Apple Developer App 11.0

Zac Hall (MacRumors):

The update also adds these changes:

• Refreshed look with Liquid Glass.
• List filtering by Unwatched, Bookmarked, and Downloaded, and preferred topics.
• Improved reliability of image capture during enrollment.
• Bug fixes and various other enhancements.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

[It] has been ported from Catalyst-based to AppKit-based (it is a SwiftUI app in either case). Expect a whole new set of idiosyncrasies along with whatever new improvements/bugs it introduces.

(You can now fullscreen videos properly, for example)

I went to launch the old app so that I could compare it before downloading the new one and realized that I had deleted it because that was the only way to prevent WWDC session links from opening in the app instead of in Safari. So I don’t have a good feel for what’s changed aside from the list filtering mentioned above and the better support for full screen videos.

The current universal links behavior is that if I click a link within Safari it stays in Safari and shows a banner for opening the link in the Developer app. That’s an improvement. If I click a link outside of Safari, it opens the Developer app. There’s no command in the app to open the current session in your browser, though you can use Edit ‣ Copy Link and then paste it.

Previously:

• Apple Developer App 10.8
• Disabling Universal Links

Apple Developer App Catalyst (Marzipan) Cocoa iOS iOS 26 Liquid Glass Mac macOS Tahoe 26 SwiftUI Universal Links

OmniFocus 4.8.10

OmniFocus 4.8:

OmniFocus 4.8 introduces a visually refreshed interface, adopting beautiful Liquid Glass design elements and a modernized look and feel when run on macOS Tahoe 26, iOS 26, or iPadOS 26. This release also includes support for a range of new OS features - support for consulting Apple’s new on-device Foundation Models via Omni Automation plug-ins, OmniFocus Shortcuts actions in Spotlight on macOS 26, iOS 26 CarPlay widgets, watchOS 26 Control Center Controls, and more!

[…]

New Navigation Bar collapses on scroll, providing more space to view your tasks on iOS 26. When expanded, the Navigation Bar contains the redesigned Perspectives Bar and buttons for Quick Open, Search, Smart Add, and Quick Entry. Collapsed, the Navigation Bar displays a minimal set of buttons (including a button showing the current perspective icon, which you can tap to expand the Navigation Bar).

Here’s what that looks like. I guess it’s the kind of design that Apple wants to encourage with Liquid Glass, but I find it annoying how the controls always seem to be moving around and showing either too much or too little.

Starting in version 4, OmniFocus for iOS showed the perspectives bar on the bottom and then had a single + button floating over the bottom-right. You could tap, double-tap, or drag it to create new actions. The new design is an improvement in that there are now dedicated buttons for creating new actions at the current location (Smart Add) or in the inbox (Quick Entry). I nearly always want it in the inbox, so I no longer have to double-tap every time!

But the expanded form of the navigation bar now includes the Quick Open button (previously available with the perspectives) and the Search button (previously available by pulling down the list). I don’t think these items need such prominence, and now they take up enough extra space that, rather than the + buttons floating over the edge of the actions, the bar now obscures the full width of the action (with fuzzy text showing through).

The lower part of the navigation bar shows the perspectives. With Liquid Glass, the bubbles for each “tab” are wider, so I can only see four perspectives at once instead of five. There’s also extra dead space below the bottom of the navigation bar, where a little bit of blurred text shows through. Overall, it feels like it takes up more space than before, while showing less.

The animating design is meant to help by auto-collapsing the larger navigation bar to a form that’s even more compact than before. Here, everything except the two + buttons gets hidden in a menu. It seemed like a promising idea, but after months of use I find it worse than the old design and probably worse than just showing the huge bar all the time (which is not an option, even if you enable Reduce Motion). The interface just feels busy, with the navigation bar animating in and out as I scroll and change perspectives. I never quite have muscle memory for where the buttons will be. And one of my most common actions—switching back and forth between perspectives—now often takes extra taps because I have to go into the menu. It’s not even fully predictable: generally, the bar goes into compact mode when you scroll down a long list, but sometimes OmniFocus continues showing the expanded bar, anyway.

Forecast and Perspective Items widgets are now available in CarPlay on iOS 26.

This is surprisingly really useful because it lets me put arbitrary text on my car’s screen. In theory, you can do this with Apple Notes, but its font size is so large that there’s barely room for any text. OmniFocus lets me pick a much smaller font to see more. You can create multiple widgets. I always have one showing my flagged actions, and I have another car-specific perspective for information that I want to have available there.

On devices running macOS Tahoe 26, iOS 26, iPadOS 26, or visionOS 26 with hardware support for Apple Intelligence, OmniFocus plug-ins can now consult Apple’s new on-device Foundation Models.

As I discussed in my post about OmniOutliner 6, I think this is really cool but haven’t found it to be useful yet. I do think there’s potential here because things are set up so that the AI can leverage OmniFocus’s rich data model. You could ask it to pull dates out of text and then set date properties on your actions. Tags and notes attached to actions can be used for either input or output. Time estimates and project names are also potential fodder. This would need to be done, not purely by prompting but by writing JavaScript using a glue layer that Omni provides. There are some sample plug-ins.

Some other nice changes in recent versions:

Control Center — Quick Entry, Quick Open and Open Perspective controls are now available in the Control gallery on macOS 26.

[…]

AppleScript’s “evaluate javascript” now resolves Promise results from asynchronous functions.

[…]

Setting values for new repetition rules is now fully supported by AppleScript.

I’ve been using OmniFocus since 1.0, and it’s normally been trouble-free, but the last year or so has been frustrating. I haven’t had any data loss, but the little bugs have worn on me. The good news is that some of the worst ones are finally fixed:

• Syncing would stop working unless I force-quit the iOS app.

• There were various problems with the iOS share sheet.

• There were major performance problems with search and quick entry.

The bad news is that some really annoying ones are still in play:

• Tabbing in the Mac app often stops working, so that the cursor moves to the search field in the toolbar instead of to the next column.

• Tags in the main view of the Mac app spontaneously collapse themselves, hiding all the actions they contain.

• After the Mac app syncs in the background, sometimes it moves the window to a different space. This bug was seemingly fixed for a while but then came back.

• The iOS app sometimes shows an out-of-date list of flagged actions. The count in the perspectives bar will be correct, but the action list itself will be missing deferred actions that recently became available. (Recent release notes suggest that this and the tabbing bug are fixed, but I still see both of them regularly, though the flagged one is perhaps less frequent than in previous versions.)

• Syncing the watch app is unreliable enough that I’ve uninstalled that version of the app. It would never sync on its own in the background, and the count shown in the complication would always be wrong. Even syncing in the foreground would fail more often than not. I don’t know whether this is the fault of the app or watchOS, but it just doesn’t work. If I added an action on the watch I couldn’t count on ever seeing it on other devices. Also, the uncompleted watch syncs would degrade the performance of the Mac and iOS apps. It works much better to skip the watch app and just input from the watch using Reminders.

My overall take is that OmniFocus is still a great app, and I don’t know what I'd do without it. I just wish it would get back to being friction-free.

See also: Reddit and Wired.

Previously:

• OmniOutliner 6.1
• Dictating Literal Reminders to My Apple Watch
• My Apple Watch SE 3 Experience
• Bulk Setting “Catch Up Automatically” in OmniFocus
• Liquid Glass Disbelief
• OmniFocus 4.7
• Foundation Models Framework
• OmniFocus 4
• OmniFocus 2’s Low Information Density

AppleScript Artificial Intelligence Bug CarPlay Design Foundation Models Framework iOS iOS 26 iOS Widgets JavaScript Liquid Glass Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 OmniFocus Syncing watchOS watchOS 26 watchOS App

SwiftUI: @State and the Attribute Graph

Federico Zanetello:

@State is one of the many SwiftUI’s pillars that, once understood, we take for granted and use pretty much everywhere without a second thought. But what is @State? What’s happening behind the scenes?

Nikita Vasilev:

The answer is that @State does not store its value in the struct. The struct holds only a thin token - a reference to a node in an external, long-lived graph maintained by the SwiftUI runtime.

[…]

State in the Attribute Graph is owned by the view that declares it. Lifetime of the graph node is tied to the lifetime of that view’s identity in the hierarchy.

Rens Breur:

As is generally known, SwiftUI hands off some of its work to a private framework called AttributeGraph. In this article we will explore how SwiftUI uses that framework to efficiently update only those parts of an app necessary and to efficiently get the data out of your view graph it needs for rendering your app.

Chris Eidhof:

In this talk, we’ll look at the system that underpins SwiftUI: the attribute graph.

Previously:

• Making Friends With AttributeGraph
• SwiftUI Data Flow 2023
• The SwiftUI Render Loop
• Lifetime of State Properties in SwiftUI
• Gosh Darn SwiftUI

Update (2026-05-15): Mindaugas Rudokas:

For an official “documentation” source, this WWDC video has a segment with pretty good illustrated explanation on how AttributeGraph and update cycle of SwiftUI works (starts at 20:47).

iOS iOS 26 Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming Swift Programming Language SwiftUI

APFS Folder Clones

Anders Borum:

After my experiments with APFS cloning, I made a Quick Action shortcut for Finder that’s much faster than Duplicate or “cp -c -R”, both of which clone files individually instead of the whole tree in one go.

The regular file copying APIs also give you folders full of file clones rather than a directory clone. His shortcut runs a Python script:

The clone is made with the macOS clonefile(2) syscall, invoked directly through ctypes. clonefile asks APFS to create a new inode that shares the source’s data extents — no bytes are copied up front, the new tree just points at the same disk blocks. The two trees diverge lazily: only blocks that are later modified in one side get their own physical storage (copy-on-write).

However, it’s not clear to me what the benefit is. Aside from somehow being faster, it sounds like you end up with the same structure. The clonefile(2) man page says:

If src names a directory, the directory hierarchy is cloned as if each item was cloned individually. However, the use of clonefile(2) to clone directory hierarchies is strongly discouraged. Use copyfile(3) instead for copying directories.

I don’t think APFS really supports directory clones except at the snapshot level.

See also: Ask Different, Howard Oakely.

Previously:

• Hyperspace 1.3
• Aliases, Hard Links, Symlinks, and Copies in Mojave’s APFS

Update (2026-05-15): Kevin Elliott (via Frizlab):

[You] can basically think of cloning a directory as doing two things:

1. Pushing the copy operation into kernel, avoiding the syscall overhead of directory iteration, creation, and individual clonefile calls.

2. Preventing all changes to the source hierarchy while the operation is in progress, making the process atomic.

That second point is what makes this potentially dangerous as, in the worst case, you could theoretically panic the kernel by stalling all activity on critical locations long enough that the kernel "gives up" and panics.

Apple File System (APFS) Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Python Shortcuts

Amazon Tokenmaxxing

Rafe Rosner-Uddin (Hacker News):

The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house “MeshClaw” product in recent weeks, allowing employees to create AI agents that can connect to workplace software and carry out tasks on a user’s behalf, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Some employees said colleagues were using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens—units of data processed by models.

They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards.

[…]

Amazon has told employees that the AI token statistics would not be used in performance evaluations. But several staff members said they believed managers were monitoring the data.

Goodhart’s law:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Previously:

• Claude at Apple
• OpenClaw (Formerly Moltbot)

Update (2026-05-15): See also: Jon Snader and Hacker News.

Amazon Artificial Intelligence Business Programming Working

Chrome’s Huge weights.bin File

Tim Hardwick:

The file in question is called “weights.bin,” which powers Google’s on-device Gemini Nano AI model – the engine behind Chrome features like scam detection, autofill suggestions, and the “Help Me Write” tool. Local models tend to be pretty big storage-wise, and this one is no different. The problem is that Google hasn’t clearly signposted the fact that it’s eating 4GB of your drive with training data.

The issue only recently came to light thanks to security researcher Alexander Hanff, who noticed that Chrome installs the model on any device meeting the minimum hardware requirements, only without prompting you whether you’d like it there in the first place.

I was opted into the On-device AI feature but for some reason did not have the file on my Mac.

Artificial Intelligence Google Chrome Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Storage

OmniOutliner 6.1

Ken Case:

Redesigning and rebuilding all of our toolbars, sidebars, and inspectors for Liquid Glass gave us a great opportunity to cross-pollinate features, making some familiar platform-exclusive features available across all platforms for the first time. And it was also easier than ever to build new features that work in consistent ways across those platforms.

For all platforms OmniOutliner 6 introduces smart Dynamic Themes, which automatically adapt to Light and Dark Mode, and a brand new cross-platform template picker.

On the Mac, OmniOutliner 6 additionally introduces the ability to open and work with concurrent multiple windows of the same document—something I find particularly useful when working with long outlines.

On the iPad and iPhone, OmniOutliner 6 adds support for creating and editing advanced Saved Filters, and a handy, new Style Attributes Inspector, plus additional style customization support for grid lines, row indentation and column-spanning Notes.

Multiple windows per document is probably my favorite new feature. I have some really big outlines that I don’t want to split up, because I like to be able to search everything at once. It had been unwieldy to flip back and forth to look at different parts of the document, so I had been duplicating the file in order to open another (view-only) copy in a separate window. Now I can just open another window—and it even supports more than two. This is also useful if I want to do a search without losing my current view.

Not being able to edit saved filters on iOS was a longstanding limitation. It didn’t affect me that much because I nearly always use OmniOutliner from my Mac. But I imagine this was a more serious problem for heavier iOS users because—at least for me—saved filters aren’t set-it-and-forget-it like smart playlists in Music. My filters often have embedded query text that I want to edit. It’s great that this can be done from iOS now, and it may be the best iOS implementation I’ve seen of this sort of complex interface. Version 6 also lets you duplicate saved filters, which is great when I want to create multiple complex filters that are the same except for one condition.

But, for me, the change is actually a regression because on the Mac the standard predicate editor interface has been replaced with the new cross-platform filter editor interface. On iOS, it’s impressive that editing complex filters is even possible, but on the Mac the new interface—based around nested sheets that lack default buttons—feels clunky. You also can no longer create new criteria at arbitrary locations; instead, they are always created at the bottom, and then you can drag them to the desired location.

I’m also unhappy with the layout of the window toolbar area. The filter field for regular searches has moved from the toolbar to a separate banner that shifts my content down and takes up more space (while wasting space in my now-empty toolbar). I used to put the i button in the toolbar for toggling the inspector pane. In previous versions, the inspector appeared below the toolbar, so I could click twice in the same place to show/hide the inspector. Now, the inspector goes all the way to the top of the window (even though there’s nothing actually in the top portion of it) so that every time I click the toolbar button it moves out from under the cursor. I think Apple is encouraging this sort of design, but I just don’t see the point. (Toggling the inspector via the keyboard also isn’t easy because I type the “I” key using my mouse hand.) On the plus side, you can now save some space at the bottom of the window by hiding the status bar.

But as I mentioned last year, one of the interesting problems we’ve been pondering is how best to link to documents in native apps. We’ve spent some time refining our solution to that problem, Omni Links, which are now shipping first in OmniOutliner 6. With Omni Links, we can link to content across all our devices, and we can share those links with other people and other apps.

Omni Links support everything we said document links needed to have. Omni Links work across all of Apple’s computing platforms and can be shared with a team. They leverage existing solutions for syncing and sharing documents, such as iCloud Drive or shared Git repositories. They are easy to create, easy to use, and easy to share.

[…]

With Omni Links, this makes collaboration easier than ever: you can select a row, copy an Omni Link, and share it with your team—and anyone with a Mac, iPad, iPhone, or Apple Vision Pro can open the link in the free viewer to see what you shared—no additional purchase required.

Omni Links are really cool and seem to have a good, flexible design. As in previous versions, you can make a link, not just to a file, but also to a particular outline row within it. Each row has a unique ID so that the link keeps pointing to the right place even if you move the row or add other rows around it. What’s new with Omni Links is that when you link to another file (rather than create an internal link within the same document) the links are more robust and sharable (either to other people or to your other devices). Each link consists of a connected folder name and a relative path. Having a floating base for the path solves the problem of each user/device having a different absolute path for iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Git, or wherever else you store your documents. You wouldn’t want to move or rename the file within the folder (as that would change the relative path), but you can change where the folder itself is stored (or even which service is used to sync it) without breaking any document links. You can just go to the Connected Folders window in OmniOutliner and tell it where that folder is now stored. The links are also scriptable via Omni Automation.

With OmniOutliner, these powerful Apple Intelligence language models are fully under your control. Like all language models, they’re not perfect oracles by any means—and they’re not fundamental to using OmniOutliner. But sample plug-ins leveraging Apple Intelligence are ready for immediate one-click installation, and plug-in authors can integrate these language models with OmniOutliner in all sorts of creative ways.

For those who choose to use them, these plug-ins can be nice time savers: automatically summarizing an article into an outline, or generating content such as a meeting agenda or a fictional story based on a simple prompt.

The integration between Omni Automation and Apple’s foundation models is really neat. Everything happens on-device, and it’s able to take input from the current outline selection, the clipboard, or a prompt that you enter, and return the results in a structured outline format. First, you need to install the AI Tools plug-in. Then you can install plug-ins Omni has written such as Outline the Clipboard or Step-List Generator or write your own (in JavaScript). Installation is easy: you can just click special links rather than having to download files and move them into place (though you can also do that if you prefer).

Currently, I see this as more a technology preview that shows potential than a feature I would use in actual work. The sample plug-ins seem useful in theory—e.g. helping you get unstuck by breaking down tasks—but do not provide features that I personally need. Apple doesn’t currently provide a user-level front end for its models. I can imagine a future where an OmniOutliner document becomes an interactive document—like a Mathematica notebook or a BBEdit AI Worksheet. This seems like an almost ideal interface for prompting an LLM because you’d get a local artifact with rich text, structure, and powerful search. Unfortunately, the results from Apple’s local model seem far behind the online competition. The answers aren’t as good and aren’t consistent; sometimes there will be a reasonable amount of detail with good formatting, but other times it will be very brief or make each line a new indented outline child, creating a pyramid of doom.

In testing, I constantly ran into errors. Both the input and output have to fit into 4,096 tokens or you get “insufficient maximum response token limit.” And lots of seemingly benign text triggered “content likely to be unsafe” errors. The local models are also really slow, often taking 30 seconds or more on an M1 Pro. There’s no progress indicator, so sometimes it isn’t clear whether it’s still thinking or the process has stopped with an error (shown in the separate Console window). Presumably, this will improve over time with better models and faster hardware.

OmniOutliner 6 release notes:

Theme colors can now automatically update when Dark Mode is turned on or off. Override the automatic color conversion when desired, to create your own light or dark appearance.

[…]

Image attachments can now be resized to better fit your content. Additionally, attachment support, previously a Pro-only feature, is now available in the Essentials edition of OmniOutliner.

[…]

New “Pasting from other apps” setting offers options for pasting styled text. Dedicated menu items are now available for “Paste and Merge Styles,” “Paste and Match Style,” and “Paste with Original Style” behaviors.

Styled text is great, but moving it between Mac apps has always been a source of friction. Paste and Match Style is usually what I use throughout macOS because it will discard unwanted formatting from the source, making the text harmonious with the destination. Paste and Merge Styles is a new Omni-specific feature that’s better in that it preserves essential styles such as bold and italic, while matching the font and color of the destination. When I wanted to preserve those, I used to have to do a regular (full) paste and then go into the Style Attributes in the inspector and click the × button for the attributes that I wanted to delete. Now this is handled automatically.

(Note: The Mac version of OmniOutliner does still support lots of different options for bold, strikethrough, and underlined text. You can still access these by clicking and holding on the buttons in the inspector, even though the little pop-down menu arrows indicating that this is possible have been removed.)

Paste and Match Style is still useful when you want to strip those basic styles, too, or get rid of links. Unfortunately, it does not get rid of links when copying and pasting from OmniFocus to OmniOutliner. I never want these links because I’m typically cutting OmniFocus actions to move them to OmniOutliner. By the time I paste the text, the targets of the links no longer exist. These dead links are pernicious because I can’t even get rid of them using the Remove Link command; that leaves black text with a blue underline, and the cursor still changes to the pointing finger even though there’s no more link to click. The solution I found is to use a script to only copy the plain text from OmniFocus. Omni also supplies a plug-in.

Ainsley Bourque Olson:

OmniOutliner 6.1, available today for all platforms, introduces a powerful collection of new Shortcuts actions—bringing the collection of actions available for automating OmniOutliner via shortcuts to 25!

OmniOutliner is a universal purchase that’s $24.99 for Essentials and $99.99 for Pro (50% off for upgrading) or $49.99/year.

See also: Bicycle For Your Mind, 9To5Mac, Mac Power Users Talk.

Previously:

• Foundation Models Framework
• Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models
• Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking
• Omni Group’s New Licensing
• OmniOutliner 5

Artificial Intelligence Dark Mode Foundation Models Framework iOS iOS 26 iOS App Liquid Glass Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 OmniOutliner Outliner Pasteboard Shortcuts URL

Xcode 26.5

Apple (xip, downloads):

Xcode 26.5 includes Swift 6.3 and SDKs for iOS 26.5, iPadOS 26.5, tvOS 26.5, macOS 26.5, and visionOS 26.5. Xcode 26.5 supports on-device debugging in iOS 15 and later, tvOS 15 and later, watchOS 8 and later, and visionOS. Xcode 26.5 requires a Mac running macOS Tahoe 26.2 or later.

[…]

Messages can now be queued in the coding assistant.

Agents can now ask clarifying questions to provide more accurate results.

[…]

Mac (Designed for iPad) apps with pointer authentication are now compatible with macOS Tahoe 26.5 and newer.

Previously:

• Xcode 26.4.1

Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming Swift Assist Xcode

macOS 15.7.7 and macOS 14.8.7

macOS 15.7.7 (security, full installer):

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

macOS 14.8.7 (security, full installer):

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

Howard Oakley.

I don’t know what happened to 15.7.6 or 14.8.6, but they seem to have been skipped.

Jesse Squires:

I updated to Sequoia 15.7.7 and now there’s this virtual “Update” drive stuck in Finder.

It won’t go away, even after multiple reboots.

Previously:

• macOS 15.7.5 and macOS 14.8.5

Update (2026-05-13): Jeff Johnson:

You can see on the Apple security releases support page that Safari 26.4 was released for Sequoia and Sonoma on March 24, the same day as macOS Tahoe 26.4. Inexplicably, however, Apple has still failed to release Safari 26.5 for Sequoia and Sonoma. If you look at the list of WebKit vulnerabilities in the security content of macOS Tahoe 26.5, those are now 0-day vulnerabilities in Safari 26.4 on Sequoia and Sonoma. Any malware author in the world can read the description of those vulnerabilities, compare the WebKit binaries on macOS 26.5 to the WebKit binaries on macOS 26.4, and reverse engineer the fixes, which would allow them to develop exploits for the vulnerabilities. The reason that software vendors standardly update all vulnerable software on the same day is to avoid this exact situation, when there’s a significant window of time for malware authors to develop attacks on vulnerable, unpatchable systems.

I’m not sure why there was a delay, but Safari 26.5 is now available for Sequoia and Sonoma. It does not show up in Software update for me, but I can get it through softwareupdate.

Previously:

• iOS 18.7.9 and iPadOS 18.7.9

Mac macOS 14 Sonoma macOS 15 Sequoia macOS Release Safari Security Software Update

iOS 18.7.9 and iPadOS 18.7.9

Apple:

This document describes the security content of iOS 18.7.9 and iPadOS 18.7.9.

[…]

Available for: iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPad 7th generation

After a brief reprieve, Apple seems to have gone back to the policy of iOS 18.7.3, where you can only get iOS 18.7.9 if your phone is not capable of running iOS 26.

Previously:

• iOS 26.5 and iPadOS 26.5
• iOS 18.7.7 and iPadOS 18.7.7
• iOS 26.2

iOS iOS 18 iOS Release iPadOS iPadOS 18 iPadOS Release Security

macOS 26.5

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

macOS Tahoe 26.5 adds a Suggested Places section to the search interface in the Apple Maps app. It also lays the groundwork for ads in the Maps app, which are coming this summer.

The App Store is also getting a monthly subscription option that will let users pay a lower price on a monthly basis, but agree to pay for a subscription for a 12-month period.

I’ve heard that macOS 26.5 introduces problems with disabling System Integrity Protection; I’m not sure whether this was fixed before the final release.

See also Mr. Macintosh and Howard Oakley.

Previously:

• macOS 26.4.1

Update (2026-05-12): Rich Trouton:

One of the features included with macOS Tahoe 26.5.0 is a new option in the Energy preferences in System Settings for automatically starting a Mac when power is connected to it, either following a power failure or when the Mac is plugged in to power.

Matt Gemmell:

With macOS 26.5, unmounted external thunderbolt drives are no longer automatically remounted whenever the screen is unlocked, bringing my 8 months of mild suffering to an end.

Update (2026-05-13): John Brayton:

I am seeing a bug in macOS 26.5 that affects keyboard shortcuts that have no modifiers and are attached to menu items.

Keyboard Shortcuts Mac macOS Release macOS Tahoe 26 Power System Integrity Protection

iOS 26.5 and iPadOS 26.5

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

iOS 26.5 introduces end-to-end encryption for RCS messages exchanged between iPhone and Android users. E2EE for RCS requires both participants in the conversation to have a carrier that supports the feature, and carriers will be rolling out support over time. Encrypted RCS messages have a small lock symbol, and match the end-to-end encryption protections of iMessage.

In the Maps app, there is a new “Suggested Places” section that displays recommendations based on location and recent searches. The Maps app is getting ads this summer, and the groundwork for ads is included in iOS 26.5 and iPadOS 26.5.

Apple added a new Pride Luminance wallpaper that matches the Pride Luminance Apple Watch face and Apple Watch band. The updates are largely the same on iPad.

Apple is calling encrypted RCS a beta:

Apple and Google have led a cross-industry effort to bring end-to-end encryption to Rich Communication Services (RCS), making the cross-platform messaging format that replaces traditional SMS more secure and private.

[…]

Encryption is on by default and will be automatically enabled over time for new and existing RCS conversations.

[…]

[iMessage] remains the best way to communicate between Apple devices.

See also: Wired.

Previously:

• iOS 26.4.2 and iPadOS 26.4.2
• Ads in Apple Maps
• Encrypted RCS Standard

Update (2026-05-12): Juli Clover:

iOS 26.5 introduces several interoperability changes for third-party wearables, which means European iPhone users have access to new capabilities when using non-Apple accessories.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

I hope this leads to a future where all RCS messages are end-to-end encrypted, but I doubt it. Currently this E2EE RCS depends both on the carriers (of both parties) in a direct chat, and the software running on their devices. The carrier list is pretty broad, but as far as I can tell, it still doesn’t include Google’s own Google Fi.

But the indication for this is subtle. You have to read the small print metadata in each chat to see if it’s encrypted. The message text remains the same shade of green.

Juli Clover:

Encrypted messages are denoted with a small lock symbol.

Matt Birchler:

Support is excellent as well. Here in the US, all carriers that support RCS, also support encrypted RCS except for H20 Wireless and Total Wireless.

Previously:

• iOS 18.7.9 and iPadOS 18.7.9
• iOS 26.3: Proximity Pairing in EU
• iOS 26.3: Notification Forwarding in EU

Update (2026-05-13): John Gruber (Mastodon):

These new DMA compliance features are the result of requirements imposed in March last year — again, from investigations that began under Vestager, not Ribera.

[…]

The EU hasn’t rescinded any of their existing requirements under the DMA. But Ribera has clearly deescalated the EU’s approach to regulating American companies in general, and Apple specifically. No new requirements in over a year, no new investigations, and no inflammatory rhetoric. (Still no iPhone Mirroring in the EU, either, though, because they haven’t rescinded any already-imposed requirements.)

Antitrust Digital Markets Act (DMA) iOS iOS 26 iOS Release iPadOS iPadOS 26 iPadOS Release Messages.app Privacy Rich Communication Services (RCS) Security

watchOS 26.5

Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer):

watchOS 26.5 adds a new Pride Luminance watch face. It also fixes a bug with dual SIM iPhones and an issue that could cause audio alerts to fail to play in the Workout app.

Previously:

• watchOS 26.4

watchOS watchOS 26 watchOS Release

tvOS 26.5

Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer):

No new features were found in tvOS 26.5 during the beta testing period, so it likely focuses on bug fixes and performance improvements.

Previously:

• tvOS 26.4

tvOS tvOS 26 tvOS Release

visionOS 26.5

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

Apple’s release notes say that visionOS 26.5 includes bug fixes and security improvements.

Previously:

• visionOS 26.4

visionOS visionOS 26 visionOS Release

audioOS 26.5

Juli Clover (release notes):

According to Apple’s release notes, HomePod Software 26.5 includes performance and stability improvements.

Previously:

• audioOS 26.4

audioOS audioOS 26 audioOS Release

Reddit Pushes Web Visitors to App

Nate Anderson:

I’ve recently developed a daily habit—perhaps one I should cut back on—of visiting several subreddits to keep up on things like audio production and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But I was surprised this weekend to suddenly find myself cut off; Reddit simply would not let me visit the site on my mobile phone.

Instead, a new overlay popped up, saying, “Get the app to keep using Reddit.”

There was no way to skip, bypass, or close the overlay. It did not provide any instructions or alternatives for continuing to use the mobile web version. What it did offer was a large button I could press to get the app. If I did so, the overlay told me, I would be able to “search better” and “personalize your feed”—two things I don’t care to do.

[…]

The block seemed curious, given that Reddit began as a website, and websites generally want traffic. […] But some services, including X and Instagram, aggressively push users toward apps—or at least toward being logged in to them.

So far this is just an experiment for “a small subset of frequent logged-out mobile users.”

Via Nick Heer:

It sucks that the open web is getting torn apart because commercial websites are incentivized to direct people to apps where large-scale scraping is a bigger challenge.

Previously:

• Only Google Can Crawl Reddit
• Twitter Now Requires Logging In
• Reddit API AMA and User Revolt
• Apollo Shutting Down June 30th
• Disabling Universal Links

Update (2026-05-11): See also: Hacker News and MacRumors.

Advertising iOS iOS 26 iOS App Reddit Universal Links Web

Ask Jeeves Shuts Down

Ask.com:

As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 30 years of answering the world's questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026.

Mr. Macintosh:

Courtesy of the Internet archive, the image above is from the 1996 beta. This is what Ask Jeeves looked like after the public launch on June 1, 1997.

Ask Jeeves Search Sunset Web

Building Shopie for Mac With SwiftUI

Paulo Andrade (Mastodon):

Unlike my other apps, where I typically blend AppKit (or UIKit) with SwiftUI, Shopie is built entirely in SwiftUI. I wanted to keep it that way to maximize code reuse across iOS, iPadOS, and now macOS. This post explores how far SwiftUI can take you on the Mac in 2026, especially if your goal is to build an app that feels truly native to the platform.

[…]

In a proper Mac-assed app, opening a context menu should enable a focus ring around the item the menu applies to, even when that item isn’t selected. […] Reminders, Notes, and Stocks are all SwiftUI apps on macOS, yet each behaves differently. Reminders only gets this right because it’s using List, which inherits the behavior from NSTableView.

[…]

SwiftUI has already gone through three drag-and-drop eras. […] But the problem with all three is that you have no visibility into the drag session unless you are the drop target.

[…]

Once again, the issue isn’t that keyboard support is impossible in SwiftUI. It’s that the framework gives you just enough to cover the simple cases, then gets in your way the moment you try to match what Mac apps have done for decades.

David Deller:

Spent most of the day fighting with SwiftUI and getting nowhere. Hate it when this happens. The solution, as always, was to redo some parts in AppKit. I wish I had done this whole app in AppKit from the start.

SwiftUI never gave me this much trouble on iOS, but it’s so much worse on Mac. And context-switching between the two is a drag.

Patrick McConnell:

SwiftUI is littered with things that do 85% of what you need and then get ignored for years. It’s the iPadOS of frameworks.

Yes, we can use Cocoa frameworks (and I do) but why can’t SwiftUI approach the level of the Cocoa frameworks?

I think in many cases Cocoa is more effective simply because Apple hasn’t spent the effort to bring SwiftUI to the same level.

Helge Heß:

I think it’s because SwiftUI is not intended to be a Cocoa level framework. Similar in how Objective-C is not supposed to replace C. That would be Smalltalk, which shows how impractical (however nice) that would be.

My personal suggestion is to consider SwiftUI a form builder on steroids. It’s extraordinarily effective for things builtin.

Helge Heß:

I can’t tell what their long-term plan is, but IMO it’s extremely unlikely to be a fully SwiftUI based system. Except for tiny platforms like watchOS (the original target AFAIK). I suspect that SwiftUI for UIKit+ was never intended to be a competitor to Cocoa, but to ReactNative and the likes.

Colin Cornaby:

I had the unpleasant experience of trying to do something complicated with a scroll view in SwiftUI. You can’t get or manipulate the scroll offset directly? What?

Previously:

• Catalyst in Tahoe
• Tahoe SwiftUI Table Bugs
• Contacts in Tahoe
• SwiftUI WebView
• SwiftUI at WWDC 2025

Update (2026-05-11): Max Seelemann:

Couldn’t have said it better.

Louie Mantia:

Every macOS developer comes to the same conclusion after trying to use SwiftUI to make a proper Mac app: it’s not ready (yet).

To be honest, I can’t understand why everyone keeps trying.

Regarding the scrolling limitation that Cornaby mentioned, Fatbobman writes:

This article will explore these latest scroll control APIs and review the development of all significant APIs related to scroll control since the inception of SwiftUI.

See also Phil Zakharchenko.

Michele:

As usual, it only works for the simple case, just try to add Section to your List and it breaks.

Phil Zakharchenko:

While trying out a few things around the SwiftUI document handling and lifecycle in a macOS application, I came across a pretty bad issue. Not only did it not do as the API promised, it actually messed with the menu in ways that would be unrecoverable to a SwiftUI lifecycle application.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I maintain building SwiftUI instead of working on a true AppKit/UIKit replacement was a generational mistake — 7 years later we’re back where we started, unable to trust SwiftUI to build a platform around, still in need of a modern, more-powerful and dependable UI framework that spans all the way down, and up, Apple’s product line. SwiftUI, outside of watchOS, gained us absolutely nothing of value, and has eroded a lot of the software quality we once took for granted

(Could you have done [a more pared-back] SwiftUI and a next-gen framework, absolutely! SwiftUI should never have been load-bearing.)

Alex Rosenberg:

I’m mostly disappointed that none of the newer frameworks have the sophistication of NSTableView and all the column rearranging and whatnot.

Dominik Wagner:

I could not agree more. It is no coincidence that there has been almost no major new mac-assed mac app since this shift inside apple. I was there when it happened, and sadly could not stop it.

The saddest thing is that a lot of apple also agreed that this was the wrong way, but politics and pro swift timelines did just dismiss all of these. Much to the detriment to what, at least to me, made apple apple, besides all its flaws: a strive to great user interaction.

Marco Arment:

I really like SwiftUI.

It just still has a lot of missing or incomplete functionality, and Apple doesn’t seem to be in much of a rush to fill in the gaps.

I sometimes wonder how much better macOS could be today if they’d never tried to make the iPad into a Mac replacement, and had focused on maintaining and improving just one great PC-class OS.

Dennis Oberhoff:

SwiftUI Previews are pretty cool. I think the biggest problem that people struggle with it is that their dependency graph is missing when they pull it up.

It crashes and its very bad in telling you why.

Helge Heß:

I think a reason why todays Apple frameworks (and languages) have “issues” is that they are being build as frameworks by framework teams, not as part of apps to support the apps, such are supposed to follow. This used to be different. AppKit was built to support creating great new apps very quickly for the NeXT, which needed apps from scratch, to be developed by NeXT themselves. Mail, Preview, Workspace, Chess, etc the minimum to get working.

Same for UIKit which wasn’t even originally meant for public consumption (which shows). It was created to quickly build good first party apps.

I’m not entirely sure, but I think this is different for SwiftUI (and many other Apple frameworks). Maybe it was the original intention for watchOS, but certainly not for UIKit+. It doesn’t seem it was “app first”. (even just for something seemingly simple/baseline, like building TextEdit or Finder)

I recall the SwiftUI team saying that during the design phase they wanted to make sure that it was capable of building Keynote. But it doesn’t look like they actually rebuilt Keynote using SwiftUI, the way Finder was rewritten from Carbon to Cocoa. My copy of Keynote for Mac has 373 nib files. So much of the story of modern APIs (not just SwiftUI) is the difference between what they can do on paper vs. in practice.

Update (2026-05-12): Keren R. Bell:

There’s a few elements to this app that I couldn’t add easily with SwiftUI, and after consulting the usual suspects, it seems I couldn’t. Take the menu bar, part of the Mac’s identity. Despite various articles promising customizability, you can’t actually tailor it to fit your app without nuking it and starting from scratch.

[…]

There’s a few other things. SwiftUI basically can not talk to the clipboard. […] To implement moving points on the canvas with Arrow keys, I couldn’t just assign the function a a keyboard shortcut. My current embarassing solution is invisible, 0x0 accessibility-hidden buttons behind the canvas, with a modifier-less Keyboard Shortcut attached to each.

Helge Heß:

People often complain about some SwiftUI bugs, lack of feature XYZ and such. But I think they often miss the structurally deep / conceptual issues. Like how many instance methods does View have? Something like 500+?

David Beck:

Agreed. Some of them apply to one specific view type, but are hard to find because they exist in this soup. Some apply to multiple types of views, but have slightly different effects. And sometimes, different views will have different modifiers to do the same thing.

It’s basically subverting the type system. Also, instead of literate APIs it relies on implicit stuff like this:

At this point, AppKit developers with their finger on the pulse may be familiar with setting subtitles on NSMenuItem using the subtitle property, which has been available since macOS 14.4.

[…]

The key insight is that we can use multiple Text views within a Button’s label to force SwiftUI to interpret the first Text view as a title, and the second one as a subtitle.

Keyboard Shortcuts Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Notes Programming Reminders Shopie Stocks Swift Programming Language SwiftUI

Apple Sued for Removing Rave App From Store

Juli Clover:

Rave, a cross-platform service that lets users watch movies and TV shows together, today filed a series of antitrust lawsuits against Apple after Apple removed the Rave app from the App Store in August 2025.

According to Rave, Apple cited “unspecified allegations of fraud and vague concerns about content moderation” when pulling the app. Rave alleges Apple targeted the service because Rave competed with SharePlay, and Apple wanted to corner the market on smartphone co-viewing. Rave claims that Apple also falsely labeled the Rave Mac app as malware, preventing Mac users from installing it.

Discussion on Reddit suggests that Rave had unmoderated public chatrooms, pornography, issues with scams, and CSAM material. The Rave app was also labeled as malware by Kaspersky, BitDefender, Windows, and Google, suggesting Apple may have had reason to protect users from the app beyond limiting competition.

They claim that the content moderation issues have been resolved.

Antitrust App Store App Store Rejection iOS iOS 26 iOS App Lawsuit Legal Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Malware Notarization Rave SharePlay

Sendy 7

Hex:

Sendy has been completely refreshed with a modern, more polished interface.

[…]

Reach your audience sooner with 2 times faster sending speeds.

[…]

Design beautiful emails faster than ever with the all-new drag & drop editor. No coding required. […] Get up and running faster with built-in templates.

[…]

Introducing a new File Manager to easily store, organize, and reuse all your uploaded images

[…]

A new Amazon SES Status indicator in the sidebar shows your current reputation (e.g. Healthy or Paused)

[…]

When editing a campaign or autoresponder, you can ask AI to review your email and suggest improvements based on what you’ve already written.

I continue to like Sendy but haven’t had the chance to install this update yet. It’s $69 for new licenses or $34 to upgrade.

Amazon SES Artificial Intelligence E-mail Mailing Lists Sendy Web

Arq Restore Notes

Greg Hurrell:

The other backup tool that has saved my hide in the past is SuperDuper!, but on this occasion I didn’t have access to my physical (SuperDuper!) backup, so restoring from the cloud (Arq) was my only option.

[…]

Arq used all the memory on the system, requiring me to start again[…] Restarting is a bit annoying, because I use Glacier storage for my backups, meaning that you can’t just start downloading the data from the cloud; instead, you request for it to be made available and then wait 5 hours before actually beginning the download. Downloading from Glacier also hurts the wallet a bit, to the tune of about a hundred bucks for all the retrieval costs associated with the repeated attempts.

[…]

There are a number of apps that you have to open or twiddle in order to get things working, even though Homebrew installs them[…]

Backup and restore have definitely gotten easier over the years, but whether on iOS or macOS restoring is never as smooth as you’d hope.

Previously:

• Parachute Backup Acquired
• SuperDuper 3.12
• Backblaze No Longer Backs Up Dropbox
• Carbon Copy Cloner 7.1.3
• A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Permissions Requests
• Arq 7

Amazon Glacier Arq Backup Mac macOS Tahoe 26

iOS 27: Custom Wallet Passes

Alen Todorov (via Hacker News, MacRumors):

After 14 years of waiting on developers to ship Wallet support, Apple is letting users do it themselves. Here is what Bloomberg is reporting, how the new flow works, and what it means for third-party tools like WalletWallet.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported on Monday that iOS 27 will add a “Create a Pass” feature to the Wallet app. Tap the “+” button you already use to add credit cards or pass emails, and Wallet will offer something it has never offered before on iPhone: a path to build your own pass.

You can scan a QR code on a paper ticket or membership card with the camera, or build a pass from scratch in a layout editor. The whole flow runs without an Apple Developer account, a Pass Type ID, or any certificate signing.

[…]

Apple shipped PassKit alongside iOS 6 back in 2012. The pitch was clean: businesses build .pkpass files, customers tap to add, everyone wins. In practice, the consistent adopters ended up being airlines, big-box retailers, ticketing platforms, and a handful of national chains. Most gyms, cafes, libraries, rec centers, and small loyalty programs never built one, because the path requires an Apple Developer account, signing certificates, and enough engineering work that “just print a paper card” almost always won the budget conversation.

This seems like it should have been a day one feature except that perhaps Apple worried that it would disincentivize developers from adopting PassKit. Instead, people created Photos albums with pictures of bar codes.

noio:

15 years ago, a friend of mine built an app to do this — “Pass Creator” — then Apple yanked the functionality.

kilian:

The wallet app UI is the peak of Apple’s ‘single 20y/o in sf’ design.

Anyone that has multiple card from the same bank (because, say, you have a personal account and a shared account with your partner) has to do the “pick between the two identical looking top 20px of cards” dance every time they use Wallet to pay for something. It is mind-boggling that the current UI persists.

I wish Wallet supported search while in Apple Pay mode and a way to add your own notes/comments to each card.

Previously:

• Apple Digital ID
• Lightroom End Marks
• Apple’s Inconsistent Ellipsis Icons

Apple Pay iOS iOS 27 iOS App QR Codes Strategy Tax Wallet WalletWallet

Delayed Siri Features Settlement

Juli Clover (Slashdot, Hacker News):

Apple will pay $250 million to settle a class action lawsuit accusing it of false advertising and unfair competition after the personalized Siri features it promoted when launching the iPhone 16 were delayed.

A smarter, Apple Intelligence version of Siri was shown off at WWDC 2024, and then promoted in ads and videos when the iPhone 16 launched in September 2024. After Apple delayed the Siri Apple Intelligence features in March 2025, Apple pulled its ads, but they had been running for several months at that point.

If you really did buy an $800+ iPhone because of advertised features that never shipped, getting back $25 doesn’t seem like much consolation. I’m not sure what would make sense, though. With a lot of products, you could just extend the return period, but returning an iPhone months or a year later is not very useful because you probably no longer have your old phone to switch back to.

Previously:

• Gemini-Powered Siri Features Delayed
• Why Apple Still Hasn’t Cracked AI
• How Apple Fumbled Siri’s AI Makeover
• Apple Shifts Siri From Giannandrea to Rockwell
• Leaked Apple Siri Meeting
• Rotten
• Apple Delays “More Personalized Siri” Apple Intelligence Features
• Apple Intelligence for Siri in Spring 2025
• Apple Intelligence Announced
• Revamping Siri With iOS 18

Update (2026-05-07): Manton Reece:

Right, because tech company class action lawsuits are now rarely about the customers. They’re about the lawyers skimming some of the money. The settlement doesn’t appear to outline the fee yet, but 25% for these things is common — and matches the Apple battery lawsuit a few years ago — which would be $62.5 million here.

Joe Rossignol:

According to the terms of the settlement, each person who files an eligible claim will receive a per-device payment of $25, but this amount could increase up to $95 if the total number of claims submitted is lower than anticipated.

[…]

Within the next few months, a settlement website should go live with an online claims form.

[…]

On an earnings call last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the personalized version of Siri will be released this year.

Apple Apple Intelligence iOS iOS 18 iPhone 16 Lawsuit Legal Siri

Software Brain

Nilay Patel (Hacker News):

It’s a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Marc Andreessen, the literal embodiment of software brain, called it in 2011 when he wrote the piece “Why software is eating the world” as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. But software thinking has been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how regular people are growing to dislike it more and more over time.

[…]

The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code. Like I said, this is a powerful way of seeing things. So much of our lives run through databases, and a bunch of important companies have been built around maintaining those databases and providing access to them.

[…]

Any business process that looks like code talking to a database in a repetitive way is up for grabs. That’s why Anthropic has been so relentlessly focused on enterprise customers, and it’s why OpenAI is now pivoting to business use. There’s real value in introducing AI to business, because so much of modern business is already software: collecting data, analyzing it, and taking action on it over and over again in a loop. Businesses also control their data, and they can demand that all their databases work together.

In this way, software brain has ruled the business world for a long time. AI has just made it easier than ever for more people to make more software than ever before — for every kind of business to automate big chunks of itself with software. It’s everywhere: the absolute cutting edge of advertising and marketing is automation with AI. It’s not being a creative.

Via John Gruber:

It’s up for debate what exactly is off and what should be done about it, but the undeniable proof that something is profoundly off is the deep unpopularity surrounding everything related to AI. You can’t argue that the public always turns against groundbreaking technology. The last two epoch-defining shifts in technology were the smartphone in the 2000s, and the Internet/web in the 1990s. Neither of those moments generated this sort of mainstream popular backlash. I’d say in both of those cases, regular people were optimistically curious. The single most distinctive thing about “AI” today is the vociferous public opposition to it and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do.

Maybe the closest analog is social media, where people love to talk about how bad it is and yet continue right on using it. In both cases, there’s the sense that abstinence is not really an option because you’ll be left behind, and meanwhile the technology is providing real utility.

Previously:

• Photoshop’s “Modern” Spectrum User Interface
• AI Layoffs

Artificial Intelligence Business Database Web

macOS Text Replacement Export/Import

Adam Engst:

What I didn’t know until recently is that Apple provides a hidden—but documented, amazingly!—way to export your replacement pairs to a property list file. All you have to do is select the items to export (Command-A selects all) and drag them to the desktop. You can then edit that file in a text editor like BBEdit or TextEdit before reimporting it, which is merely a matter of dragging it back into the Text Replacements dialog. This export/import feature is useful in three ways:

• Backup: If you have an extensive set of text replacements, making a backup would be a sensible precaution.
• Sharing: Any Mac user can import your text replacements, so if you’ve built up a custom collection of scientific, medical, or technical replacements, you can share them with colleagues.
• Easier editing: Bulk changes might be easier to make outside Apple’s one-at-a-time interface.

[…]

I was all ready to give you an updated version of the TidBITS AutoCorrect Dictionary that could be imported into the Text Replacements dialog, but after hours of testing, I just couldn’t make it work reliably enough.

Previously:

• Text Replacements Do Not Sync

Update (2026-05-11): Vítor:

The article mentions an invisible plist file, but in the past I’ve found the best way to export Text Replacements to be querying the ~/Library/KeyboardServices/TextReplacements.db SQLite database.

I’ve queried that effectively for years in an Alfred workflow because people asked for a way to export Text Replacements into Alfred Snippets.

Bug Mac macOS Tahoe 26

The Problem With the Touch Bar

John Gruber:

I know that sounds like a joke but I really do think the biggest problem with the Touch Bar wasn’t that the first crack at it wasn’t good enough, but that they never took a second crack at it.

One could argue that the second crack was adding the physical Esc key. That took three years. It might have worked out better if the initial version had included Esc and perhaps the volume controls as real keys. Then the focus could have been more on what the Touch Bar could add in place of the keys that many people rarely use, rather than on how it messed up common actions.

I think better software could have helped a lot. First, it would sometimes hang and not respond. But, more importantly, I think it could have been a lot more useful. There’s this amazing, programmable screen, but there wasn’t really any way to empower the user to do stuff with it. You could only rearrange predetermined toolbar buttons. There also should have been a better way to balance global vs. app-specific items.

Hardware-wise, I think it needed some sort of haptics. And, even now, I’m disappointed with how Touch ID works on Macs. With iPhones, it was nearly perfect for me. Through several generations of Macs, it still often rejects my finger and feels like it’s slowing me down.

Alex Rosenberg:

I thought the Touch Bar was clever and had potential. I think it was immediately and permanently sullied by being paired with the butterfly keyboard and laptops that had too few ports. Being paired with those other problems but being the official identifying feature of those machines painted a target on it.

Steven Aquino:

What was ushered with a bang exited with but a whimper. My understanding over the years has been the software people inside Apple Park more or less fell out of love with the Touch Bar. I’ve never gotten a concrete explanation why, but the enthusiasm evidently was severely, irreparably curbed.

It’s a shame, because hardware was never the Touch Bar’s Achilles heel.

[…]

I hate to break it to the able-bodied masses, but not everyone is a touch typist.

[…]

Touch Bar Zoom is/was a masterpiece.

Previously:

• MacBook Pro Late 2023
• The Reincarnation of the Touch Bar
• The Best Mac Rumors in a Long Time
• Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
• Upgrading to a 16-inch MacBook Pro
• How to Restart the Touch Bar
• Taika Waititi on MacBook Keyboards
• Haptic Touch Bar
• Making the Touch Bar Useful by Abandoning Apple Guidelines
• The Touch Bar’s Future
• Making Better Use of the Touch Bar
• What’s Wrong With the Touch Bar
• Touch Bar
• New MacBook Pros and the State of the Mac

Update (2026-05-06): Craig Grannell:

The problem for me is that it wasn’t everywhere. It’s always a long shot getting devs en masse to support new features. But to support a feature that only a relatively small number of Macs have and that pretty rapidly started to fall out of favour? That’s, er, an even longer shot.

Cory Birdsong:

The Elgato Stream Deck became a huge success at the same time the Touch Bar floundered, which tells me the problem was entirely in the software implementation. Fundamentally, the buttons on it should've been user-configured instead of dynamic based on the app. You can't build muscle memory around keys that change every time you switch applications. I used BetterTouchTool to set mine up that way, and I liked it a lot better than the default implementation.

BetterTouchTool Haptics History Keyboard Keyboard Shortcuts Mac MacBook Pro macOS 10.12 Sierra Touch Bar

GyazMail 1.8

Goichi Hirakawa:

• Compatible with Mac with Apple Silicon [i.e. doesn’t require Rosetta].
• Updated the app icon.
• Improved compatibility with macOS Tahoe.

Previously:

• Ending macOS Intel Support
• GyazMail 1.7

E-mail Client GyazMail Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Rosetta

2026 Six Colors Apple in the Enterprise Report Card

Jason Snell (complete commentary):

There weren’t too many radical changes in this year’s survey. Respondents are most positive about Apple’s hardware, with another strong score honoring its commitment to security and privacy. And optimism about the future of Apple in the enterprise skyrocketed, up half a point to tie for second-highest score in the survey.

[…]

Speaking of software surprises, half of the respondents felt that this year’s OS adoption pace was more or less the same as usual. Only 17% felt this was a slower year, up slightly from last year. What’s interesting is that there’s been a two-year trend in this category, with “quicker than usual” and “about the same” switching places. Perhaps the pace of change has just become the new normal.

[…]

Panelists were enthusiastic about some specific new [enterprise program] features, but there are still long-standing gaps that generate frustration. And what’s Apple Business, anyway?

[…]

Apple’s hardware may be riding high, but software is not going great. And yet the score went back up from last year’s low of 3.0. macOS Tahoe and Liquid Glass were the dominant sources of negativity. Complaints ranged from cosmetic inconsistency to serious breakage.

Previously:

• 2025 Apple Vision Accessibility Report Card
• 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card
• Slow iOS 26 Adoption
• 2025 Six Colors Apple in the Enterprise Report Card
• Why In-App Purchases Don’t Work for the Enterprise
• Apple Business

Apple Software Quality AppleCare Artificial Intelligence iOS iOS 26 Liquid Glass Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Mobile Device Management (MDM)

MacBook Neo and How the iPad Could Be

Craig Mod (Hacker News):

The iPad should be radically (though obviously) touch-only. No keyboards. No pointers. No mice. No trackpads. Just your disgusting fingers flopping over the screen and mooshing into icons. It should not have any window’d modes. Each app should fill the whole screen and only the whole screen. […] iPadOS shouldn’t be anything like Windows or macOS or Linux, it shouldn’t be iOS made big, it should be only like iPadOS — a singular thing of finger-poking joy.

[…]

These kinds of workflow paper cuts are everywhere on the iPad. In terms of power, that original iPad Pro is still pretty much all the iPad you could ever want or need. I’m sure there are a few of you doing more with your iPads than the original Pro could deliver, but I’m not sure there’re many. Almost anything that doesn’t involve the Apple Pencil (Procreate being one of the true killer apps, the app that may have sold more iPads to creative professionals than anything else) could be done better on a MacBook. Even email feels better on a MacBook.

[…]

This sense of iPad “not working” has only grown in the past two years with the explosion of LLMs and tools like Claude Code. macOS is the place to run the things because macOS is malleable and its constituent parts fungible, it’s able to embody the role of tool by trusting the user to be an adult.

[…]

You’d think that Apple would have seen the launch of the M1 as a clear moment to maximally delineate between MacBooks and iPad. But no, Apple got weird. Some kind of internal velocity set in motion perhaps years ago by an errant project manager continued to push the company into fuzzy software spaces. For instead of making iPadOS more iPad-focused — a touch-only wonderland of touch-computing joy — they began to make it more like fake macOS. […] And each time we’d peek — a few times a year or so — our hearts fell a little in dismay to see how far they’d strayed, how utterly uninteresting it all was, how much it was trying to be “macOS lite” but somehow, mostly, worse. […] Slowly, then quickly, those of us on macOS felt squeezed in the opposite direction.

[…]

I just love the idea that the specificity of our tools should be radically clear.

Mahmoud Itani:

Later this year, the MacBook Pro is expected to undergo one of its most significant transformations ever with a touchscreen OLED display. At around the same time, the iPhone Fold will bring a tablet-sized screen to Apple’s handset for the first time.

[…]

However, while Apple’s laptops and tablets have been largely evolving along parallel lines, they’re now seemingly en route to an intersection. The looming strategy shift suggests that Apple is thinking differently behind the scenes. iPads and MacBooks are actively borrowing hardware and software features from each other, and, at this pace, they could realistically become a single product within a few generations.

Similar to how the iPhone rendered the iPod redundant, Apple’s upcoming touchscreen products appear to be starting to dig the iPad’s grave.

iPersuade:

Most authors who write articles like this simply don’t understand how iPads are actually used in a productive environment and what makes people who use them as their main machine really like them. I have both mac and my iPad pro and mostly I live on my iPad pro. What I need the iPad for would not be solved by a touchscreen mac. The MacBook Neo is not truly competition for the iPad because they’re different tools and anybody buying a Neo to replace their iPad wasn’t using the right tool to begin with. The less expensive iPad compared to a Mac made some people pick the wrong tool for cost reasons, so in that sense it looks like competition. And in that sense it looks like the Neo is the shiny new object dislodging the iPad. The question might be how many people who bought an iPad really wanted a mac and what does that do to the iPad market? That is an open question but not for the reasons pundits typically write about.

Cyberguycpt:

The Neo Taught Me I Never Needed an iPad

Don’t get me wrong, I still really enjoy my iPad and understand why it’s a great tool for so many people. However, for most of my daily activities, the NEO is all I need. I don’t play games or draw on it; I mainly use it for social media and watching videos. Occasionally, I need to do more computer-based tasks like typing emails, writing word documents, or creating Excel sheets, which are much easier with a keyboard. Up until now, an iPad was the only option for me because of its price. I wouldn’t spend $1000+ on a laptop for just a few tasks every now and then, but with my educational discount, the MacBook at $599 finally made sense. When I first got the NEO, I was a bit skeptical about how often I’d actually use it, but I’ve found myself using it more than the iPad.

Brandon McMullen:

I have been really thinking about the place of the iPad now that the new $599 MacBook Neo has been replaced. I have seen countless videos and articles saying some version of “Why would you even buy an iPad anymore? Just get the Neo”. I think that this sentiment is both right and also very wrong.

[…]

I predict, and I hope this bears out, that as time goes on, the iPad will be looked at as less of a laptop, and more of an iPad again. Let’s let the iPad just be an iPad again. Because iPads are awesome! They’re great for drawing, journaling, reading, shopping, entertainment, gaming, lounging around with, and the list goes on and on. An iPad is an awesome “tablet computer”, it doesn’t need to be an awesome laptop. The iPad as a third device, slotted in between the smartphone and the laptop, is where it excels.

[…]

I don’t believe for a second that the new MacBook Neo is going to kill the iPad. Rather, I think the MacBook Neo may kill the mainstream desire to make the iPad a laptop replacement.

Keren R. Bell:

I think the iPad is an amazing thing when its allowed to breathe its own air, and the MacBook Neo might just let it have that chance.

Riccardo Mori:

Apple never really took a definitive decision with the iPad, so they kept changing course and approach. They kept throwing stuff at it, at this iPad that kept becoming a jack of an increasing number of trades, while being a master at very few of them, comparatively. They built an increasingly higher tower of ‘stuff the iPad can potentially do’ over the inadequate foundation that iOS/iPadOS was and is. They thought that the problem was solvable by throwing faster and faster CPUs at it, while the actual work should have been done on the operating system front. There are still things a Newton MessagePad 2100 with a 162MHz ARM processor can do better than an M5 iPad Pro because NewtonOS is a better-designed OS for the device it runs on than iPadOS is on the iPad.

They also thought that remaining vague enough about the iPad’s core purpose was a good strategy, perhaps to buy time or to avoid taking a defining direction for the iPad that couldn’t be easily reversed. Apple’s way of remaining vague was perfectly epitomised by the phrase, We can’t wait to see what you’ll do with it. Like, here’s this obscenely powerful slab of glass and aluminium, do with it whatever you wish.

[…]

First Apple tried to make iOS and iPadOS more complex because the iPad needed to be a more sophisticated device than an iPhone, but apparently there’s a ceiling after which complicating iPadOS makes the whole system unintuitive, with increasing discoverability issues, and the insurmountable obstacle that is a touch interface — and a touch interface can only do so much.

So, when the complication of iPadOS didn’t go very far, the natural next step for Apple was simplifying Mac OS.

Matt Ronge:

The iPad’s external display support is underrated.

I connected my iPad to a Studio Display and ran Workbench. Now my headless Mac mini (back in Minneapolis) is running full-screen on a 27" display in Ohio.

Remote Mac on a Studio Display through an iPad. Pretty wild. 🤯

Alex Reframe (translated):

Apple really needs to put macOS on the iPad. Not a lite version, macOS adapted for the iPad.

Here I tested it with the screen mirroring from the Mac mini, the screen adapted and touch works. It’s absolutely amazing!

At most, being able to switch from iPadOS to a version with macOS capabilities depending on the user’s needs and what they’re looking for.

Mahmoud Itani:

Meanwhile, the redesigned MacBook Pro will likely offer a slimmer shell and OLED touchscreen, bringing its form factor closer to an iPad Pro. That’s not to mention that Apple code has revealed in the past that the company is testing 5G-enabled MacBooks, so the overhauled model could potentially pack an in-house cellular modem, too.

[…]

If the touchscreen Pro is successful, it’s almost certain to expand to the Air and the Neo, making it even harder to justify buying an entry-level iPad.

[…]

The same goes for the iPad mini, which is in danger of being eclipsed by the iPhone Fold. For one, iPadOS is increasingly gaining desktop-like features that make more sense on larger screens. And those who want a small book-like tablet will surely opt for an iPhone Fold instead, which is expected to cost roughly what you’d pay for a mini and an iPhone Pro.

Hartley Charlton:

Apple has reportedly abandoned plans for a foldable “iPad Ultra” following years of disappointing sales performance for the iPad Pro.

Jon Mundy (Hacker News):

The next step for Apple seems clear to me: make an iPad Neo and lock up the tablet market. Give us a brightly coloured £200/$200ish full-sized tablet, with Apple’s peerless handle on the whole software and hardware pipeline, and its impressive custom silicon operation.

Previously:

• John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook
• macOS Post–MacBook Neo
• iPadOS Post–MacBook Neo
• An Ultralight MacBook and Other Apple Silicon Roads Not Taken
• “No” Part 2
• iPadOS 26 Announced
• The State of iPadOS in 2024
• System Settings
• Galaxy Unpacked 2019

Update (2026-05-05): Steve Troughton-Smith:

The idea that we can rewind the clock to when developers cared enough to make high-quality unique iPad apps like Push Pop Press did is a complete fantasy. If you push the reset button on iPad today, developers aren't remotely in the mood to rebuild the kind of unique, bespoke app ecosystem the device had before iOS 7 and the last big reset. If iPad were invented today, it would have a fate much more similar to Vision Pro than anybody wants to think about.

iOS 7 effectively wiped out iPad app development. For years after that release, developers were hands-full redesigning for flat design and then flexible layouts. Custom iPad app designs fell by the wayside, and eventually all the unique apps on the platform were replaced with scaled phone apps.

Update (2026-05-06): Warner Crocker:

I use an iPad as a tool in my work as a theatre practitioner. I’m on my feet with a script on my iPad, using an Apple Pencil to take notes. If I need to do keyboard work in the rehearsal room, I plop the iPad on a Magic Keyboard, do the keyboard related task, then pop the iPad off again and get back on my feet. When I’m back in my digs, I mostly work on a Mac. Apple’s ecosystem makes this all possible. When it works well.

[…]

The current lineup serves me well. Frankly, I can’t imagine any changes Apple could make that would alter how I work.

[…]

Craig Mod argues that “the specificity of our tools should be radically clear.” I buy the argument, but extending the discussion I’ll say it’s better to have more capability than less. Most users don’t touch anywhere near what even the most limited devices can offer.

[…]

Moving on, and with the “What’s a Computer?” miscues behind us, Apple’s current challenge and our headaches stem more from Apple trying to meld its operating systems into some sort of grand cohesive vision that feels the same across all of its devices. Admirable. But ultimately flawed in the same way that each different computing device Apple sells is as different as any two users who use that same device.

Artificial Intelligence iOS iPad iPadOS iPadOS 26 iPhone iPhone Fold Mac MacBook Neo macOS Tahoe 26

Apple’s Q2 2026 Results

Apple (transcript, MacRumors, Hacker News):

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $111.2 billion, up 17 percent year over year. Diluted earnings per share was $2.01, up 22 percent year over year.

“Today Apple is proud to report our best March quarter ever, with revenue of $111.2 billion and double-digit growth across every geographic segment,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “iPhone achieved a March quarter revenue record, fueled by such extraordinary demand for the iPhone 17 lineup. During the quarter, Services achieved yet another all-time record, and we were excited to introduce remarkable new products to our strongest lineup ever. That included the addition of the iPhone 17e and the M4-powered iPad Air, along with the launch of MacBook Neo, which is captivating customers all around the world.”

Jason Snell:

And now, to help you visualize what Apple just announced, here is our traditional barrage of charts and graphs[…]

Margins are now at 49.3%.

Jason Anthony Guy:

iPhone saw a quarterly revenue record, fueled by “extraordinary demand” for the iPhone 17 family, reaching $57 billion in revenue (up 22%), while Services hit yet another all-time record ($31 billion in revenue, up 16%). Mac revenue was up 6% (to $8.4 billion), iPad revenue was up 8% (to $6.9 billion), and Wearables, Home, and Accessories were up 5% (to $7.9 billion). Apple’s installed user base also reached a “new all-time high” of 2.5 billion active devices.

The company gave unexpectedly strong guidance for the June quarter, with expectations of 14–17% total revenue growth, in spite of uncertainty surrounding tariffs, wars, and RAMageddon.

Jason Snell:

Those holiday quarters are huge. They stand out on any chart you make. The other quarters, well, they’re the sag in the saddle. They’re important because you need 12 months to make a calendar, but they’ve never had the sizzle of the holiday quarter.

Which is why it’s so impressive that, for two successive “boring” quarters, Apple has generated more than $100 billion in revenue. In 2020, Apple’s “boring” quarters averaged $60.9 billion in revenue. That a company this large can still grow this much in five years is astounding.

[…]

The key concept here seems to be flexibility. It sure sounds to me like Apple wants the ability to, for example, stash a little extra cash away so that it’s capable of making big moves if it needs to. Maybe that’s capital expenditures involving AI stuff. Maybe it’s keeping enough cash ready to spring if there’s a company it feels like it can acquire, in whole or in part.

M.G. Siegler:

The dichotomy is so wild that it now gets written about every single quarter. But the dichotomy also keeps growing every single quarter as Big Tech keeps ramping CapEx and yes, Apple stays the same! I mean the chart above says it all by showing it all.

[…]

Last year, the numbers exploded. This year, they’ll explode even further. Amazon will hit $200B spent for the year. Google will be close behind at $190B. Microsoft should be around the same at $190B. Meta at $145B. Apple? Again, they hit $4.344B in CapEx in the first half of 2026 – which was down a bit year on year – so they should end in that $9B to $10B range, assuming some level of ramp.

[…]

Either Apple is right and the rest of Big Tech will have lit hundreds of billions – perhaps trillions when all is said and done – of dollars on fire, or Apple is going to be in big trouble.

[…]

What’s especially wild there is that Apple is most famously the company that doesn’t want to be beholden to anyone else if at all possible. It’s the “Tim Cook Doctrine” for chrissakes! Either they’ve forgotten that fear, which stems from the times Apple nearly died in their history when others refused to play ball with them, and have been lulled to complacency by years of iPhone dominance, or again, they just think this will be like web search. Not something they need to fully own.

Adam Engst:

Troublingly, Apple is pushing harder into advertising. In the Q&A with analysts, Parekh said the company had added more ad inventory to the App Store and would bring ads to Apple Maps in the US and Canada this summer. Apple spins the increase in ads as helping developers and local businesses, but even Apple’s pet 451 Research firm won’t be able to come up with double-digit numbers for customer satisfaction with ads.

Juli Clover (Hacker News):

Tim Cook said that the Mac mini and Mac Studio could be hard to get for months to come.

[…]

Shipping delays for the Mac mini and the Mac Studio have been increasing over the last few months, and the waits for some models stretch into months. Apple stopped selling the Mac Studio with 512GB RAM entirely, and it stopped accepting orders for some models with higher amounts of RAM. As of last week, the base Mac mini was listed as “Currently Unavailable” from Apple’s online store because it is out of stock.

Joe Rossignol:

Apple was very optimistic about the MacBook Neo before announcing it, but the company still “undercalled” the level of enthusiasm that the laptop would generate, according to Cook.

Previously:

• John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook
• MacBook Neo Sales
• Ads in Apple Maps
• Apple’s Q1 2026 Results
• More App Store Ad Spots
• Apple’s Q2 2025 Results

Update (2026-05-04): Jeff Johnson:

There should be more discussion of the line from the statement of John Ternus during the Apple earnings call: “Tim is one of the greatest business leaders of all time.”

Update (2026-05-06): Craig Grannell:

Apple making money is a good thing if you enjoy using its products and want the company to not just survive but thrive. However, I’m less excited about how Apple increasingly makes that money: advertising. Apple used to poke fun at rivals peppering user experiences with ads, and yet today it’s doing exactly that, while still claiming to be better because it respects user privacy.

[…]

Apple needs to rediscover its philosophy of old before it becomes yet another tech company that blatantly prioritizes shareholders over the people who actually use its products.

Apple Apple Quarterly Results Apple Services Business iOS iPhone 17 iPhone 17 Pro iPhone 17 Pro Max iPhone Air Mac Mac mini Mac Studio MacBook Neo

Claude at Apple

Ryan Christoffel (Reddit):

Apple recently announced an AI partnership with Google. But reporting indicates the company initially pursued deals with other companies, including Anthropic.

Based on new comments from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, it’s easy to see why.

Gurman, speaking on TBPN, said the following:

Apple runs on Anthropic at this point. Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple is doing internally in terms of product development, a lot of their internal tools…They have custom versions of Claude running on their own servers internally.

Aaron (Hacker News):

Apple accidentally left Claude.md files in today’s Apple Support app update (v5.13)

That’s an odd way of phrasing it, because it makes it sound like the file is naturally in the app package and Apple forgot to delete it. But why was it being copied into the app in the first place? (It seems to be related to building the app, not to using AI for customer support.)

Aaron:

Apple has released an emergency update to the Apple Support app (v5.13.1) to remove the Claude.md files

Ziwen:

I have a friend in apple.

He has over 200 dollars credit on claude everyday to spend.

Previously:

• John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook
• LLMs and Software Development Roundup
• Apple Picks Gemini

Apple Artificial Intelligence Claude iOS iOS 26 Programming

War on Adobe

Jess Weatherbed (Hacker News):

All empires eventually fall, and it seems the creative software industry has collectively decided that Adobe’s time has come.

[…]

Pricing in particular has given competitors an opening to attack. Some of the best alternatives aren’t just undercutting Adobe’s price — they’re available for free. People love free.

[…]

Perhaps coincidently, Canva also dropped its own bomb on Adobe’s After Effects this week. Canva has made the full version of Cavalry available for free instead of locking the motion graphics software behind its own user subscriptions, after the design platform acquired it back in February. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Canva did a similar thing last year with Affinity — a trio of apps it acquired that provide similar features to Adobe’s Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign software.

[…]

Other Adobe apps also took a hit this week thanks to the latest DaVinci Resolve 21 update. The free multipurpose post-production software — which is already considered a rival to Premiere Pro — now includes photo editing features like color-correction, masking tools, and import support for Apple Photos and Lightroom Catalog files.

Jaron Schneider (Hacker News):

No, you would no longer really “own” the software, but Adobe promised that, in exchange, going cloud-based meant that it would be more agile and better able to deliver updates and features to users. You also would, theoretically, save a lot of money by not having to purchase the physical Creative Suite disks.

[…]

I don’t think that has wholly changed in the last decade-plus, as I know there are still people at Adobe who feel the same way — I met them just two years ago when I visited with the PetaPixel Podcast team. But the difference is the corporation around those people has changed, and now those people are no longer encouraged to talk to the public the way they once were.

[…]

Adobe started to shift its focus to enticing those corporate customers to the detriment of its connection to the customers that gave it success to begin with. […] Adobe not so much forgot who its users were, but instead it actively decided they no longer mattered. It believed it had become so big, so mighty, and so important that it could move beyond them. What arrogance.

Nick Heer:

I think Adobe has actually shipped worse products as a result of this strategy — and, for once, I will avoid making it all about bugs, of which there are many. Adobe’s applications are more capable than they ever have been, but they are also often worse for professionals in actual use as a direct result of the company’s software-as-a-service model. Nearly every application contains upsells or supposedly helpful alerts that are actually ads for other Adobe services. These promotions are particularly aggressive in pushing artificial intelligence tools. Even software as relatively simple as Acrobat cannot help but promote its ability to summarize a two-page document, and then suggest you store it with Adobe’s cloud service instead of sending it as an attachment.

This stuff gets in the way of professionals trying to do their job. Adobe was pressured into adding a “Quiet Mode” in Photoshop to hide most of these things, but not all of them, and only in Photoshop. It only underscores how much Adobe views its software as something it gives people permission to use, instead of tools it makes to help people get their work done.

Eric Schwarz:

In that time, Adobe has added features, but the shift to Creative Cloud meant that the company has taken up rent-seeking and the general behavior seems to include unfixed bugs, bloat, and disrespecting its users.

[…]

I’d be willing to overlook a lot of this if the software continued to get better, but the software has strayed so far from even feeling like it belongs on a Mac. Even one of the common practices to resolve issues using the Creative Cloud Cleaner tool makes the whole thing feel like ’90s Microsoft at best and malware at worst.

Previously:

• Photoshop’s “Modern” Spectrum User Interface
• Apple Creator Studio
• Combined Affinity Studio Now Free
• Figma Files for IPO
• Does Apple Smell Blood in the Water?
• Apple Acquires Pixelmator
• The Rise of Canva

Adobe Business Canva Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Strategy Tax

Photoshop’s “Modern” Spectrum User Interface

Marcin Wichary:

The first field is not focused, so you cannot start typing the number after opening this window. You need to immediately move your hand to the mouse.

If you click on any field, the value is not pre-selected, so you cannot start typing a new number then.

[…]

Clicking on parts of the input field doesn’t bring it into focus even though the hover state promises it. (Discrepancies between hover and focus handling are a horrible new thing I’m starting to see more in recent interfaces.)

[…]

Simply backspacing through the field shows a crude error modal and – to add a second injury to the first injury – the dialog removes focus from the field!

What’s going on at Adobe? As he says, “all those transgressions are solved problems”—figured out by Adobe itself decades ago.

Marc Edwards:

This is a great post by @mwichary, demonstrating how Adobe’s apps are decaying. I have a couple to add to the pile for the new canvas window: It now accepts fractional pixels and shouldn’t, nudging increases or decreases by 0.01 pixels, and shift-nudging changes the value by 0.1 pixels.

Cabel Sasser:

there is no jumpscare quite like a “oh my god adobe updated the hue/saturation panel for the first time since 1978” jumpscare

Jason Snell:

I have been using Photoshop since John Sculley was the CEO of Apple. Longtime users can be brutally resistant to change, but I would like to think that I remain open-minded. One can’t have used Photoshop for more than three decades without having adapted to change and found utility in the new features Adobe has added over the years. I’ve used generative fill. I’ve used AI-enhanced edge detection. I’m hip and with it.

But, as Wichary detected, what Adobe is doing with the Modern User Interface is not to make a new, improved, modern interface. Adobe’s own description gives it away: It’s a hammering of all of Adobe’s user interfaces so they look alike, across Creative Cloud. It’s a “multi-platform design system,” which means in addition to Adobe being committed to “modernizing” Photoshop by making it look like Premiere, it’s also going to make it look the same on the Mac as Windows.

Already, Photoshop desperately wants to run in single-window mode, with multiple documents opening in a single uberwindow—in other words, the stink of Windows. Fortunately, you can turn that feature off, and I have.

[…]

That all said, of course, this decision could benefit Photoshop users, because Adobe could put in the work to make the app better while also fulfilling its own corporate goals of homogeneity.

Ha ha ha. Sorry. I tried to write that with a straight face.

Alejandro Romano:

We’re talking about Adobe, though. They sure had the resources, the talent, and the runway to manage that transition. They just chose not to. Priorities were different.

Remember Creative Cloud? Of course you do. We all do. It’s still with us.

Who likes it? No one.

One of the most insulting moves it enabled them to do is to hit people who dared to cancel their subscription with surprising, insane fees for trying to leave. What about that? Could you respect a company that treats their users like that? Most of them have supported and cheered them on for decades. It’s gotten to the point where, if you pirated their software, you would have a better experience.

[…]

They came up with the subscription model. It ended the last financial incentive to ship better software. They could cut down the cost of innovation, while charging customers more for the same. Win-win.

Previously:

• Acorn 8.5
• Adobe Modifies Your Hosts File for Their Analytics
• U.S. Sues Adobe Over Subscriptions
• Adobe at 40

Update (2026-05-01): Nick Heer:

If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of JavaScript, and appear to be built with React.

This is loathsome.

There are people out there who will insist it is unfair to blame the tools and that bad user interfaces can be built in entirely native languages, too, which is true. Also, Adobe’s interface has always been unique and not quite at home on either MacOS or Windows. Maybe it really is possible to build a web app that feels platform native. But I have never used one — not once — and for this mess to be increasingly used in the industry-standard professional suite of creative tools is maddening.

[…]

I was going to write about how this stuff should have been tried with people who actually use Adobe’s apps in a high-pressure environment, but I am sure it was and, also, it does not matter. Wichary has it right. These are fundamental principles of user interface design that Adobe is ignoring because its internal tooling has taken precedence.

Previously:

• War on Adobe

Update (2026-05-04): Louie Mantia:

Photoshop “redesigned” the Actions panel, one of the most fundamental features of Photoshop. The default tab is “Essentials” which I never use. “Yours” is my actions. Of course they have a setting for “Classic” mode, which is what I do for effectively every Photoshop feature that gets redesigned.

However— they also changed the behavior. Undo/redo is for the entire action rather than individual steps of an action. Not helpful! So, also uncheck “create a single history state.”

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

The before-and-after screenshots look like examples from a lecture on user interface design — if you swap them around make the new ones “before” and the old ones “after”. Better balance, better focus behavior, appropriate platform-native typography.

Eric Peacock:

Years ago the “hold option to toggle the cancel button to reset” stopped working in a bunch of effect or adjustment dialogs — like nothing would reset when the toggle was clicked.

I may-or-may-not have reported that bug at some point, but it wasn’t acknowledged or fixed for years after it initially frustrated me.

John Gruber:

You have to go back to the 1990s and classic Mac OS, but Adobe’s best apps used to have exemplary native UIs. Apps like Photoshop helped push the state of the art in Mac UI forward. Tabbed palettes were a revelation.

Update (2026-05-06): John Gruber:

It feels like the world of software is bifurcating quality-wise. This whole thing about Adobe’s new craptacular “modern” UI language (a.k.a. “Spectrum”) exemplifies one side of that bifurcation — the bad-and-getting-worse side. Software that is the product not just of an ignorance of long-established principles of interaction design, but of a willful disdain for those principles. What Adobe is now shipping is just inexplicably bad UI, ignoring literally decades of great work and long-mastered concepts — a lot of which work was pioneered by Adobe itself!

The whole thing with MacOS 26 Tahoe is similar. […] Spectrum is where Tahoe suggests that MacOS was headed under Alan Dye’s leadership: cross-platform sameness for the sake of sameness, with a complete disregard for longstanding platform nuances and idioms.

[…]

The other side of the software fork is not deserted. It’s just populated, more than ever, by the products of small independent developers who obsess, first and foremost, over quality and artistic vision.

Update (2026-05-07): See also: Hacker News.

Marco Arment:

Then re-read the last two paragraphs, replacing “Adobe” with “Apple”.

MontagFTB:

I am Foster Brereton and Principal Scientist for this UI effort. Suffice it to say, the article and this thread have had their impact on the people behind the software. We are aware we got a lot of things wrong. As the primary technical lead on the UI migration, a lot of the implementation details ultimately fall up to me.

Two things I can tell you: the engineering team does care about Photoshop (I’ve been on the team more than 15 years for a reason) and this migration is far from over for us.

These sharp edges are acknowledged, and we are working on them. Some of them are already addressed. I know this will be of little comfort to some. But to the rest, we are still here.

Update (2026-05-13): Marcin Wichary:

Oh, and when I say “broken windows,” I’m not just being cute. Here’s an example of Photoshop’s “explore” halo that occasionally appears on top of another app just because I have Photoshop open underneath. And, there is nothing I can do in Photoshop to get rid of it[…]

Adobe Adobe Creative Cloud Adobe Photoshop App Subscriptions Design Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 React Native

Zig’s Anti-AI Contribution Policy

Simon Willison (Hacker News):

Zig has one of the most stringent anti-LLM policies of any major open source project:

No LLMs for issues.

No LLMs for pull requests.

No LLMs for comments on the bug tracker, including translation. English is encouraged, but not required. You are welcome to post in your native language and rely on others to have their own translation tools of choice to interpret your words.

The most prominent project written in Zig may be the Bun JavaScript runtime, which was acquired by Anthropic in December 2025 and, unsurprisingly, makes heavy use of AI assistance.

Loris Cro:

In successful open source projects you eventually reach a point where you start getting more PRs than what you’re capable of processing. Given what I mentioned so far, it would make sense to stop accepting imperfect PRs in order to maximize ROI from your work, but that’s not what we do in the Zig project. Instead, we try our best to help new contributors to get their work in, even if they need some help getting there. We don’t do this just because it’s the “right” thing to do, but also because it’s the smart thing to do.

Contributing to an open source project is an iterated game and the majority of the value that a contributor can bring to a project lies in the later iterations. In other words, you initially invest some energy (i.e. place a bet) to onboard a new contributor, and you hope that later on that relationship starts paying you back as the contributor becomes more trusted and prolific.

The reason I call it “contributor poker” is because, just like people say about the actual card game, “you play the person, not the cards”. In contributor poker, you bet on the contributor, not on the contents of their first PR.

Simon Willison:

LLM assistance breaks that completely. It doesn't matter if the LLM helps you submit a perfect PR to Zig - the time the Zig team spends reviewing your work does nothing to help them add new, confident, trustworthy contributors to their overall project.

Previously:

• LLMs and Software Development Roundup
• curl Removes Bug Bounties
• Anthropic Acquires Bun
• curl Takes Action Against AI Bug Reports
• The Zig Programming Language

Artificial Intelligence Open-source Software Programming Zig Programming Language

Giving Up on the Vision Pro

Jason Snell:

From the first time I put on the Vision Pro, I never could get Optic ID to work quite right. I couldn’t set it up to work for the longest time, and when I finally did, using it to unlock the device only worked sporadically.

[…]

Worse, though, is that I also wasn’t offered other light shields to compare and contrast, or asked questions about my fit. I didn’t get the sense that the person I was working with knew anything about fitting someone properly. The experience was very friendly, but also quite underwhelming. It’s hard for me to blame an Apple employee for being poorly trained. I blame his employers.

[…]

I’m not sure what led to Apple’s decision to focus on hard-sell demos (for a pricey 1.0 product!) while seemingly not giving the proper attention to fitting the Vision Pro, but I’ve got a few guesses. Clearly the company decided to put its faith in an app that scans your face in order to find the right fit, and perhaps that was misguided. It’s a good start, but it’s not going to be enough on its own—take it from the guy who got two different results from the app.

John Gruber:

This seems like it could and should have been so much simpler. Why not have 4 lights instead of one, representing 25/50/75/100 percent charge levels? It seems like madness that green means “charged to capacity” when plugged in, but “50% or higher” when not. That’s a big difference!

Kyle Barr (Hacker News):

Those still holding on to their Apple Vision Pros may remain in a rather exclusive club throughout this year. Market research shows that sales for Apple’s first big, expensive headset will remain low in 2024. The latest reports from those keeping tabs on the Cupertino, California company say AVP will have dropped off 75% by the end of August. The true test for Apple’s spatial dreams may rest on the rumored (slightly) cheaper headset.

Juli Clover:

Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the [not cheaper] M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple updated the Vision Pro with a faster M5 chip and a more comfortable band in October 2025, but there were no other hardware changes, and consumers still weren't interested.

[…]

Insider sources told MacRumors that Apple has received an unusually high percentage of returns, far exceeding any other modern Apple product.

[…]

Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple.

Steve Streza:

It’s very funny that for Vision Pro, an insanely expensive and uncomfortable device notoriously light on content and use cases, Apple was banking on a minor hardware refresh to save it, and was surprised it didn’t. Just comical levels of being out of touch on your product.

Óscar Morales Vivó:

Apple has, historically, had a severe problem building things to a price. The Vision Pro was an extreme example where it would seem they couldn’t say no to anything the execs thought about.

The other major issue I see with it is the same that the iPad Pro has, where it pretends to be a productivity tool but Apple gets in the way of third parties making it so. Notably the iPad Pro is another product that doesn’t sell much and might stay alive mostly off Apple execs liking it.

I’ve had one since December and routinely use it, IMO there’s more room for improvement on the software than you seem to imply and fortunately for me I can wear it for quite a while without discomfort.

The hope would be that Apple sticks to it and v2 actually works as a product (far from the first time with Apple stuff anyway). There’s flashes of greatness here but Apple needs to get off its own way both on software and hardware for it to happen.

Amy Worrall:

They could have gone one of two ways: make it a cheap accessory, or make it a full computing platform with developer interest and not locked down. They managed neither.

Nikhil Nigade:

I don’t believe the Vision Pro is going away anywhere anytime soon. It literally drove the recent UI overhaul for  OS26 releases.

It could totally be the stepping stone to the “Air Glasses” as Juli claims in the article, but I don’t think it’s all that gloomy yet for the Vision series of devices.

Andrew Leland:

Still, my brief experience with the AVP allowed me to imagine a future version where, for instance, the price comes down, Apple opens up the front-facing cameras to developers, and what is already a powerful low-vision device could become the ultimate tool for blind and low-vision people. When I play the complicated tabletop games my son adores, and press a game’s card to my nose to read it, I often find myself wishing I could tap on the blocks of indecipherable text the way I can with a paragraph of text on my iPhone and hear it read aloud. It’s easy to imagine a non-distant future where I could wear a fourth-gen AVP, leveraging whatever comes after GPT4o, and tap one of the game cards with my finger, and hear a readout of the text printed there, along with a description of whatever illustration is on the card, too. If I preferred to use my residual vision, I might casually use two fingers to zoom in on the card (or my son’s face) the way you’d enlarge a photo on your iPhone.

Dan Moren:

I’m going to say that I’m skeptical of this pronouncement. And I’m not the only one: Jonathan Wight, who worked in Apple’s AR/VR group until 2022, disputed the report on Mastodon, and that jibes with what I’ve heard privately.

[…]

Heck, if Apple really was killing the Vision Pro, why would it update it in the first place?

[…]

Look, it’s pretty clear that there are lots of other projects at Apple that are higher priority than the Vision Pro right now. That work on Siri is clearly incredibly significant, especially in light of promises that are now two years old and still haven’t shipped. Rockwell was essentially parachuted into the Siri role as a fixer: it’s no surprise that he would draw from a trusted pool of his reports to get the job done.

Likewise, Apple has reportedly accelerated work on its smart glasses product, mounting a somewhat late challenge to products from Meta and, soon, Samsung. Again, if Apple is prioritizing getting that product out the door, it’s not hard to imagine that the company might shift personnel to work on it—especially if we’re talking personnel who have experience with augmented reality.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

The teams that were necessary to invent this thing (something like 1500 people worked on Vision Pro?) are no longer necessary. The OS is now under the purview of Apple’s existing software teams. And if there’s no third-gen model in development at the moment, all of the R&D attention can go towards the Siri glasses.

[…]

The Vision Pro is the ‘Mac Pro’ of the face-computer category, like it or not (and I don’t mean that it should go away, not until there are lower-end models that outperform it). If it gets updated more often than once every 6 years, like Mac Pro, it would be lucky.

[…]

Apple’s Vision Pro developer story has been bad vibes all round, from the very start. A lot of people have felt burned, even burnt out, with trying to build for this platform. Apple arrived with arrogance and just assumed everybody would jump with them, despite burning bridges with developers for years through their fights against Epic and the EU, among other things. I’ve talked to VR game developers who met with Mike Rockwell and came away thinking ‘I want nothing to do with these people’.

Priority no 1 under new leadership at Apple should be to fix all of this stuff: reinstate Epic on all App Stores, partner with them on bringing Unreal Engine (even Unreal Editor) to Vision Pro, stop fighting EU and antitrust legislation so viciously, and do dev outreach — bring third parties on board, make them feel good about it. The software can handle itself, but the vibes need major work.

Previously:

• External Purchase Fee Stay Reversed
• John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook
• YouTube for visionOS
• 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card
• Apple Vision Pro (M5, 2025)
• Apple Shifts Siri From Giannandrea to Rockwell

Update (2026-05-01): Mark Gurman:

Apple broke up the Vision Products Group a year ago, splitting the team across software engineering and hardware engineering. Then, Apple re-assigned much of the Vision Pro software team to Siri and the hardware team to smart glasses.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

This report comes as news to everyone at Apple working in the Vision Product Group (VPG). Nothing about the future of the platform has changed recently.

[…]

As for poor sales, I think it’s unquestionable that Vision Pro sales — and general enthusiasm — have been a disappointment. What momentum they had out of the gate has seemingly petered out. But the optimistic scenario inside Apple was not all that high. The best-case scenario was surely a bigger number of units than they’ve actually sold, but not that much more.

[…]

That speed bump in October was not intended to make a huge difference. It was just a signal that they’re still at it.

[…]

There are, I believe, as many people at Apple working on VisionOS software and immersive content today as there ever have been. It’s full steam ahead. […] I know for a fact that it is not true that the teams working on the Vision platform have “been redistributed to other teams within Apple.”

Mark Gurman:

Apple breaking up VPG doesn’t mean visionOS is going away. It means they put the OS team under Apple software and the HW team under Apple hardware. Big road map ahead of non-display + AR glasses and if it makes sense in the future, new headset.

Dan Moren:

I have no trouble believing that Vision Pro development is on the back burner. By all accounts the technology to get to the device that Apple really wants to make just isn’t here yet, and isn’t expected to be anytime soon. Could that mean the Vision Pro will eventually be killed? Absolutely. But not only is the Vision Pro still a genuinely technologically impressive device, but everything Apple developed for it will almost certainly inform future products—especially if the company is still trying to ultimately make a lighter pair of augmented reality glasses. The Vision Pro is fine where it is: even the original M2 model is still an incredibly capable device. Apple can continue as it’s doing now: building up a library of content for the device and working on pushing the envelope of its software capabilities.

Matt Ronge:

A product on ice is a cancelled product, it’s only a matter of time…

Accessibility Apple Vision Pro Liquid Glass Rumor Sunset visionOS visionOS 26

External Purchase Fee Stay Reversed

Tim Hardwick:

On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed an earlier decision letting Apple keep its current zero-fee link-out commission structure in place while it appeals to the Supreme Court. The reversal means Apple now has to return to a lower court to work out what fees it can charge developers who steer customers to outside payment options.

[…]

The three-judge panel granted Epic’s motion for reconsideration. The judges said Apple hadn’t shown that the Supreme Court was likely to take the case, and pointed out that the high court already chose not to hear Apple’s challenges once back in 2024. They also rejected Apple’s claim that being forced into lower-court hearings would cause real harm.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney shared the news in a post on X, adding that “Apple’s delaying tactics have come to an end!”

Marcus Mendes:

You can read the full document[…]

Previously:

• Apple Granted Stay Over External Purchase Fee

Antitrust App Store Apple Epic Games External iOS Payments Fortnite In-App Purchase iOS iOS 26 iOS App Lawsuit Legal

Retcon 1.6

Nathan Manceaux-Panot:

Cut, copy and paste commits between branches

• Copy a commit with ⌘C, then paste it on another branch with ⌘V
• Or, cut the commit with ⌘X, to move rather than duplicate
• Paste above the selection using ⇧⌘V, or using the context menu
• Paste hashes from other apps to insert commits
• Or, directly drag hashes into the commit list
• Drag commit previews out of the commit list

Previously:

• Retcon 1.4

Developer Tool Git Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Pasteboard Programming Retcon Version Control

Acorn 8.5

Gus Mueller (release notes):

There’s a new “Bendable” type of Arrow shape which lets you add a nice adjustable curve to your arrow. You can also have arrow heads on either end (or both) of the shape.

[…]

SVG importing has been much improved. Drop shadows, text on a path, poly lines, transforms, reading css colors, and more are all now supported.

[…]

Also new: pressing the option-tab keys will hide all palettes and toolbars. It’s a little thing, but I really like being able to see my image without any distractions.

Previously:

• Acorn 8.3 With Liquid Glass

Update (2026-04-30): Gus Mueller (Mastodon):

With the release of Acorn 8 last December, I published “ACTN002 Acorn’s Native File Format” as part of the documentation updates, which is exactly what it sounds like.

[…]

This file format has worked well in Acorn for 16 years now, and I plan on keeping it the same moving forward.

Acorn Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 SVG

California’s BASED Act Defeated

Scott Wiener:

Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) announced SB 1074, the Blocking Anticompetitive Self-preferencing by Entrenched Dominant platforms (BASED) Act, which is sponsored by Y Combinator and Economic Security California Action. The BASED Act will restore competition to the digital marketplace by prohibiting any digital platform with a market capitalization greater than $1 trillion and serving 100 million or more monthly users in the U.S., from favoring their own products and services on the platforms they operate.

[…]

Preferencing conduct prohibited under SB 1074 includes:

• Manipulating the order of search results to favor a provider’s products or services, irrespective of a merit-based process
• Using non-public data generated by third-party sellers — including sales volumes, pricing, and customer behavior — to develop competing products that are subsequently boosted above the third-party sellers’ product.
• Employing policies, charges, or practices that put business users at an unreasonable cost disadvantage relative to the provider
• Favoring the products of a company based upon the profit margin return to or paid to the provider

Malcolm Owen:

The intention was to allow other apps to become more visible, instead of the platform owner’s own services.

The bill was formed by a group of small companies backed by startup incubator Y Combinator, as well as consumer groups. However, that support was undermined by the sheer amount of lobbying Apple and Google decided to perform.

[…]

Lobbyists then started to drive constituent calls to member offices, informing them that Apple and Google’s products and services could degrade if the bill passed. Ads were also run, saying that search results would be “less useful,” that deliveries would be “slower,” and it would also make smartphones insecure.

Previously:

• Small Ways the App Store Could Be Improved for Developers
• Industry Trade Groups

Android Antitrust App Store Apple California Google Google Play Store iOS iOS 26 Legal

Apple Invites 1.8

Tim Hardwick:

Following the latest update of Apple’s Invites app, hosts can now manually edit the guest list to update guest responses and adjust the number of additional guests.

[…]

Elsewhere, the dashboard has been expanded with an All Events view, bringing both upcoming and past events into a single, unified interface. Sharing options have also been improved for hosts, who can now generate and download an image of their invite card.

John Gordon:

Anyone using Apple Invites? The latest update suggests Apple wants it to be useful. When I tested briefly it failed my basic requirements so I’m leery of evaluating further.

Every time I look at this app, I can’t believe it exists: first because it seems totally unnecessary for Apple to be involved in this space, and second because the intended workflow and prioritization of features seem completely alien. Version 1.0 let guests collaborate on an Apple Music playlist, but it took until version 1.8 to be able to edit the number of guests?

Jesper:

And for a company so insistent on saying “no” to a thousand things to gain focus, you’d think they could at least have skipped introducing their own credit cards.

RedWeasel:

And again I have to ask myself, if SwiftUI, SwiftData etc. make it so easy to create apps for all the Apple platforms, why does such a simple app only exist for iOS? Why no macOS or iPadOS version?

This would be a great showcase app and Apple could even provide the source code as an example of “here’s how we do it”.

Previously:

• Apple Invites

Apple Invites iOS iOS 26 iOS App

The Wide Range of Find My–Compatible Devices

Glenn Fleishman:

I set out a few weeks ago to compile a list of all items with certified Find My. Friends, I thought it would number between 20 and 30 items. It started to become unmanageable, so I built a site—FindYourTag—both for my own reference and because why not share it?

[…]

Apple’s absence is good news for third parties, because 14 different companies make a total of 18 wallet-insertable cards. […] About half are rechargeable, though most of those require a unique magnetically coupled adapter that you are sure to lose unless you have a special place you keep odd adapters. Other cards advertise long battery life (two to three years) and have a discount program on replacing after that point if you return the battery for recycling.

[…]

Finding out that Twelve South has a line of four different PlugBug models with Find My built in made me wonder why Apple doesn’t include Find My as a default feature on its adapters?

[…]

Satechi has the right idea here with its FindAll Glasses Case ($50). I left my distance glasses somewhere in the greater Boston area in March, and, wow, is replacing your glasses with prescription, transition lenses expensive.

[…]

But wouldn’t it be better if you had Find My as part of the vehicle, making it effectively unremovable without destroying the bike or scooter? Several manufacturers agree. You can find Apollo, Segway, Specialized, and Velotric models with just that.

Previously:

• AirTag 2026

AirTag Find My Hardware iOS iOS 26

My Favorite Apple Accessory

Upgrade:

And when that’s done, we finish our Apple at 50 coverage with a vibe-based draft.

Dr. Drang:

My favorite picks were the oddballs, the products that weren’t Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, or Apple IIs. In other words: the accessories. I was particularly pleased with Jason’s picks of the LaserWriter, the Apple Disk II, the Apple Watch Sport Band, and the second generation Apple Pencil.

[…]

My oddball entry would have been the AirPort Express. This is not in the “I can’t believe you didn’t pick” category because it’s an oddball even among oddballs, but for a short period of time for a specific subset of users, it was a great accessory.

The AirPort Express was great. The other accessories I’d highlight are the ImageWriter II and the original aluminum keyboard.

Previously:

• Apple’s 50th Anniversary
• How AirPort Changed Everything
• Brief Reviews of (Nearly) Every Mac Keyboard

AirPort Express Hardware History iPad iPhone Mac Printing

Fix iPhone Autocoreet Pleaese

Joanna Stern chose to use the first post-announcement post on her new site to return to a familiar issue that remains unresolved:

Here’s my main question: John Ternus, can you turn-us the iPhone autocorrect around?

[…]

Over the last few months, I’ve noticed more autocorrect mishaps on my iPhone 17 Pro. And I’m not alone. (I’ve also had some nasty battery drain after recent iOS 26 updates, but that’s another story for another time.) Plenty of people have complained to me about autocorrect problems. And I see the folks I’m texting with quickly correcting messages because their iPhone mangled the message.

To be fair, Apple addressed part of the problem in iOS 26.4. I’ll get to that below. But to suggest iPhone autocorrect is now fixed—or works as well as it once did—is like suggesting Siri is a genius.

Alas, New Things has no RSS feed.

Previously:

• John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook
• iOS 26.4 and iPadOS 26.4
• iOS 18 and iOS 26 Autocorrect
• Autocorrect Explained: Why Your iPhone Adds Annoying Typos While Fixing Others

Auto-Correction iOS iOS 26 RSS

Git Tower 16

Tower 15:

This update introduces Automatic Branch Management, making it easier than ever to keep your repository tidy and clutter-free. We’ve also added significant improvements to the “History” view for better visualization of your work 😎

Tower 16:

Tower 16 for Mac is now in beta, and it introduces AI Commits, allowing you to generate commit messages and descriptions with the help of AI directly from your favorite Git client.

Every year there are lots of new features, but it still seems to me that they’re ignoring the basics:

• Why can you not search the contents of files/changes?

• When I drag and drop a file that’s in one my repositories into Tower, why does it offer to create a new repository instead of showing me that file’s history?

• When viewing a file’s history, why is there no way to see the full commit message without copying the SHA-1, switching to a different view, pasting it into the search field, and changing the menu to search by Commit Hashes? This should just take one click or perhaps a hover.

Mario Guzmán:

Tower v15.0 got a new liquid glass icon but unfortunately, like some Apple-made icons early in the beta season, it looks blurry in the Dock.

Previously:

• Git Tower 14

Update (2026-05-05): Bruno Brito:

The commit message body field can now be kept always visible — toggle this in Preferences.

Yay!

Artificial Intelligence Developer Tool Git git tpower Icons Liquid Glass Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Programming Search Version Control

I Regret the Blood Pact I Have Made With iCloud Photos

Nick Heer (Mac Power Users Talk):

Apple’s next iCloud tier is a generous 6 TB, but it costs another $324 per year. I could buy a new 6 TB hard disk annually for that kind of money. […] A better solution is to recognize I do not need instant access to all 95,000 photos in my library, but iCloud has no room for this kind of nuance. The iCloud syncing preference is either on or off for the entire library.

[…]

So: the next best thing is to create a separate Photos library — one that will remain unsynced with iCloud. Photos makes this pretty easy by launching while holding the Option (⌥) key. But how does one move images from one library to the other? Photos is a single-window application — you cannot even open different images in new windows, let alone run separate libraries in separate windows. This should be possible, but it is not.

[…]

As a workaround, Apple allows you to import images from one Photos library into another — but not if the source library is synced with iCloud. You therefore need to turn off iCloud sync before proceeding, at which point you may discover that iCloud is not as dependable as you might have expected.

[…]

I have this library stored locally and backed up, or at least I though I did. I thought I could trust iCloud to be an extra layer of insurance. What I am now realizing is that iCloud may, in fact, be a liability. The simple fact is that I have no idea the state my photos library is currently in: which photos I have in full resolution locally, which ones are low-resolution with iCloud originals, and which ones have possibly been lost.

Colin Devroe:

I’m finally moving away from maticulously organizing my own library and just letting photos do it and using iCloud Photo Library. I’m syncing 170,000+ items. And it says “synced” when clearly it is not finished.

Previously:

• A Lament for Aperture
• Fixing “Optimize Storage”
• 6 TB and 12 TB iCloud+ Plans
• Photos Needs Better Storage Management

Update (2026-04-30): Nick Heer:

The first problem is that it is very easy to get images into an iCloud-stored photo library, but extremely difficult to extract them. This issue is compounded by a lack of transparency and data verification. The second problem is that it is necessary to commit to a lifetime of storage if one uses a third-party cloud option.

[…]

My dispute with this is not about third-party storage per se. Rather, it is how shoddy an experience it is to move photos out of iCloud and, also, my inability to verify that everything is as safe and secure as it should be.

But I was pointed to two pieces of software I can use that made my life easier and got me onto more stable footing. The first is Parachute Backup (MacOS 15 or later), which created a backup of my entire iCloud photo library and, soon, will also be backing up everything else I have in iCloud, for good measure.

[…]

The other piece of software to which I owe my newfound sense of calm is PowerPhotos. Despite being hands-down the most frequent software recommendation from readers, it never came up in my earlier searches. I guess I was not using the correct keywords. In any case, it is an excellent application. Because I did the full Parachute backup, I felt comfortable with PowerPhotos modifying my library and generally doing its thing. It lets me easily drag photos from my primary iCloud-connected library to my archive, and its duplicate image finder is way better than the one in Photos.

Datacide iCloud iCloud Photo Library Mac macOS 13 Ventura Parachute Backup PowerPhotos Storage

Mac Easter Eggs

Doug Brown (Slashdot):

I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now.

[…]

The “secret ROM image” text in particular seemed like it could be related to the picture shown above. I decided to dive deeper to see if I could figure out why the SCSI Manager contained these strings, in the hopes that I could solve the mystery. Would this be the clue I needed in order to figure out how to instruct the Power Mac G3 to display this picture?

[…]

When you open the newly-formatted RAM disk, you should see a file named “The Team”[…]

Howard Oakley:

This mythical animal from the Mac bestiary has been tucked away as an Easter egg in the Emoji & Symbols viewer for many years. Type the letters clarus or moof (the sound it makes) into the search box of that viewer to see the two emoji figures of a dog and a cow, although neither of them resembles Clarus in appearance, as shown in the Page Setup window in recent macOS.

[…]

More inaccessible, but apparently present for even longer, is a PNG image showing marijuana leaves embedded inside the Chess app.

[…]

According to a recent report in MacWorld, the colour-matched wallpapers provided for MacBook Neos spell out MAC.

Previously:

• MacBook Neo
• Almost Fired for Color Picker Poetry
• Tom Dowdy and SimpleText
• An Illustrated History of Easter Eggs

Update (2026-04-27): Jake Zien:

It’s not just the Neo wallpapers, they’ve been doing this for years on iPad, MacBook, iMac, Studio Display. Actually quite telling about the Neo’s positioning and importance within Apple that it says “Mac” instead of “Neo.”

Update (2026-04-28): Howard Oakley:

When I wrote that the Minimise Easter egg was defunct in macOS Tahoe, I was delighted to be corrected, thank you, as it’s still alive and flourishing.

In fact this had been documented just over a year ago by John Gruber on his Daring Fireball blog. I’ve added information from the macOS defaults site, and played around with this in a macOS 26.4.1 virtual machine.

Easter Eggs History Mac Mac OS 9 MacBook Neo macOS Tahoe 26 Wallpaper

What’s That “Structured” in Structured Concurrency?

Max Seelemann:

There are only three ways to create a concurrently running operation from the standard library, Task being the first. The other two are async let and TaskGroups — which happen to be the structured ones.

[…]

In my words, it’s a direct, inescapable dependency relationship. You can always start a task and forget about it – not structured. But when you do an async let, you need to await the result before the function ends (or discard it, see below). Likewise, task groups can only be created through with(Throwing)TaskGroup, which forces the caller to await their completion.

Previously:

• Cultivated Task Cancellation

iOS iOS 26 Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming Swift Concurrency Swift Programming Language

Stolen Device Protection May Protect You From Accessing Your Own Device

Glenn Fleishman:

Note that this remains an iPhone-only feature, even though an iPad could be exploited the same way. I have to infer either that Apple has had almost no reports of exploitation via iPad passcode theft, or that they are balancing the needs of the average iPad user who is out and about with that device against the complexity of managing Stolen Device Protection.

[…]

Once enabled, you see two options: Away from Familiar Locations and Always. Familiar Locations ostensibly leans on Significant Locations, but I’ll warn you that I have, on multiple occasions, been in my home, a place I spent a significant majority of my time, and was told by Stolen Device Protection that I wasn’t in a familiar location.

Eric deRuiter:

Stolen Device Protection will require that you erase and restore your phone to be able to regain full access to it should FaceID fail to recognize you (surgery, injury, shaving a beard, broken eye glasses, etc…)

Previously:

• iOS 26.4.1 and iPadOS 26.4.1
• iOS 26.4 and iPadOS 26.4
• iOS 26.4: Stolen Device Protection Enabled by Default
• iOS 17.6 and iPadOS 17.6
• Janky Apple ID Security

Update (2026-05-06): Gregatron5:

I’m in a park (Gravelly Point) and I rebooted my phone because the camera started acting up.

Upon restart I get a “Software updated” screen and then a screen that REQUIRES a WiFi network to continue.

[…]

It turns out this was that Stolen Device Protection thing @mjtsai likes to complain about and that I was silently opted in to.

[…]

If I had been camping or something I would have been completely without recourse. I should be able to reboot my phone and still have a working phone. This was borderline unconscionable. 😡

iOS iOS 26 iPadOS iPadOS 26 Stolen Device Protection

NetNewsWire 7.0.4

Brent Simmons:

The big new changes are to iCloud syncing: there’s a new setting to not sync the content of unread articles, since that’s the biggest part of your iCloud database and what takes the longest to sync.

NetNewsWire:

We’ve added a new weekly background iCloud storage cleanup.

This happens automatically, but there’s also a status window with a Clean Up button to initiate it manually.

Your next syncs after cleaning up may take an extra long time! This is because iCloud syncs deletions, and doing a cleanup means doing a lot of deletions.

[…]

From here on sync times should be faster and iCloud storage needs should be lower.

I’ve been syncing using Feedbin, and version 7.0.2 added an important fix for that, with more to come in 7.1.

Brent Simmons:

To be clear: we didn’t do anything in NetNewsWire to support AI, LLMs, or MCP, but, since the app is scriptable, you can do all kinds of useful things with it.

Here’s the netnewswire-mcp repo on GitHub.

Greg Pierce:

I’ve been feeling like MCP is a lot like x-callback-url. Kind of a janky, pragmatic solution to a problem that optimized for opportunities and constraints available at a particular moment.

Maybe not built to last, but super useful.

Previously:

• CKSyncEngine
• NetNewsWire 7
• NetNewsWire 6.2
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) Tools for Mac
• iCloud Syncing Limitations & Solutions

Artificial Intelligence CloudKit Feedbin iCloud iOS iOS 26 iOS App Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Model Context Protocol (MCP) NetNewsWire RSS Syncing

iOS 26.4.2 and iPadOS 26.4.2

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

According to Apple’s release notes, the software updates contain unspecified bug fixes and security updates.

Apple also released iOS 18.7.8 for older iPhones that are not updated to iOS 26.

Juli Clover (Hacker News):

A flaw with notification services allowed notifications that were supposed to be deleted to be retained on an iPhone or iPad. Apple says it fixed the logging issue with improved data redaction.

Previously:

• Notifications Privacy
• iOS 26.4.1 and iPadOS 26.4.1

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) iOS iOS 26 iOS Release iPadOS iPadOS 26 iPadOS Release Notification Center Privacy

Character in iPhone Password Removed From Keyboard

Connor Jones (Hacker News, Reddit):

A university student in the US is in data limbo after Apple removed a character from its Czech keyboard, preventing him from entering his iPhone passcode.

[…]

This is because iOS 18 was the last operating system version that allowed iPhone users to enter the special character – in this case, the caron/háček (ˇ) – using the old keyboard on the lock screen.

[…]

The student has not backed up the files to iCloud either, so they cannot be retrieved via a separate device. Apple support staff have suggested the only way to regain access to the iPhone 13 is by restoring it, which would erase the files of value.

[…]

Apple Support arranged for Byrne to attend a Genius Bar appointment, where the staffer behind the desk made no progress and even started restoring the phone without seeking the student’s consent.

My first thought was to plug in a USB keyboard, but apparently iOS doesn’t allow that before first unlock for security reasons.

Previously:

• Mac Won’t Accept Correct Login Password

Apple Retail Stores Datacide iOS iOS 26 Keyboard Passwords Security Unicode

Little Snitch for Linux

Christian Starkjohann:

I decided to use eBPF for traffic interception at kernel level. It’s high performance and much more portable than kernel extensions. The main application code is in Rust, a language I’ve wanted to explore for quite a while. And the user interface was built as a web application. That last choice might seem odd for a privacy tool, but it means you can monitor a remote Linux server’s network connections from any device, including your Mac. Want to know what Nextcloud, Home Assistant, or Zammad are actually connecting to? Use Little Snitch on the server.

[…]

But in summary: on Ubuntu, I found 9 system processes making internet connections over the course of one week. On macOS, we counted more than 100.

[…]

The kernel component, written for eBPF, is open source and you can look at how it’s implemented, fix bugs yourself, or adapt it to different kernel versions. The UI is also open source under GPL v2, feel free to make improvements.

[…]

One important note: unlike the macOS version, Little Snitch for Linux is not a security tool. eBPF provides limited resources, so it’s always possible to get around the firewall for instance by flooding tables.

Previously:

• Tahoe Won’t Unload Network Extensions
• Sequoia Network Extension Memory Leak
• Little Snitch 6 and DNS Encryption

Linux Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Networking Open Source Privacy

2025 Apple Vision Accessibility Report Card

AppleVis:

Our survey results indicate that across almost all categories, satisfaction with Apple’s accessibility offerings for blind, DeafBlind, and low vision users decreased when compared to 2024. (You can see all 2025 ratings in the “Ratings At-a-Glance” section below, as well as in the sections for each category.) Many categories saw their lowest individual ratings since we began this survey for the 2022 year, including both VoiceOver features and VoiceOver user experience on iOS and iPadOS, among several others. Satisfaction with the braille user experience on iPadOS and macOS, and the low vision user experience on tvOS, increased when compared to 2024.

For VoiceOver and braille users, dissatisfaction with software quality and the presence of long-standing accessibility bugs were overarching themes throughout participant comments. For low vision users, participant comments show that Apple’s 2025 Liquid Glass user interface redesign had a significant negative impact on the user experience for many.

Overall, user comments reflected a mixture of frustration with the state of vision accessibility on Apple’s platforms and appreciation for Apple’s work in this space. Many participants called on Apple to prioritize fixing bugs over adding new features.

Shelly Brisbin:

AppleVis users believe Apple continues to struggle when it comes to fixing bugs in VoiceOver and Braille, giving the company a C – a 3.0 rating – in this category, which covers all platforms. Also at the bottom of the ratings were macOS VoiceOver user experience, with a 3.1, and three tvOS categories, which scored between 3.2 and 3.5. Low-vision features in tvOS took the greatest ratings tumble, from 2024, slipping from 4.1 to 3.2.

Sebby:

Tahoe broke VMware Fusion for VoiceOver users; some restricted API that’s no longer available in setuid helper programs. Causes any VM to crash the moment VoiceOver starts (or is running when the VM starts). The bug is a rehash of a similar bug in Sonoma. Unlike last time, it still isn’t fixed in the .4 release of Tahoe. Remember this when Apple tells you how much accessibility means to them.

Previously:

• 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card
• 2024 Apple Vision Accessibility Report Card

Accessibility Apple Software Quality iOS iOS 26 Liquid Glass Mac macOS Tahoe 26 VoiceOver

John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook

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

Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive officer effective on September 1, 2026.

[…]

As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.

[…]

“I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to carry Apple’s mission forward,” said Ternus. “Having spent almost my entire career at Apple, I have been lucky to have worked under Steve Jobs and to have had Tim Cook as my mentor. It has been a privilege to help shape the products and experiences that have changed so much of how we interact with the world and with one another. I am filled with optimism about what we can achieve in the years to come, and I am so happy to know that the most talented people on earth are here at Apple, determined to be part of something bigger than any one of us. I am humbled to step into this role, and I promise to lead with the values and vision that have come to define this special place for half a century.”

[…]

Apple Services has been a major focus area of Cook’s, and during his tenure the category has grown to become a more than $100 billion business, the equivalent of a Fortune 40 company. Cook was also instrumental in creating the wearables category at Apple, which now includes the world’s most popular watch and headphones, and which has served as the foundation for Apple’s remarkable impact on the health and safety of its users. Under Cook’s leadership, Apple also transitioned to Apple-designed silicon, enabling the company to own more of its primary technology and deliver industry-leading gains in power efficiency and performance that directly benefit users across its products.

Apple:

Johny Srouji will become chief hardware officer. Srouji, who most recently served as senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, will assume an expanded role leading Hardware Engineering, which John Ternus most recently oversaw, as well as the hardware technologies organization.

John Gruber:

Ternus will become the 8th CEO in Apple’s 50-year history[…]

Jason Snell:

I’d actually be surprised if Cook isn’t in the executive chairmanship for a lot longer than people expect. I don’t think he’s ready to put Apple in the rearview—but I do think he’s trying to get the timing on this exactly right.

[…]

The company is impossibly larger than the one Cook took over from Jobs. The explosive growth of the iPhone, especially from 2014 on, has changed the fundamentals of the company. When iPhone growth finally slowed, Cook swapped in a growing wearables business (led by what I assume is the product Cook is most proud of, the Apple Watch) and a dramatically growing set of subscription services. Those growth lines keep Wall Street happy.

[…]

Cook’s priorities helped make Apple a manufacturing powerhouse, capable of building products nobody else could—at least, until Apple showed the way. But as Patrick McGee so capably showed in his book Apple in China, Apple was also training up China on being a tech manufacturing powerhouse.

[…]

In spite of its success, or perhaps because of it, Apple has been a company in stasis for 15 or 20 years. When everything’s going great, and all the executives just stick around no matter how rich they get on stock options, it’s really hard to make changes. The arrival of any new person in charge, not just John Ternus in particular, is an opportunity to shake things up. New leaders have the freedom to make their mark. That could be good for Apple.

Adam Engst:

Whatever issues one might have with Apple, they aren’t likely to apply to the company’s hardware, where performance and reliability have been top-notch. His skills may well translate to improving quality in other parts of the company.

[…]

I very much doubt we’ll see major changes at Apple once Ternus takes over because the company culture runs deep and its executive team has decades of experience. Ternus may be new to the CEO role, but he knows exactly how Apple works and is unlikely to modify that in any significant way—which, given the company’s current performance, is probably entirely appropriate.

Jeff Johnson:

It’s difficult to get excited at this point. Ternus doesn’t seem to be the type of person who will rock the boat. Navy, not pirate.

Riley Testut:

I’m legitimately hopeful Apple uses this an opportunity to rethink its approach to developers and regulatory issues — but will take time to see if that’s true.

Miguel Arroz:

Here’s hoping John Ternus is more open to remote work than Tim Cook.

Colin Cornaby:

It’s not likely - but I’m hoping Apple resumes live keynotes and press events. Ternus is a much better presenter than Cook. While no one is as good a showman as Jobs was, Ternus at least seems to have the best presence out of all the big tech CEOs.

The Hacker News page currently has 1,234 comments, and top one is:

Wow. Hopefully, Ternus will bring what he brought to Apple’s hardware to their software. The hardware is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else, but their software gets worse and worse every generation.

John Gruber (Hacker News):

Tim Cook is 65 years old, has been CEO for 15 years, and is going out on top. Looking only at the numbers, Cook is the GOAT. But Cook, by all accounts, would be the first to tell us he doesn’t want to be judged by the numbers alone.

[…]

With the table set by the budding iPhone and nascent iPad products Jobs left behind, Apple didn’t need a product person at the helm in the 2010s. They needed someone to let the existing products blossom and expand. Today, it feels to me like Apple needs a product guy at the helm again. Someone with the itch to spearhead the creation of new things.

[…]

And, if you agree that Apple itself was Jobs’s greatest product, Cook really is a product person after all.

I have a different take, which is that the conventional wisdom was wrong. That is, if you’re judging by the products rather than the numbers. The problem with Cook wasn’t the creation of new things; it was the lack of focus and failure to maintain what Apple already had. It turns out that you do need a product person, even to be a caretaker CEO, or decay sets in. I don’t want to minimize his accomplishments, though, because clearly the post-Jobs era could have been a lot worse. There were no bigger shoes to fill.

I don’t think it’s the case that Apple, the company, was Jobs’ greatest product. We all wanted that to be true, but we’ve now had two long intervals to see how it functions without him. It seems like a totally different company. History is not going to see Apple itself as greater than the iPhone unless Apple under Ternus or a subsequent CEO delivers another iPhone-scale product. That’s an unreasonable expectation that I don’t think anyone is predicting.

Scott:

What frustrates me most is all the low-hanging fruit that was just left to rot, mostly because—I can only assume—Cook didn’t really have finger on pulse of the entire ecosystem. Failing on “the last 10%” for pretty much every current product is the best proof I offer.

Rui Carmo:

But despite all of that, the soul of the company has felt increasingly bland, and the accumulating faux pas in software quality–culminating in the Liquid Glass debacle and the general state of macOS and iPadOS–have tested even the most faithful.

Ternus is a hardware guy, and very likely deeply involved in the MacBook Neo. My hope is that he has a better feel for what good product actually looks like, and can drive the kind of change that has been overdue for a while now.

I’d start with fixing macOS and iPadOS, preferably in a way that matches what people actually expect from their devices rather than what a design committee thinks looks modern.

Om Malik:

The challenge for Apple is still software, an increasingly cluttered interface across multiple hardware devices and platforms, and a distinct lack of clarity about what role AI will (or will not) play in its future. Ternus’s other task will be to repair an incredibly fragile relationship with developers, who have been vocal about their dissatisfaction with Cupertino.

[…]

Sure, Cook inherited the greatest product portfolio and the greatest brand in modern business. How many times have we seen people screw it up? He ran it with operational ruthlessness. He is no product visionary, and neither is Ternus. They are not Steve. Tim has run Apple for fifteen years, through a pandemic, two trade wars, a supply chain reordering, and the slow grinding shift from hardware-only to hardware-plus-services-plus-silicon.

Matt Birchler:

That said, while his tenure has been financially successful, I think a lot of people feel like Apple isn’t quite the company they originally fell in love with, and I hope Ternus can make us feel more that way again. I recognize that’s hard when you’re not the scrappy underdog, you’re one of the biggest companies in the world, but I do think it’s important for Apple to keep that “we do whatever is right for the user” energy and less of that “we extract as much as we’re legally allowed to from every user and developer” energy.

Jeff Johnson:

Seriously, how the fuck do you go from the idea “do what’s right” to “keep adding ad slots”?

Ben Thompson (Hacker News):

“What Makes Apple Apple” isn’t a new question; it was the central question of Apple University, the internal training program the company launched in 2008. Apple University was hailed on the outside as a Steve Jobs creation, but while I’m sure he green lit the concept, it was clear to me as an intern on the Apple University team in 2010, that the program’s driving force was Tim Cook.

[…]

The core of the program, at least when I was there, was what became known as The Cook Doctrine[…]

[…]

Cook, in this critique, prioritized Apple’s financial results and shareholder returns over what was best for Apple in the long run. […] This isn’t the only part of Apple’s business where this critique has validity.

[…]

It really is ironic: Tim Cook built what is arguably Apple’s most important technology — its ability to build the world’s best personal computer products at astronomical scale — and did so in a way that leaves Apple more vulnerable than anyone to the deteriorating relationship between the United States and China. China was certainly good for the bottom line, but was it good for Apple’s long-run sustainability?

This same critique — of favoring a financially optimal strategy over long-term sustainability — may also one day be levied on the biggest question Cook leaves his successor: what impact will AI have on Apple?

Nick Heer:

The Tim Cook story at Apple is an almost poetic arc. Upon arrival, he fundamentally overhauled the way its products would be made, primarily by moving manufacturing to Japan, Taiwan, and China. This groundwork is what allowed him to transform the company when he arrived as CEO, growing it into a global behemoth and working within China to create the best and most precise electronics manufacturing chain anywhere. And that became a problem for him.

Tim Hardwick:

In a new Bloomberg report, reporter Mark Gurman suggests one of the reasons Ternus has been chosen as successor is for his decision-making style, which is said to be closer to co-founder Steve Jobs than Cook, who has a more deliberative approach.

Ryan Christoffel:

Last night, a new report on incoming CEO John Ternus called the Apple veteran a decisive leader who is often led more by instinct than consensus.

And some of that initiative-taking in leadership decisions, it seems, is already focused on integrating AI more deeply into Apple’s internal operations.

See also: Dithering, Accidental Tech Podcast, Mac Power Users Talk.

Previously:

• The Quadrant Was Now Complete
• A Letter to John Ternus
• More App Store Ad Spots
• Apple Succession Planning
• The Tim Cook Era
• Apple in China

Update (2026-04-28): Joe Rossignol:

Apple on Monday announced that Tim Cook will be stepping down as CEO, and some top leaders around the world have publicly commented on the news.

Juli Clover:

Reactions on the MacRumors forums run the gamut from positive to negative, with some people praising Cook for everything he’s done for Apple, and others celebrating his departure from the role.

John Gruber:

That last sentence is something that Cook won’t get enough credit for. A major product defect or recall is just inherently more memorable than the lack of major defects or recalls. Compare and contrast to Samsung: 2016’s Note 7 was recalled for battery combustion; six other Samsung models caught fire in 2016 too; the early Galaxy Fold phones were an outright debacle. Nothing like that ever happened under Cook.

Apple recalled both MacBook Pros and Beats speakers that posed fire risks. I had a Mac, an iPhone, and an iPad become unsafe due to swollen batteries. There was Staingate. Not to mention the butterfly keyboards (with only a limited repair program) and the Apple Mail data loss, both of which took years longer to remedy than they should have.

Jesper:

By all means, Tim Cook was a better choice for Apple CEO than most people you could pick out of a hat; perhaps even of high executives at Apple working at the time. But this judgement is not unalloyed.

The following things happened under his watch (in no particular order)[…]

Riccardo Mori:

Among the working titles for this post were Good riddance and Stop the praises, and I haven’t chosen them not because I thought they were somehow mean-spirited, but because they sounded like coming from a place of deep care. They sounded like the reaction of someone with deep emotional investment in the whole thing. But over the past few years I — a long-time enthusiastic Apple user and customer — have become desensitised towards most of what Apple does and what Apple has become. And I have to thank Tim Cook for that.

[…]

I don’t want to exclusively defend Ive on this — I’m not a fan of certain design decisions and directions he made and took both under Jobs but especially under Cook — but I don’t feel that he was properly managed and utilised as the valuable asset he had been before Cook became CEO.

[…]

It’s worth noticing that, wherever Apple deviated from the tried-and-true formula, the results were questionable at best. Examples include, in no particular order[…]

[…]

One sin of Cook’s Apple I’ll never forgive is wanting to be everywhere and keep adding platforms and services. Apple went from being excellent at a selected few things to being mediocre at many things.

[…]

Fucking up Mac OS was not necessary and was completely avoidable, but it has become collateral damage under a direction that has always clearly favoured the iOS platform.

Eric Schwarz:

There was a stretch where many thought Apple was going to actually abandon the Mac. There’s been some rent-seeking behavior in the area of services. The iPad has sort of been aimlessly existing as a hardware marvel with no clear vision.

Tony Mattke (Hacker News):

Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again.

iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened. System Settings, which used to be one of the cleanest preferences UIs ever shipped, now feels like a bad Electron app pretending to be macOS.

These aren’t dramatic failures. They’re worse than dramatic failures. They’re daily proof that somewhere along the way, Apple stopped caring about the texture of using its own products.

[…]

Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture.

They survive because they don’t move metrics. They don’t reduce revenue. They don’t show up in the quarterly. But they’re exactly the kind of paper-cuts that would have annoyed Steve at 9pm on a Tuesday, and they would have been fixed by Wednesday morning.

Adam Chandler:

Apple has gone down market without eroding their perceived value of being “nice” compared to the alternatives. Apple makes nice hardware and people pay extra for that nice-ness. Yet they’ve released progressively lower cost hardware that more people can afford without compromising on quality.

As Tim Cook departs Apple as its CEO after 15 years, this should be applauded. You can spend $2500 to get one of everything they make in all of their product categories including watch, headphones, speaker, phone, laptop and iPad. Remarkable.

Jeff Johnson:

Is there any reason why we give Tim Cook credit for Apple silicon when both Johny Srouji and the P.A. Semi team joined Apple in 2008?

Andrew Sharp:

As someone who podcasts about Apple roughly once a month, what I find most striking about the past few years in Cupertino is how frequently I’ve wanted to argue that Cook’s decision-making will cost his company dearly, only to conclude at the end of a conversation that he was probably playing things the right way.

[…]

Cook’s doubling and tripling down on China (“[By 2008] Apple’s machinery in China had become more valuable than all of Apple’s buildings and retail stores put together”) may look like a mistake in retrospect, but it’s not at all clear the company ever could have scaled Apple products to reach billions of people without the skills, human scale and cost effectiveness of Chinese labor and manufacturing.

[…]

My primary criticism of Cook and his China investments is that no CEO in America was better positioned to understand the bankrupt character of the CCP. By at least 2016, Cook should have been able to extrapolate that conflict with the United States was likely inevitable, and continued reliance on almost-exclusively Chinese manufacturers and component suppliers could have catastrophic consequences for Apple.

[…]

There is also the aforementioned $109 billion in annual Services revenue, now responsible for 41% of the company’s overall profit, and built on the strength of Google’s advertising and Apple’s arguably extortive App Store policies that have gotten the company in regulatory trouble on multiple continents (amusingly, China is now “Looking at Anti-Monopoly Escorting the Digital Economy from the ‘Apple Tax’ Reduction”). Those policies alone are controversial and worth all the regulatory scrutiny they’ve received, and that’s before you consider something like the Apple “offer” to Facebook that would have taken cuts of Facebook mobile revenue and seen Facebook push users toward premium, ad-free subscriptions (from which Apple would take 30% of all sales). A few years after that deal was rebuffed, Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency to temporarily nuke Facebook’s ad business while Apple was building an ads business of its own, and continuing to take a cut (at least $20 billion per year) from a Google ads business that uses the same sort of surveillance tactics Apple loudly denounces in its own advertising. I’ll also note here that the company has been involved in vicious patent litigation, is notorious for its merciless squeeze on suppliers, and for years schemed to crush Qualcomm and its modem fees.

Scott:

Apple not only squandered opportunity to bring supply chain back to U.S., on wealth gained, but additionally now finds itself in the unenviable position that they’re no longer the BIG DOG with TSMC (to Nvidia). Was that inconceivable to Cook?

Dave B.:

The Neo is already a pretty big departure from the Cook era.

Also, I’ll bet that software design will change pretty substantially. Not in terms of aesthetics - Liquid Glass will be around for a while - but rather, in terms of the general philosophy around information architecture as well as ‘junk drawer’ design.

Two small examples we’ve already seen:

1. Mac SKU configuration in the Apple Store app

2. Moving the ‘App Updates’ button to the top in the App Store app

These are small changes, but they hint at a shift away from marketing-centric design and towards user-centric design.

Francisco Tolmasky:

Ternus will probably be the most highly scrutinized Apple CEO of the past 20 years. He’s not Steve, and he’s not Steve’s hand-picked successor. There’s no real remaining “divine Jobsian connection” for him to fall back on during rough times, and he’s following Cook’s 15 years of remarkable growth. I think people are probably over-estimating the kinds of big changes he is likely to make. Recall that the people that matter see Apple’s last 15 years not as any sort of “decay,” but historic success.

M.G. Siegler:

Ternus will say all the right things right now about staying the course that Apple is already on. But again, he has little choice at the moment, that path is pretty much set. Sure, there will be choices here and there – in particular with partnerships around AI and elsewhere – but the product pipeline is pretty locked. The question is really what Ternus chooses to set in motion for 2028 and beyond.

Scott:

Can only hope that Tim Cook stepping down also leads to some old Jobs2.0-era grudges getting squashed… Apple—as a U.S. company—needs to join in with other American tech like Jenson/Nvidia, Google, Intel, and Elon, bury stupid squabbles, and achieve even greater greatness.

Ryan Christoffel:

This weekend in his Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman shared several John Ternus quotes from Apple’s employee town hall this past week.

Ternus reportedly praised the work of Apple’s services teams, and pledged to continue expanding that important business in the future.

David Price:

The giant folding iPad, for example, has reportedly been a “priority” for Ternus in his current role, but being the new boss’s pet project gives it no guarantee of making it to market.

AirPods Apple Apple Services Apple Watch Artificial Intelligence Business China iOS John Ternus Mac Tim Cook

The Quadrant Was Now Complete

M.G. Siegler:

The music fades as Jobs walks up, looking a bit tired but healthy. He is just 44 years old.

Yes, a new video of Jobs has been unearthed. And yes, it simply must be written about.

[…]

And it seems like perfect timing for this video to surface given that Apple has just unveiled the MacBook Neo – the first laptop to come in fun colors since the candy-colored iBooks back in the day.

[…]

This is a great message delivered in a very Jobsian way: this wasn’t about a turnaround, this was about putting great products into the world. The turnaround was a byproduct of that.

He didn’t just say how great products were the focus. Apple actually delivered a string of them, both hardware and software. And you could tell that he understood why they were good.

Previously:

• John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook
• MacBook Neo

AirPort Extreme Base Station History iBook Mac Steve Jobs Wi-Fi

Filing the Sharp Edges Off a MacBook

Ken Walters (via Hacker News):

The bottom edge of the MacBook is very sharp. Indeed, the industrial designers at Apple chose an aluminum unibody partly for the fact that it can handle such a geometry. But, it is uncomfortable on my wrists, and I believe strongly in customizing one's tools, so I filed it off.

The corner is sharp all around the machine, but it's particularly pointed at the notch, which is where I focused my effort. It was quite pleasing to blend the smaller radius curves into the larger radius notch curve. I was slightly concerned that I'd file through the machine, so I did this in increments. It didn't end up being an issue.

Jeff Johnson:

I wrote about this issue 8 years ago (wherein I argued that 2006 was the best MacBook Pro design ever)[…]

I keep mentioning this and the too-large, unreliable trackpad.

Previously:

• Shiny MacBook Keys
• Please Shrink the Trackpad
• Upgrading to a 16-inch MacBook Pro
• The 16-inch MacBook Pro
• Apple’s “Loop You In” Event

Design Hardware Mac MacBook MacBook Pro

Copilot Everything

Tey Bannerman (Hacker News):

A few weeks ago, I tried to explain to someone what Microsoft Copilot is. I couldn’t… because the name ‘Copilot’ now refers to at least 75 different things.

Apps, features, platforms, a keyboard key, an entire category of laptops - and a tool for building more Copilots. All named ‘Copilot’.

Zac Bowden:

Microsoft is now beginning its effort to reduce and remove Copilot branding across Windows 11, with the latest Notepad update for Insiders outright removing the Copilot icon and phrasing. Now, the AI menu is simply called “writing tools,” and maintains the same functionality as before.

Via Steve Troughton-Smith:

Microsoft is ‘removing Copilot’ from its system apps, but it’s not removing the AI features, just taking away the branding, which brings it closer in line with how Apple Intelligence works across macOS and iOS.

Usama Jawad (Hacker News):

At the start of the year, Microsoft generated a lot of goodwill among Windows 11 fans when it announced its big plan to fix the operating system in 2026. It highlighted numerous ways to approach and remediate user concerns such as giving them more control over Windows Update and adding back some highly requested features. Another key point in the company’s announcement was pulling back on inserting Copilot everywhere, and being more mindful about how AI features are integrated into the OS. Microsoft began rolling out some changes in this regard a couple of days ago, and unfortunately, people are a little underwhelmed.

[…]

To be fair to Microsoft, if you check out our coverage of this topic, you’ll notice that Redmond did not claim that it will eradicate AI from Windows 11. In fact, its wording was more around the idea that it would be more “intentional” about how and where the Copilot branding shows up, while also ensuring that AI capabilities are actually useful.

Previously:

• Microsoft Rust and Copilot
• Forcing Copilot AI
• Opting Out of Microsoft 365’s Copilot AI
• GitHub Copilot for Xcode
• Privacy of Windows Copilot+ Recall
• Windows Copilot+ AI Features
• Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs
• Microsoft 365 Copilot

Copilot AI Microsoft Microsoft Office Windows Windows 11

Design for Repairability

Charlie Sorrel:

Apple’s MacBooks haven’t always been monolithic, barely repairable slabs of aluminum, glass, and glue. They used to be almost delightful in their repairable features, from their batteries to their Wi-Fi cards. Powerbooks, iBooks, and especially early MacBooks showed what happens when Apple applies its design skills directly to repairability and maintenance, instead of to thinness above all. Today we’re going to take a look at the best repairability features that Apple has ditched.

Eric Schwarz:

Aside from the rose-colored repairability glasses, the iBook G3 started at $1299 in 2001. Taking into account inflation, that’s almost $2500 in today’s money. Would you be able look past having a closed system if you can get at least three years of service at 1/4 the price?

Nick Heer:

These four complaints range from the somewhat quaint — swappable Wi-Fi cards — to the stuff I actually miss, which is everything else. RAM and disk upgrades are a gimme since the cost-per-gigabyte (generally) declines over time, and I would love easily swappable batteries. But right now, nearly four years into owning this MacBook Pro, I would also really like to be able to swap in a new keyboard in the future. Not only are the keycaps unintentionally becoming polished, some oft-used keys feel a little mushy.

Marcus Mendes:

As spotted by MacMagazine, the estimated service costs for the new MacBook Neo are now available.

For users without AppleCare, there is a flat fee of $149 for battery service, while other damages will require an inspection[…]

Andrew Cunningham (MacRumors):

One less-advertised change that may make the Neo more appealing to businesses, schools, and the accident-prone is that its internal design is a bit more modular and easier to repair than other modern MacBooks. That’s our takeaway after spending some time thumbing through the official MacBook Neo repair documentation that Apple published on its support site this week.

Replacements for pretty much any component in the Neo are simpler and involve fewer steps and tools than in the M5 MacBook Air. That includes the battery, which in the MacBook Air is attached to the chassis with multiple screws and adhesive strips but which in the Neo comes out relatively easily after you get some shielding and flex cables out of the way.

But the most significant change in the Neo is that the keyboard is its own separate component.

Tim Hardwick:

A teardown of the new MacBook Neo by Australian YouTube repair channel Tech Re-Nu reveals what may be the most modular and repair-friendly Mac laptop in recent times.

The Neo is shown being taken apart in just six minutes, suggesting Apple has prioritized simplicity across the board, using standard Torx screws (T3, T5, and T8) and a clean cable routing design.

Nick Heer:

They only found adhesive on the back of the trackpad — hardly the end of the world. It is a far cry from the glued-in battery of the MacBook Pro.

[…]

This does not entirely invalidate iFixit’s argument, of course. Apple’s laptops used to have replaceable memory and storage, but none of that can be changed post-purchase.

To me, the biggest problem is the SSDs. Not only can you not replace them, but you can’t even use a modern Mac with an external SSD if the internal one is damaged. It bricks the whole computer.

John Gruber:

By allowing the Neo to be a bit thicker and heavier, it’s also a lot simpler.

Juli Clover (John Gruber):

Repair site iFixit did its traditional teardown on the MacBook Neo, and was pleasantly surprised with the laptop’s repairability. “We haven’t been as happy about a MacBook since 2012,” says iFixit.

Nick Heer:

On a recent episode of “Dithering”, Ben Thompson and John Gruber discuss the Tech Re-Nu teardown of the MacBook Neo and what it reveals about the supposed trade-offs of repairability.

[…]

To summarize: “the price”, it is implied, is that the MacBook Air must be less repairable for it to have good battery life and better performance.

I am less certain.

[…]

My impression of Apple’s approach to repairability is that it was not a high priority for a long time — particularly for products nearer the beginning of their development cycle — and that it argued for trade-offs that were ultimately irrelevant.

Scharon Harding:

Apple earned the lowest grades in a report on laptop and smartphone repairability released today by the consumer advocacy group Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund. The report, which looks at how easy devices are to disassemble and how easy it is to find repairability information, gave Apple a C-minus in laptop repairability and a D-minus in cell phone repairability.

Previously:

• Right to Repair Legislation in 50 States
• 2024 Six Colors Apple Report Card
• Shiny MacBook Keys
• Mac Stuck in Recovery After Login
• Repairing by Replacing

AppleCare Hardware History Keyboard Mac MacBook Neo Solid-State Drive (SSD) Unauthorized Repair

Fast Thumbnails With CGImageSource

Max Seelemann:

The parameters are documented, but the optimal combination is not. Here’s what I learned:

• kCGImageSourceCreateThumbnailFromImageAlways: While this seems optional for correct functionality, without it there will be error logged for images that might include embedded thumbnails (like JPEG or HEIC), but don’t. There’s a FromImageIfAbsent variant, but it did not silence these logs in all cases.
• kCGImageSourceCreateThumbnailWithTransform: Required for the thumbnail to respect the EXIF orientation of the image, in case it has one (which is not uncommon for JPEG).
• kCGImageSourceThumbnailMaxPixelSize: Specifies the largest dimension of the desired thumbnail; the returned image will then be equal or smaller than this.

The first test showed incredible improvements: The same 12MP JPEG image now took just about 26ms on macOS. That’s almost 30 times faster than the naive approach.

Image IO has some very useful APIs, although unfortunately it hasn’t always been well tested. I ended up writing four different versions of an image resizer because different parts of the API would fail on certain files with different macOS versions. The resizer keeps trying different techniques until it finds one that works. Also, sometimes the APIs raise C++ exceptions. If you don’t catch these from Objective-C using @catch (...) (literally, three periods), your app will crash.

Brent Simmons:

Avoid bug in CGImageSourceCreateImageAtIndex with indexed-color (4-bit palette) ICO files — always use CGImageSourceCreateThumbnailAtIndex.

Previously:

• CGImageSource Memory Leak
• JPEG 2000

Update (2026-04-21): Paul Goracke:

A while ago, @bdudney released a wonderful little ebook titled “All the Image IO You Need to Know” which had this info as well as more. Certainly changed my coding.

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