, connected via Thunderbolt 4, is faster at reading than the MacBook Pro’s internal one. Write performance drops once the SLC cache is full.
In normal use, there are three potential causes of reduced write speed in an otherwise healthy SSD:
- thermal throttling,
- SLC write cache depletion,
- the need for Trimming and/or housekeeping.
[…]
To achieve their high storage density, almost all consumer-grade SSDs store multiple bits in each of their memory cells, and most recent products store three in Triple-Level Cell or TLC. Writing all three bits to a single cell takes longer than it would to write them to separate cells, so most TLC SSDs compensate by using caches. Almost all feature a smaller static cache of up to 16 GB, used when writing small amounts of data, and a more substantial dynamic cache borrowed from main storage cells by writing single bits to them as if they were SLC (single-level cell) rather than TLC.
[…]
Keep ample free space on the SSD so the whole of its SLC write cache can be used.
The price on added memory and SSD capacity on the otherwise excellent Mac Mini is horrible. I wanted to avoid paying the apple tax on that storage, so I am using an external SSD and it means I can get twice the storage for less than half the price. But I wanted to find out what it would mean for performance, and I couldn’t believe what I found.
The Mac mini also has Thunderbolt 4, but he finds it limiting performance. The internal 256 SSD seems to be slow, despite what was reported earlier about it using multiple chips like the larger versions.
Previously:
EFF (Hacker News):
When the New York Times reported in late 2005 that the NSA was engaging in spying inside the U.S., Mark realized that he had witnessed how it was happening. He also realized that the President was not telling Americans the truth about the program. And, though newly retired, he knew that he had to do something. He showed up at EFF’s front door in early 2006 with a simple question: “Do you folks care about privacy?”
We did. And what Mark told us changed everything. Through his work, Mark had learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) had installed a secret, secure room at AT&T’s central office in San Francisco, called Room 641A. Mark was assigned to connect circuits carrying Internet data to optical “splitters” that sat just outside of the secret NSA room but were hardwired into it. Those splitters—as well as similar ones in cities around the U.S.—made a copy of all data going through those circuits and delivered it into the secret room.
The evidence he gathered and shared led to two lawsuits that exposed the extent to which US citizens were being spied on by their own government in the post-9/11 world. Klein faced legal pressure, death threats, and the constant fear of ruin, to get his story out and tell the public what was going on. But Klein regretted nothing.
[…]
He went to one newspaper, which strung him along for months promising a big front-page splash and then spiked the story. Other media outlets refused to touch it, although he did get some TV time (see below). Having heard about the EFF, which also had the bonus of being in San Francisco, he decided to drop in unannounced.
[…]
He wrote a book about his experiences, Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine And Fighting It; it’s a cracking read.
Previously:
You can opt out of sending voice recordings to the cloud for devices that can process the audio of your Alexa requests locally (Echo (4th Gen), Echo Show 10 or Echo Show 15) or supported devices that are able to communicate with the devices in your house on the same network (Echo (3rd Gen), Echo Dot (3rd Gen), Echo Dot (4th Gen), Echo Dot (4th Gen) with clock, Echo Dot (5th Gen), Echo Dot (5th Gen) with clock).
[…]
Some Alexa features and capabilities such as Adaptive Listening, Live Translations, Dynamic Language Switching, and Reading Sidekick are unavailable when Do Not Send Voice Recordings is turned on.
Alexa will still send audio to the cloud for features that require the transmission of audio, such as when you make a call or send a message or announcement via Alexa. And, if you create a voice ID, the audio recordings used to teach Alexa your voice will be sent to the cloud. Alexa will also send audio to the cloud if you enable Alexa Guard, including for Smart Alerts and emergency calling with Alexa Emergency Assist.
I was not aware of this feature, but it turns out that my Echo Dot supports it. As far as I can tell, recent versions of Siri already do this on iPhone—HomePod presumably doesn’t have enough processing power—sending only transcripts of the text to Apple. An ongoing issue is that many of these requests seem like they could be processed locally but are instead sent to Apple.
Scharon Harding (Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot):
Since Amazon announced plans for a generative AI version of Alexa, we were concerned about user privacy. With Alexa+ rolling out to Amazon Echo devices in the coming weeks, we’re getting a clearer view of the privacy concessions people will have to make to maximize usage of the AI voice assistant and avoid bricking functionality of already-purchased devices.
In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of every command spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud.
[…]
Amazon is forcing Echo users to make a couple of tough decisions: Grant Amazon access to recordings of everything you say to Alexa or stop using an Echo; let Amazon save voice recordings and have employees listen to them or lose a feature set to become more advanced and central to the next generation of Alexa.
Amazon’s explanation for the change is rather disappointing. The main issue is apparently a more powerful Alexa Voice ID that can’t run locally, but I’m not sure that people really care about that.
Basically, the processing requests that rely on AI features can’t be done within the limited processing power of the Echo device itself. This means that voice recordings will be sent to and processed in the cloud.
[…]
This change confirms existing fears about user privacy with the implementation of the generative AI version of Alexa. Due to financial losses that came with Alexa’s operation, Amazon introduced the AI-powered Alexa+ which has far more capabilities and should generate more cash-flow. Alexa+ is based on several major language models such as the in-house development Nova, and Claude from Anthropic.
Previously:
The first DMA browser choice screens started rolling out in the EU in March 2024. Since then, they have slowly started appearing for:
- New and existing Android smartphones and tablet users with Chrome pre-set as a default browser (though rollout has been fairly inconsistent)
- New and existing iOS users with Safari as their default browser, who have iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2 or later iOS versions installed on their device (initial roll out in iOS 17.4 was poorly designed)
[…]
Firefox daily active users in Germany alone have increased by 99%. And in France, Firefox’s daily active users on iOS grew by 111%.
[…]
And we’ve found that when people choose Firefox via a DMA choice screen, they stick with it.
Via Nick Heer:
I have confirmed with Petrova these numbers reflect growth in iOS users only. They are impressive, but my interpretation of statistics like these is that one often finds percentages used like this when neither actual number is very large.
I would have liked to see a comparison vs. usage in countries without the DMA.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-24): John Gruber:
The best case scenario is that this growth for Firefox (and presumably for other alternate browsers that qualified for the EU choice screens) means that alternative browsers have gone from a tiny usage share to a twice-as-large-but-still-tiny share, and that most of the growth comes from happy users. I see no proof, though, that the growth hasn’t at least significantly come from confused users who now wonder what happened to Safari.
Jess Weatherbed (Hacker News, MacRumors, ArsTechnica):
iPhone and Android users will be able to exchange end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) RCS messages in the near future thanks to newly updated RCS specifications. The GSM Association announced that the latest RCS standard includes E2EE based on the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, enabling interoperable encryption between different platform providers for the first time.
The GSM Association said it had started working to enable E2EE on messages sent between Android and iPhone in September last year.
Personally, I never really thought it made sense for Apple, a company whose brand is about security and privacy, to withhold support for encryption on RCS. But the real issue was that the RCS standard did not include support for cross-platform encryption, even though other providers, like Google, enabled encryption on their platforms.
As noted by 9to5Mac’s Michael Burkhardt, Apple has indirectly confirmed that it will be adopting the RCS Universal Profile 3.0 specification, which includes not only end-to-end encryption, but also several other iMessage-like enhancements that were originally introduced in version 2.7 of the specification. iOS 18 supports RCS Universal Profile 2.4.
I have also noticed recently that Google Messages and Apple Messages now do a pretty good job of supporting each other’s tapbacks.
[…]
But what happens when new/updated Android phones support the new RCS encryption spec, and older devices don’t? A lock icon for the encrypted chats? If it were up to me, iOS would drop support for non-encrypted RCS — iOS should use RCS with E2EE for every device that supports it, and fall back to dumb old no-encryption-at-all SMS for all devices that do not.
Previously:
A modest proposal for how Apple can come to dominate the AI race without ever actually matching with the current leaders[…]
[…]
So what is Apple the platform vendor to do? Stop thinking like an app ecosystem participant or even an app store referee, and start thinking like a platform vendor again. Apple’s value-add here will never be by producing its own “frontier” model that does everything best.
[…]
Right now all these AI providers are returning documents in response to user intent, and everyone is treating those documents like the finished product. Here’s your poem. Here’s your picture. Anything else?.
The brilliance of OpenDoc was that each of those were raw material.
Build a semantic index (SI), and allow apps to access it via permissions given similar to what we do for Address Book or Photos.
[…]
And similar to the Spotlight indexing API, developers should be able to provide data to the SI along with rich metadata.
[…]
But give developers the opportunity, and then customers will have something to choose from. Make the Mac and iOS the best platform to build personalized LLMs.
Let the apps die and live based on their own merit and reputation. Apple can build the platform, and maybe expand on it over time and use it themselves.
Apple Intelligence has so far been the opposite of the platform strategy that had previously served it so well. Modern Apple is more about providing closed solutions and services.
Previously:
Mark Gurman (Hacker News, MacRumors):
Robby Walker, who serves as a senior director at Apple, delivered the stark comments during an all-hands meeting for the Siri division, saying that the team was facing a bad period. Walker also said that it’s unclear when the enhancements will actually launch, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the gathering was private.
[…]
But when Apple demonstrated the features at WWDC using a video mock-up, it only had a barely working prototype, Bloomberg has reported.
[…]
Walker defended his Siri group, telling them that they should be proud. Employees poured their “hearts and souls into this thing,” he said.
He also said it’s not a given that the missing Siri features will make it into iOS 19 this year; that’s the company’s current target, but “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then,” he told employees.
As far as accountability is concerned, Walker told staffers that there is “intense personal accountability” shared by John Giannandrea, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, and software boss Craig Federighi.
Bloomberg reports that Apple “doesn’t plan to immediately fire any top executives over the AI crisis.” It is, however, planning “management adjustments” in response to the problems, including “moving more senior executives under Giannandrea to assist with a turnaround effort.”
While it may sound obvious that at least some of the features are now functional within Apple, this was not entirely clear, as the company has not shown any public demos of the features being in a working state. Apple now faces the task of ensuring that the features not only work, but work well, before making them available to customers. Walker reportedly said the features were only working “up to two-thirds to 80% of the time.”
Two thirds to eighty percent success rate is like half of the Siri feature set tho
- not held by JG, Tim, or Craig
- AI only works 66-80% of the time (that’s VERY low, the last 20% is 80% of the work, even 95% is un-shippable) So it basically didn’t exist at WWDC. Ouch.
- also blamed MarCom, fairly, for the tv ad
[…]
- “As of Friday, Apple doesn’t plan to immediately fire any top executives over the AI crisis”. Notice the word immediately.
- “It has discussed moving more senior executives under Giannandrea to assist with a turnaround effort.” That’s setup for “this was the plan, but we mutually decided new leadership would be beneficial”
This is wild. Every part of it. How none of the three heads responsible were there is unreal.
Two of these need to be fired immediately. Doesn’t matter which two.
Do we have a TECHNICAL analysis? Examples of TECHNICAL analysis include:
is the problem lousy models, or that Apple is trying to integrate models into APIs in ways never done before, or that the models are crippled by DNC levels of political correctness?
are the models limited by being forced to run on hardware that’s not powerful enough (because of local execution mandate?)
has a deliberate choice been made (if so why?) to not use open source even when that provides better models (eg the claim that Whisper provides much better text to speech than Apple Dictation)?
Remember the system prompt where they asked it not to hallucinate? That was a massive red flag.
The quotes are juicy AF, but don’t really start until the 10th paragraph. Like, for example, which Siri features does Walker think are “incredibly impressive”?
[…]
Walker compared the endeavor to an attempt to swim to Hawaii. “We swam hundreds of miles — we set a Guinness Book for World Records for swimming distance — but we still didn’t swim to Hawaii,” he said. “And we were being jumped on, not for the amazing swimming that we did, but the fact that we didn’t get to the destination.”
I’d say it’s a little more like selling customers tickets for a cruise that includes a stop in Hawaii, then never actually getting to Hawaii, and hoping they didn’t notice when the ship returns to port to disembark.
Robby Walker is not a name most people will know, but he has been at Apple for 11 and a half years. In fact, he came over when Apple acquired the startup he co-founded, Cue (originally named Greplin – one of the OG “social search” products) back in 2013. Why did Apple acquire that company? Because Google – specifically, the product known as ‘Google Now’ – was destroying Siri, as Matthew Panzarino noted at the time. Siri, of course, was still not good, way back then. And Walker has been working to try to fix that within Apple ever since.
[…]
This is seemingly a “well, we tried, but it didn’t work, so we’re back-burnering those ideas and moving forward”. It raises a question that sounds like a troll but is actually legitimate at this point: are we ever going to see these features? Is this truly the AirPower of Apple Intelligence?
Based on my experience in an Apple Store this week, this disappointment has not trickled down to retail employees. I was in for an appointment after I shattered my fifteen year record of keeping my screen intact, and I was told that even though my iPhone 15 Pro was “fine” because it supports Apple Intelligence, I could get nearly $700 towards a newer one after I had mine repaired. This was something I should at least consider, apparently. And, by the way, had I tried the new Apple Intelligence features?
So let’s just examine how extraordinary and singular Gurman’s Friday report was.
Mark Gurman (tweet):
The company’s AI crisis will be the talk of its “Top 100” offsite meeting this week, and it’s planning some of the biggest iOS and macOS redesigns in its history.
If Apple’s takeaway from @gruber’s piece was merely that they need to improve their AI, then it seems Apple missed the whole point.
Previously:
After years of working on Strongbox independently, Mark McGuill has made the decision to entrust the future of this exceptional product to our team at Applause.
Applause is a team of indie developers who’ve been building iOS and macOS apps since 2010.
[…]
Our goal isn’t to change what makes Strongbox special—it’s to build on it.
At least they said what was happening this time… that’s an improvement, I guess
Previously:
Update (2025-03-17): Mark McGuill:
I started working on Strongbox as my first ever iOS app a very, very long time ago (more than 10 years!). It has obviously grown far beyond my wildest expectations. What originally began as an app purely for my own use, so that I could open those old Password Safe .dat files on my iPhone, has turned into my (and many others) indispensable password manager app.
[…]
However, ten years is a very long time, and, for me personally, it is time to move on to something different. I’ll continue to use Strongbox every day and look forward to the developments and passion the team at Applause will bring. It is hard to maintain motivation for a project for so long and recently I began to feel that Strongbox needed more attention and resources than I could ever hope to bring to it. It has orders of magnitude more users now than what it had even in the last 2 or 3 years and really requires a very dedicated team. Even someone with the most generous imagination in world would struggle to call me a great product manager. I’m a dev at heart. I’m not the right person to properly build out an enterprise like Strongbox. Our users deserve a professional, dedicated team and an enthusiastic and fresh approach.
See also: Hacker News.
The upcoming iOS 18.4 update introduces an option to set a default navigation app, other than Apple Maps, but unfortunately this new setting is limited to users in the EU. There, you can now set an app like Google Maps or Waze as your default navigation app on the iPhone by opening the Settings app and tapping Apps → Default Apps → Navigation.
Apple made this change in response to the EU’s Digital Markets Act.
This one seems kind of spiteful. I get that Apple doesn’t want to make sideloading available throughout the world just because the EU and Brazil have mandated it, but they’re going to hide the very useful maps setting in countries that don’t have a DMA?
Previously:
Anders Hejlsberg (tweet, video, Hacker News):
To meet those goals, we’ve begun work on a native port of the TypeScript compiler and tools. The native implementation will drastically improve editor startup, reduce most build times by 10x, and substantially reduce memory usage. By porting the current codebase, we expect to be able to preview a native implementation of
tsccapable of command-line typechecking by mid-2025, with a feature-complete solution for project builds and a language service by the end of the year.You can build and run the Go code from our new working repo, which is offered under the same license as the existing TypeScript codebase.
[…]
Again using the Visual Studio Code codebase as a benchmark, the current time to load the entire project in the editor on a fast computer is about 9.6 seconds. This drops down to about 1.2 seconds with the native language service, an 8x improvement in project load time in editor scenarios.
Instead of rejecting apps over tiny wording disputes, mentions of android, and business model disagreements could Apple PLEASE enforce 4.5.4:
“Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them”
Apple has just rejected my beta of Pythonista Lab because they have “recently identified that the app is subject to US sanctions regulations”. No real further explanation. 🤬
[…]
I suspect that it was this Iranian URL in the source code of the
fakermodule that triggered it, and I’ve re-submitted without it, still waiting though…
Hey Apple AppReview, over 5 days of “In Review” for an app that has a single button that does a single thing is a bit much, wouldn’t you agree? Approve, or approve not. Kthxbye.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-19): Manton Reece:
- Wait for Apple to approve TestFlight beta.
- Wait even longer if the build is stuck “processing” for unknown reasons.
- Wait for Apple to approve final version.
- Release to customers.
Just a stark difference. ☹️
Yoshi and team are creating their own ROMs for review to work around Apple’s insane demands that they limit the emulator to ROMs they own the license to.
Via Craig Grannell:
There’s no way this is going to get past app review, surely?
The
@Sendableannotation indicates that closure parameters are passed over an isolation boundary before they’re called. A missing@Sendableannotation in a library has negative effects on clients who call the function; the caller can unknowingly introduce data races, and SE-0423: Dynamic actor isolation enforcement from non-strict-concurrency contexts injects runtime assertions for non-Sendableclosure parameters that are passed into libraries that don’t have data-race safety checking. This means that a missing@Sendableannotation can lead to a runtime crash for any code that calls the API from an actor isolated context, which is extremely painful for projects that are migrating to the Swift 6 language mode.There’s a large category of APIs with closure parameters that can be automatically identified as
@Sendablefunctions, even if the annotation is missing: Objective-C methods with completion handler parameters.@Sendableis nearly always the right default for Objective-C completion handlers, and programmers have already been searching for an automatic way for completion handlers to be@Sendableby default when auditing Clang headers.[…]
If a completion handler does not cross an isolation boundary before it’s called, the parameter can be annotated in the header with the
@nonSendableattribute using__attribute__((swift_attr("@nonSendable"))).[…]
Changing this proposal later to use
sendinginstead will pose source compatibility issues, because it would become invalid to have a protocol requirement that is imported with asendingcompletion handler and implement the requirement with a@Sendablecompletion handler. The same source compatibility issue exists for overridden class methods.
Previously:
Mozilla, which in 2023 received about 75 percent of its revenue from royalties paid by Google and other search providers for search engine usage in Firefox, worries that the US Justice Department’s proposed ban on the very same Google Search payments would be rather harmful.
[…]
Google’s payments to Apple for making its search service the default in the Safari browser, which reached around $20 billion in 2022, discouraged competition, as the Justice Department argued and the court agreed. However, by banning such payments to browser makers, the government’s remedy could choke off Mozilla’s primary revenue source, putting its operations (and non-trivial executive paychecks) at risk.
“These proposed remedies prohibiting search payments to small and independent browsers miss the bigger picture – and the people who will suffer most are everyday internet users,” said Mark Surman, president of Mozilla, in a statement Monday.
Alexander Pushkov at al. (Hacker News):
While Mozilla has always championed user privacy and an open web, the increasing reliance on Google for revenue raises important questions about our shared commitment to these values.
Now is the time for Mozilla to take bold steps to reinforce its identity as a privacy-centric nonprofit and to prioritize the Firefox browser as the heart of your mission.
It is time to reevaluate the partnership with Google and seek alternatives that align with Mozilla’s values. By distancing itself from Google, Mozilla can reaffirm its commitment to user privacy and autonomy, fostering trust among its user base.
Previously:
John Gruber (Mastodon, Bluesky, Hacker News, MacRumors, Mac Power Users, AppleInsider):
But we didn’t see all aspects of Apple Intelligence demoed. None of the “more personalized Siri” features, the ones that Apple, in its own statement announcing their postponement, described as having “more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps”. […] There were no demonstrations of any of that. Those features were all at level 0 on my hierarchy. That level is called vaporware. […] What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis.
[…]
Careers will end before Apple might ever return to the level of “if they say it, you can believe it” credibility the company had earned at the start of June 2024.
Damaged is arguably too passive. It was squandered. This didn’t happen to Apple. Decision makers within the company did it.
Who decided these features should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and advertise these features in a TV commercial, and promote them as a selling point of the iPhone 16 lineup — not just any products, but the very crown jewels of the company and the envy of the entire industry — when those features still remained in such an unfinished or perhaps even downright non-functional state that they still could not be demoed to the press? Not just couldn’t be shipped as beta software. Not just couldn’t be used by members of the press in a hands-on experience, but could not even be shown to work by Apple employees on Apple-controlled devices in an Apple-controlled environment? But yet they advertised them in a commercial for the iPhone 16, when it turns out they won’t ship, in the best case scenario, until months after the iPhone 17 lineup is unveiled?
Who said “Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it”? And who said “Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t promote this now?” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook.
[…]
It’s easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks arguing “We need to show something that only Apple can do.” But it turns out they announced something Apple couldn’t do. And now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in AI, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when. Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work.
Wow. As an ex employee, this will create a tsunami. Good for you. We all felt this way. It’s all smoke and mirrors. They don’t have a serious plan. Siri should have been everyone’s wake up call. Your framing around “credibility” was excellent and just might move mountains. Hope so.
Ex-MobileMe team here. This was a brutal time.
It was so bad that when he presented iCloud onstage, Steve said “I know what you’re thinking: why should I trust them? They’re the ones who gave us MobileMe!”
Gruber has never been an Apple shill – he has voiced criticisms of the company on many occasions – but he has been someone who clearly has a close relationship with the iPhone maker. He’s one of a number of friendly ears Apple uses from time-to-time to help get a message out. So when Gruber goes thermonuclear in this way, that’s no small thing.
I’ve read Daring Fireball for 23 years and he has never come close to this level of criticism about the company. It reads like an obituary, and I agree with every word.
Nailed it
Alarm bells have rung in Cupertino. Their reaction sets the tenor.
I think a lot of people are missing the point of Gruber’s piece.
The problem here isn’t that Apple Intelligence is bad/behind. That’s a symptom.
The problem is that the culture at Apple is broken and Apple has devolved into a company that will lie and promote mediocrity.
The road I’d have preferred?
“AI is early, but we’re all over it. Right now a lot of these early products don’t deliver at the quality and standards our customers expect. We’re focused on what matters to our customers, today.”
Rewatching the keynote after reading Gruber’s post jogged my memory and while I still have no interest in many of those features, it really does seem like Apple sold everyone a bill of goods.
With this failure, longstanding bugs, products like the Vision Pro that can’t justify their existence, and even the general arrogance towards regulators worldwide, Apple needs to step back and reflect why some of its biggest supporters have been so vocal lately. The company may still be successful on paper, but it does feel similar to the ineptitude that eventually led to the “bad” days in the ’90s.
My own mistake was that I assumed I would see it and that it would still suck. I did not expect not to see it. That’s the surprise here to me. Apple touted vaporware on stage.
[…]
Some believe this change may be related to security. Because this is Apple’s AI — Siri — handling your very personal data stored on your devices, there’s a far greater risk than with more “general” AI services, the thinking goes. It’s possible, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple uses that as an excuse/rationale regardless, as it fits their overall narrative well. But I think it’s just as likely — if not more so — that such features simply don’t work. That Siri simply doesn’t work. Again.
[…]
Yes, I was holding out hope that the innovations behind AI would start to slow enough that Apple could be the one to best productize such advances. But we’re not there yet. And so, in a weird way, it still feels as if Apple is too early in AI, at least for them.
They clearly — clearly — felt pressured by Wall Street into rushing Apple Intelligence out the door. Cook can say he doesn’t “consider the bloody ROI” all he wants, he obviously does at least somewhat!
According to Kuo, Apple is already aware of Apple Intelligence’s “underwhelming performance,” and has provided suppliers with conservative iPhone shipment forecasts as a result.
No, the smart Siri will need buy-in from developers. Devs will tell the system about nouns and verbs that their apps know about — the semantics of the app’s data model objects, and the actions users can take upon them. Additionally, using this structured data, apps will tell the system what the user is doing right now, thus providing the context that Siri can become aware of. It’s all built on top of the existing Intents and UserActivities that apps have already been using to integrate with Shortcuts, Spotlight, and a bunch of other bits of the system. But using those is optional, and even for an app that’s got a head start, the new supercharged versions will require extra work to adopt.
I suspect Apple was hoping that, by pre-announcing what’s coming, devs would rush to adopt these intents, so when smart Siri does ship, there’d be a bunch of apps ready for it. After all, if Apple shipped a user-facing feature that didn’t do anything yet because apps hadn’t adopted it, that wouldn’t be a good look either.
I don’t think that this was the entire reason for the pre-announcement, and nor do I think the pre-announcement was made with conscious knowledge that this delay would come. I see it more as something that might have tipped the balance slightly on an already contentious internal decision, and that it went hand in hand with a bit of naïve optimism about what could be accomplished in time.
However, even the APIs didn’t ship to developers until iOS 18.4 (which is still in beta).
Apple will need devs to buy in to their new tech. Too bad they spent the last decade + crapping all over devs
Goodwill isn’t just a nice thing. It’s self serving too. Apple forgot that in their rush to squeeze every dime from every person they could.
Don’t really care about Apple Intelligence, don’t really care about ChatGPT, don’t really care about the whole AI bullshit fest, other than that it has the potential to destroy education, literacy, numeracy, and the planetary ecosystem. Those concerns aside, however, I do care that Apple management have caved to the hype to the extent that they feel they have to lie about this shit or they’ll be ‘left behind’.
Something I haven't really seen anyone touch on relates to an example you point to in this article where Siri takes action for you across apps ala ”Send the email I drafted to April and Lilly”
Do you really trust Siri to do that? I don’t. I still have a hard time talking to Siri and trusting that it interpreted me correctly. At this point, I don't understand why they don't leave it behind and rebrand.
Trust is earned. Siri lacks trust.
Reminded me of a Guy Kawasaki concept call “bozosity.” I think Apple is afflicted with that.
I have my own explanation, something my readers are familiar with, and it is the most obvious one. Just as Google is trapped in the 10-blue-link prison, which prevents it from doing something radical, Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company weighed down by its market capitalization and what stock market expects from it.
They lack the moral authority of Steve Jobs to defy the markets, streamline their product lineup, and focus the company. Instead, they do what a complex business often does: they do more. Could they have done a better job with iPadOS? Should Vision Pro receive more attention?
The answer to all those is yes. Apple has become a complex entity that can’t seem to ever have enough resources to provide the real Apple experience. What you get is “good enough.” And most of the time, I think it is enough – because what others have on the market is worse. They know how to build great hardware; it’s the software where they falter.
Another thing that came to mind for me recently is how many misses Apple has had with marketing in the past 12 months. Things started with the iPad Pro ad where they destroyed tons of creative tools, which people did not react well to, and Apple soon apologized for. Then there were the Apple Intelligence ads that were celebrating people being shitty employees and spouses with AI to trick people into thinking they were competent and loving. And now we have Apple pulling one of their premiere ads from the internet because it advertises an iPhone 16 feature that they have confirmed will not ship until at least the iPhone 17 is released later this year. It’s simply the sort of messiness I’m not used to seeing from Apple.
If the iPhone was a properly open computer - then other folks would have figured out how to provide an amazing assistant.
Apple wouldn’t be in control - but their platform would be stronger - and their devices more valuable to own.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-14): Joe Rosensteel:
Apple very rarely has the time to refine anything they ship. Version one of a thing tends to stick around for a long time with only extras bolted on, or omitted, because the people involved are simply too busy for a second pass. Because the bar to ship quality software is so low, and the need to revise quickly is nearly nonexistent, there was never any chance that they’d meet expectations for the robust features Apple was promising.
Let’s review what Apple actually shipped as Apple Intelligence.
[…]
This takes us to another thing about Visual Intelligence: you can’t run Visual Intelligence on a photo that you already took. Unlike a Google image search, or similar, it will only accept your fake shutter button non-photos as input. Again, this is worse than existing products.
[…]
So, just in that little run-through, you can hopefully see what I see. The problem isn’t just “More Personalized Siri” not shipping, the problem is what did ship, and what that portends for all future releases. Software quality is out the window, so for “More Personalized Siri” to not meet the low bar of something like Visual Intelligence…
[…]
The only thing they did with Siri in the past year that was significant was add the new visual language for Siri. I believe every Apple pundit under the sun has been in agreement that that was a huge mistake because it signaled change where there was no meaningful change.
Note how the “Cafe Grenel” ad involves what I take to be the simplest version of personalized Siri, and even that is unable to be shown to the press.
[…]
If Apple could demonstrate a more functional Siri, I imagine it would have done so by now. That feels like the bare minimum and it seems not even that modest Spotlight-based improvement is able to be shown.
[…]
I do not trust Siri and, right now, I also do not trust Apple to tell me what the status is with Siri, either.
My thought after leaving this to fester a bit is that Apple today is focused on being Apple, and some might say on staying Apple. Apple before was focused on building products.
There's an NBC Brian Williams interview with Steve Jobs from 2006 which elucidates this; rather than quoting exact lines, Brian tries to corner Steve into seeing his silhouette as a captain of industry in the annals of history, and Steve is very uncomfortable because he just wants to go on to do the next thing. (And notes that a lot of products are just "technology in search of a problem".)
The things John Gruber noted, pretty much to a T, would not have been issues if Apple was all about just building the product. Most of the hot water that Apple is in, no matter what the reason, it wouldn't be in if it was not first focused on being Apple.
I think he’s overthinking it. What happened was, Board-level people and Wall Street both yelled the same thing at Tim Cook: “Make grandiose AI announcements or your share price goes down.” In 2025 capitalism, those voices can’t be ignored or resisted. So they made the announcement.
That’s what makes this whole thing so inexplicable to me. What’s the point of building up so much capital -- both literal cash and figurative faith -- if not to use it to hold one’s fire when catching up
AAPL was the most valuable company in the world a year ago. They had no need to overpromise and risk underdelivering.
The thing about John Gruber’s “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” is that it fails to link the Apple Intelligence fiasco to the general level of decrepitude of Apple’s software offerings. There are so many bugs in Apple’s software these days that it is simply impossible to trust that they might be able to build a tool that, say, can RELIABLY respond to requests such as “Add this address to their contact card”.
Something IS indeed rotten in the State of Cupertino, but that rot is not new. To me, it feels like the Apple Intelligence fiasco is the accumulation of Apple’s software failures over the past 10-15 years finally coming to a head. They are just not very good at making software anymore.
See also: Jim Dalrymple and Dithering.
Update (2025-03-17): Rui Carmo:
The main issue I have with Apple Intelligence is that all the features that have been surfaced so far (except perhaps Writing Tools, which can actually be a powerful accessibility enabler) are utterly pointless, and even if Private Cloud Compute seems like a major technical achievement to the uninitiated, there are loads of confidential computing solutions out there right now.
But here’s another thing: any confidential AI computing solution, regardless of how it manages context and compute, requires a working AI model–preferably one smarter than the one powering Writing Tools. And Apple has, so far, shown zero public interest in creating the kind of frontier models that people like me deal with on a daily basis.
I initially thought that their punting on some replies and deferring to ChatGPT was a way to defer accountability (although they had no compunction in having “older” Siri defer to Wolfram Alpha, something that seems to have stopped), but now I think that Apple is simply incapable (or, most likely, unwilling) to invest in training their own large-scale models and is sticking to
gemmaandphigrade on-device SLMs for the time being.[…]
Just go into Shortcuts and check what actions you can automate in any of Apple’s core apps (at least the ones that seem relevant to me in the context of a “Smarter Siri”)[…] There is pretty much zero “public” API surface to do anything remotely like what Apple Intelligence requires to fulfill its promises where it regards context awareness or application actions. […] As someone who relied a lot on e-mail plugins until Apple effectively killed them, still tries to use JXA and Shortcuts to automate their workflows and bore witness to AppleScript’s progressive demise over the years, I’d say Apple not just painted themselves into a corner here, but they did that to themselves due to their general neglect of macOS and iOS foundational technology.
Would any of this happened during the live keynote era? Sure, Apple had to contend with the many issues of prototype iPhones for the Macworld 2007 presentation — there were lots of iPhones onstage because memory management was so poor that Jobs would likely need to switch units several times, and the network connectivity was fudged to work more reliably. But it was real.
So how is the current mess Tim’s fault? Doing something well doesn’t require being first, and Apple seldom has been in the past. Two reasons: profit margins vs. product headroom, and HW vs. SW lead times to pivot. Tim screwed Apple on both counts by being incredibly greedy.
[…]
That $800 iPhone 15 you bought nine months ago will never be able to use AI because it only has 6GB of RAM. […] How much did Tim Cook profit by holding back 2GB from your $800 phone? $3-5 tops. That is one half of one percent profit margin, a rounding error.
This is exactly why Tim is always talking about “customer sat[isfaction].” As long as people say they’re alright with whatever they have, he can convince the gullible board the products are good. But that’s not how any of this works, and we all know it.
[…]
It will be SEVEN YEARS before Apple can ship any AI models that are larger than 2GB which will work on all supported iPhones. And 2GB models are a joke, no matter how clever they get implementing them (MoE)
But what if Apple has discovered that it’s not actually possible? AI is entirely new, with new requirements that stress the limits of hardware. Apple is attempting to cram a clever intermingling of data and Siri features into 8 GB of RAM. As a comparison, the largest version of DeepSeek R1 can only be run on a brand new Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra and 512 GB of RAM.
Apple does have an out if on-device models fall over: private cloud compute. But scaling that out to hundreds of millions of iPhone users goes well beyond what Apple had presumed was needed when they talked last year about ramping up production of M2-based servers for AI.
While I do not care much about Apple Intelligence, other products get worse and that affects me every day.
I’m a long-time user of Fantastical to manage my personal and professional calendars. When macOS 15 was announced, I had the idea to test the new Calendar.app and see if I could live with just the default calendar. After upgrading to macOS 15, I noticed that one of my calendars had a warning symbol and informed me that calendar events couldn’t be refreshed. When macOS 15.1 didn’t fix the issue, I contacted Apple. After many hours of debugging and assembling logs, to this day, Calendar.app still can’t sync my events.
We shouldn’t worry about having major software updates every year. Instead, it would be great if Apple engineers had more time to fix things before moving on with new features. Apple needs another Snow Leopard.
What I find involuntarily funny in this specific wave of criticism is that for some of these people this has been the straw that broke the camel’s back when it comes to Apple breaking trust and bullshitting their customers and user base.
Siri is the epitome of overpromising and underdelivering in Apple’s history.
[…]
I have given Cook the benefit of the doubt a lot of times, and I’m not putting the blame entirely on him, but for me that something in the State of Cupertino which is rotten now has been rotting for years under Cook’s tenure.
The trajectory taken by user interface design, system software quality and first-party software production has been on a steady decline since… let’s say 2014, with the advent of Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
[…]
Under Jobs, Apple was rather selective regarding the markets they wanted to be participating in. Under Cook, there’s this constant urge of being present everywhere, whether with a product or a service. Consequence: many more internal departments popping up, more managers micromanaging, more secrecy and fear of leaks probably leading to worse interdepartmental communication, more resource fragmentation. And we see design choices that seem more like the result of too many people having a say, or product directions dictated by teams not directly involved in the product, and so forth.
I keep hearing stories like that: apple is understaffed
Every single team is understaffed. It’s almost become a joke amongst engineers how understaffed teams are.
[…]
A lot of it is the inertia of corporate culture from Steve’s purge when coming back from NeXT and the difficulty in getting budget allocated to hire more people.
Some teams are understaffed some are not. The ones that are understaffed rarely do much of anything about it.
I hear the Messages team is 3-4 times the size it was when I left. What are all those people doing, I can’t know. But I’d bet $20 it involves the interest payments for 25 years of tech debt.
On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about exactly where things went wrong with Siri[…]
Previously:
Update (2025-03-24): Riccardo Mori:
Software-wise, well, I have a bit of a bias, having used Macs since 1989. I clearly know the Mac (and iOS/iPadOS) ecosystem and software selection far better than any other platform. But in recent years I’ve been familiarising myself with Linux (mainly Ubuntu and Crunchbangplusplus) and have been using Windows 10 and 11 on my ThinkPads, my Surface Pro, and my Lenovo Legion 7i gaming laptop. And overall it’s been a pleasant experience. With hiccups here and there, but again, mostly deriving from lack of habit or familiarity. I think Windows 10 and Windows 11 have been good examples of UI improvement on Microsoft’s part. And as far as reliability goes, I’ve been using my Legion 7i gaming laptop for more than a year now, and I’ve had zero issues with Windows 11. No weird crashes, no instability, no misbehaving apps, nothing.
See also: Accidental Tech Podcast and The Talk Show.
Mark Gurman (Mastodon, MacRumors):
Apple Inc. is preparing one of the most dramatic software overhauls in the company’s history, aiming to transform the interface of the iPhone, iPad and Mac for a new generation of users.
The revamp — due later this year — will fundamentally change the look of the operating systems and make Apple’s various software platforms more consistent, according to people familiar with the effort. That includes updating the style of icons, menus, apps, windows and system buttons.
[…]
A key goal of the overhaul is to make Apple’s different operating systems look similar and more consistent. Right now, the applications, icons and window styles vary across macOS, iOS and visionOS. That can make it jarring to hop from one device to another.
I feel like we just had a major redesign, and it mostly made things worse. So, surely, there are many areas that need refinement, but this sounds like not that. With bugs everywhere and Apple Intelligence in disarray, why is Apple choosing to introduce even more chaos? Plus, they should not be doubling down on the mistaken idea that the problem with macOS is that it doesn’t look enough like iOS.
This is the same thing said by Alan Dye in introducing MacOS Big Sur’s overhaul less than five years ago: “we wanted consistency throughout the ecosystem, so users can move fluidly between their Apple devices”. I do not think this is a worthwhile goal unto itself. It is unclear to me how today’s Apple operating systems are insufficiently consistent in ways that are not beneficial to the user experience. I do not think MacOS, iOS, and VisionOS should all look and work the same because they are all used in completely different ways.
[…]
This has me excited and worried in similar measure. There are things on all of these products which could use rethinking. This could be the culmination of many years of rethinking every component and interaction to figure out what works best. But I do not think it is worth getting too hopeful for a rethink or even a reintroduction of depth and texture across Apple’s systems. This set of redesigns may be described here as “dramatic” but, given the number of users who depend on these operating systems, I doubt it will be. I do not think much re-learning will be expected, despite Gurman’s belief this will “go well beyond a new coat of paint like iOS 7”.
I am trying not to get too far in my thoughts until I see it for real, but I do not like the sound of more glassy, translucent effects. One of the most common phrases I have used in recent years of filing Apple bug reports is “insufficient contrast”. I am not optimistic that pattern will not continue.
“Consistency” is bullshit. Because it always tends to give way to the lowest common denominator.
Let the Mac be a Mac. Let the iPhone be an iPhone. Let the iPad be an even better iPhone. Lend to the individual strengths of each platform.
Maybe if each platform OS utilized its unique platform strengths, we wouldn’t need redesigns every 3-4 years. They’re expensive for them (and us, as devs).
They need to stop making my powerful desktop look/behave like an iPhone.
I don’t know anyone who has ever complained that the differences between their phone’s UI and their computer’s UI made the experience of going from one device to the other “jarring”. There’s lots to complain about in iOS and in macOS, but none of it has anything to do with the fact that they are different.
Gurman’s story is acting like Apple hadn’t already done this years ago.
While the report is light on detail, the few clues it provide does make it sound like the upcoming software updates could almost a complete reversal of the flat look we’ve had for more than a decade …
With iOS 7, Apple ditched all the 3D and skeuomorphic elements in the UI in favor of very flat graphics which have remained in use ever since.
The report – which of course may or may not turn out to be accurate – says that the new look will be “loosely” based on visionOS.
Please not the circular app icons.
Israeli website The Verifier was first to report about the potential visionOS-like redesign, but it said the changes were coming in iOS 18. It is possible that this report was accurate about the details, but wrong about the timeframe.
Then, earlier this year, Jon Prosser claimed that iOS 19 will feature a redesigned Camera app. In a video uploaded to his YouTube channel Front Page Tech, he shared renders of the app's alleged new design, revealing translucent menus and other visionOS-like elements. He speculated that the changes could extend to the Home Screen and beyond.
[…]
At a minimum, you can expect iOS 19 to have a more simplified and translucent appearance, if these rumors are true.
Basic idea is something very much akin to the look and feel of VisionOS, but brought to the Camera app, and perhaps throughout the entire system (or just parts of it) in iOS 19. Seems cool, seems fresh, and seems aligned with where Apple has been heading.
Some recent iPadOS tweaks seem awfully visionOS-inspired. Same with some of the Apple Intelligence elements – well, the parts Apple has managed to ship, at least. And certainly Apple’s new Invites software follows some of these new paradigms. And it’s undoubtedly not a coincidence, as Parker Ortolani pointed out last month, that an entirely new app created by Apple was built using some new design ideas.
Apple has a long history of borrowing from their newer OSes and devices to extend older ones – just think about how much of iOS/iPadOS and even macOS started with watchOS ideas. While Apple may maintain that they absolutely positively do not want to merge the Mac and the iPad, they’ve essentially been doing so through software UI regardless.
If Apple modifies the look of platform user interfaces, I’m guessing that SwiftUI will play a huge part in a successful transition.
[…]
Those of you who have been digging around in UIKit to accomplish things will have regrets.
[…]
Similarly, if you’ve been building apps with all kinds of wild design elements to make them look cool, you’re going to a bit of a rude awakening.
Those of us who were around for [iOS 7] and Aqua remember exactly what that felt like 😀
I figured that was the case before the launch of visionOS, but that turned out to be UIKit all the way down and neither SwiftUI nor UIKit had any particular advantage for matching new system UI. And that was a whole new platform.
I really don't think it's going to be the case this time, either. Any SwiftUI app striving for high quality is going to have just as much of a pain in the ass working across both old and new styles as native code.
Only vanilla apps will have it easy.
what is almost guaranteed, by the unforgiving yearly cycle and the engineering effort otherwise wasted on AI, is that any major redesign in 2025 is not going to have anywhere near enough resources or time in the oven, so I expect a lot of pain and churn over the summer no matter which UI framework you choose
Rumours: Apple are redesigning their operating systems Us: Oh god, please no!
Twenty years ago, we’d have heard this and been excited for what delights it would bring. These days, not so much.
To these veteran Mac coders, the reaction to Aqua was universally negative. People were actively very angry. It’s a waste! It’s ugly! It’s confusing! How could you. It went on and on, and I was surprised because Aqua looked cool and fun to me.
The Aqua look and feel was definitely polarizing. And Apple dialed back its most exuberant details with each subsequent Mac OS X update — less transparency, subtler pinstripes (pinstripes!), etc. But iOS 7 was equally polarizing, and its excesses also got dialed back (or perhaps better, said, dialed back up) with each successive iOS release — a little more depth, some subtle hints of texture.
Either Apple is never going to ship an altogether new UI theme, or they’ll ship one and a large number of people will declare it utter garbage and proof that Apple has completely lost its way.
Why does that have to be the cycle? Why can’t they iterate internally and ship something that’s more refined instead of a design at the outset that’s obviously too much? Why do they have to throw out the old design soon after its excesses have mostly been fixed? It’s the same modus operandi as forcing an annual major OS release so that new features and bugs are being introduced just as the next major version goes into beta. It’s a treadmill that never arrives at a polished version.
I want to be on record saying that iOS7 and later still sucks in comparison to having actual buttons and other affordances.
Same with this ‘courageous’ new world of overloaded titlebars, overflow menus, and touch-centric controls on a mouse-centric UI.
Sure, maybe that wasn’t 20 years ago, but aside from System 7 to MacOS 8, and classic to OSX (the bones were good), Apple has been terrible at UI changes.
Am I the only one who sees the news that Apple is having SIGNIFICANT problems with A.I./Siri running head first into the news that Apple is planning a significant UI/UX change with iOS 19/macOS 16? Is everyone at Apple on crazy pills?? Last thing we need is MOAR upheaval.
Alex:
I am just wanting a new snow leopard release where they just stop features and actually fix stuff so it works
Besides destroying the interface for users, every Apple OS redesign creates a massive amount of unpaid make-work for 3rd party developers.
I dunno about other developers, but I’m not sure I have the energy to redesign all my apps this year if iOS is getting an iOS-7-style revamp 😐
Not exactly looking forward to that. Still haven't fully recovered from the psychic wounds of the iOS 7 redesign, tbh.
if i imagine all of macOS redesigned from the ground up with the same user hostile thoughtlessness of the System Settings…
…maybe it really is the year of Linux on the desktop.
they did a shit job with System Settings, and they reckon they are now doing the whole OS?
As if the SwiftUI community isn’t fragmented enough, wait until SwiftUI × iOS 19 is using a different design language 🙂
If that’s the way it works out — with a new visual look drawing attention from lackluster progress on the AI front — surely the timing will be coincidental, but some accidents are happy accidents, as Bob Ross used to say.
[…]
There should be no question that all of what Lovejoy is saying here is true. If Apple launches an all-new systemwide UI theme for iOS 19, something even half as radical a change as iOS 7’s theme was, it will be the only thing most users notice or opine about.
[…]
Part of what makes Apple Apple is that the company is (or at least should be) led by people who both have great taste and trust their own instincts.
No, John, Apple was the company led by people who have great taste.
There is literally NOBODY remaining in Apple leadership who has great taste.
Reminder that Federighi thought the Catalyst apps got really good in the Catalina public beta and likes the new System Settings.
Gripe #47853 of UI things on the Mac / from Apple slipping through QA.
This button is colored blue and looks like it would absolutely be the default button, but pressing return / enter does not activate it.
A lot of Mac apps coming out of Apple these days no longer behave like Mac apps. Is it SwiftUI? Is it Mac Catalyst? Not sure because at least in AppKit, it would just be standard out-of-the-box default behavior for this key button to accept return/enter from the keyboard.
You may think we’re being cynical or overreacting but this is now death by a thousand papercuts and we’re just not used to this being life-long Mac users (me since the 90s).
While the Apple Intelligence fiasco is recent, I’ve been complaining about the decline of Apple’s software for ten years.
It’s not just quality control, sloppiness, and inconsistency, but fundamentally bad user interface design glazed with inadequate AI features.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-14): Craig Grannell:
Not looking forward to this, because it inevitably means months of interfaces that haven’t been tested for vestibular disorders and other accessibility issues. I just hope the problems don’t last as long as they did for iOS 7, which caused all kinds of issues for countless users.
Also, it’s never complete, is it? macOS and iOS are the interface equivalents of that XKCD standards cartoon.
Apple will have a hard time convincing the world to redesign apps with translucent Vista glass everywhere (and not just because of all the developer goodwill they’ve burned lately). The iOS 7 redesign, for all its problems, was following the tide. Apps were already moving toward flat design because it’s simpler to build tooling for the triumvirate of iOS, Android, and web.
“Design for the platform first” would’ve been great, but outside of indie space, it lost to Figma and design systems.
See also: Accidental Tech Podcast.
Update (2025-03-17): Marcin Krzyzanowski:
At Apple our team made no user testing, no user studies and we shipped a whole system app to 500M+ iPhones
that live rent free in my head when i hear about apple redoing ios ui in 2025
Now, Bloomberg reports that Apple executives are “confident” that users will love this visionOS-inspired design.
According to Gurman, the overhauls for iOS 19, iPadOS 19, and macOS 16 go “well beyond a fresh coat of paint,” and will “alter the way people interact with their devices for many years to come.”
The redesigns, which will span across Apple’s biggest platforms, will take inspiration from Apple’s latest platform, visionOS[…]
More “familiar”?
By giving all OSes the look and feel of an OS (visionOS) that hardly anyone has? Got it.
just what the world needs, low-contrast UI that’s also translucent, where touch targets are all the same shape: round.
I’ve decided that it is essential that I develop a practice of optimism to navigate this complicated season in the Apple developer world.
Optimism isn’t enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a feeling, optimism is a choice. I have much less of the enthusiastic feelings these days about my relationship to Apple and its technologies (discussed here on Under the Radar 312), but I can still choose to optimistically look for the positives in any situation.
[…]
So with that in mind…here are six positive reasons for optimism about a possible major redesign coming to iOS 19.
OpenAI has updated the ChatGPT app for macOS with the ability to directly edit code in popular development environments including Xcode, VS Code, and JetBrains tools.
The new feature allows the AI chatbot to make changes to code without requiring users to copy and paste between applications. ChatGPT can now read code from these environments and make edits directly within them.
macos developers going to mock macOS System Settings, yet ship app settings like this
people, that is an anti-pattern. please don’t spread that.
I had a lot of success using ChatGPT to selectively convert my Objective-C code to Swift across a portfolio of projects. Couple hundred thousand lines. It’s fluent in everything.
Previously:
Apple (June 2024):
Swift Assist serves as a companion for all of a developer’s coding tasks, so they can focus on higher-level problems and solutions. It’s seamlessly integrated into Xcode, and knows the latest software development kits (SDKs) and Swift language features, so developers will always get the latest code features that blend perfectly into their projects. With Swift Assist, tasks like exploring new frameworks and experimenting with new ideas are just one request away.
Xcode 16.3 and still no Swift Assist. WWDC25 is around the corner....
Swift Assist was supposed to arrive in 2024, but it never even appeared in a beta. Apple hasn’t announced that it’s postponed or cancelled. It’s not even mentioned in the release notes.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-13): John Gruber (Mastodon):
If anyone else who was in those WWDC briefings remembers whether Swift Assist was actually demoed, please let me know. I’m genuinely curious if Swift Assist was another thing — like all of “more personalized Siri” — that wasn’t even in demonstratable shape at WWDC.
Anyone besides John Voorhees?
See also: Tim Hardwick and John Voorhees.
Update (2025-03-24): Thomas Ricouard:
Swift Assist was teased as the most basic AI feature we could wish for Xcode. Give me some Swift code from a prompt. Everyone and their grandmother is doing that now. Maybe it was still in the “impressive” bucket last year; now, it’s just basic. Now we have Cursor Agent, Windsurf, and the MCP (Model Context Protocol) to make interoperability possible between LLM and tools.
[…]
Sorry, we do have some local auto-completion Xcode model, but it’s not that great. Sure, it runs locally, privacy, yada yada. I personally find the GitHub Xcode extension better. And it’s from MICROSOFT. Do you see the irony?
[…]
Also, we’ll be forever checking isswiftassistavailable.com.
Previously:
John Gruber (Mastodon, Dithering, MacRumors, Slashdot):
Reading between the lines, and based on my PhD-level fluency in Cupertino-ese, what Apple is saying here is that these “more personalized Siri” features are being punted from this year’s OS cycle to next year’s: to iOS 19 and MacOS 16.
[…]
It was already pretty obvious these features weren’t coming in iOS 18.4/MacOS 15.4, because they’re not in the developer betas that are already out. And if these features were coming in iOS 18.5/MacOS 15.5, or even iOS 18.6/MacOS 15.6, Apple wouldn’t have felt the need to issue this “It’s going to take us longer than we thought...” statement today. Delivering the “more personalized Siri” in iOS 18.5 or even 18.6 would have been delivering them on the originally announced schedule — the “coming year” that began with WWDC 2024. That would have been the tail end of that “year”, but within it.
[…]
This is the “App Intents” stuff — the features requiring Siri to have access to and, effectively, understanding of your personal information, in your apps, stored privately on your devices. These are the most helpful-sounding, most practical, most futuristic features of Apple Intelligence. And they’re the sort of features Apple is almost uniquely positioned to offer, alongside only Google, as the provider of a mobile platform and device ecosystem.
[…]
Most of Apple Intelligence has felt like Apple has pushed it out a year ahead of the company’s usual level of baked-ness. I’ve held all year long that if the entire industry — along with Wall Street — weren’t in the midst of a generative-AI/LLM mania, that “Apple Intelligence” wouldn’t have been announced until this year’s WWDC, not last year’s.
Those Apple Intelligence announcements at WWDC 2024 were vitally important for Apple. The company felt that it had to show that it hadn’t completely missed the boat on the hottest topic in the tech industry, and that it was working hard to infuse the power of AI through all its products. I would argue that succeeded at doing so, and its barrage of Apple Intelligence marketing the past six months has reinforced the point. People in the know might criticize that Apple’s behind, or that its tools aren’t close to the state of the art, but the general perception is that Apple’s in the game—which was a real question last year at this time.
[…]
Apple got exactly what it wanted out of WWDC 2024. The penalty for failing to ship some of those features will be the equivalent of a slap on the wrists. But this all increases the stakes for WWDC 2025, when Apple will still need to show that it’s capable of creating useful Apple Intelligence features—and its audience should be more skeptical about the company’s ability to ship them.
After announcing that some Apple Intelligence Siri features promised for iOS 18 will be delayed, Apple has tweaked the wording on its iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia webpages to remove mentions of the Siri capabilities that are being pushed back.
Since last fall, Apple has been marketing the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence with an unreleased Siri feature. After confirming today that the more personal version of Siri isn’t coming anytime soon, Apple has pulled the ad in question.
The commercial starred Bella Ramsey who should probably win an award for acting like Siri worked.
I think that was the only TV commercial Apple ran showing the “personalized Siri through App Intents” feature that Apple has now admitted won’t ship in iOS 18, but I saw that commercial a lot during the baseball playoffs and NFL season.
[…]
Apple’s product pages for Apple Intelligence, iOS 18, and MacOS 15 Sequoia are lousy with references to these “new era for Siri” features that we now know aren’t going to ship this year. This is a marketing fiasco.
It’s particularly daunting when reading your words in 2011 on how Apple would never publish future concept videos. It feels like Apple crossed a line here.
i don’t mean to be too pessimistic, but i’m genuinely curious: when will the first apple intelligence false advertising class action drop?
Unsurprisingly, this news comes on a Friday and is announced via a carefully circulated statement instead of on Apple’s own website.
Unsurprising but still disappointing. This is like burying a correction to a front-page news story in the back of the newspaper. Maybe someday there will be a “Thoughts on Siri”, blame Forstall for Maps, or “So why the f**k doesn’t it do that” moment.
It is a single feature, but it is a high-priority one showcased in its celebrity infused ads for its flagship iPhone models. I think Apple ought to have published its own news instead of relying on other outlets to do its dirty work, but it fits a pattern. It happened with AirPods and again with AirPower; the former has become wildly successful, while the latter was canned.
[…]
Instead of monolithic September releases with occasional tweaks throughout the year, Apple adopted a more incremental strategy. I would like to believe this has made Apple’s software more polished — or, less charitably, slowed its quality decline. What it has actually done is turn Apple’s big annual software presentation into a series of promises to be fulfilled throughout the year.
[…]
Apple only just began including the necessary APIs in the latest developer betas of iOS 18.4. No matter when Apple gets this out, the expansiveness of its functionality is dependent on third-party buy-in. There was a time when developer adoption of new features was a given. That is no longer the case.
Delayed or not, Apple’s proposed Intents-based Apple Intelligence features require a ton of buy-in from developers for it to be of any real use, and the incentives really aren’t there — donating your app’s content and functionality to enrich Apple’s AI alone, bypassing your UI, UX, branding, metrics, et al, to be delivered in a content soup alongside your competitors.
A third party developer base that won’t even bother recompiling Netflix or YouTube for visionOS won’t care much for that.
This sounds like OpenDoc all over again.
Apple’s WWDC 2024 was dominated by Apple Intelligence. Being able to run Apple Intelligence things like the new Siri was the main marketing pitch to get people to buy the new iPhones this year. The iPhone SE was replaced with a much more expensive iPhone 16e, so it could run Apple Intelligence.
I think this is Apple’s biggest product blunder since Apple’s inability to ship a modern OS in the 1990s (which led to Apple’s acquisition of NeXT).
I have a hunch that this delay might relate to security.
These new Apple Intelligence features involve Siri responding to requests to access information in applications and then performing actions on the user's behalf.
This is the worst possible combination for prompt injection attacks!
Via John Gruber (Mastodon):
So Apple had promised for this year — and oft promoted — an entire set of features that they not only have now acknowledged will not ship this year, but which they might, in fact, never be able to ship. Makes me wonder how many people inside Apple were voicing these concerns a year ago, and why they lost the debate to start promising these features last June and advertising them in September.
Willison has been writing about prompt injection attacks since 2023. We know that Mail’s AI summaries were (at least initially?) sort of susceptible to prompt injections (using hidden HTML elements), as were Writing Tools during the beta period. It’s scary to imagine what would happen with a well-crafted prompt injection when the attack’s surface area becomes the entire assistant directly plugged into your favorite apps with your data. But then again, one has to wonder why these features were demoed at all at Apple’s biggest software event last year and if those previews – absent a real, in-person event – were actually animated prototypes.
[…]
Regardless of what happened, here’s the kicker: according to Mark Gurman, “some within Apple’s AI division” believe that the delayed Apple Intelligence features may be scrapped altogether and replaced by a new system rebuilt from scratch.
[…]
From his story, pay close attention to this paragraph:
There are also concerns internally that fixing Siri will require having more powerful AI models run on Apple’s devices. That could strain the hardware, meaning Apple either has to reduce its set of features or make the models run more slowly on current or older devices. It would also require upping the hardware capabilities of future products to make the features run at full strength.
iPhone hardware being the choke point is going to be brutal.
And anyone like us with lots of apps and intents is going to stress their devices constantly.
I already force quit my apps often to free up slivers of RAM.
[…]
I think the fundamental problem with App Intents as Apple Intelligence is in theory it works and in practice it doesn’t scale unless you’ve got a great chip and lots of power to give.
Siri is doing actual damage to Apple’s brand/credibility. It shouldn’t be delayed, it should be canned next year.
The company’s never been flat-out dishonest on its products like this before. The Mac Studio page still showcases a use case that flat out does not work
it has somehow gotten worse with Apple Intelligence, too. I asked my phone via CarPlay to open the Books app and it replied “I don’t know an app named Books. You can search for it on the App Store”.
How… I am sorry, how is this so bad 14 years later?
I don’t think most people would actually use those features because Siri has let them down for too many years. Tonya and I talk to Siri all the time because of our HomePods and many HomeKit devices, but our usage is extremely limited. I trust Siri to turn lights on and off (sometimes leading to “How many digital assistants does it take to screw in a light bulb?” jokes), set timers, make reminders, and play music, but that’s about it. Even with these use cases, I’m unsurprised—but annoyed—when Siri fails to hear a command, gets part of it wrong, or responds completely inappropriately.
I don’t trust—or use—Siri for anything else because so many attempts have failed. Like Lucy, Siri frequently pulls the football away. Unlike Charlie Brown, I long ago gave up embarrassing myself.
I still wish they had just focused on fixing the basics first. Not only would I not trust it to handle sophisticated tasks when, say, the music controls don’t work, but it also makes it seem like they’re in denial about how Siri exists today.
I wonder if people at Apple are puzzled at our reaction to Siri? If they think Siri is terrific and working perfectly, or if they recognize the things that drive us crazy, but can’t seem to find the path to fix them?
The thing is, it has never worked well. It’s impossible that they could think that it’s working as anyone expects.
Yes, Apple also does have a history of turning some poorly received rollouts around. The best examples of that are Apple Maps and the Apple Watch. Even so, once a product launched becomes a product laughed at, it’s difficult to erase the echos of that laughter.
[…]
Siri has never fulfilled Apple’s bold promises with any consistent value beyond setting a timer or adding a reminder. Even that fails enough of the time to earn users’ distrust and provide late night comedians with jokes so easy to make that the shrewder jokesters have moved on.
“Product knowledge” is one of the Apple Intelligence Siri features that, in its statement yesterday, Apple touted as a success. But what I asked here is a very simple question, about an Apple Intelligence feature in one of Apple's most-used apps, and it turns out Siri doesn't even know the names of its own settings panels.
I’ve previously argued they need to delete all the Siri code and start fresh with a ChatGPT wrapper but I expect pride will make them fight that to the bitter end.
It’s their best choice if they believe competing with Gemini on Android is critical for iPhone sales.
But from the moment it was announced, Apple Intelligence has felt like it was rushed to market, suggesting that Apple was unprepared for the sector’s explosive growth and how quickly competitors would integrate these features into their products. From the outside looking in, Apple appeared so focused on advancing its silicon, launching Vision Pro, and figuring out what to do with its now cancelled Project Titan vehicle project that the talent and resources to devote to AI weren’t there.
Apple’s saving grace, for now, is the belief that many users are still oblivious to the full potential of AI in their daily lives and that Friday’s announcement will create the most frustration among those deeply embedded in Apple’s ecosystem who are also the cutting edge of technology.
I mention that last point because, for many of my friends and family, AI is either 1) a non-issue or 2) simply synonymous with asking ChatGPT stuff. But features will trickle down fast, and soon, manually combing through a dozen emails to find that one PDF or determining who said they’d bring what to the potluck from several messages will feel prehistoric relative to any other platform. And at that point, if Apple still runs a version of Siri that struggles to set multiple timers, they’re f***ed.
[…]
My first move would be to work on integrating more with AI services like ChatGPT, DeekSeek, Co-Pilot, or Gemini. Right now, Apple makes launching out to ChatGPT a very stilted experience. But if there’s a way to enable more seamless query handling, it could significantly improve the experience and satisfaction and placate most users until you can roll out the version of Siri you intended to.
Realistically, this AI race is a giant ship anchor Apple has willingly strapped to its own neck, that will mire it dreadfully. A game they can’t ever win, and a distraction that is eating up all the OS engineering energy that some of their product lines desperately need. It has added literally nothing of value to this year’s OS releases.
Apple needed to do two things: make Siri not suck, and provide an LLM through API so that devs could make their own features and choices. It did neither.
ChatGPT didn’t need access to all your local or sensitive data to be incredibly useful. It didn’t need to be wired into every corner of the OS or outside of the sandbox. It didn’t need special privileges or entitlements given to only it. It didn’t need the biggest and most powerful Apple chips, or the latest OS to run on.
Apple has lost itself completely in the weeds, when a Siri app and API that works just like ChatGPT’s would have done 90% of what anybody is actually looking for
After reliving that Ballmer moment, it’s uncanny to watch this CNBC interview from one year ago with Johny Srouji and John Ternus from Apple on their AI strategy. Ternus even repeats the chuckle!! Exuding the same delusional confidence that lost Ballmer’s Microsoft any serious part in the mobile game.
Still trying to figure out what they were laughing about.
Pundits are going to keep telling you ‘there’s no moat’ around generative AI, and yet still Apple appears to be falling further and further behind after being caught flat-footed.
The moat is Nvidia, the moat is data, the moat is doing it in the cloud at the expense of privacy, the moat is trying to tie any of it together for massive monolithic OS updates that come but once a year.
All of which Apple, at a DNA level, will struggle massively to compete with.
I thought Apple would do their usual thing, of being the last to adopt a new technology but the first to use it to create polished user experiences. but instead they’ve shipped promises.
Apple used to promise the impossible, and then it would actually deliver.
Apple still makes the same promises, but no longer has the institutional competence to deliver.
It is like an aging sports GOAT that is in denial and refuses to accept that he isn’t the same guy anymore.
The pattern is depressingly familiar in successful businesses. A company achieves spectacular success, then gradually shifts its focus from transformative innovation to shareholder value – dividends, stock splits, and the comforting predictability of incremental improvements. Meanwhile, the future takes shape elsewhere, often in messier, less immediately profitable corners of the industry.
Apple has long been characterised as a “fast follower” rather than a pioneering innovator. It wasn’t the first to make an MP3 player, smartphone, or even a personal computer. This strategy served Apple brilliantly in the past – observing others’ mistakes, then delivering exquisitely refined products with unmatched attention to design, usability, and integration. The first iPhone wasn’t novel in concept, but revolutionary in execution because it had a unique interface: multitouch. In fact, I would argue this was the last time Apple’s user interfaces went in a bold direction.
But AI presents a fundamentally different challenge. This isn’t merely a new product category to be perfected – it’s a paradigm shift in how humans interact with technology. Unlike hardware innovations where Apple could polish existing concepts, AI is redefining the entire computing experience, from point-click or touch-tap to conversations. The interface layer between humans and devices is transforming in ways that might render Apple’s traditional advantages increasingly irrelevant.
More troubling still is the misalignment between Apple’s business model and AI’s trajectory. Apple thrives on high-margin hardware in a controlled ecosystem, while AI is primarily software and services-driven, often benefiting from openness and scale.
The number one phrase that has been used to characterize Apple’s response to the ChatGPT moment in November 2022 is flat-footed, and that matches what I have heard anecdotally. That, by extension, means that Apple has been working on Apple Intelligence for at most 28 months, and that is almost certainly generous, given that the company likely took a good amount of time to figure out what its approach would be. That not nothing — xAI went from company formation to Grok 3 in 19 months — but it’s certainly not 17 years!
[…]
Still, it’s worth pointing out that exclusive access to data is downstream of a policy choice to exclude third parties; this is distinct from the sort of hardware and software integration that Apple can exclusively deliver in the pursuit of superior performance. This distinction is subtle, to be sure, but I think it’s notable that Apple Silicon’s differentiation was in the service of building a competitive moat, while Apple Intelligence’s differentiation was about maintaining one.
[…]
At the same time, it’s not as if Siri is new; the voice assistant launched in 2011, alongside iMessage. In fact, though, Siri has always tried to do too much too soon; I wrote last week about the differences between Siri and Alexa, and how Amazon was wise to focus their product development on the basics — speed and accuracy — while making Alexa “dumber” than Siri tried to be, particularly in its insistence on precise wording instead of attempting to figure out what you meant.
To that end, this speaks to how Apple could have been more conservative in its generative AI approach (and, I fear, Amazon too, given my skepticism of Alexa+): simply make a Siri that works.
As a Mac user, I have this incredible wealth of GPU and CPU power, which in turn allows me to run LLMs locally.
A few weeks ago, before a trip out of the country for my daughter’s spring break, I set up a local instance of DeepSeek and made sure I could connect to it via Tailscale running on my Mac.
[…]
A week or so ago I was grousing to some friends that Apple needs to open up things on the Mac so other LLMs can step in where Siri is failing.
[…]
The crux of the issue in my mind is this: Apple has a lot of good ideas, but they don’t have a monopoly on them. I would like some other folks to come in and try their ideas out. I would like things to advance at the pace of the industry, and not Apple’s.
With iOS being more locked down, it would be even harder for third parties to step in. I don’t see Apple ever opening up the intents system so that other AIs could consume the data rather than just provide it. (I’d love to even see Spotlight on the Mac opened up in this way.) But there should at least be an API so that you can invoke other AI assistants with the same ease as Siri: via a hardware button, “Hey,” etc.
The idea is a fascinating one: if Apple Intelligence cannot compete with the likes of ChatGPT or Claude for the foreseeable future, but third-party developers are creating apps based on those APIs, is there a scenario in which Apple may regain control of the burgeoning AI app ecosystem by offering their own native bridge to those APIs?
Essentially, I’m thinking of a model similar to what Cursor, Perplexity, and dozens of other AI companies do: instead of necessarily bringing your own API key, you can use an abstraction layer in the middle that absorbs all the costs of the API you’re calling – usually, for a monthly fee and within certain limits. What if Apple followed a similar approach in iOS 19/macOS 16 with an Apple Intelligence API that is actually a bridge between native apps and other cloud-based AI providers?
[…]
Of course, the alternative is for Apple to bide their time, wait until they have a proper Apple Intelligence LLM to offer as an API for all kinds of features (that is, beyond summaries alone), and let third-party developers continue building primarily through other providers’ SDKs and APIs. But if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple offer something along these lines in the near future.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-13): Steve Troughton-Smith:
It bugs me when people suggest Apple spending resources on AR/VR was a waste and they should have spent it on Siri/AI. Here’s the thing — AI, especially the way Apple is doing it, is a bolt-on. They could wait 10 years, then add the latest & greatest, and be no worse off than today. But a whole new platform built around AR/VR (which I think is going to be huge) is the kind of thing that only Apple can build, and it needs significant multi-year buy-in and investment from Apple and third parties.
It kills me that we’re sitting on top a huge pile of content with Tapestry and can’t explore how to mine it using the models that are already on my device.
All kinds of interesting UI would emerge: what folks are talking about, meme timelines, etc. App Intents only give that data away and don’t work to our advantage.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-24): Ina Fried:
The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, seeks class action status and unspecified financial damages on behalf of those who purchased Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones and other devices.
Via John Gruber:
Most of these class action lawsuits are bullshit, but it’s hard to argue with the basic premise of this one.
Filipe Espósito (October 2024, MacRumors):
As seen by 9to5Mac in an unlisted App Store article, Apple has developed a new system that will use all user reviews on the App Store to create a summary highlighting “the most common customer feedback” about each app. According to the article, the summaries will be updated every time new reviews are added.
[…]
The idea is to make it easier for users to identify when an app doesn’t deliver what it promises in the App Store. Since these summaries will be auto-generated, Apple says developers will be able to report when they consider a summary to be “inaccurate.”
The best thing Apple could do with AI is detect when a customer is writing a support request into the App Store review box and prompt them to send it to the developer instead.
Starting in iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4, people can see a new review summary on your App Store product page to more easily learn about apps and games at a glance. Generated using large language models (LLMs), each summary compiles highlights and key information from individual user reviews into a short paragraph. Summaries are refreshed at least once a week for apps and games with enough reviews to provide a summary. People can tap and hold the summary to report a problem, and developers can also use App Store Connect.
As part of a phased rollout, review summaries are currently available in English for a limited number of apps and games on the App Store in the United States. This feature will expand to all apps with a sufficient number of reviews in additional storefronts and languages over the course of the year.
Via Sarah Perez (MacRumors):
Apple is not the only tech giant to look to AI for analyzing reviews. Amazon introduced AI summaries for product reviews on its platform back in 2023. Google’s Gemini AI can also be used for product review summaries, as one developer tutorial explains. The company also added AI-powered review summaries in Google Maps last year.
Previously:
Juli Clover (release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer/M4, IPSW/M4):
According to Apple’s release notes, macOS Sequoia 15.3.2 includes important bug fixes and security updates, and it is recommended for all users.
See also: Mr. Macintosh and Howard Oakley.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-12): Jeff Johnson:
The use of the plural “security fixes” seems a bit misleading, because Apple has documented only one security fix in 15.3.2, for a bug in WebKit: “Maliciously crafted web content may be able to break out of Web Content sandbox.” In any case, macOS 15.3.2 appears to be entirely, or at least mostly, a security update. And the update was uneventful on my Mac mini, though of course overlong, as all macOS updates are nowadays. On my MacBook Pro, however, the update was… not uneventful. For some reason, immediately after the update, the Setup Assistant ran again, as if I were setting up a new Mac.
I suspect that the Setup Assistant would have re-enabled Apple Intelligence if I hadn’t already intentionally mismatched my system and Siri languages to prevent that very outcome.
My theory is that the Setup Assistant is the reason that Apple Intelligence is re-enabled on some Macs but not on others.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-24): Ric Ford:
Yet another MacInTouch reader emailed us about Apple’s recurring macOS bugs that keep breaking home folder relocation and forcing insecure workarounds.
Previously:
Juli Clover (no iOS/iPadOS release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer):
According to Apple’s release notes, the iOS 18.3.2 update adds important bug fixes and security updates. On some devices, it fixes an issue that could prevent playback of some streaming content.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-12): Juli Clover:
After installing iOS 18.3.2, iPhone users have noticed that Apple Intelligence is automatically turned on, regardless of whether it was turned off prior to the update being installed. There is an Apple Intelligence splash screen that comes up after updating, and there is no option other than tapping “Continue,” which turns on Apple Intelligence.
If you’ve updated to iOS 18.3.2 and do not want Apple Intelligence enabled, you will need to go the Settings app, tap on Apple Intelligence , and then toggle it off. When Apple Intelligence is enabled, it consumes up to 7GB of storage space for local AI models, which is an inconvenience when storage space is limited.
iOS 18.3.2 switched on Apple Intelligence against our wishes without permission or notification.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (tweet):
In February, Apple used the same language — “an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals” — for another bug, but there is no evidence the two attacks are connected. Before that February patch, Apple had never used this wording before.
Apple identifies this latest vulnerability as CVE-2025-24201. Apple filing a CVE is unusual, as the company typically only acknowledges external researchers and organizations while remaining silent about vulnerabilities discovered internally.
I spent some time trying to piece together what may have taken place.
[…]
I suspect that Apple would have quietly integrated this fix into its next set of updates, except that it also affected Google Chrome. That required going public and filing a CVE, and once that had happened, Apple had no choice but to release these updates immediately to ensure that its current operating systems weren’t vulnerable.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-18): Juli Clover:
The iOS 18.3.2 update that Apple released last week appears to have broken iCloud Mail for some users. There are multiple complaints on Reddit and the MacRumors forums from users who say that iCloud Mail is not able to push new iCloud emails to their iPhones after the iOS 18.3.2 update.
Juli Clover (no release notes, security, no developer, no enterprise):
According to Apple’s release notes, visionOS 2.3.2 provides important bug fixes, security updates, and addresses an issue that may prevent playback of some streaming content.
Previously:
Juli Clover (release notes, no security, no developer):
This update addresses an issue that may prevent playback of some streaming content on Apple TV 4K (3rd generation).
Previously:
Over the last few years, many have reported that their Macs spontaneously updated or even upgraded macOS when they didn’t expect them to, and often against their wishes. This can occur when Software Update in System Settings has Install macOS updates turned off. Explanations of how Apple appears to be able to override that setting have so far been lacking; this article explains how it happened overnight to my iMac Pro, when it updated itself from Sequoia 15.1.1 to 15.3.1.
[…]
As a result, it had periodically notified me of updates to 15.2, 15.3, and most recently 15.3.1, each of which I had politely declined. Those notifications became more persistent, and one or two gave me either of two options, to update now, or later that night, and couldn’t otherwise be dismissed. I therefore chose to defer the update until the night, and nothing came of them.
One of those notifications, though, decided to end my procrastination and added a background activity named com.apple.SUOSUScheduler.tonight.install to the DAS-CTS scheduling system. In the small hours of the morning, DAS rescored its list of activities, and decided that it was time to dispatch that task[…]
As he says, “Software update notifications tricked the user into unwittingly agreeing to perform a macOS update.” There’s no button to decline the update or just close the notification. All you can do is click on the notification itself, avoiding the buttons. This will open System Settings, which you then have to close. If you do click a button, the user is “given no second chance to confirm they intended the update to take place.”
Once the update had been scheduled by DAS, the only way to postpone or abort it would have been to shut the Mac down. Activities scheduled by DAS-CTS are hidden from the user, who has neither awareness nor control over them.
The situation on iOS is similar, where there is no option to decline an update. You can only tell it to install Later, and then when it asks for your passcode you have to tap Cancel.
Tom Mulhall, another longtime Mac expert, emailed us that Apple force-updated iOS against his will, just as Apple did to Howard Oakley’s Mac.
Oddly, I just turned on my iPad after not using it for a week, and despite being set to automatically update the OS it was a few months behind and didn’t offer an update until I went into Settings.
Previously:
The Finder was certain there was nearly 228 GB available, but also claimed that 852 GB was used. Did that mean that my 1 TB SSD had grown in size overnight to just over 1.08 TB? What was this “83.71 GB purgeable”, and had the Finder already assumed it had been deleted? Could the Finder really have made an error of more than 50% in calculating free space?
I turned to Disk Utility, which confirmed what I had expected, that there was actually 144 GB free.
My own free utility Mints said much the same.
[…]
Over those years, the Finder has repeatedly shown errors in accounting for used and free space on APFS, although they’re seldom as large as this.
[…]
The Finder is the front window of macOS. When it has made a fool of itself like this, repeatedly, ever since the introduction of APFS, it only makes the whole system look amateur.
This article considers just what counts as being “purgeable”.
[…]
Key to understanding which of these are considered to be purgeable is Apple’s clear statement that the user can’t manually remove those files, but they’re in the sole control of macOS. That eliminates the first three, snapshots, evicted iCloud files, and purchased content, which are all in the control of the user.
Snapshots have been a common misattribution here, but even a cursory consideration demonstrates that they are counted in used space, not purgeable space.
macOS superimposes additional space management features over APFS to make some file system contents purgeable when it runs short of free space. These aren’t explained in any coherent way in user documentation, nor can I find any explanation provided to developers. Furthermore, information given to users is inconsistent across the Finder and Disk Utility, and appears riddled with bugs that only confound the user. This article demonstrates these in an edge case for clarity.
When you drag a file to copy it to another volume, the Finder calls on File Coordination (com.apple.foundation.filecoordination) to perform that action. It sets up a server and client for the purpose; if the copy can’t take place using existing free space, this is passed to CacheDelete (com.apple.cache_delete) to free up sufficient purgeable space to complete that copy action.
The process of purging that follows is performed in a series of phases, proceeding in the order given in the list above, with snapshots last. Once any given phase has succeeded in purging sufficient space for the copy to complete successfully, purging should cease.
Precize tells you almost everything you might want to know about files, including their inode number and extended attribute size, and has extensive support for bookmarks. Two years ago, I added a couple of boxes to indicate whether it’s an APFS sparse file, and whether it has ever been cloned. This new version has a third box that informs you whether that file is purgeable.
That’s fine for individual files, but not practical for discovering them by the folderful. For that, I turned to Sparsity, which already checks for sparse files and clones, using its Crawler accessible from its Window menu.
There’s a new checkbox here so you can scan whole folders and discover exactly which of the files within them are purgeable, and how much space they occupy before being purged.
In this sequel I’ll focus on the period between the creation of Time Machine snapshots using the command
tmutil localsnapshotand the reporting of the conversion of 94 GB of files to purgeable space, a large and critical change in the availability of space to macOS, apps and the user.
Rather than writing a huge file to try to force purging, plan ahead and create real free space in advance. Here are some suggestions.
Have you ever wondered where apps like Disk Utility get their figures for free space on volumes, particularly those for purgeable and available space? If you thought they got them from APFS, then I’m sorry to disappoint, but their source is the space management feature in macOS, its CacheDelete subsystem.
[…]
You may be surprised to learn that when you open the Finder’s Get Info dialog on a volume, no call is made to CacheDelete to obtain its latest figures for purgeable or available space. As there’s no indication in the log that those figures are obtained from anywhere comparable, it’s most likely that the Finder maintains its own values, and updates them periodically from CacheDelete. What is strange, though, is that when the Finder posts a file system event that’s inevitably going to result in CacheDelete refreshing its authoritative figures, the Finder doesn’t appear to obtain the updated figures once CacheDelete has compiled them.
This may explain why the Finder’s Get Info figures can become badly out of kilter with those shown in Disk Utility and third-party apps. It emphasises the fact that, if you want accurate and up-to-date figures for free space, you should ignore the Finder and check in Disk Utility or elsewhere.
[…]
While evicting items to iCloud and deleting snapshots give you a good idea of the minimum space you’re likely to free, deleting caches is only likely to be able to provide a maximum, and will invariably achieve considerably less. And if that Data volume has little or no purgeable space, then Safe mode isn’t going to create any more.
CacheDelete isn’t started until after user login, and (with the exception of its privileged helper
deleted_helper) runs in user mode on services and locations owned by that user. The best way to appreciate how active CacheDelete is in Safe mode is to compare that with standard mode. In the latter, CacheDelete first works through its property lists to build its database of services whose purgeable data it manages. It then lists the latest information it has on those services and their caches. Once that’s completed, it checks each of those standard services for shared purgeable and nonpurgeable space, just once, then announces updated totals for purgeable space. The whole sequence is likely to take around 0.3 seconds to complete.After login in Safe mode, CacheDelete completes a similar initialisation, then proceeds to perform multiple passes through all the services whose caches it manages, first to establish what is purgeable and what is not, then to refresh what it can. Many of those are performed in conjunction with iCloudNotificationAgent, and at different levels of urgency, from 1 to 3. At the end of a period of 20 seconds or more, CacheDelete returns with a set of updated values that may be worse than those it started with, but should be more accurate in the event that macOS needs to free up purgeable space to accommodate an important demand on free space.
[…]
It’s important to remember that the amount of space stated as Available already includes that given as purgeable.
Although I much preferred the Finder’s figure of nearly 400 GB of “available” space, I realised that could only come at the cost of purging all that 228 GB of “purgeable” space. As that seemed to include many of my files, I thought it was time to work this week’s magic trick. I therefore restarted the Mac, and all of a sudden purgeable space had vanished, leaving me with only about 165 GB of free space after all.
[…]
That’s two major versions of macOS and almost two years apart, and the Finder still can’t come up with correct figures.
Ingo:
“Get Info” for the “Macintosh HD” in the Finder delivers values that are valid for the APFS volume group composed of the Macintosh HD System volume and the Macintosh HD – Data.
The value of the expression (Finder > Get Info “Macintosh HD” > Used) + Free + (Disk Utility > Macintosh HD – Data > Other Volumes) exceeds the value of the total capacity of the container disk, because the value “Other Volumes“ used in this expression includes the storage used for the System volume too.
Previously:
Matteo Rattoti (via Christian Tietze):
This repository demonstrates a bug in
NSFileWrapperwhere overwriting a file with the same content using-[NSFileWrapper writeToURL:options:originalContentsURL:error:]sometimes causes the file’s modification date to be set in the past instead of updating to the current time.
I think I saw someone speculate that this is due to it not using a nanosecond-capable date/time API—which would imply that this only happens on APFS—but I can’t seem to find the post.
Update (2025-03-12): Mark Rowe:
I mentioned on Slack that
struct statreturns modification times as atimespecwhich has ns resolution. Foundation sets modification times usingutimeswhich represents times astimevalwhich only has μs resolution. Foundation also explicitly rounds the ns portion of the timestamp to μs rather than truncating. I’m not sure why it doesn’t useutimensatinstead. That takes atimespecand so should allow ns resolution when setting the modification time.
Hours after the new Mac mini hit customers’ desks, some users started complaining that when they hooked up a hard drive or SSD to the unit, they’d see Wi-Fi speeds drop, or be cut entirely. The reports were almost always followed up with the realization that when disconnected, the Wi-Fi speeds would go back to normal.
[…]
The case of the M4 Mac mini is aluminum, with a plastic lower case. There are no breaks in the aluminum for the Wi-Fi antenna, so Apple has placed it underneath that very thin plastic base of the unit.
For the most part, this is fine. The desks and surfaces a Mac mini are generally placed on are wood, which has nearly no Wi-Fi attenuation.
Since that plastic is so thin on the base, things get a little dicier when the unit is placed on top of a metal-enclosure hard drive, or dock, for instance.
He also triggered the problem with RF interference from certain USB cables.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-12): Sherief, FYI:
high speed [differential] signals on a wire become indistinguishable from a radio source at points - Intel published a paper on this and a little birdie told me this was actually discovered while working on Apple hardware.
I raised my mini by placing it on a thick stone coaster. I’ll have to do some testing after work. It would explain why the mini has been the most unreliable with the Vision Pro.
Louis Rossmann has shared a new video encapsulating his surprise, and disappointment, that Brother has morphed into an “anti-consumer printer company.” More information about Brother’s embrace of the dark side are shared on Rossmann’s wiki, with the major two issues being new firmware disabling third party toner, and preventing (on color devices) color registration functionality.
Rossmann is clearly perturbed by Brother’s quiet volte-face with regard to aftermarket ink. Above he admits that he used to tell long-suffering HP or Canon printing device owners faces with cartridge DRM issues “Buy a brother laser printer for $100 and all of your woes will be solved.”
Sadly, “Brother is among the rest of them now,” mused the famous RepairTuber.
Scharon Harding (via Slashdot):
The video, spotted by Tom’s Hardware, has 163,000 views as of this writing and seems to be based on a Reddit post from 2022. In that post, Reddit user 20Factorial said that firmware update W1.56 caused the automatic color registration feature to stop working on his Brother MFC-3750 when using third-party cartridges.
“With the colors not able to be aligned, the printer is effectively non-functional,” 20Factorial said. The Redditor went on to say that when asked, a Brother customer service agent confirmed that “the printer is non-functional without genuine toner.”
[…]
Brother denied to Ars Technica that it intentionally bricks printer functionality when users install third-party toner or ink.
[…]
20Factorial isn’t the only one who has claimed to see printer capabilities decline when trying to use a third-party cartridge.
The general consensus seems to be that official Brother cartridges work a little better, but that Brother doesn’t block you from using alternatives.
Previously:
Filipe Espósito (via Dare Obasanjo):
As reported by Brazilian newspaper Valor Econômico (via O Globo), a federal judge in Brazil ruled on Wednesday that Apple will have to open up the iOS ecosystem to third-party apps in Brazil just like the company did in the EU. The judge considers that the “limitations” imposed by the company on developers could jeopardize the entry of new competitors in the segment.
In November 2024, the Brazilian antitrust regulator “Cade” ruled that Apple can no longer prevent developers from selling content and distributing apps outside the App Store in Brazil. The company would have 20 days to comply with Brazil’s antitrust legislation, otherwise it would be fined more than $40,000 a day.
[…]
Judge Pablo Zuniga has ordered that Apple will have to implement the required changes in Brazil within the next three months. The judge states that, despite Apple’s claims, the company “has already complied with similar obligations in other countries, without demonstrating a significant impact or irreparable damage to its business model.”
The rules are changing worldwide. Apple can make this easy for itself, or it can tediously lose its fights one country at a time.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-12): Juli Clover:
Epic Games plans to bring Fortnite to Brazil after the Brazilian government forces Apple to permit sideloading, according to details Epic shared on social media.
Presumably Apple will just roll out in Brazil the same compliance rules, policies, and APIs that they started offering last year in the EU. But will Brazilian users get access to EU third-party app marketplaces, and vice-versa? Or will Apple try to segregate these app marketplaces region-by-region, such that Brazilian users will only get access to Brazilian third-party app marketplaces, and EU users will remain limited only to EU third-party app marketplaces?
Digg founder Kevin Rose has teamed up with former rival Alexis Ohanian to buy the once-popular content aggregator as they bet on an artificial intelligence-powered revival of the platform that once drew around 40 million monthly visitors.
Launched in 2004 by a then 27-year-old Rose, Digg was once called the “homepage of the internet” and was a rival to Reddit, opens new tab, a firm co-founded by Ohanian.
Mike Isaac (via Hacker News):
“This is the perfect time to revisit this idea with fresh eyes,” Mr. Rose, 48, now a venture capitalist at True Ventures, said in an interview. He said social media had become so ubiquitous that “it doesn’t need to be winner take all,” adding that “we don’t need to take down Reddit to win.”
It’s an interesting move given that Reddit was a competitor who pretty much inherited that “homepage of the web” accolade. Also ‘interesting’ is the pair’s belief that most moderation can be done by AI …
[…]
The site was essentially killed by a combination of an unpopular update, widespread manipulation, and the growing popularity of Facebook – whose Like and Share buttons proved more popular. In 2012, the company was broken up and sold for parts.
Before it was acquired by Money Group, a publisher and advertising company, Digg was previously owned by BuySellAds. No word on how many people were working on the most recent version and whether any of them will continue.
Previously:
Security researchers are warning that data exposed to the internet, even for a moment, can linger in online generative AI chatbots like Microsoft Copilot long after the data is made private.
[…]
Lasso co-founder Ophir Dror told TechCrunch that the company found content from its own GitHub repository appearing in Copilot because it had been indexed and cached by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Dror said the repository, which had been mistakenly made public for a brief period, had since been set to private, and accessing it on GitHub returned a “page not found” error.
[…]
Lasso extracted a list of repositories that were public at any point in 2024 and identified the repositories that had since been deleted or set to private. Using Bing’s caching mechanism, the company found more than 20,000 since-private GitHub repositories still had data accessible through Copilot, affecting more than 16,000 organizations.
Any passwords or keys that were ever made public, however briefly, should be revoked. However, there may be other information of interest that’s now stored, and it was not obvious to me that it would be accessible via Copilot when it doesn’t show up in Bing.
Previously:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
Update (2025-03-12): Jon Parise:
I maintain one impacted browser extension, and I’ve decided that the work required to migrate the code to Manifest V3 isn’t worth it, especially when the result won’t work any “better” than the current version.
See also: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store.
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 dependenciesto developing an independent browserusing a novel engine based on web standards.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
Update (2025-03-13): Joe Rossignol:
Apple told Ars Technica’s Andrew Cunningham that not every generation of M-series chips for Macs will include an “Ultra” chip.
“When asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an ‘Ultra’ tier,” he wrote.
Perhaps that means we will never get an M4 Ultra chip?
Ahead of time, the first reviews of the device have been shared by select publications and YouTube channels.
The new M4 Max Mac Studio is a solid update, given that the Mac Studio hasn’t been updated since the M2 generation. The M4 Max chip performs as you would expect. Apple provided me with a review unit elevated from the base model, with 16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, 128 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of storage, which would cost $3699 on Apple’s site.
The Apple Mac Studio featuring the M3 Ultra represents the most powerful AI workstation currently available, tailored specifically toward AI developers’ demanding workflows. With its unprecedented unified memory (up to 512GB) and robust GPU performance, the M3 Ultra Mac Studio excels at running large language models (LLMs) efficiently, surpassing even high-end PCs in practical AI workloads. Its integration with Apple’s MLX framework provides optimized, user-friendly performance, establishing the Mac Studio as a uniquely capable machine for both current and future AI development.
Given that High Power Mode is offered on MacBook Pro models with the M4 Max chip, it seems like Apple has made a deliberate choice to not offer it on the Mac Studio with the same chip. It could simply be that the Mac Studio is a large desktop computer, meaning that High Power Mode is not necessary due to the lack of battery life or thermal constraints to begin with. However, we have not confirmed Apple's actual reasoning behind this decision.
The new Mac Studio models with M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips support Low Power Mode, according to an Apple support document updated today.
Apple says turning on Low Power Mode reduces the Mac Studio's fan noise, which is useful for tasks that require a quieter environment, and it also allows for reduced power consumption if the computer is left running continuously.
Hassam Nasir (via Helge Heß):
Polysoft Services, a French repair store, launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for developing custom PCBs that users can easily swap in and out at much lower costs than Apple. Luke goes with this concept as he upgrades his Mac Studio from 512GB to a whopping eight TB across two modules, which is expected to retail in the US at $849 (799 Euros). A quick search shows us that Apple is charging $2,400 for a similar upgrade—that’s 2.8x more expensive!
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:
Update (2025-03-14): Joe Rossignol:
Apple said the M3 Ultra chip is the “highest-performing chip it has ever created,” and the unverified benchmark result seems to confirm that. In the single result, the 32-core M3 Ultra chip achieved a multi-core CPU score of 27,749, which makes it around 8% faster than the 16-core M4 Max chip that previously held the performance record. The result also reveals that the M3 Ultra chip is up to 30% faster than the 24-core M2 Ultra chip.
As expected, the M4 Max chip tops the M3 Ultra chip in terms of single-core CPU performance by nearly 20%, according to the result.
In one Geekbench 6 result for the new Mac Studio, the M3 Ultra with an 80-core GPU achieved a Metal score of 259,668, up from 222,582 for the M2 Ultra chip with a 76-core GPU in the previous-generation Mac Studio. If that single result is accurate, then the M3 Ultra offers up to 16% faster graphics performance than the M2 Ultra.
The M3 Ultra chip is very much modeled on the M3 Max and offers twice as many CPU and GPU cores, Neural Engine cores, and the like. But look closer: The M3 Ultra offers a maximum of 512GB of RAM, four times the maximum 128GB of the M3 Max. And the M3 Ultra supports the faster Thunderbolt 5 specification, not the older Thunderbolt 4 of the rest of the family.
That means the M3 Ultra is an in-between chip, mostly based on the older M3 generation, but with a few high-end additions that push it up toward the M4 in terms of capability.
[…]
Still, the M3 Ultra’s arrival is weird enough to make it feel like we’re all missing part of the bigger picture. If there’s no other shoe to drop, why did the M2 Ultra-based Mac Pro not get its own M3 Ultra chip bump?
Update (2025-03-17): treblewoe (Threadreader):
When challenged why on earth in 2025, Apple is shipping an M3 Ultra when the M4 has been out for ten months, they spun, “not every chip generation will have an Ultra config.” While technically true due to Tim’s greed, it is conscious deception on their part.
Here’s what really happened. Jumping back to late 2020, Apple shipped the very first M1 silicon in Macs alongside the A14 Bionic from the iPhone 12 upon which it is heavily based. Chip design is an incredibly difficult task, and reuse of elements is key to making variants.
[…]
When the Studios and Mac Pro sold poorly, Apple made the call in the last quarter of ’23 to cancel revising the Studio or Mac Pro with an M3 Ultra – too low volume to be worth it. Tragically this was the precise moment when Apple was realizing local compute was vital.
By mid ’24 when all those high-memory configs were selling like crazy (relatively) due to LLMs, Apple had already made two terrible mistakes: killed the M3 Ultra that could’ve sold right into that demand. And worse, they had deleted the UltraFusion from the M4 entirely.
There will never be an M4 Ultra not due to some policy, but due to one of the worst near-misses in computing history. And given how long it took them to emergency ship the M3 Ultra (which was probably initially for Private Cloud Compute), the M5 might not be interposed either.
Previously:
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.
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.
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.
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
The Apple Color Czar needs to get Apple’s Blue Accessory Department under control. 11 current products, all with different blues…
Previously:
Update (2025-03-14): Tim Hardwick:
The Mute key, a staple on Mac keyboards since the PowerBook G3 'Lombard' debuted in 1999, has finally received a logical redesign on the new MacBook Air with M4 chip. As spotted by iCulture, the key now displays a speaker with a strike through it – matching the actual on-screen indicator that appears when you press it in macOS.
The new M4 MacBook Air is the Mac most people should buy.
[…]
I decided to run some benchmark tests on all four generations of Apple silicon MacBook Air, along with a last-generation Intel model from 2020. The charts are below, but the results are what you’d expect—there’s a huge leap from Intel to Apple silicon, and Apple’s been pushing performance forward with each generation of chip. (This new M4 actually offers the largest jump in processor performance between generations in the Apple silicon era.)
[…]
In normal lighting, the new MacBook Air camera didn’t appear that different from previous generations—it offered a little better contrast. As the lighting got worse, it showed that it could do a better job. Those statements give short shrift to the versatility of the camera, however. Because it’s a 12MP widescreen camera, the default, comparable webcam view is actually zoomed in via Center Stage—and zooming out exposes that the camera covers much more ground than its predecessors.
[…]
I really don’t mean to give Apple a hard time, but I had to double-check my shipping manifest because I was convinced the company had sent me a silver laptop to review. But when I placed the MacBook Air next to other modern Apple silver products, it’s clearly a different shade, and at certain viewing angles the blue undertone becomes more pronounced.
“Could you tell me which one is the new sky blue?” (Points at silvery one) “And that MacBook Pro is the regular silver?” “Yes.” “Ok…”
Ahead of time, the first reviews of the laptop have been shared by selected publications and YouTube channels, offering a closer look at new features and changes.
Update (2025-03-18): Tanner Bennett:
PSA: you can buy 192 GB of high-end DDR5 RAM for $600.
Apple still charges $400 for 16 GB.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
The new keyboard features a larger built-in trackpad, a 14-key function row, and a new aluminum hinge.
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.
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.
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.
Given how important Apple Intelligence seemingly is to Apple, I’m floored that the new iPad doesn’t support it. Baffling.
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:
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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 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.
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:
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:
This post describes the release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 6.1.
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
Intthat’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.
I really like proposals that make things work more intuitively. What this one does is expand the use of
nonisolatedso 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*TaskGroupfamily of APIs.[…]
Another area that has seen attention is around the
sendingkeyword. There were a number of situations where the compiler was too conservative withsendingand 6.1 has gotten a lot better!
Previously:
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:
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:
