Apple (Hacker News, Reddit, MacRumors):
Apple today announced AirPods Max 2, bringing even better Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), elevated sound quality, and intelligent features to the iconic over-ear design. Powered by H2, features like Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, Voice Isolation, and Live Translation come to AirPods Max for the first time. The new AirPods Max also unlock creative possibilities for podcasters, musicians, and content creators, with useful features like studio-quality audio recording and camera remote.
[…]
Siri Interactions allow users to conveniently and privately respond to Siri announcements by simply nodding their head yes or gently shaking their head no.
For day-to-day use, I prefer AirPods Pro. They’re just so small and convenient. For louder environments and longer sessions, I’ve been using some Bose QuietComfort headphones, which I got on sale for less than half the price of the AirPods Max. I find them more comfortable (perhaps because of the lower weight) and like that the ANC is adjustable. They also have a built-in headphone jack and a power button.
Hartley Charlton:
Most notably, the overall industrial design is identical.
[…]
The knit mesh canopy is also the same despite criticism over time that the fabric can stretch or lose tension with prolonged use.
[…]
The Smart Case has also not been updated and the device still uses the same case introduced in 2020, which covers the ear cups while leaving the headband exposed and places the headphones into an ultra-low-power state when stored inside.
This is a lot like the recent Studio Display update.
Joe Rossignol:
On the AirPods Max 2, a new Camera Remote feature allows you to press the Digital Crown to take a photo and start or stop video recording while using Apple’s Camera app or compatible third-party camera apps on an iPhone or iPad.
I wonder whether the EU will take issue with that.
Previously:
AirPods Apple Hardware Announcement iOS iOS 26 Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Siri
EagleFiler 1.9.20 is a maintenance release of my Mac digital filing cabinet and e-mail archiving app that improves importing (from Mariner Paperless, Evernote, and Apple Creator Studio), adds some scripts for working with dates and filenames, and improves searching and tagging.
macOS 26.4 adds some classes with strange names like AppIntentsServices.$RunnerServiceDispatcherActorProtocol and IDSFoundation.$IDSDRealTimeGroupSessionManager that confuse PyObjC and that (oddly) seem to get imported as part of Core Foundation even though they’re part of higher level frameworks. This was causing crashes at launch until I got it to ignore those symbols.
The Touch Bar is the gift that keeps on giving. Certain Web archive files seem to trigger a bug in WebKit’s Touch Bar support that causes a crash, so now we override that.
I continue to have problems with fake repos for my apps appearing on GitHub, trying to get people to download malware. In most cases, GitHub takes them down, but lately the scammers have started removing the malware (presumably temporarily), and then GitHub reports that it’s “taken appropriate action” but the rest of the repo purporting to be for my app remains up.
Previously:
Apple Creator Studio AppleScript EagleFiler Evernote GitHub Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Malware PyObjC Touch Bar WebKit
Ari Levy and Jordan Novet:
Atlassian said on Wednesday that it’s eliminating 10% of its workforce, or about 1,600 jobs, as the company restructures following a plunge in its stock price driven by developments in artificial intelligence.
“We are doing this to self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales, while strengthening our financial profile,” CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said in a blog post.
[…]
Other bosses have played up AI while saying they were lowering headcount in recent months. In February, Block’s Jack Dorsey announced that the payment company would lay off 4,000 employees as it seeks to put “intelligence” at the core of its operations. Amazon’s top human-resources executive, Beth Galetti, said in an October blog post disclosing a 14,000-person reduction in force that “this generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet.”
Jordan Valinsky:
Amazon is laying off 16,000 employees, the company’s second round of large-scale job reductions in three months as it fights to improve its standing in the battle for AI supremacy.
Axel Kannenberg (Hacker News):
Cannon-Brookes emphasized in his blog post that Atlassian does not follow the philosophy of replacing people with AI. At the same time, he also stated, “It would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.”
Jaspreet Singh (Hacker News):
The move comes as investors increasingly scrutinize software firms amid fears that advances in AI could disrupt traditional software business models, though some analysts say the sector-wide selloff may be an overreaction.
Top executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in January had said that while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies that were already planning layoffs.
Tony Arnold:
AI is a convenient scapegoat to distract from the actual failures in both businesses.
Resume.org (via John Gruber):
Companies cite AI (44%), reorganization/restructuring (42%), and budget constraints (39%) as the top drivers of layoffs
59% admit they emphasize AI when explaining hiring freezes or layoffs because it plays better with stakeholders than citing financial constraints
Zaheer Kachwala and Joel Jose:
Adobe’s battered shares fell another 6% on Friday as news that the Photoshop maker’s long-time CEO would step down cast fresh doubts over its strategy to battle mounting AI competition.
Shantanu Narayen is credited with crafting the modern Adobe by turning its creative tools into a subscription service with more reliable revenue. But an influx of artificial intelligence rivals that can create images at low cost and with a simple text prompt has in recent years raised doubts about its position.
The Grind Hotline:
Adobe is facing growing pressure from AI disruption, slowing enterprise budgets, and investor concerns about the future of creative software. In this episode of The Grind Hotline, we break down why layoffs could be coming next — and what the signals inside the tech industry are telling us.
Blind:
seeing lot of people especially in noida getting put on pips lately particularly from dx team. no severance being offered just performance improvement plans that everyone knows are precursor to firing.
Katie Paul, Jeff Horwitz, and Deepa Seetharaman:
Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers.
[…]
Over the last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing Meta to compete more forcefully in generative AI. The company has offered huge pay packages, some worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years, to court top AI researchers to a new superintelligence team.
The company has said it plans to invest $600 billion to build data centers by 2028.
Andrej Karpathy (Hacker News):
This is a research tool that visualizes 342 occupations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, covering 143M jobs across the US economy. Each rectangle’s area is proportional to total employment. Color shows the selected metric — toggle between BLS projected growth outlook, median pay, education requirements, and AI exposure.
Previously:
Amazon Artificial Intelligence Atlassian Layoffs Meta Square
Jeff Johnson:
The older, simpler API [NSURL URLWithString:URLString] behaves the same as [NSURL URLWithString:URLString encodingInvalidCharacters:YES] when your code is compiled with the iOS 17 or macOS 14 SDK. So much for backward compatibility! [NSURL URLWithString:URLString] continues to work fine with example 1, leaving the URL string untouched, but it mangles example 2:
https://example.org?url=https%253A%252F%252Fexample.org%253Ffoo%5B0%5D%253Dbar
Notice that the brackets are encoded as %5B and %5D, which is good, but the preexisting % characters are also encoded as %25, thereby transforming %3A (an encoded : character) into %253A, which is bad, indeed bonkers! The % characters did not need to be encoded, because they are already valid characters in a URL query.
I’ve seen other weird behavior, even using an old SDK, such as NSURLComponents returning nil instead of a valid URL.
Previously:
Cocoa iOS iOS 26 Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming URL
