Michael Tsai

Lower App Store Fees in China

Michael Tsai — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:04:39 +0000

As of March 15, 2026, changes will be made to the commission rates that apply to the China mainland storefront of the App Store on iOS and iPadOS.

The commission rate for standard Apple In-App Purchase and paid app transactions will be 25%. Currently, the rate is 30%. The commission rate for qualifying Apple In-App Purchase transactions under the App Store Small Business Program and Mini Apps Partner Program, and for auto-renewals of Apple In-App Purchase subscriptions after the first year, will be 12%. Currently, the rate is 15%.

Simon Sharwood:

Apple said the changes came “following discussions with the Chinese regulator.”

[…]

In February, the company surely perceived its Chinese business was at risk when reports suggested Chinese regulators were considering a probe into its app store commissions. Those reports saw Apple’s share price slump by around five percent.

[…]

China is a Google-free zone, so app stores operated by manufacturers of Android handsets are numerous and well-used. Apple therefore faces more competition in China than elsewhere.

The other major difference in China is the popularity of an app store run by web giant Tencent, which offers both conventional smartphone apps and “mini programs” – apps that run within the WeChat messaging application it operates.

Jeff Johnson:

The crazy thing about the App Store cut in China is how it arrived so quietly in comparison with years of court battles in the US and legislation in the EU.

Previously:

Five Decades of Thinking Different

Michael Tsai — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:04:33 +0000

Computer History Museum (MacRumors):

Join us for a special CHM Live evening celebrating Apple’s first half-century, featuring speakers from across the eras of Apple history, including former Apple CEO John Sculley, Senior Employee Chris Espinosa, former Senior Vice President (SVP) of Hardware Engineering Jon Rubinstein (by video), and former Chief Software Technology Officer and SVP of Software Engineering Avie Tevanian.

From the early garage days of the 1970s, to the heyday of the Macintosh in the 1980s, to Apple’s transformation in the 2000s with the iPhone, the program will explore how Apple repeatedly redefined itself while holding fast to a distinctive vision.

This is really good.

Previously:

Meta Acquires Moltbook

Michael Tsai — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:04:30 +0000

Amanda Silberling (Hacker News, Slashdot):

Meta acquired Moltbook, the Reddit-like “social network” where AI agents using OpenClaw can communicate with one another. The news was first reported by Axios and later confirmed to TechCrunch.

Moltbook is joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, a Meta spokesperson told us. Moltbook creators Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will join the team as part of the acquisition.

[…]

OpenClaw blew up among the tech community, but Moltbook broke containment, reaching people who had no idea what OpenClaw was, but who reacted viscerally to the idea that there was a social network where AI agents were talking about them.

Previously:

Apple’s 50th Anniversary

Michael Tsai — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:44:13 +0000

Tim Cook (tweet, MacRumors):

Fifty years ago in a small garage, a big idea was born. Apple was founded on the simple notion that technology should be personal, and that belief — radical at the time — changed everything.

[…]

At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday. But we couldn’t let this milestone pass without thanking the millions of people who make Apple what it is today — our incredible teams around the world, our developer community, and every customer who has joined us on this journey. Your ideas inspire our work. Your trust drives us to do better. Your stories remind us of all we can accomplish when we think different.

Joe Rossignol:

Apple today announced that it will celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary over the coming weeks, but it has yet to reveal any specific plans.

Previously:

Apple: The First 50 Years (Forthcoming)

Ensembles 3

Michael Tsai — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:44:09 +0000

Drew McCormack (February):

Had my Core Data sync framework, Ensembles, pretty much in maintenance mode. With Apple moving on to SwiftData, didn’t seem any point to modernizing the 15 year old ObjC codebase. But I had the thought to give Claude a shot at it, and in 2 days I’ve got a complete port: Swift 6, structured concurrency instead of OperationQueue. Even adding a bunch of new backends (Box, pCloud, S3). Will make it available as Ensembles 3 to subscribers soon.

Drew McCormack:

The core idea behind Ensembles is that sync doesn’t need a central server. Each device keeps its own copy of the Core Data store. The framework watches your saves, generates compact change logs, and when changes arrive from another device, it merges them in. There’s no server that understands your data model. No hosting costs. Each device is an equal peer.

[…]

More recently, the web community has started to embrace this approach and given it a name: local-first. I attended the inaugural Local-First Conf in Berlin in 2024, and gave a short talk about my journey with Ensembles — at that point more than 10 years old. It was good to see so much energy around ideas that some of us had relied on for a long time.

[…]

One thing that made this feasible: Ensembles had extensive tests. Without those, I wouldn’t have attempted it. When you’re rewriting a sync framework — where bugs mean data loss — you need to know things actually work. The tests were the safety net. Claude Code would produce Swift code, the tests would catch problems, and I’d fix things up. Without that feedback loop, this would have been reckless.

Ensembles 3:

Ensembles is the only local-first sync framework for Core Data and SwiftData. Unlike most sync frameworks, it requires no custom server — your data syncs as opaque files through storage your users already have: CloudKit, Google Drive, OneDrive, WebDAV, or any custom backend.

[…]

Ensembles 3 is a modern rewrite of the Ensembles Objective-C framework in pure Swift, with async/await concurrency and Swift Package Manager distribution. It is fully backward compatible with Ensembles 2 cloud data.

[…]

No vendor can inspect, lock, or hold your data hostage.

Unlike Apple’s own CloudKit-based solutions:

Full Core Data fidelity — ordered relationships work. Validation rules preserved. No model compromises required.

The tradeoff is that your objects don’t really live in the cloud where they can be searched or fetched on-demand. The cloud is treated as dumb storage, and you have to pull down a full local copy before you can really do anything.

The CloudKit backend is free. It’s $99/year for additional backends and encryption or $499/year for full source access and code-level support.

Previously:

6K Display Comparison

Michael Tsai — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:44:04 +0000

Wade Tregaskis:

Nobody else has even tried to make a bright 6k display – in fact, every non-Apple 6k display is outright dim by modern display standards – they’re barely brighter than the original 5k display in the 2015 iMac!

[…]

For the price of one Apple Pro Display XDR you can get four Asus ProArt 6k displays.

I suspect there’s only two 6k panel models in existence – the one used by Apple & Asus, and the one used by LG & Dell.

I did not realize that the LG and Dell displays actually have more pixels than the Apple and ASUS ones. I’m still surprised that Apple discontinued the Pro Display XDR without introducing a replacement.

Garrett Murray:

I am so disappointed Apple decided to discontinue the 32-inch Pro Display XDR. After so many years, I assumed Apple would at least maintain the product and push an update similar to the 27-inch version they just released, but obviously they didn’t see enough traction with this high-end, limited-audience display and just decided to scrap it entirely. As Wade said, while the new 27-inch Studio Display XDR features are welcome improvements, downgrading to a 27-inch main display is not something I’m interested in. I will likely just accept the lower brightness and contrast ratios of something like the LG UltraFine evo because, for me, the screen real estate and density are far too valuable.

Previously:

Hardware-Exclusive Mac Accent Colors

Michael Tsai — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:43:57 +0000

John Gruber:

By default, the MacOS accent color in System Settings → Appearance defaults to a color that matches the Neo’s hardware — a fun trick Apple has been using for decades.

David Deller:

This is the first I’m learning that System Settings sometimes has a special accent color only available to a Mac with a particular hardware colorway. (I’m boring and always buy silver devices, otherwise I think I would have noticed.)

I’m a bit annoyed that I didn’t know to test with these colors. I test with all the other colors.

Mahdi Bchatnia:

Accents is an app that lets you use the iMac/MacBook Neo accent colors on any Mac.

Marko Zivkovic:

The MacBook Neo ships with a special build of macOS 26.3, AppleInsider as predicted. All other Macs will need macOS 26.4 beta 4 to get the wallpapers made for the machine.

Previously:

Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

Michael Tsai — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:20:49 +0000

Greg Knauss:

What I am talking about is being replaced, about becoming expendable, about machines gaining the ability to adequately perform a very specific function that was previously the exclusive domain of skull meat.

What I’m talking about is that nothing I do matters. That nothing I can do matters.

In just the past few months, what was wild-eyed science fiction is now workaday reality. I’ve been dubious about the prospects of LLMs creating code (and lots and lots of other things) for as long as they’ve existed, but it’s hard to argue with the latest wave and their abilities from a purely practical, purely capitalistic, purely ship-something-anything perspective — the perspective that pays the bills. I’ve seen self-professed non-technical people bring functioning code into being, and that bests a significant number of actual humans I’ve worked with.

[…]

Is the code any good? I don’t know. Who cares? Nobody looks at it anyway. AI produces a result, and results are what matter, and if you’re waiting for quality to factor significantly into that equation, I’ve got some bad news about the last 40 years of professional software development for you.

Gus Mueller (Hacker News):

I’ve been using Claude Code quite a bit lately, not so much to replace my programming but to augment it. The new animated image export preview in Acorn 8.4.1 was a direct result of that. It was a nice little feature that I knew exactly how to do, but I hadn’t prioritized getting done yet because there were a bunch of other things on my plate. But with a little assist, it was quick to implement.

But why bother implementing anything when anyone can make an app in an instant? […] But at the same time I’m not worried about being replaced by AI, or by quick free apps that have been built by AI. And in some ways I’m more hopeful than ever.

[…]

I’ve got feelings because anyone can put an app together now, so what’s the point of me? But at the same time, I can focus on what I want to focus on and hopefully charge forward and maybe everyone else will get tired of little vibe coded apps because you still have to know exactly what you want to build. And you can’t build something you can’t think of. And I know how to think and I have ideas.

And I have discipline and I know how to ship. And in my experience, that’s what has always mattered.

Joey Politano (Hacker News):

Brutal numbers for US tech sector jobs released today—overall, employment decreased by 12k last month and is down 57k over the last year

mjr00:

In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an “average” developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.

Contrary to what many say, I don’t think it’s simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren’t. Juniors are still getting hired because they’re still way cheaper and they’re just as capable as using AI as anyone. The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren’t high performers.

Samuel Coron:

Yet Citadel is saying that the job openings for software developers are rapidly rising

Rafe Rosner-Uddin (Lobsters):

Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.

The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.

[…]

AWS suffered a 13-hour interruption to a cost calculator used by customers in mid-December after engineers allowed the group’s Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, and the AI tool opted to “delete and recreate the environment,” the FT previously reported.

[…]

Amazon has undertaken multiple rounds of lay-offs in recent years, most recently eliminating 16,000 corporate roles in January. The group has disputed the claim that headcount cuts were responsible for an increase in recent outages.

George Hotz (Hacker News):

That said, if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out. The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players. If you have a job like that, or work at a company like that, the sooner you quit the better your outcome will be. This is the real driver of the layoffs, the big players consolidating the rent seeking to them. They just say it’s AI cause that makes the stock price go up.

The trick is not to play zero sum games. This is what I have been saying the whole time. Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns. If you create more value than you consume, you are welcome in any well operating community.

Previously:

LLMs and Software Development Roundup

CoreDataEvolution

Michael Tsai — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:20:35 +0000

Fatbobman (Mastoson):

This library is designed to simplify and enhance Core Data’s handling of multithreading, drawing inspiration from SwiftData’s @ModelActor feature, enabling efficient, safe, and scalable operations.

[…]

Custom Executors for Core Data Actors
CoreDataEvolution provides custom executors that ensure all operations on managed objects are performed on the appropriate thread associated with their managed object context. It uses a UnownedJob-based serial executor path compatible with the minimum supported OS versions.

@NSModelActor Macro
The @NSModelActor macro simplifies Core Data concurrency, mirroring SwiftData’s @ModelActor macro. It generates the necessary boilerplate code to manage a Core Data stack within an actor, ensuring safe and efficient access to managed objects.

NSMainModelActor Macro
NSMainModelActor is the main-thread companion macro for classes. It binds modelContext to viewContext and provides the same convenience access APIs (subscript, withContext) through NSMainModelActor protocol extensions.

Elegant Actor-based Concurrency
CoreDataEvolution allows you to create actors with custom executors tied to Core Data contexts, ensuring that all operations within the actor are executed serially on the context’s thread.

Previously:

Weathergraph 1.0.330

Michael Tsai — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:34:40 +0000

Tomas Kafka:

Multiple locations — the most-requested Weathergraph feature — is finally here.

Save home, work, your favourite trails, or your next destination. Switch between them instantly with a single tap.

Finally. This is still my favorite weather app. As with the forecast provider toggle, the location toggle works on the main graph (and retains your scroll position) but not within a daily forecast.

Previously:

Acme Weather 1.0

Michael Tsai — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:34:16 +0000

Adam Grossman:

Fifteen years ago, we started work on the Dark Sky weather app.

[…]

We enjoyed our time at Apple. So why did we leave to start another weather company?

It’s simple: when looking at the landscape of the countless weather apps out there, many of them lovely, we found ourselves feeling unsatisfied.

[…]

Our homegrown forecasts are produced using many different data sources, including numerical weather prediction models, satellite data, ground station observations, and radar data. Most of the time, our forecast will be a reliable source of information (it’s better than the one we had at Dark Sky). But, crucially, we supplement the main forecast with a spread of alternate predictions. These are additional forecast lines that capture a range of alternate possible outcomes[…]

The main two things I want, which previous apps didn’t provide, are an easy way to see different predictions for the same location (since there can be huge variance, e.g. in the number of inches of snow) and different locations at the same future time (to help decide where I should go). This tries to address the first half, though it doesn’t seem to give a range of alternate predictions for the amount of snow, only the likelihood of precipitation and its subjective intensity.

John Voorhees:

If you see widely separated lines, there’s a greater chance that conditions will vary from what Acme’s model expects, whereas a tight cluster of lines gives you greater confidence as you walk out the door.

[…]

Beneath the hourly conditions graph, Acme displays a horizontally scrolling list of weather stats. Swiping between them repopulates the graph with whichever forecast metric you want. It’s a lot of data, and it’s all accessible without scrolling vertically or switching views, which I love. Also, when precipitation is on its way, the app displays an additional graph with minute-by-minute details for the upcoming hour.

[…]

Acme Weather includes an unusual emphasis on notifications, too. Instead of relegating the feature to the app’s settings, Acme dedicates an entire tab to it. In a world of notification overload, that’s a bold move, but it works. That’s because Acme puts its users in the driver’s seat, offering fine-grained control over the notifications you receive.

Chance Miller:

What strikes me most about the app is how well it takes large amounts of information and distills that into an interface that is actually readable.

cornchip:

I’ve thought before that I’d like error ranges in weather graphs. Alternative predictions aren’t quite how I’d imagined it. Showing some detail/personality/confidence level for the alternative prediction lines might help. This might also be solved by time with the app to learn how surprising the weather turns out to be when predictions were divergent.

Cumulative precipitation could use another dimension to the data to show either soon-ness in the next 24 hours or how short of a time period is predicted to deliver most of the rainfall. That’s a hard data visualization problem.

Previously:

Ars Technica’s AI-Fabricated Quotes

Michael Tsai — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:32:21 +0000

Maggie Harrison Dupré (Hacker News, more context):

The Condé Nast-owned Ars Technica has terminated senior AI reporter Benj Edwards following a controversy over his role in the publication and retraction of an article that included AI-fabricated quotes, Futurism has confirmed.

Earlier this month, Ars retracted the story after it was found to include fake quotes attributed to a real person. The article — a write-up of a viral incident in which an AI agent seemingly published a hit piece about a human engineer named Scott Shambaugh — was initially published on February 13. After Shambaugh pointed out that he’d never said the quotes attributed to him, Ars’ editor-in-chief Ken Fisher apologized in an editor’s note, in which he confirmed that the piece included “fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them” and characterized the error as a “serious failure of our standards.”

I’ve enjoyed Edwards’ work over the years and linked to many of his pieces, but obviously this is a very serious offense.

gracelynewhouse:

The individual firing is a distraction from the structural issue. Newsrooms have been cutting editorial staff for a decade, which means the verification layers that would have caught this — fact-checkers, copy editors, senior editors doing source verification — largely don’t exist anymore. Then they adopt AI tools that increase throughput without increasing oversight capacity, and act surprised when fabrication slips through.

This is a classic systems failure: you remove the safety mechanisms, add a new source of risk, and punish the individual operator. It’s the same pattern you see in industrial accidents.

This has been going on for a lot longer than a decade. To me, the takeaway is not that it’s the system’s fault but that many of these media brands are operating on undeserved trust. There’s a lot less checking going on than there used be or that you might imagine.

The other interesting point is that Edwards says the intent was not to use AI to fabricate quotes but as a tool for processing quotes he already had:

During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based Al tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline.

[…]

I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words.

Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft.

This seems not so different from how I commonly hear people say that they use AI to collect/extract or reformat information into a table. I’ve never understood, given the propensity for hallucination and citing papers that don’t exist, why such a distillation should be trusted. Yet I know that people are already relying on such LLM-derived works to make decisions. At least with code, you can compile it and test it and read it to see whether it makes sense. With a number in a table cell, how can you easily check where it came from?

Previously:

LLMs and Software Development Roundup

Paul Brainerd, RIP

Michael Tsai — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:31:01 +0000

Todd Bishop (via Adam Engst):

In early 1984, Paul Brainerd and four engineers packed into his old Saab and another car and drove south on Interstate 5 from Seattle. They had been laid off after Kodak bought their employer, Atex, a company whose computerized text-processing systems let newspaper reporters and editors write and edit stories on video terminals instead of typewriters.

They had six months of savings, a rough idea for a piece of software, and no company name.

What happened next was documented years later in oral history interviews with Brainerd for the Computer History Museum, and Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry.

[…]

Paul Brainerd, who went on to coin the term “desktop publishing” and build Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker into one of the defining programs of the personal computer era, died Sunday at his home[…]

Jeff Carlson:

It’s not hyperbole to say I wouldn’t be where I am today without PageMaker. My school paper had a Mac Plus and swapped 3.5-in disks often to run both the Mac and PageMaker.

Jason Anthony Guy:

Desktop publishing was one of the biggest reasons I obsessed over computers in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Though I spent more of my time in QuarkXPress than PageMaker, I can trace my early creative and business ambitions to the software and industry Brainerd pioneered.

AirPods Control Center Design in iOS 26

Michael Tsai — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:32:54 +0000

Marco Arment:

I fail using this UI at least once a week.

It’s the AirPods Control Center volume pane, where I go to put my AirPods Pro into Adaptive mode (which I have configured a hundred times to be part of the long-press selection, but that always gets inexplicably forgotten).

What you’re SUPPOSED to do is tap the circle to bring up the modes.

But right below it is the OBVIOUS LOOK OF A DROPDOWN CONTROL, complete with the double-arrow and tint color, but it is NOT ACTUALLY A TAPPABLE CONTROL AARRGGHHH 😡

You’re supposed to tap the gray icon that matches the background, not the blue arrows that look like a button. What were they thinking?

You get to this screen by long-pressing on the volume slider in Control Center. It does not work to long-press on the volume slider in the sheet that you get after tapping the AirPlay (sound output selector) button within an app.

Previously:

Hetzner Price Hikes

Michael Tsai — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:32:37 +0000

Hetzner (Hacker News, Reddit):

The costs to operate our infrastructure and to buy new hardware have both increased dramatically. Therefore, our price changes will affect both existing products and new orders and will take effect starting on 1 April 2026.

We have genuinely tried hard to optimize our costs and to prevent increasing our prices for as long as possible. But we can no longer compensate for the strain that it has placed on our operations. We want to continue to deliver quality products that meet both our standards and your expectations, so we must take this step.

Here’s the table of pricing changes, which seem to vary from single-digit to triple-digit increases.

John Brayton:

I updated this post to reflect that price increase. I have not found any statement that the IPv4 prices are changing, so I assume that they are not.

Previously:

1Password’s Price Hike

Michael Tsai — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:32:24 +0000

Adam Engst:

1Password has announced that prices for its popular password manager will increase for renewals made on or after 27 March 2026. In an email to users, the company said that 1Password Individual will increase from $35.88 per year ($2.99 per month, paid annually) to $47.88 per year ($3.99 per month), and that 1Password Families would increase from $59.88 per year ($5.99 per month) to $71.88 per year ($6.99 per month).

[…]

Annoyingly, 1Password referred to the price increase as an “update,” as in “We’re updating the cost of your subscription,” and “we’re updating pricing for Family plans.”

Over the years, 1Password has really diverged from what I’m looking for, but if you need what it offers the new price doesn’t seem crazy. However, it is off-putting to see the increase described as an “update.” (Simplenote used the same language last year to announce that it was going into maintenance mode.) Big picture, Apple Passwords is free and more than enough for most users, so it’s not surprising that the price of what has become a more niche solution would go up. I wonder how much additional revenue this will bring in vs. the number of of unsubscriptions it causes as the announcement jolts some customers into realizing that they no longer need it.

We can debate how well the two apps implement those features, but neither is seriously problematic. 1Password justifies its price with its significantly larger compatibility matrix and feature set, including[…]

[…]

After all that, 1Password sent another email today, apologizing for the first one because we had signed up for the Families Launch Special Plan, a legacy pricing tier that is apparently locked in for life. I hadn’t remembered that, but presumably someone did. So I’m happy—I get to keep using all the 1Password features without paying more.

The Age Verification Trap

Michael Tsai — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:32:15 +0000

Waydell D. Carvalho (Hacker News):

In cases when regulators demand real enforcement rather than symbolic rules, platforms run into a basic technical problem. The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are. And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely. Age-restriction laws push platforms toward intrusive verification systems that often directly conflict with modern data-privacy law.

This is the age-verification trap. Strong enforcement of age rules undermines data privacy.

[…]

When disputes reach regulators or courts, the question is simple: Can minors still access the platform easily? If the answer is yes, authorities tell companies to do more. Over time, “reasonable steps” become more invasive.
Repeated facial scans, escalating ID checks, and long-term logging become the norm. Platforms that collect less data start to look reckless by comparison. Privacy-preserving designs lose out to defensible ones.
This pattern is familiar, including online sales-tax enforcement. After courts settled that large platforms had an obligation to collect and remit sales taxes, companies began continuous tracking and storage of transaction destinations and customer location signals. That tracking is not abusive, but once enforcement requires proof over time, companies build systems to log, retain, and correlate more data. Age verification is moving the same way. What begins as a one-time check becomes an ongoing evidentiary system, with pressure to monitor, retain, and justify user-level data.

Apple (MacRumors):

Today we’re providing an update on the tools available for developers to meet their age assurance obligations under upcoming U.S. and regional laws, including in Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Utah, and Louisiana. Updates to the Declared Age Range API are now available in beta for testing.

Andy Edser (Hacker News):

The government of California is implementing a law that requires operating system providers to implement some form of age verification into their account setup procedures.

The Lunduke Journal:

Here’s where each of the “All Operating Systems must do age verification” laws are as of today.

Matthew Green:

This has bothered me, because every month that goes by I become more convinced that anonymous authentication the most important topic we could be talking about as cryptographers. This is because I’m very worried that we’re headed into a bit of a privacy dystopia, driven largely by bad legislation and the proliferation of AI.

Neil (Hacker News):

I have yet to see a well-considered proposal.

Worse, the question that they are trying answer is rarely stated clearly and concisely.

And it is unusual to see any consideration of broader sociological issues, let alone an emphasis on this, with a focus instead on perceived “quick win” technosolutionism.

But anyway…

I was pondering last night for which services I, personally, would actually be willing to verify my age or identity.

And… the answer is “none”.

Previously:

Lower Google Play Store Fees and Registered App Stores

Michael Tsai — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:13:06 +0000

Ryan Whitwam (PDF):

Late last year, Google and Epic concocted a settlement that would end the long-running antitrust dispute that stemmed from Fortnite fees. The sides have now announced an updated version of the agreement with new changes aimed at placating US courts and putting this whole mess in the rearview mirror. The gist is that Android will get more app stores, and developers will pay lower fees.

[…]

Representatives for Epic and Google have both expressed enthusiastic support for the newly announced settlement, which is subject to Judge Donato’s approval. The parties say the agreement will resolve their dispute globally, not only in the US.

[…]

The settlement affirms that developers in the Play Store will be able to steer users to other forms of payment. This is what got Fortnite pulled from the Play Store (and Apple App Store) back in 2020. When developers choose to use Google’s billing platform, they’ll pay lower fees as well.

In-app content will now have a 5 percent Google billing fee, plus a 15 percent service fee for new installs. Existing installs will have a higher 20 percent service fee. Flat-rate app and game purchases will be set at 15 percent total for new installs. The service fee for ongoing subscriptions will be 10 percent. These are all modest reductions on the previous rates, which have been cut down in recent years, but the flat 30 percent Play Store share is well and truly dead.

Sean Hollister:

By the end of the year, it will launch a “Registered App Stores” program outside of the US, so that you can download and install third-party app stores (like the Epic Games Store) from the web without the friction that Google erected previously.

[…]

With Registered App Stores, another distinct program run by Google, the company is promising to not charge developers fees at all. “They don’t pay any ongoing fees related to any of the transactions happening in the apps,” says Samat. And installing them onto your Android device should be a relatively frictionless experience.

[…]

To be clear, “Registered App Stores” is not what a US court has ordered Google to create in the United States — Google must instead carry rival app stores inside of its own Google Play Store, and give them access to the full catalog of Android apps so they can meaningfully gain ground against Google and undo its monopoly.

Ian Carlos Campbell (Hacker News):

Google says that its updated fee structure will come to the EEA, the UK and the US by June 30, Australia by September 30, Korea and Japan by December 31 and the entire world by September 30, 2027. Meanwhile, the company’s updated Google Play Games Level Up program and new App Experience program will launch in the EEA, the UK, the US and Australia on September 30, before hitting the remaining regions alongside the updated fee structure. For any developers interested in offering their own app store, Google says it’ll launch its Registered App Stores program “with a version of a major Android release” before the end of the year. According to the company, the program will be available in other regions first before it comes to the US.

Sean Hollister (Slashdot):

On March 3rd, [Tim Sweeney] not only signed away Epic’s rights to sue and disparage the company over anything covered in the term sheet — Google’s app distribution practices, its fees, how it treats games and apps — he signed away his right to advocate for any further changes to Google’s app store policies, too. He can’t criticize Google’s app store practices. In fact, he has to praise them.

The contract states that “Epic believes that the Google and Android platform, with the changes in this term sheet, are procompetitive and a model for app store / platform operations, and will make good faith efforts to advocate for the same.”

[…]

He may even have to appear in other courts around the world to defend this deal with Google, and Google gets to make sure his public statements are supportive of the deal from here on out.

And while Epic can still be part of the “Coalition for App Fairness,” the organization that Epic quietly and solely funded to be its attack dog against Google and Apple, he can only point that organization at Apple now.

Jeff Johnson:

This is obviously terrible, but I find it strange that all or most of the criticism is going to Sweeney, letting Google off the hook. Sweeney cynically agreed to the terms for financial benefit, but clearly the terms were demanded by Google, not by Sweeney.

Nick Heer:

Regardless, it is notable for these sweeping changes to be brought to Android phones worldwide in the coming years, while Apple’s App Store is a patchwork of region-specific policies difficult for developers to navigate. It is too bad there is not really competition between these stores. Most people who buy smartphones choose the platform as a whole and accept whatever software experience they are provided. They do not need to bother themselves with the business terms of each store. With the improvements to third-party stores on Android, it sets up the possibility for greater competition within that platform. Apple should do the same.

Ryan Jones:

Apple announced weird (and incomplete) redone fees for EU in June 2025, and said they would clear it up and have one rule set by the end of 2025… that didn’t happen.

I figured the drop dead date was Jan 2026 payment date to devs – that day is tomorrow.

And today Google announced very similar new rules. 🤔

[…]

After screaming for years, apparently everyone has forgotten about the June 2025 change and missed Jan 1 plan.

Previously:

Welcome (Back) to Macintosh

Michael Tsai — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:12:54 +0000

Nick Heer:

Snell converts the software score to an average letter grade of B to B–. Is Apple satisfied with shipping a consistently B product?

I confess the grade I have given has been lower than this average. My experience with Apple’s software for the past several years has been markedly less than fine. Given that my scores have deviated from those given by many others, I started to question my own fairness — which, given that I am merely A Guy giving my opinion about a multi-trillion-dollar corporation, is a little silly. Then again, software is made — mostly — by people, and the intent I have in participating in the Six Colors survey is that a person working at Apple might possibly read my feedback.

[…]

The most important factor is whether the features I use perform as expected. If it does so with unique design and flair, that is a welcome bonus, but it must be built on a solid foundation.

[…]

I am somewhat impressed by the breadth of Apple’s current offerings as I consider all the ways they are failing me, and I cannot help but wonder if it is that breadth that is contributing to the unreliability of this software. Or perhaps it is the company’s annual treadmill. There was a time when remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software meant you traded the excitement of new features for the predictability of stability. That trade-off no longer exists; software-as-a-service means an older version is just old, not necessarily more reliable.

Riccardo Mori:

I very much enjoy using older Mac OS versions, but not being able to browse the Web properly and securely, not being able to correctly sign in to check a Gmail account, not being able to fetch some RSS feeds because you can’t authenticate securely or establish a secure connection is very frustrating. Not having Dropbox work on my 2009 MacBook Pro running OS X 10.11 El Capitan is a minor annoyance and means I just won’t have access to certain personal files and that I’ll have to sync manually whatever I do on this other machine.

But if I put these two factors aside, there’s nothing about those older Macs, nothing about the older Mac OS versions they run that makes them less reliable. The crystallisation of the operating system they use and the software environment I find on them is exactly what makes them more reliable than the newer stuff. Just because an application has been discontinued by Apple — like Aperture — doesn’t mean it has stopped working or has stopped being reliable.

[…]

What’s really sad in all this is that many of those “problems with the fundamentals of the operating system and first-party apps” aren’t structural; that is, they’re not derived from historical faults or shortcomings in the fundamentals of the operating system. They often are the result of more recent bugs breaking something that used to work or a solution that had already been found, and said bugs have been allowed to fester thanks to an unsustainable yearly release cycle that forces engineers to work on new features instead of fixing what broke down in previous iterations.

Nick Heer:

The cycle of having a major new version ready to preview by June and shipping in September means the amount of time Apple spends focusing on the current version must necessarily shrink. How many teams at the company do you suppose are, right now, working on MacOS 26 when WWDC is a little over three months away? Engineering efforts are undoubtably beginning to prioritize MacOS 27. There are new features to prepare, after all.

Marcin Wichary:

Is what we’re seeing overall is really just Apple losing the battle with complexity?

[…]

Today, Apple seems successful on paper, so the pressure needs to come from inside, from someone high up enough to recognize that what Apple is doing vis-a-vis software quality is not sustainable and hasn’t been for some time now. That the bill already came due on all of the decisions where systems thinking and deep testing and focus and preventative maintenance and paying off design debt have been deprioritized in favour of another shiny launch event that stretches the teams and platforms even thinner.

Jesper (Hacker News):

With the possible exception of individual dodgy Time Machine protocol implementations from third parties, all of the issues are directly traceable to components fully in Apple’s control. None of these issues are impossible for Apple to fix. All of them are incumbent on them to do so. Nearly all of them have persisted for at least two major OS releases and multiple Macs.

In the middle of all this, what Apple chooses to focus on is to implement a redesign that no one asked for, that butchers both the most conceivably fundamental usability and the visual pleasantness its user base has self-selected its platforms for; which only saving grace is that it is half-assed enough to not actually really change some things too badly, compared to what it could have been like. Although, had I upgraded to macOS Tahoe, chances are on top of the visual change, I would have been treated to basic Apple Event infrastructure falling apart and stopping working causing hangs, instability and unpredictability.

[…]

The hardware is great and no doubt M5 and M6 variants will run circles around M1, but if I have to sink down further into this bog, that price is too high to pay - a common enough sentiment that it is a matter of public interest to document downgradability or attempting to block dark pattern upgrades.

[…]

My hope is that Macintosh is not just one of these empires that was at the height of its power and then disintegrated because of warring factions, satiated and uncurious rulers, and droughts for which no one was prepared, ruining crops no one realized were essential for survival.

Brent Simmons:

I don’t want to quote the best parts — just go read it if you haven’t yet.

Garrett Murray:

I genuinely hope Jesper is correct here and my pessimism proves wrong in the long run—that the current version of Apple has been so damaged by a decade of simplification and profit obsession, losing so many valuable people who could effect meaningful change along the way.

Joe Lion:

How did the post end? Sorry, Liquid Glass wouldn’t let me get to the bottom of the page

David Deller:

As of today, all mentions of Liquid Glass have disappeared from developer.apple.com (the main home page). This may or may not mean anything… but I’ve been watching for it.

Previously:

Apple Watch Fitness Regressions

Michael Tsai — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:12:40 +0000

Gus Mueller (Mastodon):

In episode 680 of ATP, at about 6:12 in, Marco Arment goes off on watchOS 26’s fitness app and trashes all the changes. And I couldn’t agree more with him.

I thought it was just me who hated all the changes, and the slow animations, and the workout picker. It’s such a regression I don’t even know where to start.

[…]

If I could downgrade my watch safely, I would.

Previously:

watchOS 26 Removed Offline Workout Voice Alerts

How Long Will My Mac’s SSD Last?

Michael Tsai — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:12:31 +0000

Howard Oakley:

To work out how long you can expect your Mac’s internal SSD to last before it reaches that cycle limit, all you need do is to measure how much data is written to it, and once that is 3,000 times the capacity of the SSD, you should expect it to fail through wear. Fortunately, SSDs keep track of the amount of data written to them over their lifetime. This can be accessed through better SSD utilities like DriveDx, and I even have a feature in Mints that will do that for most internal SSDs.

[…]

Unless you work with huge media files, by far your worst enemy is swap space used for virtual memory. When the first M1 Macs were released, base models with just 8 GB of memory and 128 GB internal SSDs were most readily available, with custom builds following later. As a result, many of those who set out to assess Apple’s new Macs ended up stress-testing those with inadequate memory and storage for the tasks they ran. 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.

Previously:

macOS 26.3.1

Michael Tsai — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 18:48:16 +0000

Juli Clover (release notes, no security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW):

According to Apple’s release notes for the update, it adds support for the new Studio Display and Studio Display XDR. Apple has also released a firmware update for the new displays.

See also: Howard Oakley and Mr. Macintosh.

Previously:

Update (2026-03-06): Patrick Wardle:

Apple: “3rd-party security tools can’t run in the kernel because they might panic.”

Also Apple: kicks us out and replaces us with their EndpointSecurity kext ...which can be trivially panicked from userland, taking down every security tool + the whole system (macOS 26.3.1)! 🙄

iOS 26.3.1 and iPadOS 26.3.1

Michael Tsai — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 18:48:06 +0000

Juli Clover (iOS/iPadOS release notes, no security, no enterprise, no developer):

According to Apple’s release notes, the update adds support for the new Studio Display and Studio Display XDR, and it includes unspecified bug fixes.

Previously:

BenQ MA270S 5K Display

Michael Tsai — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 18:48:02 +0000

Andrew Liszewski:

It was first announced last month without pricing or availability details, but BenQ has now shared all the specs for its new 27-inch 5K display designed for Mac users. The MA270S matches the size and 5,120 x 2,880 resolution of the new Studio Display and Studio Display XDR Apple announced yesterday, including a Nano Gloss surface providing improved viewing angles.

The BenQ MA270S will be available through the company’s online store and retailers including Amazon this month for $999, making it $600 cheaper than Apple’s new $1,599 Studio Display. However, it’s not quite as fully featured as Apple’s latest monitor. The MA270S delivers 99 percent of the P3 color gamut, but is limited to 500 nits of brightness, compared to 600 for the Studio Display.

It has Thunderbolt 4 instead of Thunderbolt 5, but 4 USB ports instead of 2, plus 2 HDMI. There’s no camera. You do get a height-adjustable stand (that can also pivot) and a power button.

Zac Hall:

BenQ’s MA-series is especially designed for color accuracy when paired with a MacBook.

Previously:

Avoiding Tahoe

Michael Tsai — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 18:47:44 +0000

Rob Griffiths (Hacker News):

I have macOS Tahoe on my laptop, but I'm keeping my desktop Mac on macOS Sequoia for now. Which means I have the joy of seeing things like this wonderful notification on a regular basis.

Or I did, until I found a way to block them, at least in 90 day chunks.

[…]

The secret? Using device management profiles, which let you enforce policies on Macs in your organization, even if that "organization" is one Mac on your desk. One of the available policies is the ability to block activities related to major macOS updates for up to 90 days at a time (the max the policy allows), which seems like exactly what I needed.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

I followed Griffiths’s instructions about a week or so ago, and I’ve been enjoying a no-red-badge System Settings icon ever since. And the Tahoe upgrade doesn’t even show up in General → Software Update. With this profile installed, the confusing interface presented after clicking the “ⓘ” button next to any available update cannot result in your upgrading to 26 Tahoe accidentally.

Liam Proven:

The Reg FOSS desk has an entry-level MacBook Air, with just 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of SSD storage, and doesn’t have room for the new OS version. We also don’t like the sound of it, so for six months or so, we’ve been dismissing the upgrade reminders – but in recent weeks Apple is making them more prominent. For us, this handy little tool arrived at an opportune moment.

[…]

It’s a neat little hack, and we know of a few people who tried out Tahoe and disliked it enough to do manual downgrades. We suspect this little tool may prove temporarily quite popular.

Chris Pirillo:

AFAICT, MacOS Tahoe is worse than malware because it disguises itself as an upgrade.

Andrew Cunningham:

My general approach to software redesigns is to just roll with them and let their imperfections and quirks become background noise over time—it’s part of my job to point out problems where I see them, but I also need to keep up with new releases whether I’m in love with them or not.

But this person has no such job requirement, and they had two questions: Can I downgrade this? And if so, how?

The answer to the first question is “yes, usually,” and Apple provides some advice scattered across multiple documentation pages. This is an attempt to bring all of those steps together into one page, aimed directly at new Mac buyers who are desperate to switch from Tahoe to the more-familiar macOS 15 Sequoia.

Howard Oakley:

Although the way that macOS updates itself has changed beyond all recognition over the last few years, we tend to assume that it still works much as it did in the past, downloading a single update file, decompressing and installing that. This series of articles takes a deeper dive into what actually happens, and tries to explain how it differs from previous package updates.

Andy Ihnatko:

Software Update respects the fact that a System Update would be disruptive to your productivity at this time. Would Sir or Madam care to update tonight, automatically?
Software Update wishes to remind Sir or Madam that this new Update, which Software Update informed you of yesterday, is available.
If Sir or Madam thinks that Software Update cannot keep this up alllll week if necessary, then Sir or Madam doesn’t know Software Update very well.

[…]

Listen to me, you feckless, thumb-sucking wetbag: You will Update. Your System Software. Right. The Frick. NOW. It’s not even a demand. It’s reality.

[…]

The longer I delay a major MacOS system update (in this case, macOS Tahoe 26.3), the less stable my Mac becomes…until the whole thing stops working. This stinks.

Previously:

Update (2026-03-06): Chris Turner:

First thing I noted was that it applied to macOS 15.7.3; it was written back in January of this year, and I had already updated to 15.7.4. So I read through the comments to see if anyone had actually addressed this issue of Rob’s solution working or not with the latter version. No one had, but Jeff Hirsch had left a comment that had me running off to System Settings to give it a whirl:

Go into Software Update, switch your Beta Updates to the macOS Sequoia Public Beta channel and enjoy your nag free Sequoia experience. Done and done.

No profiles, no expiration. Just a quick and painless removal of those persistent Tahoe upgrade nags.

Yes! This is the kind of thing I was looking for: something simple, easily undoable when the time comes, and I don’t have to worry about a lot of copying and pasting in Terminal.

If you don’t see the Beta Updates options, enter this command in Terminal:

open 'x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.Software-Update-Settings.extension?action=showBetaUpdates'

Previously:

MacBook Neo

Michael Tsai — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:14:34 +0000

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors, Slashdot):

MacBook Neo starts with a beautiful Apple design, featuring a durable aluminum enclosure in an array of gorgeous colors — blush, indigo, silver, and a fresh new citrus. Its stunning 13-inch Liquid Retina display brings websites, photos, videos, and apps to life with high resolution and brightness, and support for 1 billion colors. Powered by A18 Pro, MacBook Neo can fly through everyday tasks, from browsing the web and streaming content, to editing photos, exploring creative hobbies, or using AI capabilities across apps. In fact, it’s up to 50 percent faster for everyday tasks like web browsing, and up to 3x faster when running on-device AI workloads like applying advanced effects to photos, compared to the bestselling PC with the latest shipping Intel Core Ultra 5. Providing up to 16 hours of battery life, MacBook Neo allows users to go all day on a single charge. A 1080p FaceTime HD camera and dual mics make it easy to look and sound great, and the dual side-firing speakers with Spatial Audio deliver crisp, immersive sound. MacBook Neo also features Apple’s renowned Magic Keyboard for comfortable and precise typing, and a large Multi-Touch trackpad with support for intuitive gestures, enabling smooth and precise control.

[…]

And starting at just $599 and $499 for education, MacBook Neo is Apple’s most affordable laptop ever, providing an unprecedented combination of quality and value.

The base model has 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. For $699 you can get a 512 GB SSD and Touch ID. Both models have one USB 3 port and one USB 2 port (both with the USB-C connector). At 2.7 pounds, it’s the same weight as the MacBook Air.

All in all, this looks like big improvement over the M1 MacBook Air (except that it can’t run Sequoia). It’s the same price as the iPad Air (sans keyboard) and iPhone 17e. I don’t know why this took so many years, but I think it’s going to be a hit.

Jason Snell:

No $599 Mac laptop is going to exist without compromises, but they’re surprisingly minimal, in my opinion.

[…]

If you’re wondering if an iPhone processor can really drive a Mac, let me reprint this chart that I posted last year[…]

The A18 Pro is faster at single-core than the M3 and slightly faster at multi-core than the M1. The biggest limitation is the 8 GB of RAM, which is fine for many uses, but not for Xcode.

Mario Guzmán:

They were so, so close! The Citrus should have been a Key Lime instead. Leave the Indigo as is and boom, you’d have the iBook G3 SE colors from 2000. 😄

Previously:

Update (2026-03-04): John Siracusa:

The A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo is 19% faster than the M2 Ultra in the Mac Pro in single-core performance (Geekbench 6).

The MacBook Neo starts at $599.

The Mac Pro, which is still for sale, starts at $6,999.

Colin Cornaby:

The display has a resolution of 2408x1506. It uses an A18 Pro CPU - same CPU used in the iPhone 16 Pro. The iPhone 16 Pro Max has a 2868× 1320 display.

If a game runs well on an iPhone 16 Pro, it should run well on a MacBook Neo. The display resolutions are nearly the same.

Andrew Cunningham (MacRumors):

The screen is also a bit of a step down from the MacBook Air’s 13.6-inch 2560×1664 screen. Apple says it’s a 13-inch LCD with a 2408×1506 resolution and 500 nits of maximum brightness. It does not support the P3 wide color gamut or Apple’s True Tone technology, unlike the old M1 MacBook Air. It has rounded upper display corners like the current MacBook Airs and Pros, but doesn’t include the notch. The MacBook is also capable of driving a single external display—up to 4K at 60 Hz, disqualifying it from powering Apple’s 5K Studio Displays.

Stephen Hackett:

Here’s a list of what separates the MacBook Neo from the $1099 MacBook Air, besides their sizes[…]

Rui Carmo:

I know a bunch of people will disagree, but this is the most relevant Mac announcement in years[…]

[…]

I would swap my iPad Pro for it in a flash (if it had a 12” display, that is). And that is probably exactly why it is that big.

M.G. Siegler:

I still stand by it: this is the smartest move Apple has made in years.

[…]

I’ve long been baffled by the notion that Apple would cede the education market – one they long dominated when I was a kid – to cheap Windows devices and more recently, Chromebooks. Yes, they clearly thought the iPad could be the answer there. But that always felt a bit off. Sure, the iPad is a brilliant device and great for some things in classrooms. But for a lot of work, including school work, you’re going to want a “real” computer. Try as they might with keyboards and trackpads, Apple has not been able to morph the iPad into that real computer. And they keep insisting they don’t want to! (Even if their constant tweaks suggest otherwise.)

That’s fine. But again, it doesn’t work in the classroom. Even if it works 90% of the time, it needs to work 100% of the time for students. And the MacBook Neo can. Finally.

Mr. Macintosh:

The Neo no longer includes a physical indicator light. macOS now displays the camera in use indicator in the menu bar whenever the webcam is active.

I’m interested to see what my Apple security researcher friends think about this. Hopefully Apple has implemented protections to properly isolate this new webcam notification.

Update (2026-03-05): John Gruber:

The MacBook Neo looks and feels every bit like a MacBook. Solid aluminum. Good keyboard (no backlighting, but supposedly the same mechanism as in other post-2019 MacBooks — felt great in my quick testing). Good trackpad (no Force Touch — it actually physically clicks, but you can click anywhere, not just the bottom). Good bright display (500 nits max, same as the MacBook Air). Surprisingly good speakers, in a new side-firing configuration. Without even turning either laptop on, you can just see and feel that the MacBook Neo is a vastly superior device.

[…]

I came into today’s ~~event~~ experience expecting a starting price of $799 for the Neo — $300 less than the new $1,099 price for the base M5 MacBook Air (which, in defense of that price, starts with 512 GB storage). $599 is a fucking statement. Apple is coming after this market. I think they’re going to sell a zillion of these things, and “almost half” of new Mac buyers being new to the platform is going to become “more than half”. The MacBook Neo is not a footnote or hobby, or a pricing stunt to get people in the door before upselling them to a MacBook Air. It’s the first major new Mac aimed at the consumer market in the Apple Silicon era.

[…]

And while the ports aren’t labeled, if you plug an external display into the “wrong” port, you’ll get an on-screen notification suggesting you plug it into the other port.

[…]

8 GB of RAM is not a lot, but with Apple Silicon it really is enough for typical consumer productivity apps. (If they update the Neo annually and next year’s model gets the A19 Pro, it will move not to 16 GB of RAM but 12 GB.)

As I said above, I think 8 GB is OK for this model, but I still object to this narrative from Apple that Apple Silicon somehow makes 8 GB better, that it’s really “analogous to 16GB on other systems.” That even seems backwards because the unified memory architecture means that some of the RAM will be used for graphics rather than apps.

Tim Hardwick:

Apple’s low-cost MacBook Neo is compatible with the company’s new Studio Displays, but its output will be scaled to 4K resolution at 60Hz.

Joe Rossignol:

In short, Apple said MacBook Neo sounds fresh.

“We wanted something that felt fun and friendly, and fresh, and felt like it really suited the spirit of this product,” said Colleen Novielli, a Mac product marketing director, in conversation with TechRadar’s Lance Ulanoff.

BasicAppleGuy:

MacBook Neo v. MBA Size comparison
Height: 1.27 cm (0.50 inch) v. 1.13 cm (0.44 inch)
Width: 29.75 cm (11.71 inches) v. 30.41 cm (11.97 inches)
Depth: 20.64 cm (8.12 inches) v. 21.5 cm (8.46 inches)
Weight: 1.23 kg (2.7 pounds) v. 1.23 kg (2.7 pounds)

Julio Ojeda-Zapata and Adam Engst:

MacBook Neo has a significantly smaller battery than the MacBook Air—36.5 watt-hours versus 53.8 watt‑hours. The smaller battery won’t yield much cost savings, but its reduced weight may be necessary to offset other components that cost less but weigh more.

[…]

Instead of the Force Touch trackpad introduced with the 12-inch MacBook that relies on pressure sensors and a haptic click simulation, Apple advertises the MacBook Neo as using a Multi-Touch trackpad. If that’s the same trackpad as before, it has a physical click mechanism that doesn’t work as well at the edges and is more likely to fail. However, it’s undoubtedly cheaper and still supports multi-finger gestures. It doesn’t support the Force Touch features like deep pressing a file in the Finder to open it in Quick Look, but we doubt many people use them.

[…]

A MacBook Neo is perfectly adequate for writing short papers in Pages, creating presentations in Keynote, analyzing science lab data in Numbers, browsing the Web in Safari, keeping up with email in Mail, and chatting with friends in Messages.

[…]

However, the MacBook Neo isn’t appropriate for all students. We’d recommend that college-bound students stick with the MacBook Air, even if they don’t anticipate needing its full power. It’s hard to predict what might be necessary during college, and a student may find themselves wanting to edit video, produce music, run stats apps, and more.

David Sparks:

I’ve been teaching people how to use Macs for a long time. The number one barrier has always been cost. People want to try the Mac, but they can’t justify the price. That excuse just evaporated.

Warner Crocker:

I support a number of folks, both older and younger, who only use computers in the same basic way they use their smartphones. I’m thinking Apple’s new MacBook Neo, with a starting price of $599 will hit many of their sweet spots.

Victor Wynne:

I was overall impressed with the company managing to bring decent specs and industry-leading build quality to a $599 laptop. I expect holiday sales later this year will be chart topping.

[…]

There being no RAM upgrade beyond the stock 8GBs is disappointing, but not surprising necessarily. I think within a year or two a newer A-series chip will be added, and that will result in a RAM bump to 12GBs like we’ve seen with recent iPhone releases.

Jason Anthony Guy:

I figured $800 would be as low as Apple would be willing to go for its “low cost” laptop. Under $800 seemed improbable. Under $600 was laughably impossible.

Well, Apple went and did it. They built the seemingly impossible: a sub-$600 laptop which—despite its limitations and compromises—is a perfectly calibrated, entry-level computer that’s worthy of being called “MacBook.”

Andy Ihnatko:

To explain it in breakfast terms: Apple can’t get itself excited about making and selling a $6 takeout bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich on an English muffin. But it’ll apply an almost terrifying amount of institutional energy towards the development of a $60 hotel restaurant breakfast.

This sort of attitude is usually cited as one of Apple’s strengths. It isn’t. It frequently holds Apple back. “A strip of bacon, a scrambled egg, and a slice of American cheese on a toasted English muffin” is a straightforward and unremarkable piece of design and engineering, but:

It fills a universal need. It’s immensely popular. It’s precisely what millions of people want. It’s relevant and it’s flawlessly aligned. It can be prepared to a high standard, quickly, efficiently, and in large quantities, by an worker with little training, using the facility’s existing manufacturing lines and tooling.

Eric Schwarz:

With the color choices, $499 education price, and being enough computer for many tasks, I suspect these will sell like crazy—K-12 institutions looking to move away or supplement Chromebooks now have a cheaper option, college students on a budget can still get a Mac. The $100 upgrade to double the storage and add Touch ID will probably feel worthwhile for some, but the low-end model hits an incredible price point for any Mac.

Are there compromises? Absolutely, but I think that Apple made good choices on what to cut compared with the MacBook Air. Thinking to a number of past budget Macs, they usually hit a price point, but were quite terrible in major ways.

MacBook Pro 2026

Michael Tsai — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:16:33 +0000

Apple (Hacker News, TidBITS, MacRumors, ArsTechnica):

Apple today announced the latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with the all-new M5 Pro and M5 Max, bringing game-changing performance and AI capabilities to the world’s best pro laptop.

[…]

The new MacBook Pro includes N1, an Apple-designed wireless networking chip that enables Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, bringing improved performance and reliability to wireless connections. It also offers up to 24 hours of battery life; a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display with a nano-texture option; a wide array of connectivity[…]

[…]

The new MacBook Pro delivers up to 2x faster read/write performance compared to the previous generation, reaching speeds of up to 14.5GB/s and accelerating workflows for professionals working across 4K and 8K video projects, LLMs, and complex datasets. MacBook Pro with M5 Pro now comes standard with 1TB of storage, while MacBook Pro with M5 Max now comes standard with 2TB. And the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 now comes standard with 1TB of storage.

Seems like a great incremental update.

Juli Clover:

The starting price of the M5 MacBook Pro was $1,599, but now it starts at $1,699 because of the updated storage. While the starting price has gone up, the price for SSD upgrades has technically shifted down.

[…]

Upgrading to 2TB from the base starting storage used to be $600, but now the 2TB upgrade is $400. The 4TB upgrade is $1,000, $200 less than the $1,200 that it used to cost.

John Gruber:

The MacBook Pro Tech Specs page is a good place to start to compare the entire M5 MacBook Pro lineup.

I wish Apple would have permalinks for these pages so that I could link to content that wouldn’t be different next year.

Also worth noting — Apple’s RAM pricing remains unchanged, despite the spike in memory prices industry-wide.

It’s the least they could do given the huge margins in the past.

Last year you needed buy one with the high-end M4 Max chip to get 64 GB; now you can configure a MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro with 64 GB.

Previously:

Update (2026-03-04): Mr. Macintosh:

Looks like Apple updated the keyboard on the new M5 16‑inch MacBook Pro. The Backspace, Return, Shift, and Tab labels are gone, replaced with symbols instead.

Kyle Hughes:

I think the M5 Macs are likely the last ones built on procurement agreements pre-memory-and-storage-shortage. I predict that shortage will not end in the next few years and will affect all parts of the consumer computer economy because I predict that the marginal return on silicon in data centers will increase exponentially with the scaling of AI. I predict this will dramatically drive up the cost of products for consumers or dramatically drive down their supply.

MacBook Air 2026

Michael Tsai — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:16:20 +0000

Apple (Hacker News, TidBITS, MacRumors):

Apple today announced the new MacBook Air with M5, bringing exceptional performance and expanded AI capabilities to the world’s most popular laptop. M5 features a faster CPU and next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, enabling MacBook Air to power through a variety of workflows, from creative projects to complex AI tasks. MacBook Air now comes standard with double the starting storage at 512GB with faster SSD technology, and is configurable up to 4TB, so customers can keep their most important work on hand. Apple’s N1 wireless chip delivers Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 for seamless connectivity on the go.

This looks really good. There are still two Thunderbolt ports, plus MagSafe, and a 32 GB RAM ceiling. The RAM pricing is confusing. The base model with the 8-core GPU is $1,099 with 16 GB of RAM, and you can’t upgrade its memory. For $1,199, you can get the model with 10 GPU cores, and then it makes available a $400 option to upgrade to 32 GB of RAM, but clicking on that shows a total of $1,499 rather than $1,599.

Previously:

Update (2026-03-04): John Gruber:

Base storage went from 256 to 512 GB, but the base price went from the magic $999 to $1,100[…] Presumably, those in the market for a $999 MacBook will buy the new […] lower-priced MacBook “Neo”[…]

Previously:

MacBook Neo

Apple M5 Pro and M5 Max

Michael Tsai — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:15:40 +0000

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors):

The chips are built using a new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture. This innovative design combines two dies into a single system on a chip (SoC), which includes a powerful CPU, scalable GPU, Media Engine, unified memory controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5 capabilities. M5 Pro and M5 Max feature a new 18-core CPU architecture. It includes six of the highest-performing core design, now called super cores, that are the world’s fastest CPU core. Alongside these cores are 12 all-new performance cores, optimized for power-efficient, multithreaded workloads. Collectively, the CPU significantly boosts performance by up to 30 percent for pro workloads. The GPU scales up the next-generation architecture introduced in M5 to an up-to-40-core GPU. With a Neural Accelerator in each GPU core and higher unified memory bandwidth, M5 Pro and M5 Max are over 4x the peak GPU compute for AI compared to the previous generation.

Looking backward, the naming is confusing in that the “super” cores are the same as the M5 performance cores. They could have instead kept the “performance” and “efficiency” names and given the new type of core a new name. It’s not obvious what would could be, though. Looking forward, the naming does seem to accurately convey that the new “performance” cores are in the middle and closer to “super” than to “efficiency”.

Here’s a summary of the cores situation:

	Regular	Pro	Max
M1	4p/4e	8p/2e	8p/2e
M2	4p/4e	8p/4e	8p/4e
M3	4p/4e	6p/6e	12p/4e
M4	4p/6e	10p/4e	12p/4e
M5	4s/6e	6s/12p	6s/12p

I’m pleased that I can get the maximum number of CPU cores and 64 GB of RAM without having to go Max.

Andrew Cunningham:

Apple’s approach here is different—for example, the M5 Pro is not just a pair of M5 chips welded together. Rather, Apple has one chiplet handling the CPU and most of the I/O, and a second one that’s mainly for graphics, both built on the same 3nm TSMC manufacturing process. The first silicon die is always the same, whether you get an M5 Pro or M5 Max.

[…]

And now, in the middle, we have a new type of “performance core” used exclusively in the M5 Pro and M5 Max.

These are, in fact, a new, third type of CPU core design, distinct from both the super cores and the M5’s efficiency cores. They apparently use designs similar to the super cores but prioritize multi-threaded performance rather than fast single-core performance. Apple’s approach with the new performance cores sounds similar to the one AMD uses in its laptop silicon: it has larger Zen 4 and Zen 5 CPU cores, optimized for peak clock speeds and higher power usage, and smaller Zen 4c and Zen 5c cores that support the same capabilities but run slower and are optimized to use less die space.

Jesper:

“Maxing out at over 614 GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, the M5 Max SoC architecture is more efficient than ever at calculating specular highlights on user interface componentry that needn’t be translucent,” notes Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies.

Previously:

Update (2026-03-04): John Gruber:

Another way to think about it is that there are regular efficiency cores in the plain M5, and new higher-performing efficiency cores called “performance” in the M5 Pro and M5 Max. The problem is that the old M1–M4 names were clear — one CPU core type was fast but optimized for efficiency so they called it “efficiency”, and the other core type was efficient but optimized for performance so they called it “performance”. Now, the new “performance” core types are the optimized-for-efficiency CPU cores in the Pro and Max chips, and despite their name, they’re not the most performant cores.

Thomas P. Moonis:

This affects Apple in other ways, too. The “Air” isn’t the lightest or thinnest iPad or MacBook (starting tomorrow, in the latter case, but also true from 2015-2019 when the plain MacBook existed). The M(n) Max chips are not the maximum-performance chips in the lineup.

Jason Snell:

Here’s the backstory: With every new generation of Apple’s Mac-series processors, I’ve gotten the impression from Apple execs that they’ve been a little frustrated with the perception that their “lesser” efficiency cores were weak sauce. I’ve lost count of the number of briefings and conversations I’ve had where they’ve had to go out of their way to point out that, actually, the lesser cores on an M-series chip are quite fast on their own, in addition to being very good at saving power!

Om Malik:

M5 is different. It is the first proof that the original M1 idea is durable enough to survive a fundamental change in how the chips are built today and in the future. The capabilities of the new design reflect that.

For example, while the core counts didn’t change, Apple put a Neural Accelerator inside every GPU core. M5 Pro still has 20 GPU cores. M5 Max still has 40. Same as M4. But each core now does double duty. That is how Apple claims 4x the AI compute without adding more silicon. The GPU is becoming an AI processor that sometimes does graphics.

[…]

Once you’ve proven you can split the chip and keep unified memory working across the pieces, the question changes. It is no longer “how big can we make this chip?” It is “how many pieces can we connect, and in how many dimensions?”

Update (2026-03-06): Joe Rossignol:

In this unconfirmed result, the M5 Max with an 18-core CPU achieved a score of 29,233 for multi-core CPU performance, which tops the 27,726 score achieved by the Mac Studio's M3 Ultra chip with a 32-core CPU. M5 Max is now the fastest Apple silicon chip ever, and it even topped every other consumer PC processor in the Geekbench database.

Studio Display and Studio Display XDR

Michael Tsai — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:13:23 +0000

Apple (Hacker News, Reddit, MacRumors):

The new Studio Display features a 12MP Center Stage camera, now with improved image quality and support for Desk View; a studio-quality three-microphone array; and an immersive six-speaker sound system with Spatial Audio. It also now includes powerful Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, providing more downstream connectivity for high-speed accessories or daisy-chaining displays. The all-new Studio Display XDR takes the pro display experience to the next level. Its 27-inch 5K Retina XDR display features an advanced mini-LED backlight with over 2,000 local dimming zones, up to 1000 nits of SDR brightness, and 2000 nits of peak HDR brightness, in addition to a wider color gamut, so content jumps off the screen with breathtaking contrast, vibrancy, and accuracy. With its 120Hz refresh rate, Studio Display XDR is even more responsive to content in motion, and Adaptive Sync dynamically adjusts frame rates for content like video playback or graphically intense games. Studio Display XDR offers the same advanced camera and audio system as Studio Display, as well as Thunderbolt 5 connectivity to simplify pro workflow setups. The new Studio Display with a tilt-adjustable stand starts at $1,599, and Studio Display XDR with a tilt- and height-adjustable stand starts at $3,299. Both are available in standard or nano-texture glass options[…]

The old, terrible camera was also 12MP. I’d rather have an iPhone rear camera and no Center Stage. It seems like the display panel is the same, as are the limited number of ports and the price. I wonder whether it still has an A13 and no power button.

The price premium for 5K Retina displays remains surprising. A 1× Dell 27-inch display is $189.99, a 4K one is $239.99, and you don’t have to pay extra to get matte.

Matt Birchler:

I’m incredibly disappointed. I continue to think the Studio Display is for people who care about everything in a computer monitor besides the display itself.

[…]

There are people who really value physical design, and that’s fine, but if you want a great monitor that looks better than this (yes, even at 5K), there are other options, all of which cost a good deal less.

[…]

Compared to the $6,000 Pro Display XDR Apple was selling before, [the Studio Display XDR is] a steal at $3,300. And truthfully, it looks like a great monitor. 5K 120Hz mini-LED with 2,304 local dimming zones is undeniably a compelling combo.

[…]

I think what bums me out about Apple’s display lineup is that they are only serving the absolute highest end of the market, they have no truly “consumer” displays.

Dan Moren:

By default, the Studio Display still comes with a tilt-adjustable stand, though there are options for both a height-adjustable stand or a VESA mount. The Studio Display XDR gets the height-adjustable stand by default, and can also be configured with a VESA mount.

Juli Clover:

According to Apple’s list of compatible Macs, neither model will work with an Intel-based Mac.

Juli Clover:

According to Apple, Macs that have an M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra, M2, or M3 will only support the Studio Display XDR at 60Hz.

Tim Hardwick:

Apple today discontinued its Pro Display XDR, following the introduction of a new 27-inch Studio Display XDR monitor.

Wade Tregaskis:

All in all… meh.

28% fewer pixels for 34% fewer dollars – so technically better value, if you don’t really care about screen real-estate. But that extra real estate is really valuable, and Apple have now apparently ceded the large display market to… well, mostly the tumbleweeds. Sure, there’s technically other 6k displays, like the LG, the Dell, or the Asus, but while they have some advantages – less than half the price, most notably – they have real big disadvantages – like low brightness and poor contrast ratios.

[…]

I didn’t bother including the audio & camera aspects because I’m genuinely confused as to who, in the market for an expensive display, would care? If you’re doing photography there’s no sound anyway, and if you’re doing videography in this price range you should be using real speakers or headphones.

[…]

I’m also choosing to overlook the firmware, which I assume uses the same weird, bastardised, glitchy version of iOS as the prior Studio Display model.

Previously:

Update (2026-03-04): Simon:

The same $1599 base price for the same 5K panel they introduced all the way back in 2014. What a missed opportunity. And they still consider a proper adjustable stand just another source of extra income.

Jason Anthony Guy:

This update—which is mainly about Thunderbolt 5 and improved microphones and speakers—is underwhelming. Selling it for the same prices as the outgoing monitor is even more disappointing.

Mr. Macintosh:

User: The industry is moving towards larger displays
Apple: XDR 32" = dead
User: uh ok.. we also wanted a 27" 120hz Studio Display
Apple: ok. Studio Display XDR 27" for $3299
User: What? no that’s not...
Apple: enjoy

Adam Engst:

Few Pro Display XDR owners will likely switch to the Studio Display XDR. While it has some improved specs, it’s still significantly smaller—who’s going to give up a 32-inch 6K display for a 27-inch 5K display?

But on its own, the Studio Display is important. By bringing mini-LED technology, HDR support, and professional color accuracy to a 27-inch display at $3299, Apple has made these capabilities accessible to video editors, photographers, and designers who couldn’t justify the cost of the $5000 Pro Display XDR, particularly when coupled with the $1000 Pro Stand.

Mr. Macintosh:

If I plug the new Studio Display into my Tahoe supported Intel Mac, it’s just flat‑out not going to work?

[…]

All I’m asking for is base compatibility. 60 hertz, mic, camera & speakers.

Mr. Macintosh:

Apple display daisy‑chaining has returned after an almost 10 year hiatus!

You can now daisy‑chain up to four Studio Displays (& XDR) with the new MacBook Pro M5 Max.

John Gruber:

I guess it would be nice to see HDR content, but not nice enough to spend $3,600 to get one with nano-texture. And I don’t think I care about 120 Hz on my Mac?

Mike Piatek-Jimenez:

Just saw the Studio Display XDR. $3300 for a 5K 27” display? No thanks. The brightness, mini-LED pixels, and 120Hz are nice, but there are tons of other options with similar features for a third of the cost.

I bought the Pro Display XDR years ago. It was outrageously expensive, but at the time it was the only 6K display on the market (and had a 32” size to match). That extra resolution and size made it worth it to me. I’m kind of surprised that Apple is replacing it with a smaller model.

Colin Cornaby:

The new Studio Displau XDR price is so bonkers that I originally thought I was reading about a new 6k/32 inch display. There were comparable displays on announced at CES I’d expect to come in around the $1000 mark or less. Only things missing were the webcam and speakers.

I really wish they had kept the 6k/32 config and price dropped it.

Garrett Murray:

It’s 2026 and we’re back to Apple’s biggest display size being 27 inches. What a disappointment. I don’t understand why we’re permanently locked into the idea that 27 inches is the biggest a display needs to be.

iPad Air (M4, 8th Generation)

Michael Tsai — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:44:29 +0000

Apple (MacRumors, Hacker News):

With M4, iPad Air is up to 30 percent faster than iPad Air with M3, and up to 2.3x faster than iPad Air with M1. The new iPad Air also features the latest in Apple silicon connectivity chips, N1 and C1X, delivering fast wireless and cellular connections — and support for Wi-Fi 7 — that empower users to work and be creative anywhere.

[…]

With the same starting price of just $599 for the 11-inch model and $799 for the 13-inch model, the new iPad Air is an incredible value.

Michael Simon:

Kicking off a week of product announcements, the new iPad Air has arrived, but if you go see it at the Apple Store, you’d be hard-pressed to know if Apple actually switched out the old models. They have the same dimensions, same colors, and same displays, have the same prices, and the same tagline on Apple’s website.

Dan Moren:

All the major improvements are under the hood. In addition to the M4 processor’s 30-percent performance improvement, there’s now 12GB of unified RAM—up from 8GB of memory in the M3 Air—and memory bandwidth of 120GB/s, compared to the 100GB/s offered by the earlier model. The M4 also unlocks hardware acceleration for 8K in more formats, including H.264, ProRes, and ProRes RAW.

John Gruber:

With the M5 iPad Pro models, RAM is tied to storage: the 256/512 GB iPad Pros come with 12 GB RAM; the 1/2 TB models come with 16 GB RAM.

Matt Birchler:

What’s notable about this time is that this is actually the second year in a row where I’ve basically been able to say the same thing. Last year’s M3 iPad Air was also just a processor swap over the M2 version.

[…]

The 128GB base storage is not great for a premium tablet like this. We saw Apple bump their budget iPhone up to 256GB base storage today, so why not their second-highest end iPad?

[…]

The 60Hz display is getting pretty damn long in the tooth. It’s fiiiiine, but at some point it’s time to get an upgrade. The Air has had the literal exact screen for 7 years now.

Andrew Cunningham:

This version of the Apple M4 is slightly cut down compared to the version that ships in Macs or that came with the M4 iPad Pro. It has only 8 CPU cores—3 high-performance cores and 5 efficiency cores, down from a maximum of and 4 and 6. It also uses 9 GPU cores instead of 10, and there isn’t an Air variant with 16GB of RAM. A 16GB RAM configuration was available for M4 iPad Pros with 1TB or 2TB of storage.

moolcool:

The iPad would go from a never-buy to a buy-right-away for me, if they added user profiles. It’d be a nice thing to have on your coffee table, where anyone in the household can pick it up and be logged into all of their stuff.

Windows XP had this feature. Chromebooks have this feature. It’s inexcusable that such an expensive gadget can only have one user.

Previously:

iPhone 17e

Michael Tsai — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:44:24 +0000

Apple (MacRumors, Hacker News):

At the heart of iPhone 17e is the latest-generation A19, which delivers exceptional performance for everything users do. iPhone 17e also features C1X, the latest-generation cellular modem designed by Apple, which is up to 2x faster than C1 in iPhone 16e. The 48MP Fusion camera captures stunning photos, including next-generation portraits, and 4K Dolby Vision video. It also enables an optical-quality 2x Telephoto — like having two cameras in one. The 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR display features Ceramic Shield 2, offering 3x better scratch resistance than the previous generation and reduced glare. With MagSafe, users can enjoy fast wireless charging and access to a vast ecosystem of accessories like chargers and cases. And when iPhone 17e users are outside of cellular and Wi-Fi coverage, Apple’s groundbreaking satellite features — including Emergency SOS, Roadside Assistance, Messages, and Find My via satellite — help them stay connected when it matters most.

[…]

Available in three elegant colors with a premium matte finish — black, white, and a beautiful new soft pink […] iPhone 17e will start at 256GB of storage for $599 — 2x the entry storage from the previous generation at the same starting price[…]

This sounds way better than last year’s iPhone 16e.

Dan Moren:

Apple also says that the 17e has a 48MP Fusion camera system, which on the face of it seems identical to last year’s “2-in-1 camera system” although Apple touts the 17e’s “next-generation” portrait mode that adds the ability to recognize people, dogs, and cats as well as to add portrait mode effects after the fact. The 12MP TrueDepth camera in front likewise has the same specs as last year, with the same addition of “next-generation portraits.” Apple attributes this ability to improvements in its image pipeline.

Adam Engst:

However, for most people who pay attention to the details, I think the $799 iPhone 17 remains a better deal. For $200 more, you get a larger, brighter screen (6.3 versus 6.1 inches), Camera Control for the fastest access to the camera, an Ultra Wide camera for macro and wide-angle photos, a higher resolution 18-megapixel Center Stage front camera with support for dual capture, better battery life, Always-On display with ProMotion technology for smoother scrolling, Dynamic Island, and more.

However, the 17e does have the Action button, which I think is better for triggering the camera, anyway.

Andrew Cunningham:

The new iPhone includes an Apple A19 chip similar to the one in the more-expensive iPhone 17—both phones have six CPU cores, but the 17e only gets four GPU cores instead of five.

Matt Birchler:

MagSafe has been added, although it does have slower charging speeds than the other iPhones in the lineup (but it does equal the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro lineup, so not too far behind).

[…]

Based on Apple’s compare page, it looks like this might be the exact camera that’s in the iPhone Air.

Steven Aquino:

I gotta say, if the iPhone 17e had a Dynamic Island, I might’ve given it serious consideration as my everyday phone. Everything I need, no fluff.

Previously:

Update (2026-03-04): Jeff Johnson:

My iPhone SE 3rd generation:
5.45 x 2.65 x 0.29 inches
5.09 ounces
$429

iPhone 17e:
5.78 x 2.82 x 0.31 inches
5.96 ounces
$599

Andy Ihnatko:

I feel as if Apple just unrolled the blueprints for the iPhone 17 and thought about how to make a less-expensive version of that thing. They started with this, and then worked their way down to there.
It doesn’t strike me as a device that was designed from the ground up to hit a maximum price point. In my eye, that’s the more interesting challenge, and it creates more interesting products at this price level. It’s the difference between designing a less-interesting version of an expensive thing, and designing a brand-new thing that’s truly exciting…where the lower price is among the least-interesting things about it.
The price is the other thing that’s nagging at me right now. Was $599 the best they could do? Is $599 even a worthy goal?

Octavo 1.0

Michael Tsai — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:44:03 +0000

Amy Worrall (Mastodon):

Octavo arranges your pages for perfect printing — booklets, mini zines, business cards, and more. It also cleans up messy PDFs: fix mismatched page sizes, straighten skewed scans, and position each page precisely.

[…]

Create saddle-stitched booklets with automatic page ordering. Just load your PDF and Octavo handles the imposition maths.

There’s a free Lite version and a $24.99 one-time unlock in the Mac App Store.

Mac App Store Review Times Increasing

Michael Tsai — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:43:58 +0000

Spencer Dailey:

Average app review times for my Mac app (launched in 2019) have gone up by 3-5x and, it appears others too (tons of posts on Apple’s forums like this one). Mac app reviews now typically take 5 days, and I’m seeing lots of reports of 10+ day waits for some. While iOS app reviews have been faster for me, others have seen big delays there too. It just varies, but it’s clear that reviewers are underwater. This is very likely do to the rise in AI-assisted coding, which has in turn led to more app submissions. According to AppFigures, App Store submissions rose 24% in 2025 through November. According to Runway data, January and February’s average review time and max review times were significantly higher than they were in the last 4 months of 2025.

[…]

I and others have also run into delays in app processing too (which must happen before a build can even be submitted for review) and have personally seen it take up to 10 hours!

Previously:

Update (2026-03-03): David Deller:

It’s so bad.

Jeff Johnson:

I think this varies quite a bit.

On February 15 and 16, I had two Mac App Store updates reviewed and approved within hours.

However, Mac and iOS updates submitted on February 10 both took 2 days.

calicoding:

we had a Mac app take 10 days, after which we developer rejected. The next submission took 20 minutes

Amy Worrall:

Octavo seems to be taking 3-4 days each time. Got a 1.0.1 that’s been in progress since Friday…

macOS 26.4: Charge Limit and Shortcuts

Michael Tsai — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 20:32:31 +0000

Dylan McDonald:

The Charge Limit feature, which lets you set a maximum charge to help extend battery health, was previously only available on iPhone and iPad.

[…]

Additionally, the new iOS 26.4 and macOS 26.4 betas bring Charge Limit to the Shortcuts app.

I like the current feature to automatically restore the charge limit the next day, so I don’t forget. But there are two problems:

If I know I’ll need more battery life tomorrow, I can’t turn off the charge limit before I go to bed because it will turn it back on at 6 AM. What I really want is for it to stay off for 24 hours.
It still takes a bunch of taps to go into the Battery settings and turn off the charge limit in the first place.

Shortcuts support should make the second part easier, and perhaps it can also be used to turn the limit back off that first morning.

Previously:

iPhone 80% Charging Limit

Sync iPhone Alarms to an Apple Watch

Michael Tsai — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 20:31:52 +0000

Glenn Fleishman:

And yet. And yet. When you desperately want the digital jingle bell to sound off on a particular device, my goodness, what a fuss that might be.

Quick: Without picking up your iPhone, tell me how you configure an alarm in the Clock app to trigger on your Apple Watch when you’re wearing it? I can’t remember, and I just looked it up.

[…]

“Push Alerts” isn’t my first thought for syncing alarms and timers, but at least it’s there.

It always confuses me that the Notifications section of System Settings seems like an auto-generated list of the same settings for each app, but then a few system apps get special options sprinkled in there.

Flickr’s URL Scheme

Michael Tsai — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 20:31:36 +0000

Marcin Wichary (Hacker News):

Half of my education in URLs as user interface came from Flickr in the late 2000s.

[…]

This was incredible and a breath of fresh air. No redundant www. in front or awkward .php at the end. No parameters with their unpleasant ?&= syntax. No % signs partying with hex codes. When you shared these URLs with others, you didn’t have to retouch or delete anything. When Chrome’s address bar started autocompleting them, you knew exactly where you were going.

[…]

It was a beautiful and predictable scheme. Once you knew how it worked, you could guess other URLs. If I were typing an email or authoring a blog post and I happened to have a link to your photo in Flickr, I could also easily include a link to your Flickr homepage just by editing the URL, without having to jump back to the browser to verify.

Nick Heer:

It is the kind of logical directory-style scheme I wish I would see in library-based desktop applications, too. I still have copies of my libraries for Aperture and iPhoto on the same Mac as I use for Photos. Each of those has a pretty understandable structure within the library package: the most substantial part is a “Masters” folder containing a year, month, day, and then project folder hierarchy; among others, there is also a “Database” folder with nondestructive edit operations, though that becomes less intelligible structure if you drill down to the project level.

Marcin Wichary:

My post about Flickr URLs gathered some interesting responses (especially on Mastodon, thank you all!), so I thought I’d do what podcasts call a “mailbag episode”!

[…]

Both Erin Sparling and Nelson Miner highlighted how much the craft of Flickr URLs related to the craft of its API:

Literally used to talk about how good this URL scheme was in class, it was so informative. The Flickr API still informs everything I do these days, URLs included.

steerpike:

Flickr deserves a lot of praise for a number of technical advances that I wish had seen wider adoption. Their API was one of the first and honestly still one of the most enjoyable to actually use as a developer. It’s still full of incredibly interesting API calls that you wouldn’t expect from it unless you read carefully. Did you know, for example, that flickr API will provide you with the bounding box co-ordinates of different types of places? From a neighbourhood all the way up to a continent?

Previously:

Update (2026-03-04): Jaanus Kase:

Flickr’s web embeds were still working 15 years after I created them

Very unusual to have longevity for anything at all these days

Flickr deserves praise for being a good Internet citizen

Why Not Objective-C

Michael Tsai — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:57:09 +0000

Brent Simmons:

I led the effort to port our remaining Objective-C to Swift. When I started that project, Objective-C was about 25% of the code; when I retired it was in the low single digits (and has gone even lower since, I’ve heard).

[…]

Objective-C code was where a lot of our crashing bugs and future crashing bugs (and bugs of all kinds) lived.

[…]

A second thing we knew was that having to interoperate between Swift and Objective-C is a huge pain.

[…]

And a third thing we knew was that very few of our engineers had a background writing Objective-C. Maintaining that code — fixing bugs, adding features — was more expensive than it was for Swift code.

I prefer Swift for new code, but I don’t really want to rewrite working code. I haven’t found my old Objective-C to be a source of bugs. However, I always seem to end up rewriting more than I initially planned because the interop is such a pain. I like using Swift for the main data types in my app, but of course those get used everywhere, including from Objective-C code. I’m also convinced that Objective-C interop is a source of some of the weird compiler behavior I see with crashes and dependency tracking. The part I don’t like rewriting in Swift is stuff that calls plain C APIs. The Swift version often feels less readable, and I’m less sure that it’s correct—both the opposite of my normal experience with the language.

Update (2026-03-03): Brent Simmons (Mastodon):

Then of course I wrote some Objective-C code recently and really, really loved it.

[…]

Once you get past that, which takes a day or two given a good-faith effort, you’ll realize how small a language it is, how easy to hold in your palm and turn around and understand all sides of it. And you’ll appreciate how easy it is to make good decisions when you don’t have a surplus of language features to choose from.

[…]

It’s a cliché to call Objective-C a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age. It’s better thought of, these days, as a loaded footgun.

But I did absolutely love writing this code! So much fun.

Brent Simmons:

Two things I didn’t note in my post on Objective-C but could have: the compiler is crazy fast, and the debugger is wonderfully smooth, without all the latency we’ve become used to the last bunch of years. The whole experience feels so different — so light and easy.

smitty825:

I have an old Objective-C Mac app that I have to go back and rebuild on occasion. There are two things that blow my mind each time I rebuild:

No matter what version of Xcode I use…it always compiles successfully the first time.

Holy hell…does it compile fast! It feels like I press the build and deploy button, and it’s deploying almost immediately.

I was recently working on some Objective-C code, while my Mac was on battery in Low Power Mode. I made some changes to the app code and pressed the keyboard shortcut for Test Again. At first I thought nothing had happened, but actually it had recompiled and run the test in the blink of an eye. It feels totally different from writing Swift, where even a tiny change in test code (so that app doesn’t need to be recompiled) takes 5–10 seconds.

Update (2026-03-04): Manton Reece:

I still prefer Objective-C and plan to continue to use it. One change I’m thinking about making, though… Going all code for UI instead of XIBs or Storyboards, to make it easier to diff when working with AI.

Previously:

An Appreciation of Objective-C

Rewriting Apple’s Password Monitoring Service in Swift

Michael Tsai — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:55:59 +0000

Ricky Mondello et al. (2025, Mastodon, Hacker News):

The migration from Java to Swift was motivated by a need to scale the Password Monitoring service in a performant way. The layered encryption module used by Password Monitoring requires a significant amount of computation for each request, yet the overall service needs to respond quickly even when under high load.

[…]

Prior to seeking a replacement language, we sought ways of tuning the JVM to achieve the performance required. Java’s G1 Garbage Collector (GC) mitigated some limitations of earlier collectors by introducing features like predictable pause times, region-based collection, and concurrent processing. However, even with these advancements, managing garbage collection at scale remains a challenge due to issues like prolonged GC pauses under high loads, increased performance overhead, and the complexity of fine-tuning for diverse workloads.

[…]

Overall, our experience with Swift has been overwhelmingly positive and we were able to finish the rewrite much faster than initially estimated. Swift allowed us to write smaller, less verbose, and more expressive codebases (close to 85% reduction in lines of code) that are highly readable while prioritizing safety and efficiency.

[…]

Not only were our initial results heartening, but after a few iterations of performance improvements, we had close to 40% throughput gain with latencies under 1 ms for 99.9% of requests on our current production hardware. Additionally, the new service had a much smaller memory footprint per instance — in the 100s of megabytes — an order of magnitude smaller compared to the 10s of gigabytes our Java implementation needed under peak load to sustain the same throughput and latencies.

cogman10:

The call out of G1GC as being “new” is also pretty odd as it was added to the JVM in Java 9, released in 2016. Meaning, they are talking about a 9 year old collector as if it were brand new. Did they JUST update to java 11? And if they are complaining about startup time, then why no mention of AppCDS usage? Or more extreme, CRaC? What about doing an AOT compile with Graal?

The only mention they have is the garbage collector, which is simply just one aspect of the JVM. And, not for nothing, the JVM has made pretty humongous strides in startup time and GC performance throughout the versions. There’s pretty large performance wins going from 11->17 and 17->21.

I’m sorry, but this really reads as Apple marketing looking for a reason to tout swift as being super great.

CharlesW:

Another near-certain factor in this decision was that Apple has an extreme, trauma-born abhorrence of critical external dependencies. With “premier” support for 11 LTS having ended last fall, it makes me wonder if a primary lever for this choice was the question of whether it was better to (1) spend time evaluating whether one of Oracle’s subsequent Java LTS releases would solve their performance issues, or instead (2) use that time to dogfood server-side Swift (a homegrown, “more open” language that they understand better than anyone in the world) by applying it to a real-world problem at Apple scale, with the goal of eventually replacing all of their Java-based back-ends.

Previously:

Swift Server Powers Things Cloud

Michael Tsai — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:55:35 +0000

Vojtěch Rylko and Werner Jainek (2025):

The robustness of this work is ensured by a rigorous theoretical foundation, inspired by operational transformations and Git’s internals. After twelve years in production, Things Cloud has earned our users’ trust in its reliability. But despite the enduring strength of the architecture itself, the technology stack lagged behind.

[…]

Our legacy Things Cloud service was built on Python 2 and Google App Engine. While it was stable, it suffered from a growing list of limitations. In particular, slow response times impacted the user experience, high memory usage drove up infrastructure costs, and Python’s lack of static typing made every change risky. For our push notification system to be fast, we even had to develop a custom C-based service. As these issues accumulated and several deprecations loomed, we realized we needed a change.

A full rewrite is usually a last resort, but in our case, it was the only viable path for Things Cloud. We explored various programming languages including Java, Python 3, Go, and even C++. However, Swift – which was already a core part of our client apps – stood out for its potential and unique benefits. Swift promised excellent performance, predictable memory management through ARC, an expressive type system for reliability and maintainability, and seamless interoperability with C and C++.

[…]

Our Swift server codebase has around 30,000 lines of code. It produces a binary of 60 MB, and builds in ten minutes.

[…]

Compared to the legacy system, this setup has led to a more than threefold reduction in compute costs, while response times have shortened dramatically.

In contrast, OmniFocus puts all the logic in the client and can sync using any WebDAV server.

Werner Jainek (MacRumors):

The new cloud is already up and running – and you didn’t notice a thing. That was by design. From the outside, everything appears the same. But under the hood, everything changed: the infrastructure, the architecture, and the language it’s written in.

This post takes you behind the scenes: why we rebuilt Things Cloud, why we chose to write it in Swift, and how we transitioned without skipping a beat.

[…]

To ensure a smooth transition, we ran the new cloud in parallel with the old one. While the old Things Cloud continued syncing everyone’s to-dos, the new cloud quietly processed the same data using its own logic and infrastructure. Every edge case and every corner of the sync model was tested under real-world conditions – without anyone ever noticing.

Justin Bengtson:

What have been some of the pain points in using Swift on Server? What does the community think it needs to be improved to be more widely adopted in the industry? Any specific issues with deploying on Mac or Linux would be nice to know as well.

taylorswift:

yes, in general, i have found Swift’s “crash early and crash violently” philosophy to be problematic for server-side use cases, where availability is paramount and downtime is fatal.

to this day, Swift doesn’t have a good way to recover from precondition failures, so a single logic error in a many hundreds of thousands of lines codebase, triggered by a single unlucky visitor (or robot) has a nuclear-sized blast radius that takes down the service for everyone.

Simon Leeb:

I’ll take a crashing service any day of the week, if the alternative is a runtime with “let’s soldier on, it’ll be fine YOLO” vibes. I can image the post-mortem forum post would then be “I accidentally updated half a million user data records with unrecoverable garbage” instead of “things were patchy for a while”.

Konstantin:

Build times, compute and memory footprint during build are astronomical. Swift components are costing us 3x more than JVM/Kotlin components and 10x more than Rust/Go components to build. It’s really quite expensive to run Swift on the server.

[…]

Developing for the server on macOS is a huge pain in two main areas: 1) the overlapping types with iOS/macOS frameworks (e.g. Crypto) makes it impossible to know if what builds on macOS will build and even run on some Linux environment. Others have already mentioned the pain of FoundationEssentials, networking etc. 2) As a result of the previous, the ecosystem of Swift packages is full of libraries which although claiming support for server/linux targets, do not actually (correctly) support that.

[…]

DX around tooling has many papercuts (we see this when onboarding devs coming from more established server language ecosystems). One very prominent point is, well, IDE - Xcode is great for apps but positively hostile for server apps.

Previously:

Mac App Store Search Not Showing Mac Apps

Michael Tsai — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:53:45 +0000

Jeremy Provost:

When you search for Morpho, the App Store automatically flips you over to iPhone & iPad Apps, even though there’s a perfectly good Mac app that matches the search.

To add insult to injury, searching for Morpho on the iPhone or iPad App Store does show our app first. But specifically because we’ve built a Mac app, our app doesn’t show up in the list of iPhone & iPad Apps on the Mac App Store. For being a good platform-citizen, we’ve been rendered virtually invisible in search.

I’ve seen this happen with several apps, including Morpho.

I don’t know when this changed, but now it makes sense why 2025 was our worst year for Morpho downloads on the Mac.

If the Mac App Store can’t be bothered to promote, you know, actual Mac apps, then I don’t know what the point is for developers or customers.

Jeremy Provost:

I tried it again, and it’s true: searching for Morpho now defaults to Mac Apps.
I wish I knew why this happened, why it’s working now, and whether it’s truly fixed or could happen again.

Jeremy Provost:

Here’s a report on Reddit that the same thing is happening for another app, but only in certain countries.
Ultimately, it seems that with the launch of Morpho Converter 3.0 there were enough searches or downloads to “upgrade” it to defaulting to Mac Apps.

Previously:

Mac App Store Design in Tahoe

Michael Tsai — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:53:33 +0000

Tony Arnold:

The attention to detail in Apple’s App Store app is just… not there. I draw your attention to the “Available on” subtitles below each app in the grid — they’re inconsistently truncated, some not even indicating that they are truncated.

The spacing and padding also seems to be “best efforts” (check the device icons).

I want to be kind, but this design and experience feels like a lot of “good enough, ship it”.

Matt Godden:

The strongest impression I have from everything Apple has done, since the era of introducing Catalyst and SwiftUI, is they are trying to create “design systems” that remove the need for a designer, and remove the need for design tool skills on the part of developers. For example, the sheer number of UIs that seem to just use standard (SF Symbols?) UI icons, where previously they would have rolled their own.

These broken edges are where the designers are already out of the loop.

Previously:

App Store Comparison Shopping

Michael Tsai — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:52:59 +0000

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon):

Hot on the heels of my previous blog post My collected App Store critiques, I have yet another critique. It’s undoubtedly old news to many people, my critique coming years too late, but in my defense, I almost never shop for apps in the App Store. Rather, I merely download apps in the App Store that I already discovered outside the App Store, the old-fashioned way: recommendations from trusted friends, associates, and experts.

[…]

When I shop in physical retail stores, all of the products are upfront paid and have listed prices that I can compare. The same is mostly true of online retail stores too.

[…]

One thing that drives me nuts about the In-App Purchase business model is that it creates massive customer confusion. How do you know in advance exactly how much the app costs, what exactly you’re getting for the price, and what functionality, if any, is free? And if you’re confused about any of these things, then how can you possibly comparison shop between various apps in the App Store?

[…]

I can’t make much sense of the list of In-App Purchases, which appears to include multiple conflicting prices for the same thing, and doesn’t explain what SnoreLab Premium gives you.

Even on the Mac, you can’t open multiple windows to compare two apps side-by-side. Nor can you select text to copy and paste it as you collect notes about your app research.

In my opinion, the App Store has the opposite design: not to protect users but to perplex them, making the otherwise simple process of purchasing a product an unholy mess, reducing Apple users to helpless and hapless victims of greedy developers—including Apple, a financial beneficiary of all App Store IAP—who deliberately misdirect and mislead with cunning bait-and-switch schemes to pump the maximum amount of money out of consumers. The goal is to get you hooked first, invested in the app with your time and effort before you realize how much money you have to invest.

Nick Heer:

Apple utterly buries this information on individual app listings. To get even a vague idea of how much an app is going to cost, a user must scroll all the way past screenshots, the app’s description, ratings and reviews, the changelog, the privacy card, and the accessibility features — all the way down to a boring-looking table that contains the seller, the app’s size, the category, the compatibility, supported languages, the age rating, and only then is there a listing for “In-App Purchases”. And, if they exist, a user must still tap on the cell to find the list of options and their associated cost.

Cory Birdsong:

You mention the lack of app reviews on the web - that is also partially Apple’s fault. They shut down their affiliate link program in 2018, which was a reliable way to make money reviewing apps.

I assume it hit editorial coverage of non-game software the same way. The Sweet Setup had Wirecutter-style roundups/reviews for apps, and now it’s selling productivity courses.

Daniel Gomes:

I really miss app reviews. Really miss them. It was enjoyable to discover new software by reading reviews that popped up in my RSS.

In fact that is how most of us actually found apps before social media days. That applies to Mac apps but also iOS apps.

We really, really need good trusted software reviews. That should also make life harder for the fly by night and scam apps…

dxzdb:

These multiple prices are a huge pet peeve of mine. I believe if you ever put your app on sale - AppStoreConnect keeps every price and what you called it forever. Also if you use a name longer than 26 characters it’s going to truncate and the differentiating text may never be seen by customers.🤦‍♂️

Jeff Johnson:

I understand people who defend the CONCEPT of a vendor-locked software platform.

The problem is that Apple’s IMPLEMENTATION of a vendor-locked software platform is deplorable, the worst in so many ways, not only for developers but also for users.

[…]

In 2026, more than 17 years since the App Store opened, you cannot claim with any plausibility or honesty that Apple is even TRYING to improve or put forth a good-faith, reasonable effort in maintaining the App Store.

Previously:

Update (2026-03-02): Craig Grannell:

The sad reality is app review sites aren’t viable. Worse: broader app coverage rarely is either. That in part comes down to Apple and its affiliates schemes being eroded, but it’s also down to a lack of eyeballs on websites and people’s unwillingness to pay for editorial.

I used to write Android, iOS and Mac app and game reviews for a range of UK and US publications. Almost everything has been cancelled.

Swift Testing With Event Streams

Michael Tsai — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:50:38 +0000

Matt Massicotte:

The original implementation used XCTestExpectation to do it. […] At first, I thought that I could use Swift Testing’s confirmation system to handle this.

[…]

But this had two problems. The obvious one is the nesting. I couldn’t figure out an easy way to avoid it. And in fact, my real code had even more callbacks than this.

The second was about ordering. As far as I can tell, there’s no way for me to distinguish here between “a-b” and “b-a”.

[…]

Eventually, someone else suggested I use an AsyncStream to capture events.

Previously:

Issues Adopting Swift Testing

How to Replace Time Capsule

Michael Tsai — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:50:23 +0000

Howard Oakley:

Tahoe no longer lets you start a new backup on a Time Capsule, nor it appears to any other store requiring HFS+ (Mac Extended) format.

Time Capsule support is expected to end with macOS 26 Tahoe, as macOS 27 is unlikely to support AFP any more, so those Intel Macs compatible with Tahoe can continue backing up to Time Capsules until they’re replaced. Apple remains intentionally vague about this, stating only that AFP “won’t be supported in a future version of macOS”, and has been even less clear about support for backup stores on HFS+.

[…]

If you’ve upgraded to macOS Tahoe and erase your Time Capsule’s backups, you’ll be unable to store any new backups on it, unless you revert to Sequoia. This is yet another compelling reason not to upgrade to macOS 26.

This is of course an issue because Time Capsule backups frequently become inoperable and need to be reset.

Glenn Fleishman:

Time Capsule was always on, could be located anywhere you could plug it in, handled connections over Wi-Fi and Ethernet, and allegedly just worked. As any of us who owned one recalls, it often didn’t just work. Backups would fail, requiring erasure of the entire internal drive with no option to recover older backups. There was no Disk First Aid for Time Capsule.

[…]

Internet-hosted backups are a good supplement, but I don’t think there’s a drop-in replacement that boasts the same ease, even if reliability were not an issue.

[…]

What can you do today to replace a Time Capsule and provide the functionality it offered? You have effectively three choices:

Add a drive (or drives) to a desktop Mac.

Install a NAS that supports the features required for Time Machine.

Use a third-party tool that is tweakier than Time Machine, but may fit the bill better.

Helge Heß:

What do you recommend for a noob that wants to make sure his Mac laptop is backed up? I did setup my Synology to do the same, but it is pretty awkward and much worse than what Time Capsule provided.

Previously:

Annoying TextEdit Scroll Bar in Tahoe

Michael Tsai — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:49:52 +0000

susukang:

This problem is already reported not only on Reddit but also on Apple Community.

[…]

At least, one annoying problem is fixed that the scroll bar keeps moving to the right, which makes some letters on the left unreadable.

Via Jeff Johnson:

TextEdit rtf documents always appears horizontally scrolled with show ruler

Always showing the scroll thumb seems to be fixed in macOS 26.4 Developer Beta 1, but it adds a new problem. Now the scroll bars look funny, with a gray background behind the rounded, gray scroll track. (Johnson sees the extra gray background with macOS 26.3, so maybe there’s some other factor that triggers it?)

Previously:

TextEdit Love

Michael Tsai — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:49:37 +0000

Kyle Chayka (Hacker News):

What I’ve accrued the most of by far, though, are TextEdit files, from the bare-bones Mac app that just lets you type stuff into a blank window. Apple computers have come with text-editing software since the original Mac was released, in 1984; the current iteration of the program launched in the mid-nineties and has survived relatively unchanged. Over the past few years, I’ve found myself relying on TextEdit more as every other app has grown more complicated, adding cloud uploads, collaborative editing, and now generative A.I. TextEdit is not connected to the internet, like Google Docs. It is not part of a larger suite of workplace software, like Microsoft Word. You can write in TextEdit, and you can format your writing with a bare minimum of fonts and styling. Those files are stored as RTFs (short for rich-text format), one step up from the most basic TXT file. TextEdit now functions as my to-do-list app, my e-mail drafting window, my personal calendar, and my stash of notes to self, which act like digital Post-its.

I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does; it doesn’t hawk new features, and it doesn’t demand I update the app every other week, as Google Chrome does. I’ve tried out other software for keeping track of my random thoughts and ideas in progress—the personal note-storage app Evernote; the task-management board Trello; the collaborative digital workspace Notion, which can store and share company information. Each encourages you to adapt to a certain philosophy of organization, with its own formats and filing systems. But nothing has served me better than the brute simplicity of TextEdit, which doesn’t try to help you at all with the process of thinking.

This resonated with me even though I mostly use TextEdit on secondary Macs that don’t have all my apps installed.

Via Michael Steeber:

I almost always have an unsaved document open on my Mac that I use like a scratchpad. And I have it set to create plain text files by default.

Louie Mantia:

Some things may not require redesigning. We might have simply figured them out.

Jason Anthony Guy:

Other than that final font faux pas—TextEdit’s default font is Helvetica—it’s a wonderful ode to an underappreciated app and a beautiful bit of writing.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

I get the feeling that Chayka would be better served switching from TextEdit to Apple Notes for most of these things he’s creating. Saving a whole pile of notes to yourself as text files on your desktop, with no organization into sub-folders, isn’t wrong. The whole point of “just put it on the desktop” is to absolve yourself of thinking about where to file something properly. That’s friction, and if you face a bit of friction every time you want to jot something down, it increases the likelihood that you won’t jot it down because you didn’t want to deal with the friction.

[…]

But a big pile of unorganized RTF files on your desktop — or a big pile of unsaved document windows that remain open, in perpetuity, in TextEdit — is no way to live. You can use TextEdit like that, it supports being used like that, but it wasn’t designed to be used like that.

Of course, I think EagleFiler offers the best of both worlds. You get the same delightful text engine as TextEdit, yet you skip the friction of creating and saving files. But there’s no opaque database or proprietary file format like with Apple Notes; the real RTF files are still there, organized in real folders, and you can double-click to edit them in TextEdit itself if desired.

Garrett Murray (Mastodon):

This exact scenario is what led me—22 years ago, in 2004!—to create xPad for macOS.

Jon Snader:

Since I write everything in Emacs, this never happens to me. Part of starting a new file is executing a find-file which specifies its name and file system location. Even then, I just specify it in the minibuffer; there’s no annoying open dialog to deal with.

[…]

As you all know, I solved the same problem with Journelly. I use it as my memo book and typically make about 10 entries per day. People think of Journelly as integrated with Emacs but it can also save its data in Markdown so it’s perfectly usable on any system and editor as long as you’re using an iPhone.

It’s amusing how 40 year old technology is still more convenient and easier to use than “modern” systems with dialog boxes for everything.

Marcin Wichary:

Notes are still evolving. The UI keeps changing. I’ve had a note shared by a friend hanging alongside my own notes for years, without me asking for it. I remember the moment when tags were introduced, and suddenly copy/paste from Slack started populating things in the sidebar. Then there was this scary asterisked dialog that slid so well into planned obsolescence worries that it felt like a self-own[…]

[…]

On top of that, the last version of Apple Notes on my macOS occasionally breaks copy/paste (!), which led to some writing loss on my part. (If you cut from one note intending to paste in another, and realize nothing was saved in the clipboard, you lost the text forever.)

Jeff Johnson:

“I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning”

Except TextKit 2 totally wrecked the TextEdit UI.

Rony Fadel:

Dang what a downgrade (macOS Tahoe)

Jeff Johnson:

I finally figured out a longstanding, annoying TextEdit bug:

FB21856749 Mouse pointer changes from I-beam to arrow when clicked on insertion point, thereby preventing text selection

This is especially problematic when you open a document in TextEdit, which places the insertion point at the beginning, and you want to select text from the beginning. It’s difficult to avoid clicking on the insertion point.

Wevah:

Oh wow. I wonder if it’s because the insertion point is now its own view instead of being drawn by the text view (iirc).

2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card

Michael Tsai — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:46:14 +0000

Jason Snell (complete commentary):

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)

[…]

After a few years of relative stability, the Mac has now given back all the goodwill it earned from our panel with the release of Apple silicon Macs. The issue wasn’t on the hardware side: There was wide agreement that Apple is at the top of its Mac hardware game. But macOS 26 Tahoe was condemned as a disastrous OS release, due to its half-baked visual design that hurt the Mac’s usability.

[…]

It was a very good year for iPhone hardware, which helped drive this score up from last year. The iPhone 17 line-up earned a lot of praise, including the base iPhone 17, for adding a bunch of features previously seen only on pro iPhones. The iPhone 17 Pro got a lot of love, too, while the response to the iPhone Air was more polarizing. Of course, the new Liquid Glass design on iOS 26 also came in for a lot of criticism, though many panelists praised it. Generally, iOS is considered the place where Liquid Glass shines best, even if some panelists felt that was damning with the faintest of praise.

[…]

A lot of praise was for iPadOS 26’s new windowing system, in which Apple seems to have figured out how to balance the iPad with a desire among some users for Mac-style window management. Some panelists who said they had drifted away from the iPad reported coming back into its gravitational pull. But as always, some skepticism remains about the iPad’s very reason for being.

Here are my responses:

Mac: 3 The M4 MacBook Pro with nanotexture display is one of my favorite Macs ever. The M4 MacBook Air was a great update, with more RAM and a lower price. The Mac Studio finally got an update, though the M3 Ultra chip is now two generations behind the M5 in the baby MacBook Pro released the same year. Nothing seems to be happening with iMac or Mac Pro. Overall, I’m down on macOS Tahoe due to the Liquid Glass design and large number of bugs. I do like that AutoFill can now work in third-party browsers. The new Spotlight seems like a big improvement, though I continue to prefer LaunchBar.

iPhone: 2 Processor, battery, camera improvements, and Ceramic Shield 2 in iPhone 17 (and 17 Pro) are nice, but I just find it hard to get excited about iPhone these days. The camera improvement I want to see, reverting to a deeper depth of field, will probably never happen. As with the Mac, iPhone is let down by the new software. I guess I like the new Camera app, and I like CarPlay widgets (though they need more font controls), but most of the other changes that I notice day-to-day are either neutral or regressions. Liquid Glass is maddening. Apple also set a bad precedent in preventing newer iPhones from updating to iOS 18.7.3, thus forcing them to update to iOS 26 to get security updates.

iPad: 4 Putting Liquid Glass aside—which is admittedly hard to do—iPadOS 26 is the biggest improvement in a long time. Multitasking works much better now. I still do not find it a very compelling platform, though. More than 99% of what I do is better on my Mac, my iPhone, or my Kindle. But if you like iPad, this was a good year.

Wearables: 3, Apple Watch: 4, Vision Pro: 1 Live Translation seems magical, though I’ve not used it myself yet. I’m concerned that AirPods Pro 3 seems to have issues with fit and static. I really like the Apple Watch SE 3. Vision Pro made few visible advancements this year and seems like it needs to be rethought or cancelled.

Home: 2 My HomePod continues to not work well for Siri or music. The smart outlet that I installed last year no longer works reliably. The Home app is still frustrating.

Apple TV: 3 It continues to work OK, but I don’t think any of the changes this year really improved my experience. I’m still not very happy with the software or the remote.

Services: 2 iMessage and Siri still work poorly for me. Apple Pay and the rest of iCloud are OK, with most apps that sync having occasional hiccups. The other services don’t interest me except in that their existence seems to be warping Apple’s product design decisions.

Hardware Reliability: 5 My family’s hardware has been solid this year (not counting the ever-present USB problems), and I don’t recall any major issues reported elsewhere. I remain a bit on edge because if a Mac’s SSD fails, the Mac can no longer even be used with external storage, and my experience with AppleCare has not been great.

OS Quality: 1, Apple Apps: 2 Most of the old bugs are still there, and the new OS releases brought new ones. Will this ever get better? Apple just seems lost. This year, I want to highlight how unreliable Screen Time is. I also experienced new issues where the “d” key sometimes doesn’t work on my Mac (with any keyboard) and my Apple Watch wouldn’t charge with third-party chargers. Nearly all of Apple’s Mac apps feel like they need attention, but I don’t really wish for that because recent revisions—like the Contacts app in Tahoe—tend to be regressions. I keep being tempted to switch away from Safari—the reliability, performance, and compatibility are subpar—but am sticking with it for now because I prefer its user interface.

Developer Relations: 2 The same old issues with the App Store, documentation, the schedule, and bug reporting. Apple needs a turnaround. Swift has not taken over the world. It continues to get new features without really feeling mature. Swift Concurrency is now officially approachable, but the complexity remains, and Apple has not convinced the community that this approach is actually an improvement. Flagship frameworks like SwiftUI and SwiftData continue to disappoint. On the plus side, there is finally a roadmap for improving the type checker.

Apple’s Impact in the World: No vote We tend to focus on hardware and software, and sometimes Apple’s interactions with various governments, but its customer account policies are an increasingly important area. These days, much of our devices’ functionality relies on services tied to your Apple Account. The account holds your purchases, your data (cloud storage and backups), and it’s the key to even being able to use certain features. It’s incredibly important, yet as we saw this year with the story of Paris Buttfield-Addison, your account can be taken away through no fault of your own and with no recourse save from running to the press. This is completely unacceptable. Apple should revise its procedures so that this sort of thing can never happen again, and it should audit its software to make sure that as much of it as possible does not require an account. One particular area of concern is passkeys. Years after their introduction, Apple finally shipped credential exchange, but it turns out that users still don’t have control over their data. You can’t export your passkeys for offline storage and later reimport into the Passwords app. Even if you have a full backup of your Mac, you can’t restore it and access your passkeys unless you have access to your Apple Account. If your Apple Account is working, your data is stored in iCloud, but it’s not really backed up because you can’t access historical versions. A sync bug will just wipe it out everywhere. If, as Apple says, passkeys are the future, they need to be implemented in a way that serves and protects users, rather than locking their data into a cloud of questionable reliability and which they could lose access to at any moment simply for trying to redeem a gift card.

• • •

Adam Engst:

For the fourth year in a row, Hardware Reliability topped the list, followed by the iPhone, iPad, and Services categories. On the other end of the spectrum, the Vision Pro and Developer Relations continued to dwell at the bottom[…]

[…]

Perhaps most troubling is that of the 14 categories, scores dropped in 11. Apple’s Impact on the World category suffered the largest decline, falling a full point to an F grade—a precipitous drop driven by Tim Cook’s obsequious relationship with the Trump administration. The controversial Liquid Glass design in macOS 26 Tahoe also drew heavy criticism, dragging the Mac’s score down by 0.7 points despite uniform praise for the hardware. The main bright spots were the iPhone (up 0.2 points thanks to the well-received iPhone 17 lineup) and iPad (up 0.2 points due to iPadOS 26’s new windowing system).

[…]

The panelists’ commentary was especially pointed this year. John Siracusa called Tahoe “the worst user interface update in the history of the Mac,” while John Gruber said, “There is nothing about Tahoe’s new UI that is better than its predecessor.”

Nick Heer:

I am somewhat impressed by the breadth of Apple’s current offerings as I consider all the ways they are failing me, and I cannot help but wonder if it is that breadth that is contributing to the unreliability of this software. Or perhaps it is the company’s annual treadmill. There was a time when remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software meant you traded the excitement of new features for the predictability of stability. That trade-off no longer exists; software-as-a-service means an older version is just old, not necessarily more reliable.

[…]

What I expect out of the software I use is a level of quality I simply do not see. I do not think I have a very high bar. The bugs in the big paragraph above are not preferences or odd use cases. They are problems with the fundamentals of the operating system and first-party apps. I do not have unreasonable expectations for how things should work, only that they ought to work as described and marketed. But complaints of this sort have echoed for over a decade and it seems to me that many core issues remain unaddressed.

Danaher to Buy Masimo

Michael Tsai — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:46:06 +0000

Sabrina Valle and Gnaneshwar Rajan:

Danaher, a $150 billion U.S. company that makes tools used in developing and testing medicines, on Tuesday agreed to buy Masimo for $9.9 billion, expanding in patient-monitoring devices in a surprise move outside its main focus.

CNBC:

Masimo’s non-invasive pulse oximeters will complement Danaher’s invasive Radiometer blood analyzer devices.

[…]

Masimo recently transformed itself into a “pure-play” med-tech firm after selling its Sound United unit, which held audio brands Denon and Marantz, to Samsung’s Harman last year for $350 million.

I wonder if this will affect the legal fight with Apple over Apple Watch.

Previously:

YouTube for visionOS

Michael Tsai — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:45:45 +0000

Samuel Axon (MacRumors):

When Apple’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset launched in February 2024, users were frustrated at the lack of a proper YouTube app—a significant disappointment given the device’s focus on video content consumption, and YouTube’s strong library of immersive VR and 360 videos. That complaint continued through the release of the second-generation Vision Pro last year, including in our review.

Now, two years later, an official YouTube app from Google has launched on the Vision Pro’s app store. It’s not just a port of the iPad app, either—it has panels arranged spatially in front of the user as you’d expect, and it supports 3D videos, as well as 360- and 180-degree ones.

Jason Anthony Guy:

It’s been an embarrassment on both sides: for Apple, which couldn’t muster sufficient enthusiasm for its first new platform in a decade; and for Google, which actively opted out of allowing its iPad app on the Vision Pro two years ago—and then blocked third-party apps hoping to fill the void.

[…]

While I haven’t yet fired it up on my Apple Vision Pro (it needs to be charged, lol), I’ll give this release a qualified finally.

Alex Rosenberg:

Cynical take: they only made an official YouTube app for Vision Pro to make sure that those users aren’t actively bypassing their low-grade poorly-targeted inserted advertising.

Devon Dundee:

Now, it’s Netflix’s turn.

Previously:

YouTube Blocks Background Playback

Michael Tsai — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:45:31 +0000

Jon Martindale (Hacker News):

Typically, YouTube will stop playing on your phone or tablet if you turn off the screen; if you want to listen to an hour-long playlist or podcast on your next walk with your device locked in your pocket, you need to pay $13.99 per month.

Dwayne Cubbins (Hacker News, Slashdot):

While a majority of reports are coming from Samsung Internet users, it’s not the only browser impacted. Users on Brave, Vivaldi, and even Microsoft Edge have complained about the issue.

[…]

When users try to minimize the browser or turn off their screen, the audio cuts out. On Samsung devices, some users noticed a fleeting notification that said “MediaOngoingActivity” right before the media controls vanished entirely.

[…]

For years, people have relied on these mobile browser workarounds to get a free taste of what YouTube Premium offers: ad-free viewing and, crucially, background audio. This sudden, simultaneous failure across multiple browsers strongly suggests a targeted change by YouTube.

[…]

We’ve already reported on YouTube’s fresh crackdown on third-party clients like NewPipe. So it won’t be a stretch to assume that YouTube is indeed patching such workarounds.

Ryan McNeal:

A Google spokesperson has confirmed to Android Authority that YouTube has been updated so that non-Premium users can no longer access background playback[…]

Liv McMahon (Hacker News):

Google has revealed YouTube brought in more than $60bn (£44bn) in revenue in 2025 as the firm targets getting more subscribers.

The figure, which totals the money generated through advertising on YouTube as well as paid subscriptions, far surpasses streaming rival Netflix’s $45bn revenue.

Chris Menahan:

Today, @TeamYouTube fully removed the ability to search by upload date by killing the last workaround (appending the URL with &sp=CAISAhAB).

The feedback they got on this change last month was overwhelmingly negative, but rather than listen to their users, they chose to remove all workarounds.

Previously:

YouTube for visionOS

Building Zavala 4.0

Michael Tsai — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 21:19:50 +0000

Maurice Parker:

Adding data syncing to any application is hard. iCloud helps with that somewhat, but it is still really hard to get right. Shoehorning a hierarchical data structure like an outline into a flat data structure like iCloud is super hard and I did not get it right the first time. While I did improve the reliability of the syncing code over the course of many Zavala releases, it was never quite right. […] This has been resolved in Zavala 4.0.

To do this I had to change how Rows are stored in the internal database as well as how they are stored in the iCloud database. This new solution works really well, but isn’t compatible with the old versions of Zavala.

[…]

Love it or hate it, Liquid Glass is the new design language from Apple for their latest operating systems. If you are an app developer and don’t support it, your app is going to look dated and out of place on the latest OS’s. Fortunately, I feel like Zavala is one of those kind of apps where Liquid Glass looks good and isn’t the worst at usability.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to have a Liquid Glass version of your interface along side the legacy look and feel of previous OS versions. This is because you have to update to the latest API’s to correctly use Liquid Glass and some things, like the spacing of elements have been changed. Basically to keep backwards compatibility for OS’s before the version 26 ones, you need to maintain two different versions of the user interface code.

[…]

I used Claude Code to translate Zavala into German.

Previously:

NetNewsWire 7

Update (2026-03-02): Steve Troughton-Smith:

iOS 26 is the minimum for any major releases of my apps going forward. There’s just no way I’m maintaining two separate UIs for every app

Maurice Parker:

I only had one user write to me to let me know that not supporting older OS versions with Zavala 4.0 inconvenienced them.

Arizona Age Verification Bill

Michael Tsai — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 21:18:32 +0000

Ken Macon (Hacker News):

Arizona legislators have introduced what may be the most aggressive app store age verification bill in the country. House Bill 2920 would require age verification not just for app downloads, but for preinstalled software, the browser, the text messaging app, the search bar, the calculator, and the weather widget. Every piece of software on a mobile device would be subject to age-gating ID checks under this proposal.

[…]

For anyone under 18, the bill mandates that their account be “affiliated” with a parent account. The app store would then be required to obtain “verifiable parental consent” before allowing the minor to download an application, purchase an application, or make any in-app purchase.

[…]

If a developer makes what the legislation calls a “significant change” to an application, the parent account must provide renewed consent before the minor can access the updated version. […] This means a weather app that adds a banner ad would require fresh parental consent. An update to a note-taking app’s privacy policy would trigger the consent mechanism.

Previously:

France’s Social Media Ban

Michael Tsai — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 21:18:28 +0000

RTÉ (Hacker News):

French politicians have passed a bill that will ban social media use by under-15s, a move championed by President Emmanuel Macron as a way to protect children from excessive screen time.

[…]

It will now go to the Senate, France's upper house, ahead of becoming law.

[…]

The legislation, which also provides for a ban on mobile phones in high schools, would make France the second country to take such a step following Australia's ban for under-16s in December.

Previously:

Australia’s Social Media Ban

macOS 26.4 Beta: Problems Mounting HFS+ Volumes

Michael Tsai — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:21:52 +0000

I normally don’t write about beta bugs, but I’ve seen lots of people discussing this one and also received customer questions about it. I can reproduce it on my Mac, though not for every HFS+ volume.

Apple:

HFS external media might fail to mount automatically. (168672160)

Workaround: For macOS only, use CLI tool diskutil mount to attach the relevant disk device.

This also affects disk images, both creating them and mounting them on macOS 26.4 (even if they were created using another version). I discuss some workarounds for DropDMG here.

Thomas Rohde (Reddit, MacRumors, 2):

Apparently fsck_hfs is broken

Mr. Macintosh:

I tried to warn as many people as possible about HFS issues but I did not at the time know it was fsck.

Thomas Rohde:

I have 7 (seven!) external drives that I currently can’t use 🙄

Corentin Cras-Méneur:

Finally figured out how to properly mount my external HFS drives under macOS 26.4b1! diskutil mount—suggested as a workaround in the release notes—was SURE not cutting it. I had to use sudo mount -t hfs instead (specifying the filesystem format and mount path manually). What a pain it was!

[…]

They are all standard hard drives and I never migrated them to APFS because I didn’t want the loss of performance (plus, I’ve seen some pretty nasty corruptions on APFS that were really REALLY hard to recover from while I have my faithful DiskWarrior for HFS+).

Previously:

APFS Enumeration Performance on Rotational Hard Drives

Update (2026-02-20): See also: Dave Nanian.

Update (2026-03-02): Apple replied to my feedback saying they think the bug is fixed in beta 2 (Reddit). It looks to me like it is.

Outlook Copilot Bug Exposes Confidential E-mails

Michael Tsai — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:21:31 +0000

Sergiu Gatlan (Hacker News):

Microsoft says a Microsoft 365 Copilot bug has been causing the AI assistant to summarize confidential emails since late January, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies that organizations rely on to protect sensitive information.

[…]

“A code issue is allowing items in the sent items and draft folders to be picked up by Copilot even though confidential labels are set in place,” Microsoft added.

Thomas Claburn:

It’s just this sort of scenario that has led 72 percent of S&P 500 companies to cite AI as a material risk in regulatory filings.

[…]

“Although content with the configured sensitivity label will be excluded from Microsoft 365 Copilot in the named Office apps, the content remains available to Microsoft 365 Copilot for other scenarios,” the documentation explains. “For example, in Teams, and in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.”

[…]

In theory, DLP policies should be able to affect Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat. But that hasn’t been happening in this instance.

Previously:

Apple’s .car File Format

Michael Tsai — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:18:02 +0000

Ordinal0 (via Hacker News):

In this post, I’ll walk through the process of reverse engineering the .car file format, explain its internal structures, and show how to parse these files programmatically. This knowledge could be useful for security research and building developer tools that does not rely on Xcode or Apple’s proprietary tools.

As part of this research, I’ve built a custom parser and compiler for .car files that doesn’t depend on any of Apple’s private frameworks or proprietary tools. To make this research practical, I’ve compiled my parser to WebAssembly so it runs entirely in your browser, so no server uploads required. You can drop any .car file into the interactive demo below to explore its content.

[…]

From the decompiled BOMStorageOpenWithSys function shown above, we can infer the overall layout of a BOM file. It begins with a fixed-size header, followed by a block index table and a variables table.

[…]

While standard BOM files store installer package manifests, .car files repurpose the container for asset storage.

Searching for Apps With Spotlight

Michael Tsai — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:17:56 +0000

Brent Simmons:

Spotlight has recently become terrible for launching apps after being so good for years. Now when I type something like Cal or Calendar or even Calendar.app I have to manually select the actual app in the list, if it even appears.

I’ve never used Spotlight for this on macOS (preferring LaunchBar) but have used it often with iOS. These days, I find that searching for an iOS app with Spotlight often doesn’t show the app anywhere in the results. Sometimes it will give me a Wikipedia or App Store entry even though the app is already installed on my phone. Searching with App Library does work reliably.

Update (2026-02-19): Alex:

Spotlight on my #macos #Tahoe keeps crashing because it encounters some issue inside its index.

See also: anul agarwal (via Mr. Macintosh).

Update (2026-02-20): TanglyConstant9:

spotlight is meant to be GOOD not randomly decide its going to search the dictionary definition of the app im tryna open. this is crazy but i lowkey miss launchpad

Versioning Your SwiftData Schema

Michael Tsai — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:17:39 +0000

Mohammad Azam:

We started with a simple model. Then we added a new property and transformed existing data. Then we introduced a uniqueness constraint and cleaned up duplicates before enforcing it. Each change felt small in isolation. But every one of those changes altered the structure of data already stored on disk.

[…]

SwiftData gives you the tools to do this properly. VersionedSchema gives you structure. SchemaMigrationPlan gives you control. Custom migration stages let you reshape data intentionally instead of hoping automatic migration handles everything.

It seems like they got this part of the SwiftData API right.

Previously:

SwiftData

iOS 26.4: Stolen Device Protection Enabled by Default

Michael Tsai — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:26:46 +0000

Juli Clover:

Starting with iOS 26.4, Stolen Device Protection will be enabled by default and turned on for all iPhone users.

[…]

Stolen Device Protection requires additional authentication through Face ID or Touch ID to access certain iPhone features like the Passwords app, Lost mode in Find My , Safari purchases, and more. Some features are disabled entirely without authentication, while others have a one-hour security delay.

[…]

Prior to iOS 26.4, Stolen Device Protection had to be enabled manually in the Face ID and Passcode section of the Settings app. There is an option to remove security delays when the iPhone is in a familiar location, which allows full functionality at home but protection when out and about.

Based on the screenshot, it looks like Stolen Device Protection is not actually enabled by default; rather, iOS strongly encourages you to opt in by forcing you to either tap a giant blue Turn On button or some little blue text, which doesn’t even look like a button, that says Not Now.

I plan to opt out because of my prior bad experience with iOS inappropriately locking me out and the familiar location safety feature not working properly. I think it’s more likely to burn me than save me. I might feel differently if I had important passwords in iCloud Keychain. I think I’d rather see an option to require a longer passphrase to unlock Apple’s password manager.

Previously:

Update (2026-02-19): J. Blake:

I’ve never turned on the advanced protection but after reading your blog, I checked my “Significant Locations” …and they were not.

iOS 27 “Rave” Update to Clean Up Code

Michael Tsai — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:25:57 +0000

Tim Hardwick:

Apple’s iOS 27 update will prioritize cleaning up the operating system’s internals, with engineers making changes that could result in better battery life, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

The effort is said to be similar to what Apple did with its Snow Leopard Mac update years ago, and will involve removing old code, rewriting existing features, and subtly upgrading apps to improve performance.

Note that it does not say they are focusing on fixing bugs. We’ve heard stuff like this before, and it did not produce anything like a Snow Leopard. Who can say whether a particular feature needs to be rewritten without seeing the code, but I don’t think there’s any reason to presume that a rewrite will improve reliability. At best, there’s now lots of new code that has not been tested at scale. At worst, Apple has a history of rewrites making things worse and even eventually being scrapped. These days, hearing that a feature or app that you depend on is receiving attention in an OS update may provoke more fear than excitement.

Jeff Johnson:

Thus, it’s indisputable that iPhone had a significant effect on Leopard. Strangely, nobody appears to acknowledge that iPhone may have had a significant effect on Snow Leopard too. Apple (in)famously promoted Snow Leopard as having “0 New Features.” Although this was clearly a joking exaggeration, the joke had a grain of truth, reflecting the limited scope of Snow Leopard compared to its predecessors such as Leopard and Tiger. No joke was Snow Leopard’s price discount: $29 compared to $129 for Leopard or Tiger. Many people assume that Snow Leopard had 0 new features because Apple was working instead on countless bug fixes, as if features vs. bug fixes were the only possible tradeoff. But Apple’s PR mentions a different tradeoff. What if Snow Leopard had 0 new features because Apple was working instead on iPhone—and iPad! After Apple released iPhone, the company did not simply rest on its laurels. It pushed ahead, not only on iPhone, which was becoming a huge hit, ultimately to overshadow the Mac, but also on a new product, iPad, released in April 2010. Does anyone believe that the key software engineering and QA resources “borrowed” from the Mac OS X team were all promptly returned, like a library book?

[…]

Sadly, I see no reason to believe that Apple has suddenly started to care again about software quality. The new year-based operating system numbering scheme is an overt sign and painful reminder to me that Apple has no intention to end the self-enforced yearly major OS update release schedule that is a primary cause of Apple’s software quality problems. What I liked about the Snow Leopard era, and what I think everyone liked about it, was the unusually long period after major releases when we received mostly minor bug fix releases, slowly improving the quality of the operating system, avoiding big disruptions. In that sense, we will never have another Snow Leopard, because the future is annual major updates.

I liked Snow Leopard’s focus on OS internals and developer features like GCD. But what was really special about it was the time between major releases, and that obviously can’t be replicated on an annual schedule.

Previously:

Update (2026-02-19): Nick Lockwood:

ah yes, the team that hasn’t managed to ship a stable software update in 15 years is going to rewrite the only parts of the OS that actually still work properly. What could go wrong?

macOS Repair Assistant Replaces Apple Diagnostics

Michael Tsai — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:25:06 +0000

Howard Oakley:

[Y]ou’ll then be invited to choose from the available diagnostic suites according to your Mac’s hardware, from:

Mac Resource Inspector, to test the main Mac hardware over a period of 1-7 minutes;

Display Anomalies, for any built-in LCD panel;

Keyboard, only when built-in;

Trackpad, only when built-in;

Touch ID, for any built-in Touch ID sensor;

Audio, to verify audio output using a set of test tones.

Currently these are run individually and there’s no means to run them all in sequence.

[…]

This is a huge improvement on Apple Diagnostics, but there’s one slight glitch. Previous results from diagnostic testing were recorded in the Diagnostics section of System Information, but not those from Repair Assistant.

As he says, the documention is unhelpful and vague. Note that Repair Assistant is different from Recovery Assistant, which also debuted in Tahoe.

Previously:

Update (2026-02-19): Howard Oakley:

There have been substantial changes made to Recovery for Apple silicon Macs in recent versions of macOS. This article guides you through its increasing complexities, using the road map below.

There’s one overriding caution: you will come across two different features with the same name. When you click on Options in the opening screen, that opens Recovery Assistant, where you select the user and authenticate to gain access to the Recovery app with its window of four options. If you open the Utilities menu in that, you’ll see a command Recovery Assistant, which opens another app that calls itself Device Recovery Assistant, but is generally referred to simply as Recovery Assistant, although it’s not the same as the other Recovery Assistant at all.

OpenClaw Developer Joins OpenAI

Michael Tsai — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 02:24:09 +0000

Peter Steinberger (Twitter, Hacker News):

When I started exploring AI, my goal was to have fun and inspire people. And here we are, the lobster is taking over the world. My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use. That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research.

[…]

What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.

[…]

It’s always been important to me that OpenClaw stays open source and given the freedom to flourish. Ultimately, I felt OpenAI was the best place to continue pushing on my vision and expand its reach.

Sam Altman:

Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.

OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support. The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that.

Steinberger discusses OpenClaw and acquisition offers from OpenAI and Meta in an interview with Lex Fridman. See also: Marcus Schuler.

Previously:

OpenClaw (Formerly Moltbot)

Update (2026-03-03): Tianzhou (Hacker News):

OpenClaw has now crossed 250K+ stars, overtaking React to become the most-starred non-aggregator software project on GitHub — a title React held unchallenged for years. From zero to #1 in under four months, with no sign of slowing down.

Update (2026-03-04): Dan Shipper et al.:

“I have my Claw. Now what?”

This is the question everyone asks as soon as they get their Claw. You now have an infinitely patient, infinitely capable robot assistant at your beck and call. But having infinite options can be as intimidating as having none.

This guide exists to help you understand what a Claw can do for you, and get specific ideas to integrate into your work and life so that it feels like magic (with zero technical jargon).

UK CMA Secures App Store Committments

Michael Tsai — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 02:23:55 +0000

UK Competition and Markets Authority:

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is seeking views on a package of commitments from Apple and Google intended to deliver immediate improvements in certainty, transparency and fairness for thousands of UK businesses dependent on app stores to serve their customers. Additional commitments from Apple will deliver a step change in how developers can request interoperable access to the iOS and iPadOS mobile operating systems, giving greater certainty over how they can deliver innovative new products. The commitments will be underpinned by robust monitoring and reporting by the CMA to ensure compliance.

[…]

App review: Making sure Apple and Google review apps to be distributed on their app stores in a fair, objective and transparent way and do not discriminate against apps which compete with their own, or give preferential treatment to their own apps.

App ranking: Making sure Apple and Google rank apps in their app stores in a fair, objective and transparent way and do not discriminate against apps which compete with their own, or give preferential treatment to their own apps.

Data collection: Making sure Apple and Google safeguard the app data they gather from developers in the course of app review and do not use this data unfairly.

Interoperability: Enabling developers to more easily request interoperable access to features and functionality within Apple’s mobile operating systems[…]

Via Carly Page:

The watchdog says it will track metrics, including review timelines, appeal rates, and the handling of interoperability requests to ensure the commitments translate into real changes.

Did anything ever come from the EU interoperability requests? Or are the changes we’ve seen just a result of the DMA itself?

William Gallagher:

The CMA describes its announcement as being proposed commitments. It says that views are welcome by 17:00 GMT on March 3, 2026, although it rather buries how you submit those views in a blog and accompanying set of supporting documentation.

Depending on the views submitted, the CMA says that its proposed commitments will take effect from April 1, 2026.

Previously, the UK’s CMA has claimed that Apple stifles competition between browsers on the iPhone. However, it has so far chosen not to create regulations to force any changes.

Tim Hardwick:

The CMA says it will closely monitor implementation and won’t hesitate to impose formal requirements if the companies fail to follow through. Further measures are expected in the coming months that could include potential changes to how Apple’s digital Wallet app operates.

Ben Lovejoy:

Apple told Bloomberg that the changes provide great opportunities for developers.

“The commitments announced today allow Apple to continue advancing important privacy and security innovations for users and great opportunities for developers,” an Apple spokesperson said.

Previously:

Apple Creator Studio AI Usage Limits

Michael Tsai — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 21:57:48 +0000

William Gallagher:

Apple buries the fact that its Apple Creator Studio bundle’s generative AI features come with any usage limits, but the limits are real and now appear to be significantly less than expected.

Apple (via Ben Lovejoy):

The exact number of images, slides, and presenter notes that you can generate varies based on the complexity of the queries, server availability, and network availability. At a minimum per month, if used exclusively, you can:
Generate 50 images
Generate 50 presentations (with approximately 8–10 slides each)
Generate presenter notes for 700 slides
Usage limits reset each month.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

This entire app used 7% of my weekly Codex usage limit. Compare that to a single (awful) slideshow in Keynote using 47% of my monthly Apple Creator Studio usage limit 👀

John Gruber (Mastodon):

Something feels off here, by at least an order of magnitude (maybe two?), that creating an entire good app costs way less than creating one shitty slide deck in Keynote.

Previously:

The End of iTunes Wish Lists

Michael Tsai — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 21:57:41 +0000

Juli Clover:

Apple will soon do away with iTunes Wish Lists featuring movie and TV shows, according to emails going out to customers as of today. Apple says that people who still have wish lists should migrate items to their Apple TV watchlist before the feature is removed.

Each email that Apple is sending out includes a PDF with TV shows and movies that are on the individual’s iTunes Wish List. Apple says that users can tap on each link and then tap on the “+” button to get items to appear in the Apple TV watchlist.

Brian Webster:

Seriously? They couldn’t manage to code this up, I have to transfer each one manually? Really?

Benjamin Mayo:

is this finally the end of the iTunes Store app?

I hope not, because the Music and TV apps don’t really offer the same functionality for managing the content you or a family member has purchased.

Manuel Guzman:

I used to use it to keep a list of movies I was interested and then bought them when they went on sale. Pretty annoying that they removed this feature.

Previously:

Update (2026-02-19): Juli Clover:

With tvOS 26.4, Apple has removed the dedicated iTunes Movies and iTunes TV Shows apps that listed content available for purchase.

Update (2026-03-02): Joe Rosensteel:

I have to warn you that any normal person in your life is going to be very upset when you upgrade to 26.4. Not because they were directly using the movies and tv shows app tiles but because those were likely left in their default position and were load bearing apps. Their removal reflows the home screen. If you know people with default top rows do them a favor and shuffle two other seldom-used apps up there. For the love of god don’t put anything important there because people have muscle memory.

Gemini-Powered Siri Features Delayed

Michael Tsai — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 21:57:31 +0000

Zac Hall (Hacker News, MacRumors, AppleInsider, Slashdot):

Despite inking a deal with Google to use Gemini AI as the brains behind upgraded Siri, Apple is reportedly facing internal challenges in getting the final product ready for prime time. The reported delays could stretch into iOS 27 this fall. Apple first announced a more capable version of Siri in 2024; that update hasn’t shipped yet.

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

After planning to include the new capabilities in iOS 26.4 — an operating system update slated for March — Apple is now working to spread them out over future versions, according to people familiar with the matter. That would mean possibly postponing at least some features until at least iOS 26.5, due in May, and iOS 27, which comes out in September.

Gurman notes that while Apple hasn’t promised a ship date more specific than this year, the company has been eyeing iOS 26.4 around March as the release target.

M.G. Siegler:

Oh, you have heard this before? A half-dozen times just in the past few years?

[…]

As I see it, Apple has two problems. The first one is the bigger one: they need to fix Siri. But the second one is tangentially related to that quest: they need to plug the leak of detailed information about the Siri roadmap and timeline.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

If these features are going to drop in iOS 26.4, they should be in pretty good shape right now internally. If they’re in bad shape right now in internal builds, it’s really hard to see how they could drop in iOS 26.4. And once you start talking about iOS 26.5 (let alone 26.6), we’d be getting really close to WWDC, where Apple’s messaging will turn to the version 27 OSes.

Matt Birchler:

I’ve seen a few “how can it be delayed if it was never publicly announced?” posts on socials, and I genuinely wonder about these folks. Set aside these features were advertised as coming in 2024, and we can still mention that internal products are planned and delayed 👏🏻 all 👏🏻the 👏🏻 time 👏🏻 at companies, regardless of if they gave customers timelines.

Juli Clover:

Apple is still planning to launch the smarter, more capable version of Siri in 2026, the company told CNBC today.

Manton Reece:

OpenAI ships major new features multiple times a month. I don’t see how Apple can be competitive in AI unless they rethink how they work and release software.

Previously:

macOS 26.3

Michael Tsai — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:20:37 +0000

Juli Clover (release notes, security, enterprise, developer, full installer, IPSW):

According to Apple’s release notes, macOS Tahoe 26.3 focuses on bug fixes and security updates rather than new features, so it is a smaller update than some of the other releases we’ve had.

In the next couple of weeks, Apple will begin testing macOS Tahoe 26.4, an update that is expected to be much more feature packed.

Mr. Macintosh (post):

Apple’s macOS engineers: I know you’re working incredibly hard to make Tahoe better. The long hours spent troubleshooting bugs and fixing interface issues… all that effort, only for it to be trivialized by this nonsense.

[…]

Just take a look at the Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro patch notes. HUNDREDS OF MINOR FIXES LISTED!

How is it possible that an entire OPERATING SYSTEM does not have a single listed bug fix?

Matt Henderson:

Apple just keep getting better and better.

Howard Oakley:

What Apple doesn’t reveal is that it has improved, if not fixed, the shortcomings in Accessibility’s Reduced Transparency setting. When that’s enabled, at least some of the visual mess resulting from Liquid Glass, for example in the Search box in System Settings, is now cleaned up, as the sidebar header is now opaque.

Adam Engst:

Previously, some awkward aspects of Liquid Glass transparency persisted even after the user enabled Reduce Transparency, as shown in the Finder sidebar header and the System Settings Search field.

[…]

Two other Liquid Glass-related pecadillos fared less well. First, although Apple fixed a macOS 26.2 problem that caused the column divider handles to be overwritten by scroll bars (first screenshot below), if you hide both the path bar and status bar, an unseemly gap appears between the scroll bar and the handles (fourth screenshot below). Additionally, while toggling the path and status bars, I managed to get the filenames to overwrite the status bar (third screenshot below). Worse, all of these were taken with Reduce Transparency on, so why are filenames ever visible under the scroll bar?

Mario Guzmán:

Saddens me that even in 26.3 RC for #macOSTahoe, toolbars are still very much visually broken in full screen. :(

Jeff Johnson:

I couldn’t in good conscience sell ChangeTheHeaders to new customers when it was likely that the Safari extension wouldn’t work as advertised. The good news is that in my testing, Safari version 26.3, released yesterday by Apple, appears to have fixed the bugs. Thus, I’ve now returned ChangeTheHeaders to the App Store!

Steve Troughton-Smith:

There has been effectively zero progress on any of my critical showstopping UI-level blocker framework bugs since i/macOS 26.1. It really feels like we’re not going to see any progress again until WWDC and the next OS release. I have several apps I just haven’t been able to ship with Liquid Glass updates as a result.

Previously:

Update (2026-02-19): Nick Heer:

In apps like Messages and Preview, the toolbar finally has a solid background when Reduce Transparency is turned on instead of the translucent gradient previously. The toolbar itself and the buttons within it remain ill-defined, however, unless you also turn on Increase Contrast, which Apple clearly does not want you to do because it makes the system look ridiculous. Also, when Reduce Transparency is turned on, Siri looks like this[…]

Rui Carmo:

My desktop (a Mac Mini M2 Pro) has been crashing repeatedly since the update, and the symptom is always the same: it suddenly becomes sluggish (the mouse cursor slows down, then freezes completely), and then after a minute both my displays flash purple and then go black as the machine reboots.

For a machine that used to be on 24/7 with zero issues, this is a definite regression.

VaibhavMD:

I finished my work noted down the temps and started update finished update and closed the lid and let the os get stable. Next day I started working again with same softwares and to my surprise temps were way low compared to previous most of the time close to 55c and with really heavy load 70c to 80c sometimes it was going above 90c but never saw it cross 100c under full load. So for me it was big improvement after updating to Mac OS 26.3.

Ultragamer2004:

I recommend upgrading, 26.3 RC performance is pretty good on my base M2 air.

Update (2026-02-20): Marco Arment:

Another comically basic bug in Tahoe’s TV.app: if you remove a download from this menu, you cannot remove any other downloads from this screen (because the menu item won’t appear in their context menus!) until you navigate to a different section, then back to Downloaded.

I really have to wonder if anyone at Apple uses this app…

Update (2026-03-02): Mike Wuerthele and Malcolm Owen:

A number of users have taken to online support forums and social media to try and get help with an external drive issue in macOS Tahoe 26.3. Affected users are finding that external drives are not mounting properly, despite previously working fine.

The AppleInsider editorial team has also encountered the issue, with some seeing problems predominantly with SSDs. In our videographer’s case, the drives he uses daily fail to work properly at mount at times, with read and write speeds sometimes going down to a few megabytes per second, and forcing reboots.

[…]

Other accounts we’ve seen are more severe failures. The drives just fail to mount entirely.

Previously:

macOS 26.4 Beta: Problems Mounting HFS+ Volumes

iOS 26.3 and iPadOS 26.3

Michael Tsai — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:20:21 +0000

Juli Clover (iOS/iPadOS release notes, security, enterprise, developer):

According to Apple’s release notes, iOS 26.3 and iPadOS 26.3 include unspecified bug fixes and security updates, but there are a couple features that Apple didn’t highlight [link].

Andrew Cunningham:

Apple is adding a handful of iPhone features designed to make it easier to use third-party devices in Apple’s ecosystem.

Eric Slivka (Hacker News):

That vulnerability in the dyld dynamic link editor could allow for the execution of arbitrary code, and Apple says the bug may have been exploited in an “extremely sophisticated attack” against targeted individuals on versions of iOS before iOS 26.

Connor Jones (Hacker News):

Apple patched a zero-day vulnerability affecting every iOS version since 1.0, used in what the company calls an “extremely sophisticated attack” against targeted individuals.

Eric deRuiter:

iPad gets the same treatment as iPhones did on the last release with the 18 update being available only for the iPad 7th generation.

ktguru:

With iPadOS 26.3, when using iPad with Magic Keyboard, still seeing the bug that breaks “Show Links On Hover” in Safari.

Links still don’t display.

Jeff Johnson:

Does Instagram Reels make iOS 26.3 Safari freeze for anyone else?

Previously:

Update (2026-02-19): John Gruber:

I upgraded my iPhone 17 Pro to iOS 26.3 this morning (straight from the release version of iOS 26.2 — I skipped the 26.3 betas), and by noon, it was stuck at the lock screen. Pressing and holding the side button and either of the volume buttons at the same time did not bring up the expected screen with “Slide to power off”, “Medical ID”, and “Emergency Call”.

The above force-restart method worked, though.

macOS 15.7.4 and macOS 14.8.4

Michael Tsai — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:20:05 +0000

macOS 15.7.4 (security, full installer):

This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users.

macOS 14.8.4 (security, full installer):

This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users.

watchOS 26.3

Michael Tsai — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:19:53 +0000

Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer):

watchOS 26.3 includes unspecified bug fixes and security updates, and there were no new outward-facing features discovered during the beta testing process.

Previously:

watchOS 26.2.1

audioOS 26.3

Michael Tsai — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:19:44 +0000

Juli Clover (release notes):

According to Apple’s release notes, HomePod Software 26.3 includes performance and stability improvements.

Previously:

audioOS 26.2

tvOS 26.3

Michael Tsai — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:19:41 +0000

Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer):

The tvOS 26.3 update includes bug fixes and security improvements[…]

Previously:

tvOS 26.2

visionOS 26.3

Michael Tsai — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:19:36 +0000

Juli Clover (release notes, security, no enterprise, developer):

Apple’s release notes say that visionOS 26.3 includes bug fixes and security improvements[…]

Previously:

visionOS 26.2

Apple Creator Studio and the App Store

Michael Tsai — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:24:43 +0000

Adam Engst:

The transition from version 14.4 of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers to version 15.1 has been confusing, to say the least. In late January, Apple released version 14.5 of all three apps, with the App Store claiming “This update contains bug fixes and performance improvements” for all three. I wonder if even that is true, given that 14.5 doesn’t appear in the version history for any of them.

The actual change in 14.5 is a dialog that appears at launch, informing the user that 14.5 will no longer receive updates and directing them to download version 15 from the App Store.

When you click the Go to App Store link in each of these dialogs, you’re taken to the appropriate page to download version 15.1. (There’s no indication of what happened to 15.0.)

Armin Briegel:

In the Finder the two apps look the same, except for the icon. But when you look at them in detail, there are two important differences. The new apps have a different name in the file system, which you can see in Terminal. The name in the file system is /Applications/Keynote Creator Studio.app.

[…]

This may seem cosmetic, but it will lead to broken dock items when the old version is removed. A user might be confused why Keynote is suddenly a question mark in the dock.

[…]

When you further inspect the application bundle by looking at the Info.plist or with a tool like Apparency, you will see that the bundle identifier of the new app is com.apple.Keynote vs. com.apple.iWork.Keynote for the old one.

digidude23:

Apple violating their own guidelines

Jason Snell:

This Creative Studio roll-out really has highlighted how lousy and inflexible the App Store back-end is. Double versions, app updates that tell you to download other app updates, and presumably why there’s only one bundle on offer… developers knew this already of course

David Deller:

As a third-party dev, I expect to have to deal with things like this. But I think it really says something that Apple themselves can’t make it work better for their own apps. (Or don’t care enough to?)

Steve Troughton-Smith:

The new subscription-based iWork apps are a whole new Universal Purchase SKU on the Mac App Store, ditching the old Mac-only records. The old standalone apps still exist (for now), but if you search the store you’ll find two completely different versions each of Pages, Numbers and Keynote

Mario Guzmán:

What are we even doing. Ads in Apple’s apps… separate versions of subscription vs non-subscription…

Steve Jobs would be running around screaming at everyone in anger.

Matt Sephton:

If you were still in doubt we had reached, and passed, the end of an era at Apple: here is the nail in the coffin.

Marc Edwards (Reddit):

I purchased Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro via my US App Store account years ago, but my Australian account is my main account. With Logic Pro 12, it looks like it’s no longer possible for me to use that setup. Final Cut Pro still works though.

Jason Snell:

But it’s another level when the same thing happens to Apple and its own apps.

[…]

I’m also struck by the fact that Apple has had to do the App Store trick of attaching subtitles to the names of every app it makes, because the design of the App Store has led to stuffing keywords into titles becoming somehow a best practice. So it’s not Final Cut Pro anymore, it’s “Final Cut Pro: Create Video.” And Numbers is “Numbers: Make Spreadsheets.”

Craig Hockenberry:

Another reason for the subtitles: app title metadata can’t be the same as another SKU on ANY platform. If you release “Foo” on macOS, you can’t use “Foo” on iOS or a universal app.

(We had to deal with this in Triode by using a dash, endash, and emdash on different platforms.)

Previously:

Update (2026-02-19): Jesse Squires:

Interesting App Store experience:

Try to install universal app on iOS.

It’s iOS 26+ only. ☹️ Doesn’t work.

Install on macOS. (It’s macOS 13+)

Downloads automatically on iOS. 🤡

Presumably, this is because there is a “last compatible version” available for iOS 18. Combine that with app download sync.

Why couldn’t the App Store “just work”? 🙃

Apple Creator Studio Icons

Michael Tsai — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:24:33 +0000

BasicAppleGuy:

A comparison between the original icons, the pre–Creator Studio icons, and the non–Creator Studio icons.

Adam Engst:

I have to wonder whether the Numbers icon expresses the designer’s disdain for Liquid Glass or the community’s criticism of it.

It looks like it’s giving the finger.

Ezekiel Elin:

I thought that the new Creator Studio icons would have a light mode variant. You know, cause Apple has spent a few years talking about making icon variants.

Nope, it uses the same icon in both modes and it looks weird in light mode.

Benjamin Mayo:

So, even after you pay (I’m in the trial period), the Creator Studio exclusive features stick out with a purple highlight in the toolbar.

Benjamin Mayo:

apple clearly listened to your feedback that menu icons should use colour to distinguish them

Mario Guzmán:

Apple: “Use a single icon to introduce a group of similar items”

Also Apple:

Previously:

Apple Creator Studio Now Shipping

Michael Tsai — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:24:17 +0000

Agen Schmitz (MacRumors, Reddit):

Goodbye iWork, hello Apple Creator Studio. Apple has released version 15.1 of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers with a bevy of new features, as long as you pony up for the Apple Creator Studio subscription[…]

[…]

$129.99 annual Apple Creator Studio subscription; Keynote, 906.7 MB, release notes; Numbers, 722.3 MB, release notes; Pages, 859.6 MB, release notes; macOS 15.6+

Agen Schmitz:

Final Cut Pro, $299.99 new, 7.39 GB, release notes, macOS 14.6+; Compressor, $49.99 new, 253.2 MB, release notes, macOS 14.6+; Motion, $49.99 new, 3.94 GB, release notes, macOS 15.6+

Andrew Cunningham:

In lieu of running through each of these apps’ new features one by one, we’ve gathered answers to some questions about how the new subscriptions will work and how they’ll compare to the standalone versions of the apps.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

While Apple’s iWork apps all have a free mode, all the pro apps (including Pixelmator) have a splash screen to force you to subscribe at launch, with no way to play around without agreeing to the 3 month subscription trial. No real surprises there.

Geoff Duncan:

I’m sure I’ll have something pithy to say about a word processor needing a whole top-level menu item called “Privacy & Analytics” once I’m done picking my jaw up off the floor and then fuming.

“Share Analytics Data” is enabled by default. Because of course it is.

Jason Snell:

I dislike Apple’s choice to roll its “iWork” suite of apps into this bundle, not just because it turns a set of free products into freemium products with upsell, but because there are plenty of users of Pages, Keynote, Numbers, and Freeform who do not need the powerful features of Final Cut, Logic, and Pixelmator.

With that said, the new features in the three classic iWork apps are all pretty impressive. (Apple says Freeform will gain suite integration at a later time.) All three apps get access to Content Hub, a media library full of photos and illustrations that can be integrated into projects for all three apps. There are also a bunch of new “premium” templates that add more options for people who don’t want to create that flyer or presentation all by themselves.

I like the Content Hub, which is accessible from the toolbar and is searchable and filterable by media type. I was able to very quickly pick out a background image for a slide and an illustration to use on a birthday card, for example. I pay an annual subscription for access to a limited number of stock media images from a library; it’s very nice that Apple is rolling this library into the Creator Studio subscription.

[…]

I’m a little less excited about the templates, which feel “premium” more in the sense that they’re not available to the people who aren’t paying. They didn’t really feel that much more creator-focused than any other Keynote or Pages template would. Shouldn’t Apple be making an effort to make nicer templates for all users of those apps? Does the introduction of premium templates mean that Apple’s no longer motivated to create new templates for everyone else? The whole thing just hits me wrong.

Benjamin Mayo:

The Creator Hub image library is really laggy to scroll around. Feels like classic SwiftUI on AppKit performance issues.

John Voorhees:

However, what’s most exciting to me is the fact that Apple is clearly repositioning these apps to appeal to a broader cross-section of creatives. Apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are no longer just for Hollywood and music studios. By filling out the iPad lineup and adding Pixelmator Pro along with enhanced versions of their productivity apps, Apple has taken the first steps toward realigning its apps with what it means to be a creative professional in 2026.

[…]

I’ve played around with the beta versions of Final Cut Pro for both Mac and iPad, and the new features work as advertised with the exception of Transcript and Visual Search, which I couldn’t get to work on the Mac. As is the case with a lot of the Creator Studio apps, my Final Cut Pro needs are pretty simple. Background export and full external monitor support on the iPad are the two features I find most compelling, but there’s a lot to be said for Transcript and Visual Search, both for editors on longer-form content and possibly for creating chapter markers for YouTube.

[…]

The lack of a podcast editing app in Creator Studio feels like a gaping hole. Podcasting straddles the audio and video worlds in a way that can be handled by a combination of Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, but practically, a simpler app that could handle standard audio and video podcast formats would be better and would serve a large segment of the audience Apple appears to be trying to reach with Creator Studio. The fact that such an app doesn’t exist yet, despite Apple’s prominence in podcasting, is surprising, but Creator Studio’s focus on a broader swath of the creative community makes me optimistic that we might see a podcasting solution someday.

Mark Ellis:

What problem is Creator Studio addressing for creators, I asked?

John and Will noted that modern creators are no longer focused on just one skill. Musicians are often also video editors, and anyone running a creator business has to be as comfortable managing finances as they are cutting together an Instagram Reel.

By bundling together production apps like Final Cut Pro and productivity apps such as Numbers, Apple is hoping that modern creators will view Creator Studio as affordable access to high-end tools.

William Gallagher:

In AppleInsider testing, Apple Creator Studio’s Final Cut Pro for iPad is proving buggy, and if you use the default settings, your work can even be completely lost.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

For some reason I’m really taken by Pixelmator Pro’s new-document/template window, especially how it shows a preview of the clipboard. Maybe it’s the years of the travesty of Photoshop’s new file window and all of its terrible, slow variations, but seeing this all done natively makes me feel warm inside. This is a nice bit of UI

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Something I outright hate about Apple’s new Pixelmator Pro is that it saves changes automatically to disk. There’s no experimentation, no temporary workspace, it just goes right to iCloud.

That’s bad enough for something like TextEdit, but when you’re talking about a pro image editor working with potentially multi-gigabyte files, that is so incredibly irritating.

You can disable this behavior on macOS, but not on iPadOS, which I think is an existential mistake. I really hope they fix that.

Mario Guzmán:

Comparing the toolbars between Pages 15 (15.1?) and Pages 14:

Why is this a unified toolbar? You can barely see any of the title. Sure, you can expand the window but sometimes you just don’t have the space. The fat toolbar items are just so space inefficient.

Oh and it gets worse if you show the labels (as the default used to be).

Apps just tend to get more and more user hostile and I'm really trying to understand why?

Geoff Duncan:

Every single update to Logic Pro breaks fundamental interface behavior I use on every project. Sometimes its how panes open and close. Sometimes it’s how adjusting region edges changes edges you aren’t adjusting (and can permanently lose audio). It literally is like they have zero QA/testing on this stuff.

With Logic Pro 12, now it’s how it sets default scroll bar placement on the region editor EVERY SINGLE TIME. It’s either slammed to the very top of the scrollbar, or slammed to the very bottom.

Joe Rossignol:

Following the launch of Apple Creator Studio this week, Apple has quietly stopped selling its “Pro Apps Bundle for Education” separately, but it remains available with the purchase of a Mac on Apple’s Education Store on the web.

Previously:

Update (2026-02-19): YellowBathroomTiles:

Logic pro 12 looks nice and that’s about all.

It crashes my session all the time, it’s laggy, it mute and unmute the whole session for some reason, it won’t load plugins correctly etc.

Conclusion: Logic Pro 12 won’t serve my needs in any professional way.

I reverted back to 11.2.2 and it’s amazing, it, actually feels like the upgrade at this point.

Meek Geek:

Ads pushing Pages, Numbers and Keynote users to subscribe to Creator Studio appear right in the sidebar all the time, while users are trying to get work done. Hopefully these gross ones stay buried.

Update (2026-02-20): Juli Clover:

With the launch of the Creator Studio subscription app offering, Apple may be phasing out the iWork branding that it has used since 2005 for Pages, Keynote, and Numbers.

Apple today removed the iWork section on its website, and the URL now redirects to a more generic “apps” page that features Creator Studio, Apple Arcade, Apple Invites, Image Playground, and other Apple apps.

Retrocade 1.3

Michael Tsai — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:32:00 +0000

Craig Grannell (Mastodon):

Still, I did write ‘Why I want Apple Arcade to include classic arcade games – and why that’ll never happen’. But now it has happened, thanks to Retrocade. And here’s the bit that genuinely surprised me: Retrocade is good to the point I think it’s the best entry point for normal people who want to play arcade classics.

[…]

The touch controls – from trackballs to paddles – actually work. You can rotate your iPhone for vertical games. And plug in a Backbone Pro or a Magic Keyboard and the app instantly reconfigures the controls accordingly.

[…]

Apple mobile gaming has gone from an outright “NO!” on emulation to Apple Arcade hosting a fantastic virtual arcade, but without setup faff – or the faint sense of criminality that comes from downloading ROMs from TotallyLegalOldGamesHonest.biz.

There’s no Mac version.

Previously:

Apple XNU: Clutch Scheduler

Michael Tsai — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:31:49 +0000

Apple (via Hacker News):

The traditional Mach scheduler attempts to achieve these goals by expecting all threads in the system to be tagged with a priority number and treating high priority threads as interactive threads and low priority threads as batch threads. It then uses a timesharing model based on priority decay to penalize threads as they use CPU to achieve fairshare and starvation avoidance. This approach however loses the relationship between threads and higher level user workloads, making it impossible for the scheduler to reason about the workload as a whole which is what the end user cares about. One artifact of this thread based timesharing approach is that threads at the same priority level are treated similarly irrespective of which user workload they are servicing, which often leads to non-optimal decisions. It ultimately leads to priority inflation across the platform with individual subsystems raising their priority to avoid starvation and timesharing with other unrelated threads. The traditional thread level scheduling model also suffers from the following issues:

Inaccurate accounting: CPU accounting at the thread level incentivizes creating more threads on the system. Also in the world of GCD and workqueues where threads are created and destroyed rapidly, thread level accounting is inaccurate and allows excessive CPU usage.

Poor isolation: In the Mach scheduler, timesharing is achieved by decaying the priority of threads depending on global system load. This property could lead to a burst of activity at the same or lower priority band causing decay for the App/UI thread leading to poor performance and responsiveness. The scheduler offers very limited isolation between threads working on latency sensitive UI workloads and threads performing bulk non-latency sensitive operations.

The clutch scheduler is the timesharing algorithm for threads on a single cluster. The Edge scheduler extends on the clutch scheduler design to support multiple clusters of different performance and efficiency charecterstics. The Edge scheduler uses the clutch timesharing per cluster and adds other multi-cluster features such as thread placement, migration, round-robining etc.

NetNewsWire 7

Michael Tsai — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:31:39 +0000

Brent Simmons (2025):

With retirement imminent — this is my last job, and June 6 is my last day (maybe I’ve buried the lede here) — I want to thank my team publicly for how they’ve made me a better engineer and, more importantly, a better person.

Brent Simmons (Mastodon):

I’m not retiring from writing apps — which means I’ll have a lot more time for working on NetNewsWire.

It’s been 15 years since the last time I could work on NetNewsWire during weekdays (as opposed to just nights and weekends), and I’m super-psyched for this.

Brent Simmons:

NetNewsWire 7.0 for Mac is now shipping!

The big change from 6.2.1 is that it adopts the Liquid Glass UI and it requires macOS 26.

Here’s the complete list of changes. I’m still on Sequoia, but from a brief test on Tahoe the Liquid Glass stuff seems to be tastefully done.

Brent Simmons (after an App Review delay):

NetNewsWire 7 for iOS 26 and up is available now on the App Store!

[…]

This version also fixes some small bugs and adds some small performance enhancements. (iOS developers might appreciate this bit: it adopts Swift structured concurrency.)

But, again, the main thing is the updated UI. It’s cool!

Previously:

Update (2026-02-20): Brent Simmons (Hacker News):

NetNewsWire 1.0 for Mac shipped 23 years ago today! 🎸🎩🕶️

[…]

Big picture: we still have a lot of bugs to fix, lots of tech debt to deal with, and lots of polish-needed areas of the app. With Brent’s retirement last year we’ve been able to go way faster on dealing with all this. We plan to keep up the pace.

Update (2026-03-03): John Gruber:

It feels a little weird for me not to be running the latest version of NetNewsWire, but since I’m skipping MacOS 26 Tahoe, I can’t run NetNewsWire 7.

Brent Simmons:

I know that NetNewsWire can’t solve the problem of social-network-induced outrage — and everything that follows from that — all alone. But it can help, even in some small way, and as part of a larger community effort, and that’s why I do it.

Previously:

Building Zavala 4.0

Update (2026-03-05): Version 7.0.1 restores support for macOS 15.

Apple News Scam Ads

Michael Tsai — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 21:34:40 +0000

Kirk McElhearn (Bluesky, Hacker News):

I use Apple News to keep up on topics that I don’t find in sources I pay for (The Guardian and The New York Times). But there’s no way I’m going to pay the exorbitant price Apple wants for Apple News+ – £13 – because, while you get more publications, you still get ads.

And those ads have gotten worse recently. Many if not most of them look like and probably are scams. Here are a few examples from Apple News today.

[…]

These fake “going out of business ads” have been around for a few years, and even the US Better Business Bureau warns about them, as they take peoples’ money then shut down. Does Apple care? Does Taboola care? Does Apple care that Taboola serves ads like this? My guess: no, no, and no.

I barely use Apple News, but I see these sorts of ads nearly every time. The other annoying thing it does is that just scrolling an article beyond a certain point will pop up a modal sheet asking me to subscribe. It interrupts my reading to do this. This is in addition to showing two rows of upsell content directly below each article.

Nick Heer:

Apple promotes News by saying it offers “trusted sources” in an app that is “rewriting the reading experience”. And, when Apple partnered with Taboola, Sara Fischer at Axios reported it would “establish certain levels of [quality] control around which advertisers it will sell through to Apple apps”.

As I was saying, the words are out of sync with the actions these days. I struggle to interpret Tim Cook and other top Apple executives at times. Are they simply not aware of the disconnect? Or did they decide it’s easier and cheaper to keep telling people that they care instead of actually caring? How long can that optimization “work” for?

speak_plainly:

Apple News and News+ represent everything wrong with modern Apple: a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. It is their most mediocre service, jarringly jamming cheap clickbait next to serious journalism in a layout that makes no sense.

The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Apple sells. Worst of all, Apple had the leverage to revolutionize a struggling industry; instead, they settled for a half-baked aggregator.

It’s a toxic mix of Apple tropes that simply weren’t thought through. The ads are the cherry on the cake.

Previously:

Update (2026-02-09): Peter N Lewis:

I’ve switched from News to Kagi News, and it is so much better.

It’s not perfect, but it is once a day, covers the highlights, and does not have any crap.

I prefer Google News, but Kagi News is pretty good, too. They both support RSS and let you view the original sources in your browser of choice.

LLMs and Software Development Roundup

Michael Tsai — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 21:34:35 +0000

Colin Cornaby (Mastodon):

Certain tasks have worked well for me. These tasks tend to fit the LLM model well.

[…]

It’s probably not surprising that there is a relationship between the sunk cost fallacy and gambling. Gamblers get a huge dopamine rush when they win. Sunk cost fallacy feeds that. No matter how much they’ve lost it will be worth it because the next hand will be the big winner.

I’m kind of worried these tools are doing the same thing to developers. It’s easy to go “just one more prompt…”

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen places these tools excel. But I’m also seeing patterns where developers don’t know when to put them down.

[…]

As for my data structures issue? Claude Code made me realize that maybe I’ve been stalling because I need to plan better. So I closed Claude Code, opened up OmniGraffle, and started sketching some UML. Because it’s probably faster that way.

Daniel Jalkut:

There’s a lot of talk about LLMs making programmers lazy and uneducated, but I’m learning more than ever thanks to the way LLMs help me to drill into completely unknown areas with such speed. Always wary, but learning with almost every response.

Rosyna Keller:

Claude is sooo much better at SwiftData and common pitfalls than ChatGTP is that it’s actually embarrassing that Apple chose ChatGPT for Xcode Code Intelligence.

ChatGPT constantly and consistently hallucinates methods that don’t exist, repeatedly said features that actually existed didn’t exist (for example, FileManager’s trashItem() does work on iOS so long as your app has the correct plist settings! (Was added in iOS 11).

John Siracusa:

I’ve actually found Gemini 2.5 Pro to be the best at the SwiftUI and AppKit questions I’m asking. They’re all master fabricators of incorrect information and made-up APIs, but I still find their flailing helpful in getting me to try new things and learning new things to search for in the docs.

Collin Donnell:

My feeling is that if you account for the amount of times LLMs lead you down the wrong path coding and waste your time, and how much faster you’ll be in the future if you take the time to truly learn a new skill the first time, it’s pretty much a wash.

Peter Steinberger:

This is really good advice.

The code I get from LLMs is directly related how sharp or sloppy I prompt and how well I prime the context.

Dare Obasanjo:

While debating whether AI can replace software developers or not is somewhat absurd, it’s hard to argue against the significant productivity boosts.

A friend shared with me how after a performance regression following a release, they asked AI to review all of the recent diffs for the culprit. It flagged a few suspicious ones and on review one of them was the cause.

I imagine this is happening in every industry which is why Azure/AWS/GCP have more demand for AI than they can handle.

René Fouquet:

I shit a lot on LLMs. They can be as stupid as a slice of bread and a huge waste of time when reading the documentation would suffice. That being said, I used ChatGPT o3 on the weekend to set up my new Linux server with a ZFS raid, Portainer and 20 or so containers and it was an enormous time saver for me. Just reading the documentation alone it would probably taken a week or so to get to the same result. There were some frustrating moments, but overall it was very useful.

Sean Michael Kerner (Slashdot):

While enterprise AI adoption accelerates, new data from Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey exposes a critical blind spot: the mounting technical debt created by AI tools that generate “almost right” solutions, potentially undermining the productivity gains they promise to deliver.

Orta Therox:

Claude Code has considerably changed my relationship to writing and maintaining code at scale. I still write code at the same level of quality, but I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate.

Claude Code has decoupled myself from writing every line of code, I still consider myself fully responsible for everything I ship to Puzzmo, but the ability to instantly create a whole scene instead of going line by line, word by word is incredibly powerful.

I believe with Claude Code, we are at the “introduction of photography” period of programming. Painting by hand just doesn’t have the same appeal anymore when a single concept can just appear and you shape it into the thing you want with your code review and editing skills.

Craig Hockenberry:

When I was fooling around with NSSound.beep(), the AI code completion suggested a duration: parameter - JUST LIKE INSIDE MACINTOSH.

Colton Voege (Hacker News):

Despite claims that AI today is improving at a fever pitch, it felt largely the same as before. It’s good at writing boilerplate, especially in Javascript, and particularly in React. It’s not good at keeping up with the standards and utilities of your codebase. It tends to struggle with languages like Terraform. It still hallucinates libraries leading to significant security vulnerabilities.

AIs still struggle to absorb the context of a larger codebase, even with a great prompt and CLAUDE.md file. If you use a library that isn’t StackOverflow’s favorite it will butcher it even after an agentic lookup of the documentation. Agents occasionally do something neat like fix the tests they broke. Often they just waste time and tokens, going back and forth with themselves not seeming to gain any deeper knowledge each time they fail. Thus, AI’s best use case for me remains writing one-off scripts. Especially when I have no interest in learning deeper fundamentals for a single script, like when writing a custom ESLint rule.

Rui Carmo:

It’s a sober reminder that the hype around “10x engineers” and all the vibe coding mania is more about clever marketing than actual productivity, and that keeping our processes deliberate isn’t a bad thing after all.

TreeTopologyTroubado (via Dare Obasanjo):

I’ve seen a lot of flak coming from folks who don’t believe AI assisted coding can be used for production code. This is simply not true.

For some context, I’m an AI SWE with a bit over a decade of experience, half of which has been at FAANG or similar companies.

[…]

Anyhow, here’s how we’re starting to use AI for prod code.

[…]

Overall, we’re seeing a ~30% increase in speed from the feature proposal to when it hits prod. This is huge for us.

Alistair Barr:

In an unambiguous message to the global developer community, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke warned that software engineers should either embrace AI or leave the profession.

Martin Fowler:

My former colleague Rebecca Parsons, has been saying for a long time that hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature. All an LLM does is produce hallucinations, it’s just that we find some of them useful.

One of the consequences of this is that we should always consider asking the LLM the same question more than once, perhaps with some variation in the wording. Then we can compare answers, indeed perhaps ask the LLM to compare answers for us. The difference in the answers can be as useful as the answers themselves.

[…]

Other forms of engineering have to take into account the variability of the world. A structural engineer builds in tolerance for all the factors she can’t measure. (I remember being told early in my career that the unique characteristic of digital electronics was that there was no concept of tolerances.) Process engineers consider that humans are executing tasks, and will sometimes be forgetful or careless. Software Engineering is unusual in that it works with deterministic machines. Maybe LLMs mark the point where we join our engineering peers in a world on non-determinism.

Stephen Robles:

But after just a few hours vibe coding, I had a working app. A few days later, it even got through App Store approval. You can watch the whole saga here[…]

[…]

But that wasn’t enough. I figured if this was possible, maybe I can build a more complex app. An app I would be proud to share and use daily. I was going to build a podcast app.

[…]

I’m sure in the hands of a skilled developer, these tools can save time, take care of menial bugs, and maybe even provide inspiration. But in the hands of someone with zero coding knowledge, they may be able to build a single-function coffee finder app, but they certainly can’t build a good podcast app.

Russell Ivanovic:

You’re not alone. I’m an experienced developer (in fact I helped create Pocket Casts) and I think what you found is universal. None of the AIs match the hype. None of them are capable of building a complete app. They are all hype and no substance.

On a more positive note: AI is very good at helping you learn things. I use it almost every day to ask questions. I never get it to code my apps. What if instead of your current approach you use it to slowly learn to code?

Jacob Bartlett:

On a good day, I’ll ship a week’s worth of product in under a day with Claude Code. On a bad day, I’ll accidentally let my brain switch off, waste the whole day looping pls fix, and start from scratch the next day, coding manually.

Can Elma (Hacker News):

The early narrative was that companies would need fewer seniors, and juniors together with AI could produce quality code. At least that’s what I kept seeing. But now, partly because AI hasn’t quite lived up to the hype, it looks like what companies actually need is not junior + AI, but senior + AI.

[…]

So instead of democratizing coding, AI right now has mostly concentrated power in the hands of experts. Expectations did not quite match reality. We will see what happens next. I am optimistic about AI’s future, but in the short run we should probably reset our expectations before they warp any further.

Matt Ronge:

We used to brainstorm crazy features and discuss how fun they’d be to build, but as a small team, we never had the time.

Now, with AI, we can create many of these ideas. It’s amazing how much it’s boosted our appetite for building. It’s SOO much fun.

Chris Hannah:

However, the use-case that I really enjoy is when it can speed-run boring tasks for me.

[…]

I’m sure I could have written this script myself, but I didn’t want to. This is the sort of task that I put off for weeks, and maybe never get around to doing it. So being able to get AI to do this for me, makes my life much easier.

Brian Webster:

Haha, Claude Code just discovered a typo in one of my database table names that’s been there for a couple years (instead of “reportMetadata” it’s “reportMedatata”). I can’t fix it because it would break backward compatibility, but at least I can put a comment there in case I come across it again in another couple years. 😅

Simon Højberg (Hacker News):

Presently (though this changes constantly), the court of vibe fanatics would have us write specifications in Markdown instead of code. Gone is the deep engagement and the depth of craft we are so fluent in: time spent in the corners of codebases, solving puzzles, and uncovering well-kept secrets. Instead, we are to embrace scattered cognition and context switching between a swarm of Agents that are doing our thinking for us. Creative puzzle-solving is left to the machines, and we become mere operators disassociated from our craft.

Some—more than I imagined—seem to welcome this change, this new identity: “Specification Engineering.” Excited to be an operator and cosplaying as Steve Jobs to “Play the Orchestra”. One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding. Did they confuse Woz with Jobs?

[…]

Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.”

Simon Wolf:

What sort of applications are people writing where AI is saving them hours and hours of hand-writing boilerplate code? This is a genuine question because, apart from in perhaps the very early stages of a new application, I very rarely find myself doing this.

I’m starting to file it away with people who think that the speed they can type at is their biggest development bottleneck. Or am I just ponderously slow and I think about my code too much so that typing is the least of my worries?

Brian Webster:

I’ve found it’s good for chugging out code that is following pretty well established patterns, but more complex than boilerplate.

To give one recent example, I had to get a new bit of info from a few levels down in my controller hierarchy up to the top-ish level of the app. This required adding similar delegate methods in a whole bunch of places and inserting all the “upward” calls. This is annoying as hell to do by hand, but an LLM does very well at this, and quickly.

Brian Webster:

One thing I find myself doing more as a result of using AI coding tools is leaving more comments in my code as a way of explaining code’s purpose to the agent when it comes across a particular piece of code. But of course this benefits future-me too, so it seems like a win-win!

Gus Mueller:

Someone reported a bug in Retrobatch’s dither node when a gray profile image was passed along - and yep there it was. Had to rewrite the function that did it because I’m a dummy. But then I was like … hey ChatGPT make me a CMYK version of this AND IT DID. And it noticed a memory leak in my implementation and said so in a comment and I’m a dummy.

Tobias Lins:

I’m slowly giving up on coding agents for certain things.

Code quality overall mostly bad

It loves to do inline await import

It often duplicates code that already exists

Hwee-Boon Yar:

I keep my notes and TODO list in a wip.md file and it’s getting big. I’m trying this:

Convert it to PDF

Cross out and star lines on my reMarkable

Ask Claude Code to read the PDF and remove lines that are crossed out and move starred lines to top

It… works!

Chris Nebel:

A problem with asking AI to do something you are unable to do yourself is that you are likely also unable to tell if the AI did a good job. It’s automated Dunning-Kruger.

Chris Pirillo:

This is the future of software. How we get there (eventually) is still anybody’s guess.

She was sitting in front of the advent calendars and asked if I still had that Gemini app installed. “Of course,” I said. To which she responded with the sudden need to create a game.

My 11 year-old daughter is vibe coding on her own volition. What’s your excuse?

David Smith:

the one cautious experiment I ran was a mixed bag:

It produced the same approach to an esoteric problem (vectorized UTF16 transcoding in Swift) that I would have

It produced a useful unit test suite

It could discuss the code it produced in relevant abstractions and make changes I requested

but

It had syntax errors initially

It duplicated code unless specifically instructed to refactor

When I accidentally asked for something impossible it generated nonsense

Paul Hudson:

Building apps in Swift and SwiftUI isn’t quite as easy for AI tools as other platforms, partly because our language and frameworks evolve rapidly, partly because languages such as Python and JavaScript have a larger codebase to learn from, and partly also because AI tools struggle with Swift concurrency as much as everyone else.

As a result, tools like Claude, Codex, and Gemini often make unhelpful choices you should watch out for. Sometimes you’ll come across deprecated API, sometimes it’s inefficient code, and sometimes it’s just something we can write more concisely, but they are all easy enough to fix so the key is just to know what to expect!

Quinn:

In recent months there’s been a spate of forums threads involving ‘hallucinated’ entitlements. This typically pans out as follows:

The developer, or an agent working on behalf of the developer, changes their .entitlements file to claim an entitlement that’s not real. That is, the entitlement key is a value that is not, and never has been, supported in any way.
Xcode’s code signing machinery tries to find or create a provisioning profile to authorise this claim.
That’s impossible, because the entitlement isn’t a real entitlement. Xcode reports this as a code signing error.

Martin Alderson (Hacker News):

I’ve been building software professionally for nearly 20 years. I’ve been through a lot of changes - the ‘birth’ of SaaS, the mass shift towards mobile apps, the outrageous hype around blockchain, and the perennial promise that low-code would make developers obsolete.

The economics have changed dramatically now with agentic coding, and it is going to totally transform the software development industry (and the wider economy). 2026 is going to catch a lot of people off guard.

[…]

AI Agents however in my mind massively reduce the labour cost of developing software.

[…]

A project that would have taken a month now takes a week. The thinking time is roughly the same - the implementation time collapsed. And with smaller teams, you get the inverse of Brooks’s Law: instead of communication overhead scaling with headcount, it disappears. A handful of people can suddenly achieve an order of magnitude more.

John Voorhees:

This week on AppStories, Federico and I talked about the personal productivity tools we’ve built for ourselves using Claude. They’re hyper-specific scripts and plugins that aren’t likely to be useful to anyone but us, which is fine because that’s all they’re intended to be.

Stu Maschwitz took a different approach. He’s had a complex shortcut called Drinking Buddy for years that tracks alcohol consumption and calculates your Blood Alcohol Level using an established formula. But because he was butting up against the limits of what Shortcuts can do, he vibe coded an iOS version of Drinking Buddy.

Andy Jones:

But while it took horses decades to be overcome, and chess masters years, it took me all of six months to be surpassed.

Surpassed by a system that costs one thousand times less than I do.

Emil Stenström:

I recently released JustHTML, a python-based HTML5 parser. It passes 100% of the html5lib test suite, has zero dependencies, and includes a CSS selector query API. Writing it taught me a lot about how to work with coding agents effectively.

Rory Prior:

Cursor is so much better and more efficient at working with iOS projects it put’s Apple’s lame efforts at AI integration in Xcode to shame. I really miss Alex, it’s a crying shame Apple didn’t buy them and let them get sucked into OpenAI to get memory holed instead.

Working on one of my apps that traces its codebase back to iPhone OS 2, and it’s making it a breeze to go from Obj-C > Swift and then modernise the code at the same time.

Kyle Hughes:

The juxtaposition of my social circle of peers who are excited that AI is finally almost behind us because a snake oil bubble is about to pop, and my own experience that everything is finally all clicking and I am addicted to doing the best work of my life faster than I ever thought possible is challenging!

Christoph Nakazawa:

2025 will be looked back on as the most transformative time in software engineering. Previously, LLMs could build simple toy apps but weren’t good enough to build anything substantial. I’m convinced that has now changed, and I’m sharing my thoughts and pro tips.

Bruno Borges:

AI has dramatically accelerated how software is written. But speed was never the real bottleneck.

Despite LLMs, The Mythical Man-Month is still surprisingly relevant. Not because of how code is produced, but because of what actually slows software down: coordination, shared understanding, and conceptual integrity.

AI makes code cheap. It does not make software design, architecture, integration, or alignment free.

In fact, faster code generation can amplify old problems[…]

Dare Obasanjo:

Software engineering is in an interesting place where some of the most accomplished engineers in the industry are effectively saying their job is now just telling AI to write all the code, debug it and fix the bugs.

Some of this is obviously marketing hype from people who are selling AI tools (Boris works on Claude Code) but this is the current mindset of the industry.

Mitchell Hashimoto:

Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports, but man, AI code analysis is getting really good. There are users out there reporting bugs that don’t know ANYTHING about our stack, but are great AI drivers and producing some high quality issue reports.

Gergely Orosz:

More people than ever before will want to learn how to build software using AI: software that works as they expect.

Demand for “fast track to becoming an AI-enabled dev” will probably skyrocket.

Gregor:

The tricky part is that good vibe coding still requires you to think like a programmer even if you cannot write the code yourself.

You need to break problems down, understand what is possible, and know when the AI is going off track.

Minh Nhat Nguyen:

About half the productivity gain from AI vibe coding comes from the fact that I can work ~80% as effectively and engaged when im tired, whereas previously it would be impossible to do anything mentally complex

David Heinemeier Hansson:

At the end of last year, AI agents really came alive for me. Partly because the models got better, but more so because we gave them the tools to take their capacity beyond pure reasoning. Now coding agents are controlling the terminal, running tests to validate their work, searching the web for documentation, and using web services with skills we taught them in plain English. Reality is fast catching the hype!

[…]

See, I never really cared much for the in-editor experience of having AI autocomplete your code as you were writing it. […] But with these autonomous agents, the experience is very different. It’s more like working on a team and less like working with an overly-zealous pair programmer who can’t stop stealing the keyboard to complete the code you were in the middle of writing. With a team of agents, they’re doing their work autonomously, and I just review the final outcome, offer guidance when asked, and marvel at how this is possible at all.

Jordan Morgan:

Agents are amazing at coding now, no surprise there. One way to use them that I’ve found valuable is as a tutor, relating new tech stacks to me using familiar parallels from SwiftUI and iOS development.

Daniel Jalkut:

Yes, I use Claude because it helps me fix more bugs faster. (It also helps with some useful automation.)

Amy Worrall:

I’ve been trying to use Claude to write some AppKit code. It’s very interesting how different it feels using AI for a framework that has a lower quantity of decent examples in the training data. The AI is very quick to make decisions that show only a reasonably superficial understanding.

I spent last night debugging auto layout constraints. I’m not great at auto layout, but the difference is I know my limits, and won’t write any that I don’t understand the implications of!

Adam Bell:

I think my favourite feature of LLMs is how, when asked to fix a bug in a feature, their predicted solution is to simply delete the feature that has the bug

Heshie Brody:

I don’t think self vibecoded software is the future for businesses

A couple of months ago I vibecoded a tool for a friends business

his entire staff has been using it for six months now (37 people)

the thing is, he’s constantly sending me feature requests, bug fixes

The app is pretty complicated since it deals with insurance benefits verification

so for someone that doesn’t have software development experience you can’t just prompt to fix it (believe me, he tried)

Aaron Levie:

Traditionally, software companies have been stuck within the constraints of existing IT budgets, which tend to tap out around 3-7% of a company’s revenue. This creates an inherent upper limit for what the budget can be for software, which translates into the total addressable market of various technology categories. Now, with AI Agents, the software is actually bringing along the work with the software, which means the budget software players are going after is the total spend that goes into doing that work in the company, not just the tech to enable it. This inevitably leads to a substantial increase in TAM for most software categories whose markets were artificially held back in size previously.

[…]

Today, the vast majority of SaaS products charge on a per-seat basis, which generally corresponds to most of the usage that the software sees today by its end users. But in a world where AI agents do most of the interaction and work on software, enterprise systems will have to evolve to support more of a consumption and usage-based model over time. AI agents don’t cleanly fit as seats on software, because any given AI agent can do a varied amount of work within a system (e.g. you could have 1 agent doing a billion things or a billion agents doing one thing).

Jordan Morgan:

Skills, rules, plugins, MCPs, different models — I went in. And, coming out the other side, I’m not entirely certain what to think anymore. Excitement? Nervous? Pumped? All of it?

It’s all different now, but I do know that if you were already an engineer with experience before this AI boom, there has never been a better time in human history to build stuff.

Perry E. Metzger:

I recently used ChatGPT Codex to find a terrible bug that had been lurking for decades in a codebase without being tracked down. It worked for an hour and fifteen minutes autonomously, produced a reproducing case, carefully ran the debugger, and handed me both the problem and a patch at the end.

Claims like “LLMs can’t debug code” are at complete variance with the real world experience of vast numbers of people.

Mo Bitar (Hacker News):

Not only does an agent not have the ability to evolve a specification over a multi-week period as it builds out its lower components, it also makes decisions upfront that it later doesn’t deviate from. And most agents simply surrender once they feel the problem and solution has gotten away from them (though this rarely happens anymore, since agents will just force themselves through the walls of the maze.)
What’s worse is code that agents write looks plausible and impressive while it’s being written and presented to you. It even looks good in pull requests (as both you and the agent are well trained in what a “good” pull request looks like).
It’s not until I opened up the full codebase and read its latest state cover to cover that I began to see what we theorized and hoped was only a diminishing artifact of earlier models: slop.
It was pure, unadulterated slop. I was bewildered. Had I not reviewed every line of code before admitting it? Where did all this...gunk..come from?

Miklós Koren et al. (Hacker News):

We study the equilibrium effects of vibe coding on the OSS ecosystem. We develop a model with endogenous entry and heterogeneous project quality in which OSS is a scalable input into producing more software. Users choose whether to use OSS directly or through vibe coding. Vibe coding raises productivity by lowering the cost of using and building on existing code, but it also weakens the user engagement through which many maintainers earn returns. When OSS is monetized only through direct user engagement, greater adoption of vibe coding lowers entry and sharing, reduces the availability and quality of OSS, and reduces welfare despite higher productivity. Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid.

Andrew Burwell:

I don’t know how to program, and have never made an application. I’m a designer, and an SME for the type of app I was able to create with Claude Code. This opens up a world of possibilities for me and I now have a list of apps for my hobby (astrophotography) that i’m creating. My first app, Laminar.

Miguel Arroz:

From what I’ve seen so far by reading the Swift code generated by these things, they are definitely not up to the task, and anyone who thinks so either is doing trivial stuff with them, or has a very different idea of software quality than me.

This is what bothers me most. If these things were actually good, we could solve all the other problems (energy, copyrights, etc). But it’s just not worth it. The result is bad and the frustrating process of iterating leads to nowhere.

Previously:

Update (2026-02-09): Steve Troughton-Smith:

Much as you don’t generally go auditing the bytecode or intermediate representation generated by your compiler, I think the idea of manually reviewing LLM-written code will fall by the wayside too. Like it or not, these agents are the new compilers, and prompting them is the new programming. Regardless of what happens with any AI bubble, this is just how things will be from now on; we’ve experienced a permanent, irreversible increase to the level of abstraction. We are all assembly programmers

Ken Kocienda (Mastodon):

AI coding assistants like Claude Code and Cursor have changed the way I work. My daily programming today looks nothing like it did even a couple years ago. Today, I hardly ever write individual lines of code. AI coding assistants has relieved me of this. It’s better at it than I am. I’m OK with that.

[…]

Now that I can delegate a lot of this work AI coding assistants, and that means I can focus more on thinking about exactly what I want to make, rather than tediously and laboriously trying to achieve my desired effects. I now spend more time thinking about the edifice as a whole, rather than on building it up brick by brick.

[…]

Today, optimizing [assemblers] lie several levels beneath the notice of contemporary real programmers. Over time, we have simply come to accept the loss of detail Mel thought was essential to proper work—since it wasn’t actually essential to the task. It was merely essential to Mel’s view of himself as a programmer.

Dan Shapiro (via Matt Massicotte):

Ward Cunningham coined the phrase “technical debt” in 1992. He was working on a financial application called WyCash and needed a metaphor to explain to his boss why they should spend time improving their code instead of shipping the next feature. For decades, the balance was simple: carry a little debt to move faster, but pay it down as soon as you can, or the accumulated mess will overwhelm and bankrupt you.

[…]

Usually, deflation is bad for debtors because money becomes harder to come by. But technical debt is different: you don’t owe money, you owe work. And the cost of work is what’s deflating. The cost to pay off your debt – the literal dollars and hours required to fix the mess – is diminishing. It is cheaper to clean up your code today than it has ever been. And if you put it off? It becomes cheaper still. This leads to a striking reversal: technical debt becomes a wise investment.

[…]

This leads to a surprising conclusion for anyone managing a roadmap. You should be willing to take on more technical debt than you ever would have before.

Please don’t give Federighi any ideas.

Nolan Lawson (Hacker News, Mastodon):

I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it.

I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production.

[…]

If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me. We are the last of our kind, and those who follow us won’t understand our sorrow. Our craft, as we have practiced it, will end up like some blacksmith’s tool in an archeological dig, a curio for future generations. It cannot be helped, it is the nature of all things to pass to dust, and yet still we can mourn. Now is the time to mourn the passing of our craft.

Wade Tregaskis:

Do you think there will remain a market for “artisanal” coders making “luxury” apps even after AI takes over the mainstream? Like how you can still buy bespoke and boutique furniture even in a world of IKEA?

Jurgis Kirsakmens:

LLM AI programming agents are not good for mental health, it supercharges FOMO and takes procrastination to next level.

I have about 20 large changesets across 2 computers and 5 repos generated with AI agents ready to be pushed that I just can’t force myself to review/take a look at.

Meanwhile there are small changes my apps need that I’m avoiding to do because I HAVE TO BE ON THE FUTURE TRAIN.

Jeff Johnson:

I’ve always been skeptical of the alleged productivity gains of Swift over Objective-C. That goes double for the alleged productivity gains of LLMs over manual coding. ;-)

My view is that if coding speed is the bottleneck in your development process, you’re probably coding too fast. Perhaps you should slow down and THINK more about your product and especially your users.

Daniel Jalkut:

Nobody who claims AI is oversold hype has ever had a 5 day problem reduced to a 15 minute, interactive solution. Again and again. You do have to know how to use it.

Mark Levison:

I’ve also seen codebases where many five day problems have been added in 1000+ line commits from misuse of the these tools.

Siddhant Khare:

I shipped more code last quarter than any quarter in my career. I also felt more drained than any quarter in my career. These two facts are not unrelated.

[…]

AI genuinely makes individual tasks faster. That’s not a lie. What used to take me 3 hours now takes 45 minutes. Drafting a design doc, scaffolding a new service, writing test cases, researching an unfamiliar API. All faster.

But my days got harder. Not easier. Harder.

Update (2026-02-20): Andrej Karpathy:

I think it must be a very interesting time to be in programming languages and formal methods because LLMs change the whole constraints landscape of software completely. Hints of this can already be seen, e.g. in the rising momentum behind porting C to Rust or the growing interest in upgrading legacy code bases in COBOL or etc. In particular, LLMs are especially good at translation compared to de-novo generation because 1) the original code base acts as a kind of highly detailed prompt, and 2) as a reference to write concrete tests with respect to. That said, even Rust is nowhere near optimal for LLMs as a target language. What kind of language is optimal? What concessions (if any) are still carved out for humans? Incredibly interesting new questions and opportunities. It feels likely that we’ll end up re-writing large fractions of all software ever written many times over.

Chris Lattner:

100% agree with you Andrej. We’re building Mojo to be that target and seeing great results. People are already one-shotting large python conversions to Mojo and getting 1000x speedups.

Malin Sundberg:

The frequency of me launching and just leave Xcode in this state becomes higher and higher with every model update…

Joseph Heck:

So if you’re trying this agentic coding thing out, there are a couple key pieces of advice that made a huge difference for me.

AEQuery

Michael Tsai — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:17:58 +0000

Mark Alldritt (Mastodon):

I’ve released a new command-line tool called AEQuery. It queries scriptable macOS applications using XPath-like expressions, translating them directly into Apple Events.

The short version: you describe what you want using a slash-delimited path, and AEQuery resolves the SDEF terminology, constructs the Apple Events, and returns the results as JSON.

[…]

The code is on GitHub. There’s also a discussion thread on MacScripter if you’ve got questions or feedback.

Previously:

Time Machine in Tahoe

Michael Tsai — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:17:53 +0000

Howard Oakley:

Time Machine had happily gone that long without backing up or warning me that it had no backup storage. […] I think this results from Time Machine’s set and forget trait, and its widespread use by laptop Macs that are often disconnected from their backup storage.

[…]

If you do just set it and forget it, you will come to regret it.

Rui Carmo (Hacker News):

Today, after a minor disaster with my Obsidian vault, I decided to restore from Time Machine, and… I realized that it had silently broken across both my Tahoe machines.

[…]

It just stopped doing backups, silently. No error messages, no notifications, nothing. Just no backups for around two months.

[…]

After some research, I found out that the issue is with Apple’s unilateral decision to change their SMB defaults (without apparently notifying anyone), and came across a few possible fixes.

Previously:

Time Machine in Sequoia

Accessing the Unified System Log From a Standard User Account

Michael Tsai — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:17:47 +0000

Rich Trouton:

Using the log command line tool doesn’t require root privileges or require admin authorization, but it needs to be run by a user with admin rights.

[…]

What this does is create a sudo configuration which allows all members of the staff group on the Mac, which is a group that has all local users on the Mac as members, to run the log command line tool with root privileges. This removes the need for the account to have admin rights and enables accounts with only standard rights to use the log command line tool to get information from the unified system log on that Mac.

Tahoe SwiftUI Table Bugs

Michael Tsai — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:17:40 +0000

Todd Heberlein:

The first bug report, FB21850924, covers a terrible memory leak in SwiftUI’s Table view, a feature our program uses a lot. […] Despite the rapid updates to the data, the sample program only keeps 1000 records in a deque, so the memory usage should bounded. Strangely, switching to another view triggers Swift to reclaim much of the memory.

[…]

The second bug report, FB21860141, covers SwiftUI Table view’s performance degrading quickly. […] Like the memory issue, simply switching to another view or, in this case, (strangely again) even just changing the window size resolves the problem.

Previously:

Xcode 26.3

Michael Tsai — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:33:05 +0000

Apple (RC xip, downloads, Hacker News):

Xcode 26.3 introduces support for agentic coding, a new way in Xcode for developers to build apps, powered by coding agents from Anthropic and OpenAI. With agentic coding, Xcode can work autonomously toward a developer’s goals — from breaking down tasks to making decisions based on the project architecture, and using built-in tools to get things done.

In addition to Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex integrations, Xcode 26.3 makes its capabilities available through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that gives developers the flexibility to use any compatible agent or tool with Xcode.

For more information, see Setting up coding intelligence.

John Voorhees:

The agent sits in Xcode’s sidebar where developers can use it to plan new features, implement them, and review the results. As developers work, the agent generates a transcript of its actions, which lets developers follow along and interact with it. For example, code snippets will appear in the sidebar that can be clicked to take developers directly to the spot in the file where the agent made a change. Code updates can also be simultaneously previewed.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

So Xcode just builds entire apps without you now

Xcode’s Codex support will happily trundle away for half an hour sticking its tendrils into every little corner of your project, touching and changing every file. It’s certainly going to be fun to build new projects with, but ain’t no way in hell I want to let that loose on any of my existing apps 😂

Rui Carmo:

Xcode 26.3 getting official Claude and Codex integration without the usual guardrails is interesting enough, but having MCP in the mix is… unusually open for Apple.

[…]

But at least they seem to have done their homework where it regards the in-editor agent harness–not sure how deep they went into IDE primitives (file graph, docs search, project settings), though, and the apparent lack of skills and other creature comforts that all the VS Code–based tools have is a bit of a bummer.

John Gruber:

I don’t know if this is super-duper interesting news, but I think it’s super-duper interesting that Apple saw the need to release this now, not at WWDC in June.

They couldn’t even wait for the final version to be shipping before sending out the press release.

Jason Anthony Guy:

I presume Apple announced these integrations now, and not at WWDC, to capture some of the frenzy surrounding tools like Cursor and Copilot.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

As a heads-up, it’s around this time of year that Xcode traditionally goes new-OS-only, i.e. requires macOS 26.

They haven’t done that with Xcode 26.3 just yet, but you might find that this is the last point release to run on Sequoia.

Juli Clover:

AI models can access more of Xcode’s features to work toward a project goal, and Apple worked directly with Anthropic and OpenAI to configure their agents for use in Xcode. Agents can create new files, examine the structure of a project in Xcode, build a project directly and run tests, take image snapshots to double-check work, and access full Apple developer documentation that has been designed for AI agents.

Saagar Jha:

If you’re an developer for Apple’s platforms and were wondering where you rank in their list of priorities consider that they were apparently capable of writing docs and adding meaningful Xcode integrations all this time but they decided to do it to help AI models instead of you.

Artem Novichkov:

This repository contains system prompts and documentation from Xcode 26.3, providing insights into Apple’s approach to AI-assisted coding and comprehensive guides for iOS 26 features and frameworks.

Artem Novichkov:

Combine is officially dead. Quote from Xcode 26.3 AgentSystemPromptAddition:

Avoid using the Combine framework and instead prefer to use Swift’s async and await versions of APIs instead.

It’s still not officially deprecated, but it’s obviously not preferred for new development.

Previously:

Update (2026-02-05): Dimitri Bouniol:

512 GB is a rough starting SSD size for development… All I did is install Xcode, my usual git repos, and a few other apps, and I’m already at >50% used before anything iCloud has even been touched…

Jordan Morgan:

Apple has honed in their config.toml to supercharge iOS development. Notes on Liquid Glass, call outs for Foundation Models — the list goes on. Though Apple blasts the doors off of their “big” stuff at W.W.D.C., you’d be crazy to think they aren’t paying attention. How we develop software is changing, and internally, it’s clear they are humming along with it. The fact that Xcode 26.3 exists, right now, is proof. They didn’t just cut a new branch once Codex’s macOS app shipped.

[…]

So, how is the actual experience? Well, pretty nice! This is such a tiny thing, but in Terminal — removing a chunk of text sucks. I’m sure there is some keyboard shortcut I’m missing, or some other app I could use like iTerm or what have you, but not being able to use Command+A and then delete it hurts. In Xcode, that’s easily done because the input is not longer running through Terminal, it’s just an AppKit text entry control.

[…]

This is a fantastic start for Xcode. If you’re later to the Claude Code or Codex scene, this is a wonderful place to start. There’s simply no going back once you learn how to use these tools. Ideas that you wanted to hack on become doable, those dusty side project folders come alive a bit more, and you get ideas out of your head much faster.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I handed it the classic SameGame codebase, gave it my coding style markdown file, and said “So this is an old ObjC app for iOS. I would like you to completely convert it 1:1 to modern Swift, with the coding style in mind. Leave no ObjC behind”

No other prompts needed; I needed to update a few legacy things in the xcode project settings (min OS version, Swift version, etc), and got this[…] All automatic, not a line of ObjC remains. Deprecated APIs were all modernized. 5,400 lines of ObjC became 2900 lines of Swift 5.

Paul Haddad:

I really hate to say it, but at least on a test project, this Xcode 26.3 coding agent stuff is pretty good. I can see why some are going gaga over it.

My main concern (other than copyright, which for some reason companies seem to ignore) is that it makes it to easy to just trust the generated code. You start reading things line by line and after a few minutes its hard not to skim over the suggested bits that get added.

Update (2026-02-06): Christian Tietze (Mastodon):

For example, ever wondered when to use the new InlineArray? See Swift-InlineArray-Span.md[…]

[…]

That is a very good summary that is painfully absent on the InlineArray API docs. As a Swift veteran, you usually look for a Swift Evolution proposal for the new tech then an try to find out there what this is all about.

[…]

The collection also has docs for 3D charts, VisualIntelligence (I didn’t know that framework existed!), and UIKit Liquid Glass guides and AttributedString tutorials.

These documents are probably not written by a human, or team of humans, because of inconsistent tone and all. So I’d wager they were LLM-generated themselves. I do hope they were edited for misinformation at least!

Update (2026-02-09): Steve Troughton-Smith:

From what I’ve seen, Xcode/Codex is way better at creating great UIKit-or-AppKit-based apps than great SwiftUI apps, probably because there’s so much more source material to reference and train on, and hierarchies are more rigid and well-defined.

Gui Rambo:

All of my attempts at having LLMs create SwiftUI apps ended up in frustration, but I’ve been playing around with a UIKit app for a couple of days now and getting very interesting results 👀

I think the syntax of SwiftUI itself is particularly confusing for LLMs. I’ve seen many models mess up things such as opening and closing braces when writing complex SwiftUI code. They also tend to bake too much business logic in view code instead of modularizing things, which doesn’t happen when doing UIKit.

Jacob Bartlett:

Simultaneously, agentic AI tooling has trivialised the overhead of writing imperative layout boilerplate. Two key disadvantages of UIKit, slow development and verbose APIs, have been negated. The models are also trained on mountains of UIKit code and docs. Good luck one-shooting fresh SwiftUI APIs like TextEditor.

In 2025, the question is unavoidable:

Should you start migrating back to UIKit?

Steve Troughton-Smith:

🛠️ Have you been using any of the new agentic tools in Xcode 26.3? What have you been using it for, and how has it fared?

I’m curious to hear everybody else’s stories, rather than just talk about mine all the time.

Gui Rambo:

I’ve spent several hours today playing around with agents in Xcode 26.3. There are lots of things I like with the integration, but by far the most frustrating aspect is that the agents will sometimes just “forget” that they’re running inside Xcode and start trying to run terminal commands for things that they can do with the Xcode integration, even simple things such as reading content from files. The good thing is that telling them to use Xcode instead usually works.

Marcel Weiher:

Has anybody else seen the scrollbars being wildly off in Xcode/Tahoe?

I had a find operation, and even though there were only 3 occurrences, the scrollbar kept showing me moving down in the file even when it was actually wrapping around to the top.

Christian Tietze:

Xcode 26.3 still can’t deal with you typing into a file while the file changes on disk without freezing (after displaying 2 alerts that block each other)

Update (2026-02-19): Two weeks later, the final version of Xcode 26.3 still isn’t available, and Apple has released an Xcode 26.4 beta.

Xcode Releases:

So while this is definitely unusual, it’s not unprecedented. If history is any guide, I expect we’ll see the final release Xcode 26.3 within the next couple of days, and it will likely be identical to the Release Candidate.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Unsurprisingly, but still disappointingly, there’s been no update to the bundled version of Codex, which is stuck on gpt-5.2-codex

Update (2026-02-20): Xcode 26.3 RC 2 (xip, downloads):

Xcode 26.3 RC 2 includes Swift 6.2.3 and SDKs for iOS 26.2, iPadOS 26.2, tvOS 26.2, macOS 26.2, and visionOS 26.2.

Once again, the release notes don’t call out what’s new in this build, but diffing shows this major change:

Xcode 26.3 introduces a comprehensive permissions system that gives you fine-grained control over what external agentic coding tools can do in your development environment.

And lots of bug fixes, mostly related to AI.

Xcode Releases:

I wonder if there's something weird about .3 releases… #Xcode 16.3, 15.3, and 14.3 all had two release candidates.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

The RC 2 version of Xcode 26.3 does indeed distribute a new version of Codex that enables the gpt-5.3-codex model.

I would guess that’s why they waited before publishing 26.3 to the App Store, and it also answers the question as to how their model update strategy might play out.

Renaud Lienhart:

Just noticed this new adaptive control in Xcode 26.4 😮

Update (2026-03-02): The final version has been released (xip, MacRumors).

Marco Arment:

Can someone at Apple vibe-code their way into this not being an app-modal window that prevents me from doing any work until it completes?

Ryan Booker:

The more bonkers thing? It’s not modal for the copy. It’s modal for the run. Hit cancel and the copy continues.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

it still happens in the background if you hit cancel

David Deller:

I am happy (?) to report that tabs in Xcode 26.3 are slightly less bad than they have been since 26.0. There are fewer situations that unintentionally create duplicate tabs of the same file (though still >0, which is still too many). Tab bar can now be scrolled instead of squishing every tab until they’re unrecognizable.

Still not as good overall as Xcode 16, but it’s progress. Good work, keep at it, folks.

Update (2026-03-04): Marco Arment:

Anyway if you ever get a wall of Xcode “Missing package product” errors, and no amount of cleaning/deleting/refreshing anything from the blog posts and AI agents actually fixes the problem…

It might be that one of those package’s Package.swift files got deleted.

Testing Tip: Always Show Scrollbars

Michael Tsai — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:32:57 +0000

Marcin Wichary:

This scrollbar serves no purpose, so it will become visual noise for a lot of your users. But when you yourself use “shy” scrollbars, you might not even realize.

Of course, the scrollbar is just a symptom of a bigger problem – an accidentally scrolling surface that will be janky to everyone regardless of their scrollbar visibility status.

Always-visible scrollbars make it easier to spot these, not to mention also being helpful in spotting[…]

Previously:

Tahoe Broke Resizing Finder Columns View

Update (2026-02-05): Jeff Johnson:

Also, Keyboard navigation

SuperDuper 3.12

Michael Tsai — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:32:41 +0000

Dave Nanian:

We’ve made some improvements to our scheduler to help mitigate some of the Tahoe “stalling during Dark Wake” problems. They’re not 100%, but things are better, and we’re investigating additional improvements for the next update.

Previously:

Tahoe NSTableView Scrolling Bug

Michael Tsai — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:05:49 +0000

Sarah Reichelt (Mastodon):

[When] I scrolled down from the top, the content rows would scroll into the header, making the top messy and unreadable. This sort of overlapping and unreadable text is a feature of the various OS 26s, but in this case, there wasn’t a hint of transparency, so it looked like a bug to me. […] This exact layout worked fine on earlier versions of macOS, but as is often the case with all the OS 26s, things that used to work no longer do.

[…]

I reversed that change and then added space below the table view. Bingo! […] If a table doesn’t stretch from top to bottom of its view controller’s content view, in macOS Tahoe, the content will scroll into the header.

[…]

I ended up spacing the table view 1 point down from the top and 1 point in from the left of its enclosing view. The left spacing is not required but it makes the layout look more symmetrical. This prevents the bug from occurring and allows me to add the content I want underneath the table[…] I don’t think it looks as neat and clean as the original layout, but at least it works.

Brian Webster:

I just solved something different, but what feels like might have been caused by whatever the same underlying issue is.

In my case, it was a table view inside a sidebar whose content scrolled up underneath the toolbar without the toolbar applying a blur. The culprit was that the enclosing scroll view had a border type chosen. Changing the scroll view to no border made the toolbar render a blur correctly over the table view content. 🤷‍♂️

Apple Platform Security Guide (January 2026)

Michael Tsai — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:05:40 +0000

Apple (revision history, PDF, Hacker News):

Topics added:
Automatically unlock Apple devices
Communicating emergency information using satellites
Quantum-secure cryptography in Apple operating systems
Platform Single Sign-on
EnergyKit data security
Attestation process security

Previously:

Apple Platform Security Guide (May 2024)

Sinofsky on Cook and Forstall

Michael Tsai — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:05:22 +0000

Richard Lawler:

Emails released by the Justice Department on Friday appear to show that former Windows boss Steven Sinofsky not only consulted Jeffrey Epstein for help in securing his $14 million “retirement” package in November of 2012, but also in working on future career steps at other companies like Samsung or Apple. One document appears to show that a couple of weeks after Sinofsky’s departure was announced, Epstein wrote to him saying Apple CEO Tim Cook was “excited to meet.”

Malcolm Owen:

While apparently excited, Cook allegedly turned down the meeting. Epstein recounts that Cook declined because he was told that Sinofsky was starting a company with “farstall?(sp).”

Bob Burrough:

Tim Cook was actively thwarting Scott Forstall’s business prospects even after Scott was no longer employed by Apple.

Scott played the most significant role in the development of iPhone and iPad save for maybe two or three other people. Did he deserve to be crushed by Tim?

Steven Sinofsky:

forstall was the guy who led the iphone software - essentially my counterpart. he was actually fired for being mean to people. I called him and we joked. he is from Seattle and his brother works at ms.

was that tim brushing you off?

I could send tim mail but don’t want him to forward to steve.

This was sent more than a year after Steve Jobs died, so I’m not sure who he’s referring to. Was he worried about Ballmer?

Steven Sinofsky, writing to Epstein (via Edward):

The industry is going through a post-hp (post bill, post jobs, post chambers) world where leaders are being picked for being stewards and benign (hopefully). The big tech compnies are all on a path to be mediocre because of that. That’s really driving the bearish views of apple--Tim isn’t the right guy and it started with forstall being fired.

Microsoft going with tony bates. Hp going with meg. People with no views of the industry. Just people who organize and speak about it.

Personally I think apple and google need them, skills, most. Apple has no one. Google killing it now but very fragile.

Update (2026-02-04): Carly Page:

Steven Sinofsky warned Microsoft that its flagship Surface was about to flop in public, then sought exit advice from Jeffrey Epstein as he negotiated his way out of Redmond.

[…]

In an email to CEO Steve Ballmer and COO Kevin Turner, he said the device was “about to catastrophically fail in a very public way,” with sales tracking at roughly one-tenth of even the lowest expectations. Once the numbers escaped, he added, there would be no hiding it. “Word will get out very soon. There is no long term without this.”

Nine days later, Sinofsky was gone.

[…]

The emails also detail Sinofsky’s unease about life after Microsoft. He floated the idea of working at Samsung, then immediately worried about being sued. Microsoft, he noted, had a long history of dragging former executives into court under the theory of “inevitable leakage of trade secrets,” filing public, bruising, and professionally disabling cases even when defendants eventually prevailed.

The Fallen Apple

Michael Tsai — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:04:22 +0000

Matt Gemmell (Mastodon, Hacker News):

Executives, experts, engineers, and designers are all leaving for more lucrative positions at even less scrupulous companies. Apple is currently the GUI laughing stock of the industry, a position once firmly held by Microsoft for decades, and the walking-back of poor decisions in followup point-releases has become normal. Liquid Glass is the sort of folly that was once limited to portfolio pieces and fanciful blog posts, complete with clumsy attempts to replicate Apple’s style of marketing copy; pretty little animations that showed as much inexperience in UX as they did proficiency in Photoshop. Now, these missteps come from the company itself.

[…]

Interface designers must have the same maxim as doctors: primum non nocere, and Apple could previously always be relied upon to remember and demonstrate it. Those days are apparently gone for now, replaced with whim and indulgence; tech demos canonised by whatever shoehorning is necessary. Putting aside the ugliness, and both inaptness and ineptness of the implementation, the largest problem with Liquid Glass is that it is so damned ominous. It portends, or perhaps reveals, a rot; an erosion in the core where Apple has always been distinct and steadfast.

[…]

The thing is, for now at least, none of this seems to matter, because the investors are happy. Apple is the gold standard for hyper-profitability and predatory monetisation. Huge margins, hardware which runs only their own operating systems, operating systems that run only approved software (with even the Mac creeping ever-closer to an iOS-style lockdown), and software which pays its tithe to Cupertino at every stage. Leverage upon leverage, incompatible with our quaint old-world perceptions of ownership, so long as the money flows.

[…]

The company feels like a performance of itself[…]

Unlike him, I think Apple’s hardware is mostly going fine, but I agree with the general thrust that Apple’s success has hidden problems. The last line really resonates. At times, the company seems like a cargo cult, repeating mantras from a previous era without actually following them and applying the same strategies as before even though they no longer make sense.

The Macalope:

We are experiencing a period of great angst in the Apple community, and most of it is the result of Tim Cook’s leadership. Cook has done a tremendous job over the years, building on Apple’s success and taking the company to new heights. For years, the Macalope skewered pundits who suggested Cook was a failure for not delivering a product as successful as the iPhone, as if it were reasonable to suggest he deliver another once-in-a-lifetime product. Cook’s tenure has been one of mature, stable stewardship, and over the more than decade and a half he’s led the company, Apple continued to ship hits like the Apple Watch and AirPods.

The problem is that we didn’t get stable stewardship. Apple’s software and developer relations fell apart on his watch.

Nathan Manceaux-Panot:

The Apple indie dev community is undergoing an identity crisis. For decades, whatever Apple said was good, was good. People mostly agreed with their ethics, design priorities, way of doing business.

Now that all of that has, well, severely degraded, it leaves us in the dark. The north star is gone.

Previously:

Update (2026-02-10): Dr. Drang:

It’s not that I don’t know what the single hollow squircle button does—I’ve been using it for 16 months. The icon could look like Kurt Vonnegut’s drawing of an asshole in Breakfast of Champions and I’d soon work out what the button was for, but the purpose of an icon is to communicate, not just be a placeholder. There’s also parallelism to consider. The icon view button looks like the screen it leads to; so should the split screen view button.

It’s probably impossible to tell the upper echelon of Apple that it’s breaking revenue records in spite of its software design, not because of it.

Update (2026-02-20): Nicolas Magand:

This collective reaction is strong because Apple is not a brand usually associated with poor quality, odd design choices, or a lack of attention to detail. It is particularly notable on the Mac, arguably the most prominent Apple software product when it comes to enthusiasm about the brand and what they stand for.

Today, some of the Apple observers and critics are almost in shock of how fast things went bad. There were warning signs before, but the core foundations of what makes the Mac a great computing platform didn’t seem threatened. The problems seemed limited to a few bugs and side apps that were quickly filed under mishaps, and the growing popularity of non-native apps that ignore Mac conventions. Now, even MacOS itself is plagued with symptoms of the “unrefined” disease. Is MacOS becoming another Windows?

[…]

For users like me, who appreciate a certain level of precision and craftsmanship in software and love Apple because of that — especially the Mac — this trend is worrisome. We know that Apple is not going away, but the Apple we love seems distracted. We worry that the Mac won’t ever feel like the Mac we love today again. We worry that our habits, our taste, and our commitments to a platform will become pointless and dépassés. We worry because there is not a proper alternative to the Mac environment.

[…]

But I thought of something that may sound like wishful thinking: What if Apple is having its own BMW-Neue-Klasse moment?

Jack Baty:

Surprisingly, I am starting to prefer being in Linux than being in macOS. Linux feels like it’s mine and I like that feeling. Everything in the OS makes me believe it was done with me mind. “Me” being “the user”. Even when things are frustrating, I usually understand why. macOS used to feel this way, but has drifted from it. It’s not all Tahoe’s fault, but it certainly hasn’t helped.
What I miss most about running macOS is not macOS. It’s the software. The polish.

Via Mike Rockwell:

Most of what I use on my Linux machine is great, but some applications just aren’t up to par with what’s available on macOS. I still prefer the Linux environment because I can fully control it, but that doesn’t keep me from missing the niceties of Mac apps.

Codex App

Michael Tsai — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:21:44 +0000

OpenAI (Hacker News):

Today, we’re introducing the Codex app for macOS—a powerful new interface designed to effortlessly manage multiple agents at once, run work in parallel, and collaborate with agents over long-running tasks.

We’re also excited to show more people what’s now possible with Codex. For a limited time we’re including Codex with ChatGPT Free and Go, and we’re doubling the rate limits on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu plans. Those higher limits apply everywhere you use Codex—in the app, from the CLI, in your IDE, and in the cloud.

The Codex app changes how software gets built and who can build it—from pairing with a single coding agent on targeted edits to supervising coordinated teams of agents across the full lifecycle of designing, building, shipping, and maintaining software.

Samuel Axon:

Skills—basically extensions in the form of folders filled with instructions and other resources—are also supported. The app lets users configure Automations, which follow instructions on a user-set schedule, with Skills support.

Based on my time using Codex, it seems capable, even though OpenAI has been running a few months behind Anthropic on the product side. To help bridge the gap, OpenAI is using a strategy it has used before: higher usage limits at a similar cost.

David Gewirtz:

In addition to the app itself, OpenAI announced a new plan mode for Codex that allows for a read-only review (meaning the AI won’t muck with your code) and selectable personalities. Personally, I’ve had just about enough personality from the human programmers I’ve managed, so I’d prefer a nice, personality-free personality in my coding agent.

Recently, OpenAI also announced that Codex has an IDE extension for use in the JetBrains IDEs. Readers may recall that back in June I moved off of PhpStorm, my favorite JetBrains development environment. I moved to VS Code simply because the AI tools were more available for that environment. It’s nice to see JetBrains IDE availability for those of us who prefer it over VS Code.

[…]

The new Mac app adds a sandbox mode and lets developers set approval levels, including Untrusted, On failure, On request, and Never (meaning the app is never permitted to ask for elevated permissions).

Previously:

DFU Port on the 16-Inch MacBook Pro

Michael Tsai — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:21:37 +0000

Jeff Johnson:

This [Apple documentation] is wrong, a discovery that took me about a half dozen attempts to update macOS on an external disk. I have a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 chip, specifically an M4 Pro chip, and the DFU port seems to be the USB-C port on the right side of the Mac, not on the left side.

[…]

Over the past few days, every attempt I made to update the disk volume to macOS 15.7.3 failed inexplicably. I tried both Software Update in System Settings and the softwareupdate command-line tool in Terminal. They went through all the motions, downloading the entire update, rebooting, etc., but afterwards I always ended up right where I started, at macOS 15.2. The softwareupdate tool gave no error message.

[…]

By the way, Software Update in System Settings allowed my Mac to go to sleep during the “Preparing” phase, despite the fact that the battery was charged to 99%, so when I returned home from a workout I unhappily found 30 minutes remaining.

Previously:

Update (2026-02-03): Howard Oakley:

I have suggested a way of discovering which is the DFU port by discovering which is listed as Receptacle 1 in System Info.

Update (2026-02-06): Howard Oakley:

The original version of that support note appears to have been published on 9 December 2024, four years after the release of the first Apple silicon Macs, and almost seven years after the first Intel Macs with T2 chips. When I discovered it in January 2025, I found it internally inconsistent, “for instance, it shows the DFU port as being that on the left of the left side of a MacBook Pro, but states in the text that on a MacBook Pro 14-inch 2024 with an M4 chip, the DFU port is that on the right of the left side instead.”

[…]

Future Macs should identify the DFU port on their case.

Yes, but also you shouldn’t have to know what the marking on the case means. The software should just tell you if an error is because of the DFU port. (Or, better yet, make it work with all the ports. Is that really not possible?)

iOS 26.3: Limit Carrier Location Tracking

Michael Tsai — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:21:29 +0000

Juli Clover:

Mobile networks determine location based on the cellular towers that a device connects to, but with the setting enabled, some of the data typically made available to mobile networks is being restricted. Rather than being able to see location down to a street address, carriers will instead be limited to the neighborhood where a device is located, for example.

According to a new support document, iPhone models from supported network providers will offer the limit precise location feature. In the U.S., only Boost Mobile will support the option, but EE and BT will offer support in the UK.

Andy Wang (Hacker News):

The feature is only available to devices with Apple’s in-house modem introduced in 2025.

[…]

[Cellular] standards have built-in protocols that make your device silently send GNSS (i.e. GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou) location to the carrier. This would have the same precision as what you see in your Map apps, in single-digit metres.

[…]

A major caveat is that I don’t know if RRLP and LPP are the exact techniques, and the only techniques, used by DEA, Shin Bet, and possibly others to collect GNSS data; there could be other protocols or backdoors we’re not privy to.

Apple and Kakao Pay Fined Over Privacy

Michael Tsai — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:21:07 +0000

Proton’s Tech Fines Tracker (via Ben Lovejoy):

While $7.8 billion in fines sounds substantial, it represents little more than a rounding error for Big Tech. Based on free cash flow, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Amazon could collectively pay off all 2025 penalties in just 28 days and 48 minutes. Alphabet alone — fined more than $4 billion — could wipe out its penalties in about three weeks.

Here’s one that I missed at the time:

During the February 25 meeting with the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), Apple representatives were asked which other countries used Apple’s NSF scores.

[…]

The incident in question stemmed from data collected by Kakao Pay, a mobile payment and digital wallet service based in South Korea. The data was sent to Alipay, a Singapore-based mobile payment platform.

[…]

KakaoPay customers were not being told that their data was being transferred overseas. This sort of data collection is a direct violation of South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA).

Additionally, Apple did not disclose that it had a trustee relationship with Alipay. PIPA required Apple to be transparent about the relationship, but it did not mention Alipay in its privacy policy.

I find this reporting confusing, but it sounds like Apple was partnering with an online payment service (akin to PayPal) that could be used to pay for transactions users made using their Apple account. Apple gave Kakao Pay access to customer information (such as NSF scores), which it then transmitted to its partner Alipay. 40 million users were affected, but the fines only totaled $3.2 million.

Data collection occurred between April and July 2018 and affected roughly 40 million users. According to PIPC, “less than 20% of users registered Kakao Pay with Apple as a payment method, but Kakao Pay sent the information of all users, including not only Apple users but also non-Apple users (e.g. Android users), to Alipay.”

I don’t understand whether this is saying that Apple had 20% marketshare and the rest were Android or that data from iOS users who were not using Kakao Pay was nonetheless shared, too.

Previously:

Apple Contractors “Regularly Hear Confidential Details” on Siri Recordings

Apple’s Q1 2026 Results

Michael Tsai — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 22:03:58 +0000

Apple (transcript, MacRumors, CNBC, Hacker News):

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $143.8 billion, up 16 percent year over year. Diluted earnings per share was $2.84, up 19 percent year over year.

[…]

“iPhone had its best-ever quarter driven by unprecedented demand, with all-time records across every geographic segment, and Services also achieved an all-time revenue record, up 14 percent from a year ago. We are also excited to announce that our installed base now has more than 2.5 billion active devices, which is a testament to incredible customer satisfaction for the very best products and services in the world.”

Jason Snell:

And now, to help you visualize what Apple just announced, here is our traditional barrage of charts and graphs[…]

Jason Snell:

Even more interesting, though, is Apple’s suggestion that it’s still selling the iPhone 17 about as fast as it can make them—or to be more specific, about as fast as TSMC can make cutting-edge 3nm chips to power them, per Cook[…]

[…]

Mac revenue was down 7% in the quarter, the poorest performance of all Apple’s categories. But it’s hard to be that down about the results, because not only did the Mac still generate $8.4B in revenue and reach an all-time high in its overall installed base, but this was all happening in a quarter that is the proverbial “tough compare”—since Apple released the M4 MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac in the year-ago quarter, and only the low-end M5 MacBook Pro in this quarter.

[…]

Apple posted a company gross margin of 48.2%, based on a 40.7% products margin and an astounding 76.5% margin on services.

[…]

What really impressed the analysts was his insistence that even this upcoming quarter, where memory price issues are expected to become even more serious, Apple says it feels “pretty good” about its guidance to another 48% to 49% margin quarter.

Joe Rossignol:

Apple CEO Tim Cook believes that his company will have opportunities to deliver “innovations that have never been seen before” this year.

[…]

Cook hypes up Apple’s future on every earnings call, but “innovations that have never been seen before” is particularly bold wording compared to his usual comment about how the company’s product pipeline is stronger than ever.

I’m still waiting for the secret Leopard features and for Catalyst to get really good.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

It is difficult to get a company to see that certain of its core competencies are in severe decline when the company is making more money than ever.

Previously:

Update (2026-02-03): Horace Dediu (Hacker News):

Apple is quite simply, delivering at the highest gross and net margins in its history.

Apple Acquires Q.ai

Michael Tsai — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 22:03:58 +0000

Richard Lawler (MacRumors, Hacker News, Slashdot):

Apple’s biggest acquisition ever is still its $3 billion Beats buy in 2014, but now the second biggest deal is bringing in Q.ai, a four-year-old AI audio startup. Apple did not disclose the terms, but Financial Times reports that Apple is spending $2 billion on the company. It also mentioned Q.ai patents for optical sensor technology that could be built into headphones or glasses to recognize “facial skin micro movements,” allowing for non-verbal discussions with an AI assistant, for example.

The founders of Q.ai will join Apple, including CEO Aviad Maizels, who founded PrimeSense. Apple bought that company in 2013 and repurposed its Xbox Kinect technology to power the iPhone’s FaceID setup. This time around, tech that understands whispered speech could connect to the generative AI-upgraded Siri or other Apple Intelligence features, and work with future AirPods, Vision Pro, iPhone, or Mac devices.

Ryan Christoffel:

Israeli technology site Geektime dug into patent details to uncover Q.ai’s work. Here’s the translation:

According to its patent applications, the company appears to be working on reading what is being said, not using voice, but by using optical sensors that detect muscle and skin movements in the face, to translate them into words or commands. Some of the patents indicate the use of a headset that also examines the user’s cheek and jaw, and will apparently allow you to talk to Siri, Apple’s voice assistant, using only lip movements.

[…]

I’m often around other people, whether that’s my family at home or random strangers out on the street or at a coffee shop where I’m working.

As a result, I always type in my AI requests. But using the iOS system keyboard can feel a bit clunky at times and slow me down. It would be so much quicker and easier to just speak my queries, were it not for the social hangup.

Dan Moren:

Overall, this feels more like a traditional Apple acquisition: a smaller company, more targeted in its use case, with talented staff that it can bring onboard.

Previously:

Sebastiaan de With Rejoining Apple

Michael Tsai — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 22:03:22 +0000

Sebastiaan de With (Bluesky, MacRumors, The Verge):

Some big personal news: I’ve joined the Design Team at Apple.

So excited to work with the very best team in the world on my favorite products. ✌️

Great news. I wish they’d also hire Mario Guzmán.

Anna Washenko:

Prior to Halide, de With had done other work at Apple, collaborating on properties including iCloud, MobileMe and Find My apps. It’s unclear if his exit will mean any notable changes for Halide, or for the Lux apps Kino, Spectre and Orion.

Ben Sandofsky:

As we mentioned in the announcement post today, we’ve been working with legendary team at The Iconfactory on Mark III. We’re also super excited to be collaborating with the renowned colorist Cullen Kelly on the new looks in Mark III.

[…]

So in short, Halide is going nowhere. This has been my full time job since 2019, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Tony Arnold:

I have spent my career leaning on Apple’s excellent design chops when building my own apps.

Now they’ve broken the design language of their operating systems so badly that it’s not possible to build excellent, bug free user experiences.

I’ve lost a north star here, and it’s heartbreaking because there’s no real way for them to turn this around for a very long time.

CM Harrington:

Here’s the thing about my trepidation around Sebastiaan de With going to Apple is he is but one man. The rest of the company has to give a fuck about design to allow people with taste and capability to make the things.

Jason Anthony Guy:

Last June, just ahead of the introduction of Liquid Glass at WWDC, de With imagined what a new design language from Apple might look like, which he dubbed “Living Glass.”

[…]

After using Liquid Glass for six months, I’ll add one more descriptor for de With’s design concepts: restrained.

See also: The Talk Show and Accidental Tech Podcast.

Previously: