Archive for August 5, 2025

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 5

Juli Clover (Mr. Macintosh):

Apple today provided developers with the fifth beta of macOS Tahoe 26 for testing purposes, with the update coming two weeks after the fourth beta.

There are no updates to the release notes, which still say Beta 4.

Mario Guzmán:

THIS IS THE NEW MACINTOSH HD ICON?! WTF

Previously:

Update (2025-08-06): The release notes now say “beta 5” and call out a few changes (integrated into the list, so you have to search for them):

In beta 5 SDK, CoreData changed several Sendable annotations to resolve compatibility issues with Swift 6’s new MainActor default isolation feature. These changes include marking NSManagedObject as NS_SWIFT_NONISOLATED NS_SWIFT_NONSENDABLE, marking NSManagedObjectContext as NS_SWIFT_NONISOLATED NS_SWIFT_SENDABLE, and requiring NS_SWIFT_SENDABLE closures for the family of perform, performBlock, performBlockAndWait and similar methods. These changes are ABI compatible with past releases but might introduce new warnings while building source code that violates the longstanding CoreData concurrency guidelines.

NSManagedObject are mutable reference types inextricably related to others in a graph and cannot be made Sendable. They are expected to be isolated to the scope of the NSManagedObjectContext that creates or fetches them. NSManagedObjectContext is a style of actor which encapsulates its own dispatch queue. While it’s impermissible to use many methods on NSManagedObjectContext from other threads, it is permissible to pass references around to invoke the performBlock family of methods, for the purpose of routing a Sendable closure to its managed dispatch queue. CoreData supports a user default -com.apple.CoreData.ConcurrencyDebug 1 which can be used to enable additional assertions.

I assume this debugging default still breaks NSAsynchronousFetchRequest (FB8438285).

Juli Clover (Slashdot):

Apple has been updating some classic Mac icons during the macOS Tahoe beta, upsetting some longtime Mac users who prefer the original look.

Mr. Macintosh:

RIP Macintosh HD icon (2001-2025) 🪦💐

Joe Rosensteel:

An external SSD enclosure that resembles a Samsung T7 but with offset port and vent holes like a Mophie power bank. It makes more sense than a naked hard drive because people always need external storage for their Macs that ship with almost none and can’t house any internal drives anyway. Bold move to put the Apple logo on it though.

Making it look like an SSD is fine, but why make it look like an external SSD? Anyway, the main problem is that it isn’t drawn well. The perspective looks wrong and is very off-putting. They did the same thing with the new icon for mounted disk images.

Nick Heer:

I want to put a finer point on the problem with this icon: it is not a mere aesthetic preference or a reaction to change, but a simple acknowledgement that this icon is not good. It has a generic quality, a lack of personality. The perspective does not make sense, either. It is just a sad grey box without any connection to literal data storage on a modern Mac, the “Macintosh HD” label beside it on the Desktop, or any object in the real world.

BasicAppleGuy:

macOS Icon History
Preview

Marcin Krzyzanowski:

these small things that makes the beta 5 (already) feels half baked. the basic controls have broken layout.

Jeff Johnson:

They’ve glassed up the video play button in Safari.

Colin Cornaby:

I real curious to see what Apple pro apps like Logic and Final Cut do with Liquid Glass.

Isaiah Carew:

i continue to believe that OS 26 is being designed by people that hate computers and don’t understand the people use them.

Previously:

Apple: The First 50 Years (Forthcoming)

David Pogue (tweet):

In time for Apple’s 50th anniversary, “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent David Pogue tells the iconic company’s entire life story: how it was born, nearly died, was born again under Steve Jobs, and became, under CEO Tim Cook, one of the most valuable companies in the world.

The 600-page book features 360 full-color photos, new facts that correct the record and illuminate Apple’s subversive culture, and 150 fresh interviews with the legendary figures who shaped Apple into what it is today.

We have to wait until March, but I bet it’s going to be great.

Previously:

SwiftUI DocumentGroups Are Terribly Limited

Christian Tietze:

This is how little you need to get started[…]

[…]

What the system does is provide a launch scene for you when you only declare a DocumentGroup in your SwiftUI.App.body. You can customize this by making the launch scene yourself. WWDC24 “Evolve Your Document Launch Experience” contains examples that at least offer to style what’s above the document picker.

[…]

So I believe they settled for: throw, and we ignore it; but throw immediately on button press, which means throw twice real quick, then you get an alert, because something’s broken.

[…]

Scenes cannot contain conditionals, the SceneBuilder does not support this. That means there’s no way to have an app offer different scenes depending on whether or not in-app purchases have been made.

Alexandre Colucci:

It baffles my mind that SwiftUI DocumentGroup still lacks the ability to programmatically create or open documents in response to external triggers like Quick Actions, Quick Look, Widgets, or the Files app.

Previously:

Update (2025-08-06): Matt Sephton:

I’m currently banging my head against this in my forthcoming pixel art app. Horrible.

Google Loses Appeal Against Epic

Mike Scarcella (MacRumors, Slashdot):

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a unanimous ruling, rejected, claims from Google that the trial judge made legal errors in the antitrust case that unfairly benefited “Fortnite” maker Epic Games, which filed the lawsuit in 2020.

[…]

U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco ordered Google in October to restore competition by allowing users to download rival app stores within its Play store and by making Play’s app catalog available to those competitors, among other reforms.

This seems to go much further than what Apple’s been ordered to do.

Tim Sweeney:

Total victory in the Epic v Google appeal!

Previously:

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