OpenAI (Hacker News):
We will bring Sky’s deep macOS integration and product craft into ChatGPT, and all members of the team will join OpenAI.
John Voorhees:
I’m not surprised by this development at all. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity have all been developing features similar to what Sky could do for a while now. In addition, Sam Altman was an investor in Software Applications Incorporated, the company behind Sky.
Samuel Axon:
That includes SAI co-founders Ari Weinstein (CEO), Conrad Kramer (CTO), and Kim Beverett (Product Lead)—all of whom worked together for several years at Apple after Apple acquired Weinstein and Kramer’s previous company, which produced an automation tool called Workflows, to integrate Shortcuts across Apple’s software platforms.
The three SAI founders left Apple to work on Sky, which leverages Apple APIs and accessibility features to provide context about what’s on screen to a large language model; the LLM takes plain language user commands and executes them across multiple applications. At its best, the tool aimed to be a bit like Shortcuts, but with no setup, generating workflows on the fly based on user prompts.
Rui Carmo:
Well, guess what: OpenAI did what Apple should have done and acquired them.
[…]
At the time it was announced I ranted on about how Apple had managed to mis-manage this kind of talent and vision for Mac automation so badly that they ended up leaving the company and not having any of what they showed at the time incorporated in Apple Intelligence, and I am sticking to my guns on that one[…]
Juli Clover:
OpenAI’s Sky acquisition comes just a day after OpenAI announced ChatGPT Atlas, a new browser that’s designed to compete with Safari and Chrome.
Ryan Jones:
It’s a chatbot.
It’s a browser.
It’s an OS.
Are you getting it yet @Apple?
Previously:
Acquisition Artificial Intelligence Business ChatGPT Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 OpenAI Sky
Marcus Mendes:
In its statement issued earlier this week to the German Press Agency, Apple said the following:
“Intense lobbying efforts in Germany, Italy and other countries in Europe may force us to withdraw this feature to the detriment of European consumers. (…) We will continue to urge the relevant authorities in Germany, Italy and across Europe to allow Apple to continue providing this important privacy tool to our users.”
Juli Clover:
Germany launched a probe into App Tracking Transparency back in 2022, and in February 2025, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office preliminarily ruled that Apple abused its market power with ATT, giving itself preferential treatment, even though Apple says it does not collect data from third-party apps. The cartel said that Apple’s restrictions made it “far more difficult” for app publishers to access user data relevant for advertising.
In March 2025, Apple was fined 150 million euros by France’s Competition Authority. French regulators said that Apple complicated the process for users to opt out of tracking and unfairly disadvantaged third-party developers and ad providers. Apple is facing a similar investigation in Italy, with a ruling expected later this year.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
Apple would rather disable app tracking prevention in Europe entirely than to have to conform to the rules in its own apps that it imposes on third party developers.
And then it tries to blame regulators and lobbyists for the situation.
At every turn, Apple is determined to prove that it’s a scummy company that can’t remotely be trusted
“Apple (…) holds itself to a higher standard than it requires of any third-party developer. [Just trust us, bro 🤞]”
Josh Calvetti:
Apple does LOTS of telemetry and tracking in their apps. They just believe that it’s okay because they are trustworthy because they said so.
Dare Obasanjo:
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
Regulators are now catching on how Apple uses protecting users as an excuse for anticompetitive practices.
Previously:
Antitrust App Tracking Transparency European Union France Germany iOS iOS 26 Italy Legal
John Ozbay (Hacker News):
In my mind, “Apple” as a brand used to be synonymous with “attention to detail” but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years, their choices have become anything but detail oriented.
[…]
If you are privacy conscious like me, and don’t give the Reminders app permission to access your location, it will ask you for location permissions every single damn time you launch it.
[…]
For some reason, Mac OS X doesn’t have a standard and consistent design for tabs.
[…]
Here’s the iOS 26 Files app in dark mode, and light mode side by side. Notice anything missing? Like the folder name or the barely visible down arrow? It’s almost as if they haven’t tested iOS 26 in dark mode at all.
[…]
I fired up Settings to disable transparency, and none of the icons showed up there at first. […] Feeling frustrated beyond measure, I enabled “reduced transparency” mode, which fixed the icons but broke other things even further.
There are just a huge number of little problems, which really degrade the experience of Apple’s platforms. This morning, the “d” key on my keyboard stopped working. This has happened several times over the last few months. I know it’s a software issue because the problem also occurs with other keyboards (both Bluetooth and USB). Restarting the Mac always fixes it. When I tried that today, the Mac showed the login prompt on the wrong display and in the wrong resolution. After a few seconds it moved to the proper display. I started typing my password but, even though I use a USB keyboard, the first few characters were dropped, and I had to backspace and start again. There was a little glitch where nothing happened for a second or two after I pressed Delete. After booting finished, everything was extremely slow for no apparent reason. The cursor was jumpy. Moving between messages in Mail took several seconds even though it was otherwise idle. LaunchBar took a few minutes to finish launching. I clicked on iStat Menus to see what was going on, and it took 30 seconds for the menu to pull down. Activity Monitor showed little CPU use and disk activity, and samples just seemed to show various apps spending lots of time waiting. Eventually, everything returned to normal speed.
A few years ago, I started collecting links for a massive post about design paper cuts. I never found the time to write it all up, and many of the posts have since been deleted, but it seems worth including some of the relevant links here instead of letting them languish in a draft:
Joe Rosensteel:
One of the things that I think about from time to time is Apple’s collection of apps. Some are the crown jewels, like Apple’s pro apps, and others help an everyday consumer to tackle their iLife. All are pretty starved for attention and resources, outside of infrequent updates aligned with showing off the native power of Apple Silicon, Apple Intelligence, or demos of platform integration that never quite get all the way there.
Previously:
Apple Software Quality Design Files.app iOS iOS 26 Liquid Glass Mac macOS 15 Sequoia macOS Tahoe 26 Reminders WebKit
Thomas Claburn:
Microsoft Excel for the past week has been hanging or crashing on iOS and iPadOS devices, to customers’ great annoyance.
The problems appear to have begun following the release of Excel version 2.102.1 for iOS and iPadOS on October 13, 2025. The release added support for Apple’s Liquid Glass design, which debuted with the September 15, 2025 release of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 – also credited with dozens of bugs.
The Register downloaded Excel for iOS, version 2.102.2, released three days ago, and found the app non-functional. The “+ Create” icon did not respond to touch events, which prevented the creation of a new spreadsheet from the menu of provided templates.
[…]
Reports of problems began surfacing about a week ago and have continued since then.
Poor testing and communication from Microsoft, and because of the App Store customers have no way to revert to the last stable version.
Update (2025-10-24): Erik Schwiebert:
This has been addressed. It was unfortunately the intersection of a latent client-side bug (been there for a long time) and a change in a server-side policy that exposed the latent bug; the issue was not connected to the monthly update and Liquid Glass changes. It took more time than desired to identify the server-side change as the root cause.
App Store iOS iOS 26 iOS App Liquid Glass Microsoft Excel
