<a href="https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/07/29/macos-15-6/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: macOS 15.6">macOS 15.6

watchOS watchOS 11 watchOS Release

watchOS 11.6

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

The watchOS 11.6 update focuses on bug fixes and security improvements, with no new features included.

Previously:

watchOS 11.5

tvOS tvOS 18 tvOS Release

tvOS 18.6

Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer):

Apple today released tvOS 18.6, the latest version of the tvOS operating system.

Previously:

tvOS 18.5

visionOS visionOS 2 visionOS Release

visionOS 2.6

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

visionOS 2.6 focuses on bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements. There are no new features in the update.

Previously:

visionOS 2.5

audioOS audioOS 18 audioOS Release

audioOS 18.6

Apple’s page isn’t showing the update, but my HomePod says it’s available and “includes performance and stability improvements.”

Previously:

audioOS 18.5

Trust and Safety Laboratory:

Monday, July 28, 2025

UK Online Safety Act

EFF:

The U.K. Parliament has passed the Online Safety Bill (OSB), which says it will make the U.K. “the safest place” in the world to be online. In reality, the OSB will lead to a much more censored, locked-down internet for British users. The bill could empower the government to undermine not just the privacy and security of U.K. residents, but internet users worldwide.

Both the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act (OSA) aim to strike a balance between fostering innovation and safeguarding the internet for generations to come.

Craig Grannell (Mastodon):

I just received an email confirming I’ve successfully verified I’m an adult. Exciting! Except no, because age verification is now going to be a regular thing for me. Why? Because the UK Online Safety Act went into effect on 25 July. And this isn’t just something affecting the land of tea, crumpets and queues. Governments worldwide are implementing similar measures to prevent minors from accessing high-risk and age-inappropriate content.

[…]

Bluesky became the canary in the age-verification coal mine, warning Brits they’d soon lose access to DMs and 18+ content. Brits went bonkers (well, they tutted, which for a Brit is tantamount to furious rage), unaware all sites must comply or risk massive fines.

[…]

Even though the UK’s implementation is barely a day old as I write this, we’re already seeing signs of overreach. Far more than porn is being locked behind verification walls, including LGBTQ+ subreddits and subjects deemed ‘inappropriate’ for ideological reasons, such as sex ed.

[…]

There are privacy and surveillance concerns. Forcing people to register for accounts begins the process of eliminating online anonymity – a genuine danger to some. It expands scope for wider surveillance. So we’ll have to trust companies won’t retain, misuse or monetise deeply personal data. Which, given historical precedent, makes me wonder how long it’ll take to get from “we’ll remove your personal age verification details within seven days” to a data breach revealing countless people’s selfies and most personal browsing histories.

Kirk McElhearn:

The UK government has set up a system where people must upload an ID or a selfie to American corporations. There is nothing preventing these companies from storing the data, and the data will eventually get hacked. There are better ways to do this.

He links to a petition to repeal the Act.

App Store Children iOS iOS 18 iTunes Connect Mac App Store macOS 15 Sequoia

This article is headlined “Around 6,000 Porn Sites Start Checking Ages in U.K.”, yet in this — the first paragraph — the reporters acknowledge these are “sites allowing porn” not “porn sites”.

[…]

When we are talking about large platforms like Discord and Reddit, there is a meaningful difference between describing them as “porn sites” and “sites allowing porn”.

Apps for Bluesky, Discord, Grindr, Reddit, and X are all available on the App Store, where they all have “16+” ratings, and the Play Store, where they have a “Mature 17+” rating with the exception of Discord’s “Teen” rating. These platforms are in a position to provide privacy-protecting age gating and, I think, they ought to do so with APIs also available to third-party stores.

The age verification mandated by this British law, however, is worrisome, especially if it becomes a model for similar laws elsewhere. The process may be done by a third-party service and can require sensitive information. These services may be specialized, meaning they may have better security and privacy protections, but it still means handing over identification to some service a user probably does not recognize.

Proton VPN (Hacker News):

Just a few minutes after the Online Safety Act went into effect last night, Proton VPN signups originating in the UK surged by more than 1,400%.

Unlike previous surges, this one is sustained, and is significantly higher than when France lost access to adult content.

Jess Weatherbed (Hacker News):

Several of the age checkers I’ve seen offer similar options: users can either choose to confirm their age by uploading bank card information, an image of their government-issued ID, or a selfie used to estimate their age.
It’s unclear if those selfie options could be spoofed by simply getting an older-looking friend to complete to process.
[…]
If the spike in Brits searching for the term “VPN” on Google is any indication, word of the loophole is spreading fast.

Chris Middleton:

The Act pressures encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Signal to monitor user chats for illegal content, which experts say could require breaking end-to-end encryption.

[…]

The law covers any site that allows users to share or interact. That includes forums, messaging apps, cloud services, open-source platforms, even Wikipedia.

[…]

Criminals will use VPNs, encrypted tools, and the dark web. The Act does nothing to stop that.

Meanwhile, everyone else will be surveilled, censored, and blocked.

Wikimedia Foundation (Evolve Politics):

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, announced its legal challenge earlier this year, arguing that the regulations endanger Wikipedia and the global community of volunteer contributors who create the information on the site.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-29): Dan Milmo and Robert Booth:

Reddit started checking ages last week for its forums and threads which include mature content. It is using technology made by a company called Persona, which verifies age through an uploaded selfie or a photo of government ID. Reddit does not have access to the photos but stores the verification status to avoid users having to repeat the process too often.

The UK government has more information about which content will be regulated:

The kinds of illegal content and activity that platforms need to protect users from are set out in the Act, and this includes content relating to:
child sexual abuse
controlling or coercive behaviour
extreme sexual violence
extreme pornography
fraud
racially or religiously aggravated public order offences
inciting violence
illegal immigration and people smuggling
promoting or facilitating suicide
intimate image abuse
selling illegal drugs or weapons
sexual exploitation
terrorism

Since these fall under the Illegal category, it sounds like they will be blocked entirely, rather than being subject to age verification. Presumably there will be a combination of algorithms, AI, and human reporting/review, but I have not seen the details.

Also:

Companies must also assess whether their service is likely to be accessed by children and, if so deliver additional protections for them. This includes protections against in-scope mis- and disinformation.

“Scope” seems to mean the scope of the Act itself, which is very broad. I guess Ofcom gets to decide what the truth is.

Emanuel Maiberg:

Several Reddit communities dedicated to sharing news and media from conflicts around the world now require users in the UK to submit a photo ID or selfie in order to prove they are old enough to view “mature” content.

Via Nick Heer:

Contrary to the beliefs of one moderator of one of these subreddits, this does not seem to be motivated by burying evidence of the atrocities of war. This is the predictable overreach of Reddit choosing to require age verification to view any “not safe for work” subreddit, because of course Reddit is not going to be sensitive to context. It is not right; it is what is least expensive because it requires little additional moderation or underlying technical changes. Reddit could implement different types of NSFW labelling, but that also increases its risk of legal liability if something is improperly labelled.

Updated Age Ratings in App Store Connect

Apple (MacRumors):

The age rating system for apps and games has been updated in order to provide people with more granular age ratings. We’ve also introduced new age rating questions to help identify sensitive content in your app and added the ability to set a higher rating to reflect your app’s minimum age requirement.

[…]

We’ve introduced a new set of required questions to the ratings questionnaire for all apps.

[…]

Please provide responses to the updated age rating questions for each of your apps by January 31, 2026, to avoid an interruption when submitting your app updates in App Store Connect.

When I log into App Store Connect, it shows a banner that says, “Age Ratings Are Changing,” but there seems to be no way to actually answer the questions for my apps. Maybe you have the opportunity to do this when submitting a new version, but Apple’s guidance above implies that they want you to answer the questions before that.

Previously:

6 Comments

Friday, July 25, 2025

iPadOS 26 Developer Beta 4

It’s like a weight has been lifted from the soul of the iPad. It remains a very nice device to use in full-screen mode with all the simplicity attendant to that mode, or via a single tap it can turn into a multi-window, multitasking device that’s appropriate for the Mac-class hardware underpinning today’s iPads. The iPad no longer feels like it’s trying to live up to the promise of being the Future of Computing; with iPadOS 26, it’s more comfortable being itself.

[…]

On the iPad, it’s a real jumble. Some stuff looks cool, while other stuff is unreadable. For the most part, the new design didn’t hinder my use of iPadOS 26, and given those shifting sands I’m going to withhold my most withering design criticisms for a later time. But, yeah… Apple either needs to figure this thing out, and fast, or it should just frost all the glass for release and keep working on it in the background until it finds a more usable solution.

[…]

iPadOS 26 will be remembered as the update where Apple declared bankruptcy on all its previous attempts to do windowing and multitasking on the iPad, and released an entirely new windowing system that has been unabashedly inspired by the Mac.[…] I admit to forgetting more than once that I was using iPadOS when it was attached to my Studio Display. […] It’s really a flexible set of controls that works well whether you’re using a keyboard and trackpad or your fingers. […] And if you don’t want to use windowing on your iPad? Well, the feature is turned on and off with a single button in Control Center.

[…]

The improvements to Files, support for background recording, and the new background tasks Live Activities are somewhat small changes on their own, but assembled together they create an iPad that just feels more ready for professional productivity tasks.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-28): Rui Carmo:

Seriously, I don’t know what Apple was thinking, but this is a regression in usability that I haven’t seen since the early days of iOS.

[…]

Everything feels much slower (and this is an M1 Pro)

Even trying to turn off animations didn’t help (“reduce motion” doesn’t do anything for window animation delays, and turning on cross-fades really shows that Apple has the animations set too slow)

[…]

It’s not really about Liquid Glass, but more about the blatant and gratuitous waste of screen real estate across the board. And I am really afraid that this is going to be the new normal, especially since I’m seeing similar things in macOS Tahoe– and if there is one thing that I like in macOS, it is that it has had (until Sonoma, at least, where title bars got too fat for comfort) a decent balance between aesthetics and efficient use of screen real estate.

Harry McCracken:

However, as someone who’s used an iPad as my main computer for almost 14 years, I can’t join the chorus of unbridled enthusiasm for iPadOS 26’s embrace of Mac conventions such as floating, overlapping windows and a menu bar at the top of the screen. Apple may well be making the right decision to please the largest pool of people who want to get work done on its tablet. But it’s also moving decisively away from some of the philosophies that attracted me to the platform in the first place, and I’m trepidatious about where that might lead.

M.G. Siegler:

To that end, my key takeaway and thought is sort of a funny one: my god, Apple has made a Mac Jr.
That sounds derisive. And it sort of is! I don’t hate the experience by any means, but it seems sort of funny what Apple has done to iPadOS to avoid letting the iPad boot macOS. It’s now this pretty weird hybrid operating system that feels like it exists between iOS and macOS. It’s still a bit more iOS than macOS, but it’s pretty close to the halfway point with iPadOS 26…

iPad may already be fifteen years old, but iPadOS 26 feels like the first day of the rest of its life — in a way no previous software update has been. A Rubicon has been crossed.

Kuba Suder:

The iPad multitasking is one of the few things in the new appleOSes that I’m really excited about, this looks so good!

The Illusion of Thinking

Apple (PDF):

Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scaling properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood. Current evaluations primarily focus on established mathematical and coding benchmarks, emphasizing final answer accuracy. However, this evaluation paradigm often suffers from data contamination and does not provide insights into the reasoning traces’ structure and quality. In this work, we systematically investigate these gaps with the help of controllable puzzle environments that allow precise manipulation of compositional complexity while maintaining consistent logical structures. This setup enables the analysis of not only final answers but also the internal reasoning traces, offering insights into how LRMs “think”. Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities.

Apple Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT Claude CS Theory DeepSeek Google Gemini/Bard Math

My basic understanding after a skim is that the paper shows, or at least strongly suggests, that LRMs don’t “reason” at all. They just use vastly more complex pattern-matching than LLMs. The result is that LRMs effectively overthink on simple problems, outperform LLMs on mid-complexity puzzles, and fail in the same exact way LLMs do on high-complexity tasks and puzzles.

Duncan Davidson:

Of course, this doesn’t change the usefulness of these models, but better understanding how they work — and which models are good for which tasks — is essential for using them well.

Anthropic and Open Philanthropy (PDF, via Marcus Mendes):

We demonstrate that their findings primarily reflect experimental design limitations rather than fundamental reasoning failures.

[…]

When we control for these experimental artifacts, by requesting generating functions instead of exhaustive move lists, preliminary experiments across multiple models indicate high accuracy on Tower of Hanoi instances previously reported as complete failures.

Colin Cornaby:

It’s kind of hilarious how the response to Apple’s AI reasoning paper was “well sure but it works great if you remove the reasoning from the reasoning test.”

Gary Marcus (via Hacker News):

My own post here laying out the Apple paper in historical and scientific context was so popular that well over 150,000 people read it, biggest in this newsletter’s history. The Guardian published an adaptation of my post (“When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it’s time to rethink the hype“) The editor tells me readers spent a long time reading it, notably longer than usual, as if people really wanted to understand the arguments in detail. (The ACM computer science society is reposting the essay, too, and there is now a French version as well).
Tons of GenAI optimists took cracks at the Apple paper (see below), and it is worth considering their arguments. Overall I have seen roughly seven different efforts at rebuttal, ranging from nitpicking and ad hominem to the genuinely clever. Most (not all) are based on grains of truth, but are any of them actually compelling?

[…]

If people like Sam Altman are sweating, it’s because they should. The Apple paper is yet another clear sign that scaling is not the answer; for once, people are paying attention.

Simon Willison:

Gary rebuts those rebuttals, but given that his previous headline concerning this paper was a knockout blow for LLMs? it’s not surprising that he finds those arguments unconvincing.
[…]
And therein lies my disagreement. I’m not interested in whether or not LLMs are the “road to AGI”. I continue to care only about whether they have useful applications today, once you’ve understood their limitations.
Reasoning LLMs are a relatively new and interesting twist on the genre. They are demonstrably able to solve a whole bunch of problems that previous LLMs were unable to handle, hence why we’ve seen a rush of new models from OpenAI and Anthropic and Gemini and DeepSeek and Qwen and Mistral.
They get even more interesting when you combine them with tools.
They’re already useful to me today, whether or not they can reliably solve the Tower of Hanoi or River Crossing puzzles.

Google:

The International Mathematical Olympiad (“IMO”) is the world’s most prestigious competition for young mathematicians, and has been held annually since 1959. Each country taking part is represented by six elite, pre-university mathematicians who compete to solve six exceptionally difficult problems in algebra, combinatorics, geometry, and number theory. Medals are awarded to the top half of contestants, with approximately 8% receiving a prestigious gold medal.
[…]
An advanced version of Gemini Deep Think solved five out of the six IMO problems perfectly, earning 35 total points, and achieving gold-medal level performance.

Previously:

Thursday, July 24, 2025

appleOS 26 Public Betas

Apple is allowing members of its public beta testing program to download and install iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 starting today. You can sign up for the public betas on Apple’s beta website. The first public beta features the same content as the fourth developer beta that came out earlier this week, though there is a new fourth beta available for developers as well.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-25): See also: TidBITS, ArsTechnica, Slashdot, Nick Heer.

App Review App Store China Department of Justice (DOJ) GPS ICEBlock iOS iOS 18 iOS App Law Enforcement Legal Privacy Push Notifications

As a user, the Public Beta builds are mostly fine. Very livable.

As a developer, these builds are a train wreck, and beta 5 can’t come soon enough

Previously:

iPadOS 26 Developer Beta 4

iOS iOS 26 iOS Beta iPadOS iPadOS 26 iPadOS Beta Mac macOS Beta macOS Tahoe 26 watchOS watchOS Beta

8 Comments

ICEBlock, an iOS Exclusive

John Gruber (Mastodon, Hacker News):

The ICEBlock app is interesting in and of itself (and from my tire-kicking test drive, appears to be a well-crafted and designed app), as will be Apple’s response if (when?) the Trump administration takes offense to the app’s existence. Back in 2019, kowtowing to tacit demands from China, Apple removed from the App Store an app called HKmap.live which helped pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong know the location of police and protest activity. The app broke no Hong Kong laws, but scared the thin-skinned skittish lickspittles in the Chinese Communist Party.

Apple first rejected HKmap.live, on the grounds that it “allowed users to evade law enforcement.” That seems to be pretty much what ICEBlock is meant to do, too. I don’t think there was ever a written rule about this, however. The closest I see is rule 1.4.4, which says that “Apps may only display DUI checkpoints that are published by law enforcement agencies[…].”

HKmap argued that the app could be used for evading law enforcement, but that it was really to help people “note locations” and that it wasn’t for the user to avoid police but to avoid dangerous situations caused by other people clashing with police.

I don’t like these types of arguments. You built a hammer, and it could be used to build a house or to vandalize, and there’s a certain ratio of use (assuming that could be calculated) where it becomes bannable?

Anyway, ICEBlock is saying something similar. Officially, it’s not for evading ICE but to “stay informed” and to help report “civil rights abuses.”

Apple ended up approving HKmap.live without citing why it changed its mind. Speculation at the time was that the initial reviewer was just wrong.

But then, a few weeks later, Apple removed HKmap.live from the App Store, saying that it had “endangered law enforcement and residents.” Again, this is a terrible place to be as a developer: it’s not enough to follow the local laws and the written guidelines from Apple, but your app’s fate hinges on whether Apple determines that it endangers people? Of course, there was no attempt to balance this against the number of people it protected. But the real reason was probably political pressure, anyway.

It will be interesting to see what Apple does here. Presumably, if Congress or certain states passed a targeted law—e.g. radar detectors are commonly restricted and outright illegal in Virginia and DC—Apple would follow it. But so far all I’ve seen are vague claims from the administration that the app is already illegal—I guess on the grounds that it constitutes abetting/harboring—and it’s unclear how much Apple has been pressured.

One defense from Apple regarding HKmap.live, however, was that the iOS app was a thin wrapper around the website, and website remained fully functional and could be saved to an iPhone user’s home screen.

This always seemed to me like a legal case decided on a procedural issue to avoid ruling on the merits.

To deliver push notifications on Android, the developers claim they would need to maintain a database of device IDs, create a user account system to manage those device IDs, and all of that server-stored data would be susceptible to law enforcement subpoenas and pro-ICE red hat hackers. […] Only iOS supports the security and privacy features for ICEBlock to offer what it does, the way it does.

But doesn’t the database still exist with iOS, and it could just be subpoenaed from Apple? Apple doesn’t want to break the security of its own devices, but it’s always cooperated with law enforcement to share cloud data that it does have.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-28): Dominic Preston (via Bruce Schneier):

The developer of ICEBlock, an iOS app for anonymously reporting sightings of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, promises that it “ensures user privacy by storing no personal data.” But that claim has come under scrutiny. ICEBlock creator Joshua Aaron has been accused of making false promises regarding user anonymity and privacy, being “misguided” about the privacy offered by iOS, and of being an Apple fanboy. The issue isn’t what ICEBlock stores. It’s about what it could accidentally reveal through its tight integration with iOS.

[…]

The developers of GrapheneOS, an open-source, privacy-focused take on Android, took to BlueSky to accuse ICEBlock of “spreading misinformation about Android” by describing it as less private than iOS. The developers said that ICEBlock ignores data kept by Apple itself and claims it “provides complete anonymity when it doesn’t.”

[…]

Apple maintains a database of which devices and accounts have installed a given app, and Carlos Anso from GrapheneOS told me that it likely also tracks device registrations for push notifications. For either ICEBlock’s iOS app or a hypothetical Android app, law enforcement could demand information directly from the company, cutting ICEBlock out of the loop.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

As far as we know, ICEBlock is as private as possible while still enabling push notifications, and a hypothetical Android version couldn’t be as private. But that privacy does depend on trust in Apple.

19 Comments

AppleCare One

Apple (MacRumors, Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot):

For just $19.99 per month, customers can protect up to three products in one plan, with the option to add more at any time for $5.99 per month for each device. With AppleCare One, customers receive one-stop service and support from Apple experts across all of the Apple products in their plan for simple, affordable peace of mind.

[…]

AppleCare One includes all of the benefits that come with AppleCare+, including unlimited repairs for accidents like drops and spills, 24/7 priority support from Apple experts, quick and convenient Apple-certified service, and battery coverage. AppleCare One also expands theft and loss protection beyond iPhone to also cover iPad and Apple Watch.

It’s been about 12 years since I bought an AppleCare policy, and in all the years before that and since I don’t recall ever having a hardware problem that was outside of the original (included) warranty period but inside of the AppleCare period. So, to me, this doesn’t seem like a great deal, but I guess it’s a really simple way to get piece of mind. I could see it making sense if you want to take advantage of Apple now offering coverage for devices for more than three years or if you’re worried about theft or loss.

Apple Services Apple Vision Pro Apple Watch AppleCare Best Buy Financial Hardware iPad iPhone Mac

Customers can also add existing devices to the new program that are up to four years old (or one year for headphones) if they are in good condition. That’s a big change from the usual 60 days from the date of purchase that customers have had to purchase AppleCare in the past.

Malcolm Owen:

While AppleCare+ with Theft and Loss covers two claims per year for one device, AppleCare One will go up to a total of three claims per year.
This does reduce the total number of claims to the equivalent of one per device under AppleCare One versus three separate AppleCare+ plans, but it seems like a reasonable change.
[…]
There is one massive outlier in the Apple products list when it comes to AppleCare One: The Apple Vision Pro.
Normally, the Apple Vision Pro costs $24.99 per month for AppleCare+. This is $5 per month more than AppleCare One’s monthly fee.

Dan Moren:

But is the bundle cost effective? Apple says in its release that “a customer can enroll their iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, and save up to $11 a month over enrolling in separate AppleCare+ plans for each device.”

Which…yes, they could. But herein lies the fine print, because in many cases it depends on what model devices you have; as always, AppleCare costs vary depending on how expensive the device is.

[…]

One lingering question involves the iPhone Upgrade Program, which already includes AppleCare+ coverage as part of its subscription fee. It’s unclear exactly how that works with AppleCare One, though I’ve reached out to Apple to ask.

Adam Chandler:

I’ll return and advocate for households like ours to just do BestBuy Total for $179 a year! Every one of those devices I listed above had 2 years of coverage paid for by BestBuy for the first 2 years and, via Best Buy’s account management area, I can attach monthly coverage to any device that is about to hit the end of the 2-years-free mark. I did that for my Apple Watch Ultra and iPad Pro M1 for a month or two until those devices were replaced. We’re on 2 year upgrades for iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods so those don’t need anything beyond 2 years and we’re on 3-4 years for MacBooks which is why I switched to a $149 a year plan directly with Apple to continue coverage until those devices are replaced.

[…]

I also would like to say that Apple is rewriting history a bit by pretending that annual, 2-year and 3-year plans never existed because those were a good deal comparatively. Today, it’s $399 to cover a MacBook Pro 16″ M4 Max for 3-years, $149 for 1 year and $14.99 a month or $540 to cover for 3 years if you’re paying monthly. The 3-year plan is only $11 a month but Apple isn’t going to tell you that. They’re going to show you $14.99 for MacBook Pro and $13.99 for iPhone and pretend like they’re doing you a favor. You can still attach AppleCare 2 and 3 year plans to a device you bought by calling Apple’s hotline or chatting with them. They just don’t show you those plans or mention them to you in retail stores.

And the monthly rates are not locked in—they could increase.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-25): Joe Rossignol:

A quick addendum to the all-new AppleCare One plan that debuted this week: it is compatible with Apple's iPhone Upgrade Program in the United States.

iPhone Upgrade Program members receive AppleCare+ with Theft and Loss coverage as part of their monthly payment, but they can switch to AppleCare One if they prefer.

Eric Schwarz:

In my case, it would cost $5.68/month more to move these four devices to AppleCare One, but it would add theft and loss coverage across the board except for my MacBook (none of my devices have it currently.) In some ways, moving devices to have this would be a pretty good value, basically adding a form of insurance for theft and loss for $60/year.

[…]

On the other hand, for my long-term plans, I intend on dropping AppleCare+ on my MacBook next summer when it turns four and probably dropping it on my iPhone eventually, just due to value dropping the likelihood of me upgrading in the next year to two, as well.

[…]

I think that’s the toughest calculation about things like AppleCare, especially on older devices that feel like a reliable, known quantity. You’re spending a portion of the device’s value every year as it’s dropping in value in hopes that if something catastrophic happened, you’d be covered. However, as devices age, you may be better off setting money aside towards something newer (such as my idea of a Mac mini.)

Update (2025-07-29): Adam Engst:

While AppleCare One simplifies device protection, it’s essential to remember that, overall, extended warranties benefit the companies offering them more than the customers buying them. Apple wouldn’t be introducing AppleCare One if it didn’t expect the program to increase its Services revenue well beyond what it pays out in AppleCare coverage. If you can afford to repair or replace a broken or lost device, self-insuring is often a more financially prudent option.

That said, AppleCare One could make sense if you:

Prefer the peace of mind of being able to have damaged or lost devices fixed or replaced for a relatively low service fee

Own multiple devices with high AppleCare+ costs

Have older devices that you’d like to protect

Prefer predictable monthly payments over unexpected repair or replacement costs

[…]

I’ve developed a set of policies surrounding AppleCare for myself and anyone who asks me for recommendations[…]

iOS iOS 26 Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Messages.app

Selecting Text in Messages.app

Joe Rossignol:

A new “Select” option in the Messages app on iOS 26 lets you select and copy a portion of text within a message bubble in a conversation.
On earlier iOS versions, you can only copy an entire message bubble.

Finally. And how about selecting multiple bubbles at once?

My other pet peeve is that on macOS you can’t start a selection by clicking in the whitespace between the bubbles.

Previously:

Core Data iOS iOS 18 Mac macOS 15 Sequoia NSError Programming Swift Programming Language SwiftData

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Ways SwiftData’s ModelContainer Can Error on Creation

Scott Driggers:

Here’s what I see from a typical report from a crashing user device. The first thing that jumps out is that there is no explanation from the SwiftData error itself.
[…]
But thankfully, we have the logs to look through. In this example, there are a few level=Error logs from com.apple.coredata that look promising[…]
[…]
Looking through similar reports I have received so far, I can see a few distinct crash reasons
Error due to schema mismatch (this is the example we reviewed above)
Error due to no free space on disk
Error due to multiple migrators attempting to migrate the database concurrently

Core Data has always logged more helpful information than it returns back in the NSError, but at least it usually gives you a reasonable error code. (They aren’t all listed in the documentation; see CoreDataErrors.h and FoundationErrors.h.) Swift has fancy error handling, but somehow the new framework bundles these disparate failures into a generic loadIssueModelContainer error with no associated information.

Previously:

App Store Apple Arcade Apple Software Announcement Game Game Center Games.app iOS iOS 26 WWDC

Apple Games App

Apple (9to5Mac, MacRumors):

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple unveiled Apple Games, an all-new destination designed to help players jump back into the games they love, find their next favorite, and have more fun with friends, turning even single-player games into shared experiences. The Games app makes it easier than ever for players to enjoy all their games in one convenient place and see what’s happening across their games, including major events and updates, so they never miss a moment.

The rumors were that this was going to be a separate games store, with games moved out of the main App Store app, but it seems to be basically Game Center rebranded.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-24): Craig Grannell:

Your line is what I feared would happen when I wrote about this in May.
Of the items in that piece, here’s how I think Apple fared in beta 3:
Nail the basics: barely
Highlight controller support: yes – buried under Library > Your Games > [menu]
Add landscape support: yes
Embrace openness (LOL): LOL indeed
Recommend good games: not really
Not get bored after 11 seconds: we shall see.

6 Comments

iPad Air Runs Windows 11 ARM via Emulation

Tim Hardwick:

A developer has demonstrated Windows 11 ARM running on an M2 iPad Air using emulation, which has become much easier since the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulations came into effect.
As spotted by Windows Latest, NTDev shared an instance of the emulation on social media and posted a video on YouTube (embedded below) demonstrating it in action. The achievement relies on new EU regulatory changes that make it easier to sideload apps on iOS and iPadOS devices. Under the DMA, users can now download third-party app stores like “AltStore Classic,” which enables the installation of UTM with JIT (Just-In-Time) compilation support.
UTM is the technology that makes it all possible, and emulates Windows 11 inside iPadOS by translating Windows code into ARM instructions as it runs. Technically, iPadOS restricts direct virtualization for third-party apps, but JIT compilation allows Windows 11 to boot and function smoothly without requiring jailbreak access.

xroissance:

Apple shut down JIT a year ago to prevent a tiny PR blunder from happening. Imagine your hardware vendor locking down hardware… after you buy it. Locking it so 3rd parties can’t run apps at full speed w/o memory restrictions. This insanity must stop now ✋ It must be illegal.

AltStore App Marketplaces Apple M2 Digital Markets Act (DMA) Emulator European Union iPad Air iPadOS iPadOS 18 Just-In-Time Compilation (JIT) UTM Windows Windows 11

AltStore PAL 2.2 now includes AltStore Classic as one of its catalog of apps. That’s right, a store within a store, which allows users in Europe to sideload hundreds of non-notarized apps.

Riley Testut:

Apple has very strict requirements on what alternative marketplaces are allowed to do…but they’re not allowed to control the content of the apps inside them 🤷‍♂️

Riley Testut:

the StikDebug app in AltStore PAL acts as an on-device debugger, which can connect to any app with the get-task-allow entitlement — which as a side-effect just happens to enable JIT for the app

Craig Hockenberry:

So you’re running the emulator in a debugger without any breakpoints?

Soon to come: a Core Debugging Fee 😉

Previously:

Update (2025-07-24): Josh Hrach:

Used UTM 5 years ago to run Windows XP on my iPad (with iPadOS 13) for gaming. Worked great before the JIT limitations.

7 Comments

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Xcode 26 Beta 4

Apple (download):

Xcode 26 beta 3 includes SDKs for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, tvOS 26, watchOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, and visionOS 26.

Last time, there was only one new item in the release notes for beta 3. This time, they didn’t even update the release notes to say “beta 4.”

Interestingly, Xcode now ships as a .xip archive inside of a .dmg file.

Nico Reese:

And there I was just blindly clicking that xip file and wondering about it failing to extract. Because of course you have to move that xip file out of the dmg first.

It did actually work for me to double-click it on the mounted disk image. It then extracted into my Downloads folder. But it’s big file, so it takes a while, and at first it looks like nothing is happening.

Previously:

Xcode 26 Beta 3

Update (2025-07-23): Xcode Releases:

The download link for #Xcode 26.0 beta 4 has been updated to be a proper .xip file now, and I have confirmed it is identical to the “XcodeXIP.xip” file that was in the DMG previously.

Apple has now updated the release notes for beta 4. The only changes noted:

Removed support for creating new Style Transfer projects.

[…]

Xcode Previews usage will frequently panic on macOS 26.0 Tahoe beta 4.

Tony Arnold:

Absolute LMAO at not being able to do SwiftUI-related development work on the beta release of macOS Tahoe for the next two weeks.

Norbert Doerner:

That is very serious, and doesn’t bode well on the software quality of the “final” version of macOS 26, whenever that will be released.
But macOS 26 so far is the worst version we have seen in the last 20 years, very low product quality with uncounted amounts of questionable, and sometimes user hostile interface choices. Sigh.

Greg Pierce:

Looks like Icon Composer icons are still causing bundle validation issues in Xcode 26b4 builds. 🫤

Andrew Eades:

I’m developing my new app using .NET and MAUI because Apple makes Xcode development unusable for large portions of the year. And I get to use Neovim and/or Rider as well.

Disk Image Icon Composer Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming Xcode

macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 4

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

This update did correctly install for me via Software Update.

The only beta 4 item that I see in the releases notes is that it says Xcode Previews will “frequently panic” so you should use beta 3 instead.

You can barely tell that Continue is a button.

See also his screenshots of Safari private windows, menu backgrounds, and sidebars.

Mario Guzmán:

I love not being able to read the now playing track info.

John Siracusa:

Is there some kind of contest within Apple to see how little contrast can be used while still technically indicating a selection? One of these disks is selected, believe it or not!

Previously:

macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 3

Update (2025-07-23): John Gruber:

There is no good argument for selection states that are anything but instantly obvious. Whoever designed this doesn’t use the app.

That playback bar though is wild

Todd Thomas:

Tahoe beta dislike I haven’t others complain about yet: the difference in look between the active window and all the inactive ones is way too subtle. I repeatedly have looked at one of my windows, pressed command-w and end up closing the wrong window. Will file a FB because easy enough and don’t need a sample app. Previous OS versions had a much more pronounced shadow + more obvious titlebar changes between active/inactive.

I think the Big Sur change for active windows was a regression, and Tahoe makes it worse.

But, still, who steps back from updating a PDF document viewer in which each page is cut off at the corners and thinks yes, this is an improvement? I repeat: a selfish design choice prioritizing Apple’s goals over that of its users.

Francisco Tolmasky:

I think one reason Liquid Glass is causing such a profoundly negative reaction is that it is making a lot of people realize that the idea that they own their computer was actually an illusion. There was a sense that by choosing the Mac and local native apps you were shielding yourself from the "rent everything own nothing" remote worldview, but the inevitability of this coming disaster reveals just how little agency you really have over "your computer.”

Increasingly, the computer feels less like "your house,” and more like being a a senior in high school living in an increasingly tense environment with your parents. You're 17 but they tell you to keep the door open. You want to tell them why you're frustrated in good faith, but they know they're in the power position and just tell you "my house my rules.” It exhausting because there's nowhere else to go, and you're still expected to be productive in this environment.

Garrett Murray:

On macOS especially, some of the new component designs are just baffling, like how sidebars look, how buttons take up so much more room and float for no purpose, etc. This is just a giant, nearly always ugly mess. Apple desperately needs new software design leadership.

Jonathan Wight:

Hard drives get perspective, time machine volumes dont…

[…]

It feels like the Time Machine icon is bulging out at the top.

Update (2025-07-25): Juli Clover:

The first Tahoe public beta is identical to the fourth developer beta that was released on Tuesday.

The new design on the Mac doesn’t feel light and glassy, as it does on iPhone and iPad. It’s just a bit of a muddle. I keep noticing how terrible toolbars look in macOS Tahoe, and toolbars are everywhere on the Mac. Apple’s stated design philosophy is to build interfaces that allow content to flow behind them, showing through (a glass, darkly?). The official line is that this makes more space for your content—but, of course, sometimes using computer software means using interfaces to manipulate content and data and other stuff, and it feels like Apple has lost its balance in a quixotic attempt to make every app look like a photo editor.

I also have to point out the hypocrisy of Apple claiming that it’s building better frames for its users’ content. That’s not what’s happening here: Apple is using our content as decoration for its interfaces, using blurred and distorted versions of our images and words to show off those glass interface elements. Sometimes, it works: the feel of a canvas sliding under a bunch of glassy interface elements makes the whole thing feel like a harmonious whole. Other times, it feels like the interface and the content have both been obscured into unusability—and that’s bad.

[…]

But in most contexts on the macOS Tahoe beta, these bubbles don’t look like glass. They look like flat light gray ovals separated from a featureless gray expanse by an amateurish drop shadow. Occasionally, when scrolling content underneath the toolbars, they do spring to life and seem to give off the effect Apple wants, but of course, many (most?) Mac apps just don’t work that way, since the important content is in the window, not sliding through the toolbar.

[…]

After a month using early builds of macOS Tahoe full time, I can confidently report that this is an upgrade that feels like an upgrade. The additional power of Spotlight and Shortcuts is going to delight a lot of longtime Mac users, and I’m really liking the direction Apple is taking Control Center in the menu bar.

He thinks Squircle Jail should be removed before Tahoe is released.

Louie Mantia:

I can’t stop thinking about how in an “adapt your app icons for Liquid Glass” session video from WWDC, the designer said that we no longer have to spend all that time rendering complicated effects in Photoshop (I like doing that!) or making different app icon sizes (I also like doing that!)

It was ridiculous to say. App icons on macOS 26 don’t have hinted sizes, so Apple’s own 16pt app icons look like ass.

iOS 26 Developer Beta 4

Apple today provided developers with the fourth betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for testing purposes, with the updates coming two weeks after Apple seeded the third betas.

I don’t see any beta 4 release notes yet.

Apple has re-enabled Apple Intelligence Notification Summaries for apps in the News and Entertainment categories.

[…]

Apple says that it has improved notification summaries in iOS 26 , addressing issues that could cause confusion with news headlines.

With the fourth beta of iOS 26, Apple has again made changes to the Liquid Glass design that’s available across the operating system, tweaking how the menus and buttons appear in apps.

Niléane Dorffer:

The glassy scrubber in the Weather app is a disaster of a UI element

legibility is so back 🙃

Adam Bell:

🙃

Pocket Casts for iOS 18 on the left, Apple Podcasts for iOS 26 on the right.
Between the illegible glass and the tab bar that disappears on scroll, I honestly have no idea who can take a look at this and say “Yes, that’ll do it. That’s good.”
Liquid Glass is a mess so far, especially on iOS. Actually pushing me to use apps without Liquid Glass.

Thing is, there is no point along the slider between 0 and 100% opacity where Liquid Glass is ‘fixed’. If you’re a developer, you can try this in code. You either have Liquid Glass, with all its issues, or you have an opaque bar — there’s just no leeway for this lensing/blur effect

Previously:

Update (2025-07-23): Marco Arment:

I just don’t see how they could’ve lived with the beta-3 design tweaks, which radically improved legibility from b1–2 and made the design far more usable, and thought, “Nah, let’s undo that.”

Guy English:

Nobody is talking about their A.I. anymore.

Apparently there are architectural changes to help with reliability, but the only way to know for certain if a generated summary is accurate is to read the original.

John Siracusa:

“Verify information” indeed, Apple…

There are also new features, including the return of Apple Intelligence Notification Summaries for news. This beta is of particular interest because it’s likely the beta that public beta testers will get in the not too distant future.

Marco Arment:

The absolute best thing they could do in their situation is to decide, right now, to ship the iPhones 17 with iOS 18.

iOS 26 is still so rough, and so buggy, that it’s not going to make its ship date without massive quality and design sacrifices.

If the iPhones only support 26, either they’re getting delayed (tanking the financials) or they’re shipping with buggy software and a controversial, half-baked design (a PR nightmare).

Louie Mantia:

I’ve never seen Apple struggle so much during a beta release cycle. They have no idea what they’re doing, and they’re letting everyone in on that. It’s not a very reassuring look.

I previously thought Apple couldn’t possibly ship without Liquid Glass for ego reasons alone, but I’m starting to wonder if they just might revert, because it—quite predictably—shows no signs of improvement.

Kuba Suder:

Thread of how websites look in Safari on iOS 26 😐

Paul Hudson:

I know there’s still a month or so of work to go, but right now I’m really struggling. These text labels matter; why are they so hard to read?

OMG iPadOS 26 beta 4 wrecked the StopTheMadness Pro extension popup window!

Khaos Tian:

Also the new camera mode picker is a disaster… Did anyone in HI even care at this point???

Dave Mark:

Look at the 3 Liquid Glass buttons at the bottom of the image.

Can’t see them? Can’t read them? Yeah, that’s a problem. 😑

Jeff:

The same thing happens for me in the Mail app. While in Dark Mode, the new Search bar at the bottom switches to REALLY bright mode and turns the Delete/Move icons into mysterious white orbs.

Sean Heber:

Been using it for a few minutes in the simulator and the glass in iOS 26 beta 4 already seems like a bit of a disaster which is saying a lot because it wasn’t without problems in beta 3.

Ged Maheux:

Let’s be clear (LOL): At no point since the announcement of iOS 26’s Liquid Glass did it ever “look good”. It’s certainly a marvel of engineering and technically impressive but just because something has cool refractions, reflections etc doesn’t make it desirable or useable.

René Fouquet:

So Apple is actually dialing forward the level on insanity on liquid glass rather than back, and things are less readable again.

There’s a Google event in a month, so…

We have about six weeks to go until new iPhones have traditionally been revealed in September, and honestly right now I don’t see how they can land this plane.

To be completely honest with y’all, I’m feeling the same sense of dread about iOS 26 as I did with Stage Manager in iPadOS 16. And it’s actually even worse, because design touches everything across platforms.
The more time passes, the more I feel like the entire idea of Liquid Glass needs to be scrapped. The material is bad; the few structural ideas they had are functionally worse than before.

Ryan Jones:

As always, everyone says “it’s a beta it won’t ship like this”… and it does.

Update (2025-07-25): Dan Moren:

It’s also worth noting that, with very few exceptions, all of the iOS 26 features that Apple demoed during its WWDC keynote this year are available, right now, in the public beta. The exceptions include the digital ID feature in Wallet that uses info from your passport and the age rating/content restriction updates in the App Store.

[…]

Controls now overlay content rather than sitting in designated toolbars or areas of the screen reserved for those controls, and are rendered in transparent glass that refracts and distorts the colors of whatever passes behind it. That’s impressive but also, at times, distracting: sometimes you see a distortion of text from what you’re reading within the UI, which is odd. Or, when scrolling past content that goes abruptly from light to dark, the buttons might similarly flip appearance from, say, black icons to white icons in a way that can feel jarring.

[…]

Safari’s reduced interface hides its commands in a plethora of pop-up menus, which leads to some oddities like two Share buttons.

[…]

Even in what seems like a modest update, there’s way more in iOS 26 than I can go through here.

I think Apple made a change to UIDesignRequiresCompatibility that now reports the OS version as iOS 26, instead of iOS 19, so you might have to update all your codepaths if you were relying on that behavior.
This also tells me that Apple fully expects a lot of developers to opt-out of Liquid Glass come September, and it may no longer be ‘just’ a compatibility mode 😅

Ged Maheux:

Quick, which one of these Safari tabs in iOS 26 is the selected one?

I think Apple’s in trouble here.

Just read the commit message to see how well Liquid Glass is going.

Mario Guzmán:

So, in OS 26 first-party apps, the “Done” button in navigation/toolbars no longer spells out “Done” but instead shows a checkmark and it is inside a circle of the app’s accent color.

I can’t get used to this being the “Done” button anymore. A checkmark feels like it has been historically more of an indication that some long running process has completed. It doesn’t feel right as a button for me to accept changes and complete my task.

Apple TV Captions

John Gruber (2024, Mastodon):

This made me think there has to be a better way to toggle captions than manually swiping and clicking on the Apple TV remote touchpad.
Turns out there are two better ways:
If you use the Control Center Apple TV remote control on your iPhone, there’s a dedicated “CC” button.
In tvOS, go to Settings → Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut, and set it to “Closed Captions”. Now you can just triple-click the Menu/Back button on the remote to toggle captions. (On older Apple TV remotes, the button is labelled “Menu”; on the new remote, it’s labelled with a “<”.)

[…]

You can also toggle captions using Siri on the remote: “Turn on captions” or “Turn off captions” (or use the word “subtitles”). And the coolest feature: “What did he/she/they just say?”, which rewinds 15 seconds and temporarily turns on captions.

I meant to post this at the time. In the interim, Apple added a feature in tvOS 18 where pressing Back will automatically show subtitles until you return to the original play position.

3D Touch Fun Hack Mac Mac App MacBook macOS 15 Sequoia Open Source Programming Trackpad

Netflix today announced that it is introducing a new subtitle option that only shows subtitles for spoken dialogue, aimed at those who don't need captions, but prefer to watch movies and TV shows with the subtitles turned on.

According to Netflix, nearly half of all viewing hours on the streaming service in the U.S. happen with the subtitles or captions on, which is why it is debuting the new setting.

Some of this is probably for accessibility reasons or because of situations where you can’t turn on the audio. But, also, it seems like newer movies and shows are not mixed well.

Samuel Axon:

Traditional closed captions are still available, of course. Those are labeled “English CC” whereas this new option is simply labeled “English” (or whatever your preferred language is).
[…]
The performance style of actors in current TV shows and movies is more naturalistic and less elocutive than it once was, so characters are more likely to speak softly. Streaming services compress the audio more vigorously than is common in physical media, which can cause problems with intelligibility.

I’m not sure I buy this compression explanation. How much bandwidth could they be saving on audio compared with what the video’s using?

thaddeus:

And it would be amazing if they better aligned text appearing to when lines are delivered. I'm kind of annoyed when my reading is ahead of what's happening in the scene. 😬

Previously:

Update (2025-07-24): Craig Grannell:

Amazingly (and depressingly), BBC iPlayer on Apple TV still lacks subtitles, despite the organisation’s public service remit. Which must say a lot about how many people are using Apple TV in the UK.

Accessibility Audio Netflix Remote.app Siri tvOS tvOS 17 tvOS 18

12 Comments

Monday, July 21, 2025

Using a MacBook Trackpad As a Scale

Krish Shah (via Hacker News):

TrackWeight is a macOS application that transforms your MacBook’s trackpad into an accurate weighing scale by leveraging the Force Touch pressure sensors built into modern MacBook trackpads.
[…]
TrackWeight utilizes the Open Multi-Touch Support library by Takuto Nakamura to gain private access to all mouse and trackpad events on macOS. This library provides detailed touch data including pressure readings that are normally inaccessible to standard applications.
The key insight is that trackpad pressure events are only generated when there’s capacitance detected on the trackpad surface - meaning your finger (or another conductive object) must be in contact with the trackpad. When this condition is met, the trackpad’s Force Touch sensors provide precise pressure readings that can be calibrated and converted into weight measurements.

Justin Miller:

This reminds me of how, twenty years ago, I used the PowerBook’s hard drive vibration sensor to rig up a seismograph to measure construction noise.

Previously:

Anna Gross, Tim Bradshaw, and Lauren Fedor (Hacker News, MacRumors):

UK Backing Down on Apple Encryption Backdoor

The officials both said the Home Office, which ordered the tech giant in January to grant access to its most secure cloud storage system, would probably have to retreat in the face of pressure from senior leaders in Washington, including Vice President JD Vance.

[…]

In its order in January, the Home Office told Apple to build in a “back door” to allow law enforcement or security services to tap into the cloud storage system that stores user data that even the iPhone maker itself is currently unable to access.

It did so by issuing a “technical capability notice” under the UK Investigatory Powers Act, legislation that critics dub a “snooper’s charter” but that the government maintains is needed by law enforcement to investigate terrorism and child sexual abuse.

[…]

Last month, Meta-owned WhatsApp said it would join Apple’s legal challenge, in a rare collaboration between the Silicon Valley rivals.

Previously:

Apple iCloud iCloud Advanced Data Protection Legal Meta Privacy United Kingdom

Bug launchd Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Spotlight System Integrity Protection

Spotlight Indexing Running Wild

Jenny Zeng (via John Gordon):

Several users have reported a bug on macOS Sequoia regarding Spotlight indexing writing a huge amount of data. Consequently, they are experiencing a large System Data on Mac and rapid SSD wear.

She recommends deleting /.Spotlight-V100 and ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight. I’ve always use mdutil to reset Spotlight, but I’ve now seen several people recommend that deleting the folders works better.

To prevent Spotlight runs wild on indexing again, you can stop it from indexing your internal disk with the following steps.

Previously:

8 Comments

USB-C Hubs and My Slow Descent Into Madness

Dennis Schubert (2021, via Hacker News):

I have one of those laptops lacking a lot of accessory ports. In fact, I’m writing this on an Apple MacBook Pro, and all I got was four lousy USB-C ports. If I want to connect pretty much anything, I need some sort of adapter or some sort of hub. USB-C hubs are a great idea: not only do they usually offer a power supply pass-through, but they also allow you to plug in some USB devices, an ethernet cable, and maybe even a monitor. Some even have fancy stuff like an SD card reader or a secondary audio output! And all of that over a single USB-C connection, which makes everything super comfortable if you frequently carry your laptop around your home, but you also have a desk with fixed devices set up.
Unfortunately, since 2018, I’ve worked through three USB-C hubs, and they’re all kinda bad.
[…]
It honestly feels like no matter what you buy, you get more or less the same hardware, and you’re most likely getting a heavily overpriced product just because some company printed their logo on it.
[…]
The fact that most USB-C hubs tend to use the same RTL8153 networking stack is also very annoying, especially since this is known to break on macOS, and it looks like Realtek just doesn’t care. That’s not really great if you’re promoting your hub primarily to MacBook owners.

dazzaji:

One of the things that I found most frustrating about USB-C hubs is how hard it is to find one that actually gives you multiple USB-C ports. I have several USB-C devices but most hubs just give you one USB-C port and a bunch of USB-A ports. At most it’s 2 USB-C ports but only with the hub that plugs into both USB-C ports on my MacBook Pro (so I’m never able to get more ports than I started with). The result is I end up having to keep swapping devices. For a connector that was supposed to be the “one universal port,” it’s weird that most hubs assume you only need one USB-C connection. Has anyone found a decent hub with multiple USB-C data outputs?

I’m using an Anker hub with a bunch of USB-A ports, and it’s one of the more reliable ones I’ve owned—certainly better than the Studio Display—but I do have the sense that it’s slowing things down compared with when I connect drives directly to my MacBook Pro. I’m also using an Anker Thunderbolt dock, which is pretty good but doesn’t have enough ports. I still wish for more built into the Mac itself. (Recent MacBook Pros are down from 4 ports to 3.)

Previously:

Hardware Mac MacBook Pro Studio Display Thunderbolt USB USB-C

7 Comments

Friday, July 18, 2025

Xcode Key Bindings to Make Refactoring Less Painful

Jon Reid:

Xcode supports automated refactoring. Supposedly.

In practice, the options are limited and often unavailable. You’ll right-click something, navigate to the Refactor submenu… only to find that the command you want is grayed out. It’s a waste of time.

[…]

With these shortcuts, I can try an automated refactoring in less than a second. If it’s not available, I get feedback right away — no wasted mouse clicks. And when it is available, I stay in the flow.

The one I’ve had the best luck with is Edit All in Scope (Command-Control-E), which isn’t in the Refactor menu.

Previously:

Keyboard Shortcuts Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Programming Xcode

2 Comments

Study on AI Coding Tools

METR (Hacker News):

We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI acceleration from AI R&D automation.
See the full paper for more detail.

Via Thomas Claburn:

Not only did the use of AI tools hinder developers, but it led them to hallucinate, much like the AIs have a tendency to do themselves. The developers predicted a 24 percent speedup, but even after the study concluded, they believed AI had helped them complete tasks 20 percent faster when it had actually delayed their work by about that percentage.
[…]
The study involved 16 experienced developers who work on large, open source projects. The developers provided a list of real issues (e.g. bug fixes, new features, etc.) they needed to address – 246 in total – and then forecast how long they expected those tasks would take. The issues were randomly assigned to allow or disallow AI tool usage.

I’m skeptical about the experimental design, and I suspect there’s huge variance in how much developers in the real world get out of AI.

Ruben Bloom:

I was one of the developers in the @METR_Evals study. Thoughts:
1. This is much less true of my participation in the study where I was more conscientious, but I feel like historically a lot of my AI speed-up gains were eaten by the fact that while a prompt was running, I’d look at something else (FB, X, etc) and continue to do so for much longer than it took the prompt to run.
I discovered two days ago that Cursor has (or now has) a feature you can enable to ring a bell when the prompt is done. I expect to reclaim a lot of the AI gains this way.
[…]
4. As a developer in the study, it’s striking to me how much more capable the models have gotten since February (when I was participating in the study)
[…]
5. There was a selection effect in which tasks I submitted to the study. (a) I didn’t want to risk getting randomized to “no AI” on tasks that felt sufficiently important or daunting to do without AI assistance. (b) Neatly packaged and well-scoped tasks felt suitable for the study, large open-ended greenfield stuff felt harder to legibilize, so I didn’t submit those tasks to study even though AI speed up might have been larger.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-21): Dare Obasanjo:

Remember the study that showed developers think vibe coding saves them time but measurements show it doesn’t after factoring in time prompting and reviewing the AI’s work?

A startup founder is on X documenting his vibe coding struggles with Replit which includes deleting the production database and ignoring requests not to make changes without asking for permission.

Artificial Intelligence Claude Developer Tool Programming

6 Comments

Some of the Apps in the App Store

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon):

This blog post is about an app named Chatbot: Ask AI Chat Bot, subtitled “Built on ChatGPT OpenAI, GPT-4", by the developer Tuqeer Ahmad. If you’re not familiar with Tuqeer Ahmad, well… neither am I. Nonetheless, Chatbot: Ask AI Chat Bot is currently #23 top grossing in the Mac App Store and the #64 top “free” download according to AppFigures.
Believe it or not, the app is in the Education category of the Mac App Store. In fact, it’s #1 top grossing and the #3 top download in Education. (I would guess that’s because students are looking for ways to cheat on their homework, sigh.)
[…]
The app does include IAP, and as I’ve already noted, makes a significant amount of revenue (more than my apps!), so it seems difficult to dispute that the developer is a trader. Thus, the developer’s self-assessment appears to be inaccurate and indeed illegal in the EU.
[…]
Anyway, that’s what it takes to become one of the top grossers in the Mac App Store. On the web, I can find no media coverage, word of mouth recommendations, or even advertising for this app. Tuqeer Ahmad is effectively anonymous. And unlike the iOS App Store, the Mac App Store has no search ads. So how does this developer find customers? Honestly, I don’t know, other than stuffing the app title, subtitle, description, etc., with popular search keywords.

Paul Haddad:

WTH? How does something like [BrightScreen] even make it into the Mac App Store?

Marcus Mendes:

You know it’s a day that ends in “y” when there’s a new App Store lawsuit. This time, the issue isn’t antitrust or developer rejection complaints, but rather a class action accusing Apple of facilitating the spread of cryptocurrency scams by allowing a fake trading app onto the App Store.

[…]

Lead plaintiff Danyell Shin says she downloaded Swiftcrypt onto her iPhone in late 2024, after being introduced to the app through an online investment group. Believing the app was trustworthy, partly because it came from Apple’s App Store, she ended up transferring more than $80,000 into the platform. Then, the funds vanished.

[…]

The filing paints a detailed picture of how Apple’s own rules for crypto apps, requiring licensing, regulatory compliance, and developer verification, were supposedly not enforced in this case.

Here’s an app called School Assistant that offers an IAP called “Tip Jar - $0.99” that actually costs $400. It’s been like that in the store for at least 6 months. [See the update below.]

Arin Waichulis (via Jeff Johnson):

It’s the same early-day digital scareware we’ve all seen before: “Your iPhone is infected with (310) viruses. Click here to remove them.” These pop-ups, seemingly always 280p quality and slapped together with stock graphics from a different reality, usually appear on shady websites as malicious ads or junk software, urging people to install a “fix” or be doomed. But one was recently spotted running as an ad on YouTube for a sketchy iPhone clean up app.
[…]
It states, “Your iphone is severely damaged by (247) virus! We have detected that your iPhone has been infected with viruses. If you don’t take any action, it will soon corrupt your SIM card, data, photos and contacts.”
[…]
From a few minutes of research, I learned the clean up application is operated by a newly formed Chinese-based company with very weak and broad privacy policies, likely created using LLMs, and ranked 50th on Top Charts in Productivity.

Thomas Clement:

The App Store is also such a cesspool. I was looking for a simple solitaire game, you’d think in 2025 the App Store would make it easy to find a simple solitaire game that isn’t a 300MB app with ads, subscriptions and extremely dubious privacy labels, but apparently no…

Previously:

Update (2025-07-21): Dylan McDonald:

This $400 IAP was NOT intentional. I have absolutely no idea how it ever got set to $400. Thankfully, as Jeff said, it was never in-use in the app. Apple altered me to the issue today and I immediately fixed the price and then removed that IAP entirely (since it wasn’t used anyways).

App Store App Store Scams Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Business ChatGPT European Union In-App Purchase iOS iOS 18 Lawsuit Legal Mac Mac App Mac App Store macOS 15 Sequoia

14 Comments

App Store Study Shows 90% of What?

Apple:

Apple today announced the global App Store ecosystem facilitated $1.3 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2024, according to a new study by economists Professor Andrey Fradkin from Boston University Questrom School of Business and Dr. Jessica Burley from Analysis Group. For more than 90 percent of the billings and sales facilitated by the App Store ecosystem, developers did not pay any commission to Apple.

The Analysis Group always comes to the right conclusions.

Following a study looking into the success of the App Store ecosystem in the United States, Apple has sponsored a second study that covers the global App Store in 2024.
[…]
Developer billings and sales of digital goods and services hit $131 billion, primarily from games and photo and video editing apps like those from Adobe. Sales of physical goods and services facilitated by App Store apps exceeded $1 trillion.

How unfair it is that Apple isn’t getting paid when you buy physical goods from Amazon or get food delivered by Domino’s or Instacart. And the study points out that Apple isn’t even counting all the commerce that happens through Safari or Google Chrome! Think of how different things might be if Apple had invented the Web browser.

Apple always releases these studies before WWDC. You might think the idea is to make developers feel good about their position, but that doesn’t make much sense given the contents of the studies. On the one hand, the inflated numbers from physical goods and services are irrelevant to us. It seems like they’re padding the numbers to confuse and get the desired result. On the other hand, if you take Apple at its word that this is what we should focus on, the takeaway is basically that we’re paying huge commissions to Apple for terrible service, but they really want us to know that the giant companies pay nothing. Thanks, that helps a lot. The real audience for these studies is regulators. It’s basically FUD: be careful or you’ll screw up $1.3 trillion of the economy.

Chance Miller:

This marks the fourth report that Apple has released on the App Store ecosystem in the last week. Last Tuesday, Apple shared a report noting that the App Store prevented over $2 billion in fraudulent transactions in 2024. Two days later, Apple highlighted that the App Store ecosystem in the U.S. facilitated $406 billion in developer billings and sales in 2024.
Finally, the company released its full App Store Transparency Report with details on things like App Store user traffic, fraud prevention, and more. The emphasis on the App Store’s ecosystem comes as Apple continues to face pushback from regulators around its App Store practices.

Jeff Johnson (Hacker News):

In the same announcement, Apple brags at length about its “Investment in Developers”:
Apple invests in tools and capabilities that make it easier for developers to distribute their apps and games, be discovered by users around the globe, and grow successful businesses.
[…]
The positive tone of today’s announcement is in stark contrast to an Apple statement from 2019 addressing Spotify’s claims:
After using the App Store for years to dramatically grow their business, Spotify seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem — including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers — without making any contributions to that marketplace.
[…]
Whenever Apple or Apple apologists claim that App Store commissions are required in order to finance the iOS platform, it’s nonsense. To be clear, I have no objection to Apple having an App Store, and for placing requirements on App Store developers. What’s unique about the iOS platform, though, is that the App Store is the sole method of distribution for third-party software.
[…]
The IAP mandate applies only to a small minority of developers, who are forced to (allegedly) support the ecosystem for the benefit of the majority, who are free riders.

Nick Heer (Mastodon):

The purpose of this study — also produced in 2020, 2021, and 2023, though not last year — is two-fold. First, it indicates to lawmakers the footprint of the App Store and suggests any further regulatory action would seriously compromise the economy as a whole. The second reason it exists is to soften the impression of Apple’s commission on digital purchases, hence this part of the study and press release, emphasis mine[…] A big amount, but measured against the total estimated economy of $1.3 trillion, it is supposed to be seen as a small fraction — “less than 10%”.

[…]

The thing about the Analysis Group’s report is that it is very broad. While it does not include transactions made through Safari on iOS, things like shopping in Amazon’s app or buying airfare in Kayak’s app are factored in. Whether these purchases were actually facilitated by the App Store ecosystem is questionable to me — would someone have not bought that flight if not for their iPhone?

[…]

Apple has argued in court this commission is for App Store upkeep, developer relations, API development, and for intellectual property licensing. These are things common to all apps. Yet only those facilitating transactions for digital services are expected to pay? How is Uber — with its half-gigabyte client app updated once or twice weekly for tens of millions of users — not paying for App Store hosting and bandwidth, but indie developers are?

Previously:

Amazon Antitrust App Store Apple Business Instacart iOS iOS 18 iOS App WWDC

Battery Life Design History Mac macOS 15 Sequoia System 6 System Preferences

Thursday, July 17, 2025

A History of Mac Settings

Marcin Wichary:

As a designer, I’m meant to dislike settings. As a user, I love them. Every year I celebrate Settings Day: a day when I take a look at the options and toggles in all the apps I use. I do this out of curiosity – what was added since the last time I looked? – but also because I love this way of getting to know software: peeking under the hood, walking the back alleys, learning what has been tricky or important enough to be equipped with a checkbox.

[…]

Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine.

Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.

Adam Engst:

Wichary is best known for Shift Happens, his multivolume masterwork about keyboards, edited by TidBITS contributor Glenn Fleishman. While Shift Happens is a visual tour de force, it is limited by the constraints of paper.
In contrast, Frame of Preference animates these historical interfaces in a charmingly interactive way. Each illustration is actually a fully emulated Mac from that era, thanks to Mihai Parparita’s Infinite Mac project. So you don’t just read about Susan Kare’s original Control Panel; you open it on the virtual Mac’s screen. Instructions in the text are shown with odd squares that turn out to be empty checkboxes—complete the action described, and you get a highlight and checkmark. If you click the Details button on the label by the emulated Mac, you’ll find “extra stuff to play with.” As you work your way through the evolution of control panels, you’ll encounter nine Macs and a NeXT Cube.

Dr. Drang:

Last week, I was going to be out with my MacBook Pro all day, and I wanted to make sure it was fully charged. I had noticed that it was typically charging up only to about 80%, and I assumed that was because Sequoia was doing some clever battery-life-lengthening thing. I wanted to turn the clever thing off so I could get the battery to 100% just for that day.

You will probably not be shocked to hear that I didn’t find the solution by simply opening System Settings and scanning the Battery panel—I had to do a Kagi search for it. It wasn’t that the toggle was buried several layers deep or that it was outside the Battery hierarchy. No, the problem was that Apple had put the toggle in a place where toggles—or any kind of control or data entry field—don’t belong.

Marco Arment:

I still can’t find anything in the System Settings app.

Previously:

8 Comments

Fixing “Optimize Storage”

Ryan Jones:

I am so out of patience for “Optimize Storage” on Apple devices.
Now I have to take half my day to figure out how to reduce Photos and Messages without nuking them.
My best solution: Disconnect iCloud Photos. That will delete all local photo copies. Then reconnect it. 🤷‍♂️
That worked. All local photos were offloaded.
Except for the Shared With You stuff from Messages.

Alex Greenland:

Yesss! My biggest gripe. With Photos and iCloud Drive on macOS and iOS.
“Optimise Storage” should leave me with comfortable space, not just leaving me a few gigs of headroom.
It’s like it tries to fill up your disk first, then takes files away, but never enough.

I think both Photos and Messages should have settings to specify the number of GB to cache locally.

Nick Spreen:

I feel like that’s not really a problem in comparison to 300gb system data

Previously:

Update (2025-07-25): Nick Heer:

As far as I can tell, my Messages cache on my iMac is a full copy of Messages in my iCloud account. It is not as though Apple is treating the cloud portion as merely a syncing solution, as it used to do with something like My Photo Stream, so it is not necessarily saving space in either my iCloud account or on my devices. I would like the option to store a full copy of my Messages history on my Mac, yes, but I also think it should more aggressively purge on-device copies. Is that not a key advantage of the cloud — that I do not need to keep everything on-disk?

Yes, Messages seems to—contra Photos—treat the local storage as a cache that never evicts anything. So it doesn’t start out as a full copy, but over time it can become one. It basically forces you to delete older messages (from everywhere) or buy a device with more storage.

iCloud iCloud Photo Library iOS iOS 18 Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Messages in iCloud Messages.app Photos.app Storage

Apple Developer Account Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Malware Notarization Security

Notarized Atomic Stealer (AMOS)

Jamf Threat Labs:

After downloading and inspecting the binary, we confirmed that it was indeed both code-signed and notarized — a detail that raised immediate concern given its malicious nature.
[…]
The application itself is named “Gmeet_updater.app,” though there’s little effort to align that branding with the user experience, suggesting a rushed or careless repackaging process.
After confirming that the Developer Team ID was used to distribute malicious payloads, Jamf Threat Labs reported it to Apple. Since then, the associated certificate appears to have been revoked.
[…]
Jamf Threat Labs identified at least three distinct macOS infostealer samples that were successfully signed and notarized using the same Team ID (A2FTSWF4A2) and later distributed in the wild.

Thomas Clement:

Notarization is a sad story. It doesn’t provide great security and is a barrier for many groups of people (young, indie, game developers, developers whose primary platform is not the Mac, etc…) to publish an app on the Mac. If Apple wants more games on the Mac, the first step is to make notarization free. Just make it free.

Or just get rid of it? It’s still a major pain, adding time and friction to each build. The notarization server still goes down at the most inconvenient times. There are some basic package structure and code signing checks that are useful, but these would be better if made available locally as part of Xcode. It’s not clear to me that the malware checks are adding much value over what we already get from code signing and macOS’s built-in malware detection.

rameerez:

I’ve lost this week trying to get my macOS app notarized
Notarization jobs would just stall and get stuck on Xcode for days!
So I wrote an email to Apple Developer Support
And the next thing I know is they TERMINATED my entire Developer Account?!

Previously:

Update (2025-07-18): See also: Hacker News.

CSV Developer Tool JSON Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Property Lists SmoothCSV

JSON Editor and PlistEdit Pro

VDT Labs (via Dave DeLong):

View and edit your JSON files in “tree” or “text” mode. “Tree” mode offers a great and error proof way to manipulate your JSON, by allowing you to easily add, reorder, delete, copy & paste the items. The “text” mode offers a quick way to interact with the raw text which makes up the JSON and to investigate invalid JSONs.
[…]
The powerful HTTP Client included in the app, at no additional costs, allows you to easily create and perform HTTP requests. While its main purpose is to ease the fetch of JSON content from a server, it can be used to get or upload any content, including binary.

Fat Cat Software:

Mac and iOS developers must edit a variety of property list and JSON files while developing their applications. PlistEdit Pro makes editing these files easier by providing an intuitive and powerful interface. In addition to being able to copy and paste or drag and drop property list data around, PlistEdit Pro also offers powerful find and replace functionality, as well as structure definitions which provide easy access to commonly used keys in various standard property list files.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-22): Matt Sephton:

i just found another CSV app: SmoothCSV

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Longplay for Mac

Adrian Schönig (2023, via Nick Heer):

Longplay 1.0 was released in August 2020. I had used the app for years before that myself, but I didn’t know how it would be received by a wider audience. I loved the kind of feedback that I got which helped me distill the heart of the app: Music means a lot to people, and Longplay helps them reconnect with their music library in a way that reminds them of their old vinyl or CD collections. It’s a wall of their favourite albums that has been with them for many years or decades. It’s something personal. The UI very much focussed on that part of the experience, and I wanted to keep that spirit alive, keep the app fun, while adding features that people and myself found amiss.

The main idea behind 2.0 was to focus on the playing of music beyond a single album. 1.0 just stopped playback when you finished an album, but I wanted to stay in the flow – to either play an appropriate random next album or the next from a manually specified queue.

Adrian Schönig (Mastodon):

I am thrilled to be finally releasing Longplay for Mac today. Longplay is all about the joy of listening to entire albums and marvelling at their beautiful album artwork. It is built from the ground up for the Mac, with the familiar pretty album wall, a dedicated mini player, all the main features from iOS, plus Mac exclusives like AppleScript and a nifty MCP server.
[…]
Meanwhile, Apple announced in June 2023 that playback support for Apple Music tracks through MusicKit was coming to the Mac in macOS 14. I restarted work on the Mac app, and while it was working, I encountered pesky playback glitches, where Apple Music playback would often but not always start stuttering after a couple of tracks. I wouldn’t launch the app like that. However, the app worked reliable already for DRM-free tracks, which is how the “Early Access“ version of Longplay for Mac was born, as I knew some people who’d only or primarily use that (including myself).
On the glitches, I tried various workarounds that I could think of, kept lots of notes on when it happened and when it didn’t, filed a TSI (which got rejected due to no known workarounds), filed comprehensive radars including a demo app to reproduce, and reached out to Apple contacts. I did get some responses and am thankful for the support, but was still blocked. macOS 14 launched with the same glitches later in 2023. End of 2024, macOS 15 launched with the same issue still present.
I kept chipping away at the Mac app in the meantime, hoping that those glitches would be resolved at some stage. I focussed on the technical details, adding polish, hitting SwiftUI dead ends and opting AppKit in more places. Then, in late in 2024, CoverSutra relaunched for the Mac and it didn’t have the playback issue. I was stunned. So I dug in again and finally came across a workaround that worked for Longplay: Updating the dock icon every second.

It’s $6 (currently $2.99) for iOS and $25 for macOS.

However, the most interesting of all of Longplay’s automation integrations is its built-in MCP server. MCP is a protocol that allows AI chatbots like Claude to interact with apps. With Longplay’s MCP server, you can do things like create Collections and Smart Collections and queue albums for playback from inside a chatbot. What makes the integration so powerful is the ability to perform those actions with the sort of natural language requests that are the bread and butter of chatbots.
For example, the other day I asked Claude Sonnet 4 to compile a list of the top 100 alternative and indie albums of the ’80s. After consulting several sources, Claude generated a list, which I then asked it to use to create a Longplay Collection using my Apple Music library. Claude got to work and created my Collection after comparing its list with my Apple Music library for a couple of minutes.
Longplay is the first app I’ve tried that uses a built-in MCP server, and I’m sold. The combination of a chatbot’s research strength and Longplay’s actions makes its MCP integration a compelling way to explore your music.

Apple Music AppleScript Bug Claude Cocoa iOS iOS 18 iOS App Longplay Mac Mac App macOS 14 Sonoma macOS 15 Sequoia Model Context Protocol (MCP) Music MusicKit Programming SwiftUI

I expect more and more developers to do this, especially now that Anthropic has a new file format and easier experience for Claude desktop extensions.

(Meanwhile, in Shortcuts, none of this is happening…)

John Appleseed:

Why isn’t the UI getting out of the way of the content by overlapping, obscuring and blurring the content?

Previously:

AppleScript Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT Foundation Models Framework Google Gemini/Bard LLaMA Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia PDF Sandboxing

NameQuick 1.9.29

NameQuick:

AI-powered file renaming that just works.
[…]
Rename legal documents, research articles, and scans automatically with clear, informative filenames.
Automatically organize invoices and receipts by extracting key details like vendor names, dates, and amounts.
Instantly rename photos with descriptive labels derived from image content or metadata for easy reference.
[…]
Use local models from Ollama for faster, offline renaming with full control over your data.

The developer says that Apple’s Foundation Models Framework is currently too unreliable and not powerful enough with its limited context window, so you need to use either Gemini, OpenAI, or Ollama. I tried it with Gemini and found that it was much better and faster than ScanSnap at pulling out names and dates from receipts, even finding some text that I could barely read myself.

I found the app itself a little hard to use. You can’t just drag and drop files onto its Dock icon, and dragging and dropping into the window didn’t properly apply the name template that I’d created and chosen. What worked best was setting up a Watch Folder. I wish it were sandboxed and supported AppleScript. NameQuick is $19 (one-time, bring your own API keys) or you can pay $5 or more per month with managed AI credits included.

Previously:

2 Comments

Shortcuts in macOS Tahoe

In macOS 26, there’s a built-in clipboard manager that can be accessed from the Spotlight interface, and a new set of Shortcuts triggers let you run automations when events occur on your Mac or at specific intervals.

Simon B. Støvring:

“Folder” and “File” seem like interesting automation triggers in Shortcuts for Mac. You can do things like “When a file is moved to this folder, process it with on-device AI”.

Of all the features I’m excited about using in macOS 26, the one that most intrigues me is the Use Model action in Shortcuts. Use Model does exactly what you think it does: you toss data into it, and an AI model somewhere (on your Mac, on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers, or even at an OpenAI server farm) will take that data and turn it into… something.

The other day, I realized that this new feature would allow me to expand my existing automation that uploads images to the Six Colors web server by adding a description of the image.

Dan Moren:

But pulling information out of a document—especially information that might appear anywhere in a variety of forms—seems like something an AI model would be good at, so I decided to take another crack at it with Shortcuts’s new AI capabilities.
I started out my workflow by grabbing all the text from a PDF or web page, then passing it to the Private Cloud Compute model. (I attempted to use the On-Device model at first, but it was both very slow and not quite as good at formatting the response in the manner I wanted.)
[…]
And therein lies the rub with all of this. The results are neither reliable nor necessarily repeatable. The same data run through this shortcut multiple times provides different answers: I’d think that anathema (not to mention madness inducing) to the sensibilities of any programmer. Given the same data, the algorithm should yield the same thing every time, but the non-deterministic nature of AI models throws that out the window.

So, the ChatGPT integration in Shortcuts’ Apple Intelligence action for iOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 appears to be the really old GPT 4 Turbo with a knowledge cutoff date of November 2023…?

Apple Intelligence Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Numbers.app Shortcuts

The greatest threat to Apple Intelligence’s App Intents adoption isn’t the underlying lack of an LLM (Apple can fix that sooner or later): it’s web apps and the rise of MCP. The automation and inter-app model is shifting from local extensions to web-based ones.
I’m imagining an Apple-made MCP bridge that runs in Private Cloud Compute 🤔

Previously:

Apple Mail Apple Podcasts AppleScript Calendar Hook Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Messages.app Music.app Notes Reminders Shortcuts URL

Weak Ubiquitous Linking in Apple’s Apps

Luc Beaudoin:

If you are like many knowledge workers, on a typical day you access over dozens of information resources. If you have to use search or navigate through folders to get to them, you’re taking a big hit on productivity. It’s much easier to access a resource by clicking on a contextually placed link than it is to search for it or navigate to it through folders. For instance, if your task list contains links to the resources (drafts, emails, notes, PDFs, etc.) you need to process today, then you can use your task list becomes a hub from which you can quickly jump to what you need.

Luc Beaudoin (Mac Power Users):

Despite its polish and promise, macOS still lacks overt support for robust, user-friendly linking. This violates both the spirit and the practical recommendations of the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking, which I authored to encourage software platforms and developers to address what I call the meta-access problem: the difficulty of re-accessing information that is related to your contextual focus.
[…]
Take Apple’s own macOS apps. In Notes, Messages, Reminders, Freeform, and even Mail, there is no “Copy Link” menu option that would let users create a persistent, shareable link to a specific item. This is a fundamental limitation for anyone who wants to organize information across documents and applications. In many cases, there’s no straightforward way — via the UI or automation — to get reliable, cross-device links.
Even when underlying identifiers do exist — and clearly they must — Apple keeps them hidden. For example, when you receive a date in a text via Messages on macOS, you can click it to create a Calendar event. That event includes a hidden link back to the original message, something like: sms://open?message-guid=ABCBB940-08A7-4FC8-8FDF-DF32CEB4234E But this linking mechanism is entirely private. There is no public API or automation hook to retrieve message GUIDs. So while Apple engineers can build this feature into Calendar, third-party developers and users are locked out.
[…]
There’s no AppleScript or Shortcuts action to [copy Music or Podcast links] either. One couldn’t add more hurdles to linking if one tried. And without a Copy Link menu item in the app’s menu bar, even UI scripting is impossible.

Previously:

Antitrust Digital Markets Act (DMA) iOS iOS 18 Web Browser

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Apple’s Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA

Jess Weatherbed:

It’s been 16 months since a DMA ruling allowed iOS developers like Google and Mozilla to use their own browser engines in the EU, so… where are they?

Open Web Advocacy (Hacker News):

Apple’s compliance did not start well. Faced with the genuine possibility of third-party browsers effectively powering web apps, Apple’s first instinct was to remove web app support entirely from iOS with no notice to either businesses or consumers. Under significant pressure from us and the Commission, Apple canceled their plan to sabotage web apps in the EU.
Both Google and Mozilla began porting their browser engines Blink and Gecko respectively to iOS. […] However there were significant issues with Apple’s contract and technical restrictions that made porting browser engines to iOS “as painful as possible” for browser vendors[…]
[…]
At the DMA workshop last week, we directly raised with Apple the primary blocker preventing third-party browser engines from shipping on iOS. Apple claimed that vendors like Google and Mozilla have “everything they need” to ship a browser engine in the EU and simply “have chosen not to do so”.
Apple has been fully aware of these barriers since at least June 2024, when we covered them in exhaustive detail. Multiple browser vendors have also discussed these same issues with Apple directly. The suggestion that Apple is unaware of the problems is not just ridiculous, it’s demonstrably false. Apple knows exactly what the issues are. It is simply refusing to address them.

Previously:

Apple M4 Pro Hardware Mac Mac mini Solid-State Drive (SSD) Storage

Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac Mini’s Storage for Half the Price

Jeff Geerling (via Hacker News):

I documented the entire upgrade—along with taking my old M4 mini 1TB SSD and putting it in my Dad’s M4 mini—in today’s video[…]
[…]
Speaking of standards… you have to do a full DFU (Device Firmware Update) restore, because unlike conventional M.2 NVMe storage, the M4 uses a proprietary connector, a proprietary-sized slot, and splits up the typical layout—the card that’s user-replaceable is actually just flash chips and supporting power circuits, while the storage controller (the NVMe ‘brains’) is part of the M4 SoC (System on a Chip). Apple could use standard NVMe slots, but they seem to think the controller being part of the SoC brings better security… it certainly doesn’t bring any cost savings, resiliency in terms of quick recovery from failure in the field, or performance advantage!
[…]
The upgraded 4TB module performed noticeably better in writes, likely because it has more flash chips on it to spread out the write activity. Reads were pretty close to the same, with minor variance in performance across different file sizes and access patterns.
[…]
I was provided the $699 M4 Pro 4TB SSD upgrade by M4-SSD. It’s quite expensive (especially compared to normal 4TB NVMe SSDs, which range from $200-400)…
But it’s not nearly as expensive as Apple’s own offering, which at the time of this writing is $1,200!

Note that this particular upgrade doesn’t work with a non-Pro M4.

Previously:

Mac mini 2024

Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Uniform Type Identifier utiluti

utiluti 1.2

Armin Briegel:

I have also released an update to my CLI tool to set default apps for urls and file types (uniform type identifiers/UTI). utiluti 1.2 adds a manage verb which can read a list of default app assignments from plist files or a configuration profile. You can see the documentation for the new manage verb here and download the latest pkg installer here.
Note, that while you can set the default browser with utiluti, whether you are using the manage option or not, the system will prompt the user to confirm the new default browser.

Previously:

Extended Attributes Gatekeeper Interface Builder Mac macOS 15 Sequoia

Gatekeeper Change in macOS 15.4

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon):

On macOS 15.2, I was able to drag the exact same downloaded WebP file to TextEdit and BBEdit with no Gatekeeper alert! Thus, it appears that the Reddit poster was correct, and something did change recently.
[…]
I perused the unusually long Apple support document About the security content of macOS Sequoia 15.4, but nothing in there jumped out at me as the probable cause of the Gatekeeper change.
[…]
The appearance or nonappearance of Gatekeeper alerts depends entirely on the downloaded file’s extension. I edited the WebP file with a hex editor to make it into a plain text file, but it still triggered a Gatekeeper alert on opening in an app. On the other hand, when I kept the file contents the same, in WebP format, but changed the file extension to .txt, the Gatekeeper alert no longer appeared.
Overall, this feels like more security theater in macOS.
[…]
My test app will open any and every file type without a Gatekeeper alert, as far as I’ve seen, when the CFBundleDocumentTypes has a single entry declaring the generic public.data in its LSItemContentTypes. The Gatekeeper alerts begin when I add a second entry with certain types, such as com.apple.webarchive or public.unix-executable. With just two declarations, one “safe” type such as public.data and one apparently “dangerous” type such as com.apple.webarchive, I see Gatekeeper alerts when trying to open any file, with any extension: .webp, .png, or even .txt.

He thinks the change in behavior may be a bug.

Thomas Tempelmann:

The problem (which has been around since macOS 10.0) is that it considers any file without a recognized extension to be an executable instead of being conservative and considering it something less. I always thought that to be a bad assumption. You cannot launch such executables directly from Finder anyway, so what’s the use case for this?

Yesterday, I saw a variation on this dialog that was new to me. I was trying to open a compiled nib file with Archaeology, and it said:

Apple could not verify “[file].nib” is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy.

The only two buttons were Done and Move to Trash. This is a document file, not executable code, and the only way I could open it was to delete the com.apple.quarantine xattr.

Previously:

Artificial Intelligence Business ChatGPT Design Icons iOS iOS 26 Liquid Glass Mac macOS Tahoe 26

Monday, July 14, 2025

Google “Acquires” Windsurf

Katie Roof and Rachel Metz (in May, via Hacker News):

OpenAI has agreed to buy Windsurf, an artificial intelligence-assisted coding tool formerly known as Codeium, for about $3 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, marking the ChatGPT maker’s largest acquisition to date.

Nickie Louise:

Windsurf, founded in 2021 by Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen, built a loyal developer base with its AI-native coding platform. The company’s flagship product, Windsurf Editor, supports enterprise-grade workflows and enables what co-founder Andrej Karpathy once called “vibe coding”—a kind of low-friction, AI-driven software creation process that’s reshaping how code gets written.
[…]
But OpenAI had a problem: Microsoft.
The tech giant—one of OpenAI’s largest investors with over $13 billion poured in since 2019—has rights to much of OpenAI’s IP under a sweeping 2023 agreement. That includes access to model weights, code, and yes, any IP OpenAI gains through acquisitions. In this case, Windsurf’s technology would fall into Microsoft’s lap by default.
That didn’t sit well with OpenAI—or Windsurf. Mohan reportedly made it clear he didn’t want Microsoft anywhere near the startup’s tech, given GitHub Copilot’s position as a direct competitor.

Hayden Field (via Hacker News):

OpenAI’s deal to buy Windsurf is off, and Google will instead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf’s R&D employees and bring them onto the Google DeepMind team, Google and Windsurf announced Friday.
Mohan and the Windsurf employees will focus on agentic coding efforts at Google DeepMind and work largely on Gemini. Google will not have any control over nor a stake in Windsurf, but it will take a non-exclusive license to some of Windsurf’s technology.

Sheel Mohnot:

One oddity of prediction markets: the fine print matters.

Polymarket had a contract on whether OpenAI would acquire Windsurf before August. They didn’t, but they announced an acquisition, so the market still resolved as “yes.”

Dave Pack (via Dare Obasanjo):

Talked to a senior employee at windsurf and current employees are getting no pay out and are left with shell of a company to “run”. All the cash is going to founders and preferred equity holders.

The Iconfactory vs. AI

Sean Heber:

ChatGPT and other AI services are basically killing @Iconfactory and I’m not exaggerating or being hyperbolical.
First Twitter/Elon killed our main app revenue that kept the lights on around here, then generative AI exploded to land a final blow to design revenue.

Pieter Omvlee:

They’ve been such a staple of the Mac indie scene that I can’t imagine them going away. At Sketch we do all our design in-house but if we weren’t, they’d have been the first at who’s doors I’d be knocking.

I would have assumed they’d be booked solid this summer, with all the design work necessitated by Apple’s announcement of Liquid Glass. I’m sorry to hear that’s not the case. If you need your icons refreshed for the 26 cycle, here’s your chance to work with some of the best designers in the business.

Eric Schwarz:

I think what’s especially disheartening and frustrating is that AI-generated “design” is taking over and seen by bean counters as “good enough” even though it lacks humanity and skill. Anyone with an eye for detail will notice flaws or an uncanniness, no matter how “perfect” it is.

Christian Tietze:

In preparation of macOS Tahoe, is a design resistance movement on the horizon?
Like, I don’t want to be part of the “icon jail evasion. Can we play within the jail?

Previously:

LisaGUI

Andrew Yaros (via Marcus Mendes, Hacker News):

LisaGUI is a “web OS” - a website that mimics the look, feel, and functionality of an operating system. More bluntly, it’s a giant JavaScript program which fully recreates the Apple Lisa’s user interface from scratch (to the best of my ability). The Lisa was Apple’s first computer with a graphical user interface (known as the Lisa Office System, or “LOS”).
[…]
Aside from Gulp.js, which I use as a simple build tool to produce a minified JS file, no third party libraries or frameworks are utilized. LisaGUI contains no code from the Lisa Office System’s source code (or any code written by Apple), and doesn’t utilize any component of any emulator, like LisaEm or IDLE.

Previously:

History JavaScript Lisa Web

Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android

Local Mess (via Dan Goodin):

We disclose a novel tracking method by Meta and Yandex potentially affecting billions of Android users. We found that native Android apps—including Facebook, Instagram, and several Yandex apps including Maps and Browser—silently listen on fixed local ports for tracking purposes.
These native Android apps receive browsers’ metadata, cookies and commands from the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts embedded on thousands of web sites. These JavaScripts load on users’ mobile browsers and silently connect with native apps running on the same device through localhost sockets. As native apps access programatically device identifiers like the Android Advertising ID (AAID) or handle user identities as in the case of Meta apps, this method effectively allows these organizations to link mobile browsing sessions and web cookies to user identities, hence de-anonymizing users’ visiting sites embedding their scripts.
This web-to-app ID sharing method bypasses typical privacy protections such as clearing cookies, Incognito Mode and Android’s permission controls. Worse, it opens the door for potentially malicious apps eavesdropping on users’ web activity.

Jorge García Herrero (via Hacker News):

Meta faces simultaneous liability under the following regulations, listed from least to most severe: GDPR, DSA, and DMA (I’m not even including the ePrivacy Directive because it’s laughable).

[…]

The Pixel script in your browser tries to send information to the Facebook/Instagram app that’s “listening” in the background.
It uses a technique called WebRTC, normally used for voice or video calls (like Zoom or Google Meet), but here it’s being used to secretly transmit data between the browser and the app.
Additionally, a technical trick called “SDP Munging” allows the browser to insert data (like the _fbp cookie identifier) into the WebRTC “initial handshake” message.

What they’ve done here may not have broken any laws, but there certainly should be laws against it. And in terms of simple common sense, the entire elaborate scheme only exists to circumvent features in Android meant to prevent native apps from tracking you while you use your web browser.

The difference between targeted advertising and spyware is there is no difference.

After Girish, et al., disclosed this behaviour, Meta’s apps ceased tracking users with this method, and Goodin said Yandex will also stop.

Antitrust Apple Digital Markets Act (DMA) European Union iCloud Photo Library iOS iOS 18 iPadOS iPadOS 18 Lawsuit Legal

I’ll note that among the so-called “interoperability” requirements the European Commission is demanding of iOS is for third-party apps to run, unfettered, in the background, because some of Apple’s own first-party software obviously runs in the background.

I think the problem is the IPC, not the running in the background. The user should have control over whether apps can open up ports for listening and whether Web sites can connect to 127.0.0.1.

Every one of the sites that includes these tracking scripts is complicit to some extent in the theft of hundreds of millions of Android users’ web browsing privacy.

Andrew Abernathy:

This sort of bullshit is why I use the web instead of native apps from Meta/Facebook/Instagram.

Previously:

Careless People

Android Digital Markets Act (DMA) Exploit Facebook GDPR iOS iOS 18 Meta Privacy Yandex

10 Comments

Friday, July 11, 2025

Apple vs. the Law

James Heppell (via Hacker News):

A week ago today I had the pleasure of attending both the Apple and Google DMA compliance workshops in Brussels. More detailed articles on the questions and answers, technical and legal analysis etc will be published over at the OWA blog, where we’ve just done the first write-up on the Google part. Here though I’d like to focus more on my own experience and personal opinions, and how I feel about some of the gatekeepers’ approach to the law…
[…]
John and I asked a couple questions on Apple’s process, specifically on why the absolute best tracker system they could come up with in ~6 months was a link to a static, once-a-week-updated PDF, hidden behind an Apple developer account. They assured us it was all that they could do in time to meet the EC’s specification, ignoring the part asking why they didn’t simply use GitHub or Bugzilla like in their other projects.
[…]
Roderick asked about Apple’s absurd requirement that anyone who wants to ship their own browser engine has to release it as a new app, and so re-acquire all their users. Mike from CODE (Coalition for Open Digital Ecosystems - 13 members including Google, Opera, Qualcomm, Meta) asked why Apple doesn’t provide a system prompt to switch default browsers, and why they’ve placed so many onerous contractual requirements around launching an alternative engine.
[…]
The TLDR is users with “Age Restrictions” parental controls (11-15% of EU users) can only use Safari. All browsers - including Safari - get a 17+ rating on iOS. Which makes no sense, as the separate “Web Content Restrictions” manages all web content on iOS. […] I followed up asking Apple why they don’t allow web developers outside the EU to test 3rd party browser engines on iOS, bringing up their own point that EU iOS will “experience unique vulnerabilities and bugs”, and so it’s crucial that all web devs serving EU users can test the browser engines currently unique to it, to not put them and their users at a disadvantage compared to Safari.

Apple apparently accused multiple groups who have nothing to do with Spotify of receiving funding from them.

Something which was very hypocritical of Apple is that, despite making a lot of noise about some of their competitors being in the room, and insisting on all questions having a person and organisation, there were a lot of people attending who were paid to be there by Apple. Last year the EC did an investigation into this after the workshop, found there were a lot of hidden links, and so said that this year everybody had to disclose if a gatekeeper or other relevant party funded them. Unfortunately though it wasn’t always enforced. The most notable example of a pro-Apple group was the App Association
[…]
John brought up data portability, how Apple Photos doesn’t do proper photo export - except with Google Photos, and how it doesn’t allow users to choose which cloud provider they want to store their data with.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-14): Saagar Jha (via Jeff Johnson):

I attended the workshop remotely (one of my questions is in the recording, if you watched it) and IMO it was mostly a waste of time. I didn’t even stick around past the App Store section. Partly because it was daytime CEST but mostly because the format was awful. Apple would spend half the time talking about how the EU was forcing them to make their OS worse and then the EC thought it was a good idea to make Q&A a batched thing so Apple could just talk for five minutes about none of the questions instead of actually being forced to answer anything. I was thinking the EC would ask questions like why nobody actually used the provisions that Apple so generously provided third party developers (obviously, because Apple designed them to be unworkable) but they mostly just stayed silent and let the Apple lawyers talk the entire time :(

Apple File System (APFS) Backup Bug Datacide Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Solid-State Drive (SSD) Storage Time Machine

Using “tmutil associatedisk” With APFS Destinations

I recently got a new SSD on Prime Day to replace one of my main hard drives. As this drive was included in Time Machine, I wanted the SSD to “adopt” the hard drive’s backup history. This way I could avoid recopying lots of data that was already backed up, which would also require pruning older snapshots.

When you get a new Mac and want to adopt the old Time Machine backup, you want tmutil inheritbackup. When you keep the same Mac but get a new source drive, you want tmutil associatedisk.

The command is documented as:

tmutil associatedisk [-a] mount_point snapshot_volume

The -a tells it to find all the snapshots for that volume on the destination, not just the specific one that you pointed it to.

mount_point is just the source volume’s path (in /Volumes, not the device path).

snapshot_volume is the destination within your Time Machine backup. The example shows this as being within the Backups.backupdb folder, but there’s no such folder when using an APFS destination. My first thought was to drag the latest snapshot from Finder into Terminal:

sudo tmutil associatedisk -a /Volumes/Aux /Volumes/.timemachine/C2E8322E-A7EA-44F8-904F-3232671E1412/2025-07-11-091237.backup/2025-07-11-091237.backup/Aux

This does not work. Instead, you need to find the path using Terminal:

sudo tmutil associatedisk /Volumes/Aux /Volumes/TM\ 7/2025-07-11-091237.previous/Aux

It’s important not to have any trailing slashes. And, also, it will fail if you use -a with an APFS destination. But I guess that’s OK because there’s only one .previous folder to point it at, anyway, and APFS itself should know the chain of parent snapshots…

Previously:

Update (2025-07-15): associatedisk worked with one of my drives. However, with another one, it didn’t. I first thought it was working because the amount of data copied and the estimated percent remaining looked right, but it ended up recopying all of the data, and deleting all my old snapshots in order to do that. In the end, the backup failed, as has happened to me with several other APFS Time Machine backups recently. It claimed there wasn’t enough space even though all the snapshots had been pruned and the destination drive was almost twice as large as the sources.

Update (2025-07-21): I rotated backups and again did associatedisk, but again the incremental backup took much longer and copied much more than expected. fs_usage showed that it was indeed copying files from the old drive, and it looks to me like they hadn’t actually changed. At this point, I doubt that associatedisk actually works.

2 Comments

macOS Tahoe’s Folder Icon Customization

William Gallagher:

It’s not like it’s going to take you long, since there are just two elements to this:
Changing a folder’s color
Adding either an icon or an emoji to the folder
In this case, icons and emoji don’t sound all that different — whichever you choose, you end up with a symbol appearing on the folder. But there are differences, and at the least, having a choice of both gives you scope to go crazy with customizing everything.

Sam Henri Gold:

Figured out how to apply any arbitrary SF Symbol to a folder in Tahoe.
xattr -w 'com.apple.icon.folder#S' '{"sym":"camera.viewfinder"}' some/folder/here

This also works with private symbol names.

also because emoji labels are just handled as strings, you can put anything in the emoji config thing.

For example:

xattr -w 'com.apple.icon.folder#S' '{"emoji":"HIMOM"}' some/folder/here

Previously:

Emoji Extended Attributes Icons Mac macOS Tahoe 26 SF Symbols

Apple Wins Dismissal in Payments Conspiracy Lawsuit

Hartley Charlton:

Apple has successfully secured the dismissal of a federal lawsuit accusing it of conspiring with Visa and Mastercard to suppress competition in the payments network industry and inflate merchant transaction fees (via Reuters).
[…]
The plaintiffs claimed that Visa and Mastercard made ongoing payments to Apple, described as “a very large and ongoing cash bribe,” to ensure Apple would not build its own rival payment network.
[…]
The court concluded that the plaintiffs had failed to provide sufficient factual allegations to support their claims, saying that they were largely circumstantial and speculative. The judge noted that Apple’s existing agreements with Visa and Mastercard included language that explicitly preserved Apple’s right to compete with them.

I’ve thought all along that the 0.15% is a really sweet deal for Apple. As far as I’m aware, Google Wallet gets 0%. Of course they wouldn’t put the no-compete stuff in writing, just as the Safari agreement with Google doesn’t specifically prohibit Apple developing its own search engine. In both cases, it probably doesn’t make sense for Apple to do it, and they’re getting paid—one oligopoly to another—for the status quo, so why bother?

Previously:

Apple Apple Pay Business Lawsuit Legal Payments

Thursday, July 10, 2025

Almost Fired for Color Picker Poetry

John Calhoun:

It was frankly a thing I liked about working for Apple in those days. The engineers were the one’s driving the ship. As I said, I wrote an HSV picker because it was, I thought, a more intuitive color space for artists. I wrote the HTML color picker because of the advent of the web. And I wrote the crayon picker because it seemed to me to be the kind of thing Apple was all about: HSL, RGB — these were kind of nerdy color spaces — a box of crayons is how the rest of us picked colors.

[…]

And it turned out, to my surprise, Apple shipped all the color pickers. No marketing or design person ever asked for them. But we, engineers, were not only programmers, we were also users and often had an intuitive sense of what other Macintosh users wanted. We knew what we wanted anyway. I was creating the things I would have wanted.

[…]

It seemed like a humble and discreet Easter egg. I mistakenly assumed the poem was in the public domain but, regardless, a single stanza would seem to me to be “fair use”. Still, it should have been obvious to me that Apple Computer Inc. was going to be very much copyright-violation averse.

[…]

A few other Easter eggs that had nothing to do with intellectual property rights were in the color pickers as well. In time, the crayons in the crayon color picker would appear worn down or broken. This had no effect on the functionality of the color picker but was kind of … cute? I believe the crayons were all restored though on Christmas Day (a new box of crayons!).

Apple Color Copyright Easter Eggs Firing History Mac System 7

Mac Automation With a Tiny Game Controller

Bluetooth Hardware Karabiner-Elements Keyboard Shortcuts Mac macOS 15 Sequoia

I never expected my game controller obsession to pay automation dividends, but it did last week in the form of the tiny 16-button 8BitDo Micro. For the past week, I’ve used the Micro to dictate on my Mac, interact with AI chatbots, and record and edit podcasts. While the setup won’t replace a Stream Deck or Logitech Creative Console for every use case, it excels in areas where those devices don’t because it fits comfortably in the palm of your hand and costs a fraction of those other devices.
[…]
As I suspected, the 8BitDo Micro works just as well with any app that supports keyboard shortcuts as it does with Anki. What’s curious, though, is that even though medical students have been using the Micro and Zero 2 with Anki for several years and 8BitDo’s website includes a marketing image of someone using the Micro with Clip Studio Paint on an iPad, word of the Micro’s automation capabilities hasn’t spread much. That’s something I’d like to help change.
[…]
The buttons on 8BitDo’s controllers can be remapped, like on many others. 8BitDo’s free Ultimate Controller app, which is available on the App Store for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, can remap every button on the Micro. The Micro doesn’t have thumbsticks, but it does have a D-pad; A, B, X, and Y buttons; four other face buttons; and L, R, L2, and R2 buttons. That makes for a total of 16 programmable buttons, an impressive number for such a tiny device.

Update (2025-07-11): Matt Sephton:

An obvious choice for a device with multiple buttons is a game controller. In modern macOS it’s easy to pair Nintendo Switch controllers, and the JoyCon (left or right) is an ideal candidate for a hand-held shortcut device. Xbox and PlayStation controllers can also be paired but they are much larger. Wired or wireless controllers will work.

You can even use a Wii remote using an adapter like the Mayflash MAGIC-NS Lite. Or you might use more esoteric controllers with an adapter from Robert Dale Smith’s Controller Adapter store. In fact, I use one of his adapters to get an old Sony Jog Controller to act like a GameCube controller, which I then map to keyboard shortcuts using the methods below. The sky’s the limit!

Artificial Intelligence Business Intel NVIDIA

Nvidia’s Market Cap

Samantha Subin and Kif Leswing (via Hacker News):

Nvidia stock rose on Wednesday lifting the company’s market cap briefly past $4 trillion for the first time as investors scooped up shares of the tech giant that’s building the bulk of the hardware for the generative artificial intelligence boom.
[…]
Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, surpassing Microsoft and Apple, both of which hit the $3 trillion mark before Nvidia.

These numbers are hard to comprehend. Nvidia is now worth about the same as Apple plus half of Meta—or, alternatively, Alphabet plus Meta—and it’s doubled in the last year.

Mike Rogoway:

New CEO Lip-Bu Tan told employees this week that he doesn’t consider Intel among the leading chip companies, a bracing message as the chipmaker began expansive layoffs in the face of severe technical and financial challenges.
[…]
Customers are giving Intel failing grades, Tan said, and the company is too far behind to catch up with industry leader Nvidia in developing technology to train artificial intelligence.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-11): See also: Kirk McElhearn, Trung Phan, and Dare Obasanjo.

Update (2025-07-14): Jeff Johnson:

NVIDIA net income the past 12 months is a stunning $77 billion on only $149 billion revenue.

In comparison, Apple had $97 billion net income, but that required $400 billion revenue.

Apple “services” revenue is pure profit, but for NVIDIA the entire company is almost pure profit.

Artificial Intelligence Google Gemini/Bard Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming Proxyman Xcode

How to Use Google Gemini in Xcode 26 Beta

Carlo Zottmann:

Google offers an OpenAI-compatible API for Gemini, and while working, it is not what Xcode expects in terms of URL layout. In Xcode’s LLM provider config, the custom “URL” parameter is the API’s base URL up to but not including the v1/ path segment, e.g. https://api.openai.com/ instead of the full https://api.openai.com/v1/. When making calls to the provider later on, Xcode will automatically append the endpoint path (e.g. v1/models etc.) to that URL.

Now, the Gemini URL structure breaks with the v1/ convention: its URL is https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/openai/ instead of https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1/. You can see why this might be a problem.

So here’s how to set up both Xcode and a proxy app to use Google’s offerings.

Previously:

Archaeology Code Signing Developer Tool Disk Image Interface Builder JSON Mac Mac App Mach-O macOS 15 Sequoia macOS Tahoe 26 Notarization Security Scoped Bookmarks

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Archaeology 1.3

Mothers Ruin Software:

macOS uses many different binary file formats.
Some — like binary property lists — have broad tool support and are relatively easy to inspect…
Some — like X.509 certificates, configuration and provisioning profiles or App Store receipts — use standard formats, but lack macOS-native inspection tools, or only have command-line tools that can be awkward to use…
Some — like compiled nibs, keyed archives, code signatures or URL bookmarks — use Apple-proprietary formats that are not documented and that have no (public) inspection tools.
Even a file in a well-known format often contains data blobs encoded in one of the other formats — such as an app’s preferences property list, which might contain URL bookmarks or an archive of serialized objects.
Archaeology gives you a way to dig into a number of these binary files.

This is a delightful app from the developer of Apparency and Suspicious Package. Aside from what’s mentioned above, it supports more formats such as notarization tickets and Mach-O binaries (showing embedded Info.plist files, SDK info, and linked libraries).

Previously:

Jeff Williams Retiring as Apple’s COO

Apple (MacRumors, 2, Hacker News):

Jeff Williams will transition his role as chief operating officer later this month to Sabih Khan, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations, as part of a long-planned succession. Williams will continue reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook and overseeing Apple’s world-class design team and Apple Watch alongside the company’s Health initiatives. Apple’s design team will then transition to reporting directly to Cook after Williams retires late in the year.

Benjamin Mayo:

I like how the press release says this succession is long planned, and yet they aren’t ready to say who is taking over Apple Watch and Health initiatives.

Also, Cook (himself set to retire in the foreseeable future) has so many direct reports now lol.

What’s intriguing about the announcement is the design part — a functional area where, especially on the software side, Apple’s current stature is subject to much debate. While Williams is staying on until “late in the year” to continue his other responsibilities — Watch, Health, and serving as the senior executive Apple’s design teams report to — Khan isn’t taking over those roles when Williams leaves. And so by the end of the year, Apple’s design teams will go from reporting to Williams to reporting directly to Tim Cook.

I’ve long found it curious, if not downright dubious, that Apple’s design leaders have reported to Williams ever since it was announced in 2019 (the very same day that Khan was promoted to SVP of operations) that Jony Ive would be stepping down as chief design officer and leaving Apple to found the (as-yet-unnamed) design firm LoveFrom. Williams had no background in design at all.

[…]

I’m of the mind that, in hindsight, it was a mistake for Jony Ive to bring HI (software human interface design) under the same roof as ID (hardware industrial design). That arrangement made sense for Ive’s unique role in the company, and the unique period in the wake of Steve Jobs’s too-young demise. But it might have ultimately made Ive more difficult to replace than Steve Jobs.

I don’t think it ever made sense because it doesn’t seem like Ive really understood software design. And Alan Dye’s background is in advertising and web/print design.

We’ve come to accept the myth that there’s such a thing as “design” in the abstract, as if some one person were qualified to design anything and everything. That’s ridiculous and nothing but a product of Jony Ive’s hubris.

Mark Gurman:

Apple didn’t announce what will happen to the Watch and Health teams but here’s the likely outcome: Apple never said this but Watch HW was already given to Ternus years ago. You can bet watchOS and health software will go to Federighi. Fitness+ will obviously go to Services.

M.G. Siegler:

Williams joined Apple in 1998 (from IBM), the year after Steve Jobs returned. The same year Cook joined (from Compaq, though he had also been at IBM for a dozen years before that).
Khan joined Apple in 1995, which was obviously before Jobs returned.
The only members of the leadership team that have been at Apple longer are: [Cue, O’Brien, and Joswiak]
[…]
It’s certainly possible that Apple is going to try to spend these next five months finding that design executive. It’s also possible that they promote Dye to such a role – he did have one of the most prominent slots at the WWDC keynote this year thanks to “Liquid Glass” – though as Gruber notes, in hindsight, it may have been a mistake to have one person overseeing hardware and software design – something that only happened because Ive stepped in on the software side after Scott Forstall was forced out in 2012.

Previously:

Update (2025-07-10): John Gruber:

Design — software at least — has already become a concern in the six years since Jony Ive left Apple, which is when design teams started reporting to Williams. And, frankly, it’s been a concern for many of us ever since Scott Forstall was fired and Ive put all design — HI and ID — under the same roof.

Apple did announce yesterday that after Williams fully retires at the end of this year, design leaders will start reporting to Tim Cook directly. Left unsaid in Apple’s announcement is who will take over Williams’s roles overseeing Apple Watch and Health. I presume Watch will simply fall under John Ternus (SVP hardware) and that Sumbul Desai, who already has the title VP of health and frequently (always?) appears during the Health segments of Apple keynotes, will report directly to Cook.

Alan Dye Apple Apple Watch Design iOS iOS 26 Jonathan Ive Liquid Glass Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Tim Cook watchOS watchOS 26

Apple ID Apple Password Manager iTunes Connect Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Passkeys Safari Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) Web Xcode

Downloading Xcode With a Passkey

When I went to download the new Xcode beta, I again ran into an annoying Safari behavior, which seems to be specific to Apple’s sites. It pops up an Apple Account sheet offering to sign me in. But it can only sign in with my personal Apple ID, not my developer one. I have to click the blue text “button” to pick a different account, and there’s no keyboard shortcut for that.

Signing into Apple sites normally requires Apple’s special 2FA, which doesn’t work with Safari autofill. So I thought I’d try the Sign in with Passkey button to log in with one step. This should be an ideal use case: Apple’s browser, Apple’s Web site, Apple’s password manager. The first time I clicked the button it showed a progress spinner, and nothing happened for 30 seconds. I reloaded the page and tried again. After 5 seconds, it showed a Sign In sheet, but like the first one it wanted to use my personal Apple ID. I clicked Other Sign in Options, but that only let me use a passkey from a different mobile device or a hardware key.

I thought it was supposed to let me choose from multiple passkeys. Maybe the problem is that I don’t have one for my developer account? I opened the Passwords app, and the Passkeys section showed nothing for Apple. How could this be when account.apple.com does let me sign into my personal account with a passkey? I’m losing hope for the new credentials exchange feature if the app doesn’t even show all of my passkeys.

It seems like I need to create a passkey for my developer account, but I don’t see how to do that. I see nothing about passkeys at account.apple.com or at developer.apple.com/account/. The documentation is almost comically unhelpful:

From anywhere on the Apple Developer website, click Account on the top right.
Sign in to your Apple Account.

Stack Exchange has no idea, saying only that passkeys are created automatically.

Previously:

7 Comments

Xcode 26 Beta 3

Apple:

Xcode 26 beta 3 includes SDKs for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, tvOS 26, watchOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, and visionOS 26.

This is the only change that’s noted as being in beta 3. Why can’t Apple write release notes that tell us what’s actually new in this build?

Ryan Ashcraft:

The Beta 3 SDK adds support for Glass.clear, which looks like the glass material used more commonly throughout the system in Beta 1 and 2 of iOS 26. Less contrast, more glass-like.

Xcode Releases:

The download page says it requires macOS 15.4 or later, but Xcode’s Info.plist says it requires 15.5. The Info.plist is always correct.
[…]
Most importantly, #Xcode 26.0 beta 3 sees the return of the “BETA” badge on its app icon!

Malin Sundberg:

Whoop whoop! Now we can finally find a workaround for this 😬

John Siracusa:

I still can’t create a release build of my app in Xcode 26 beta 3 on Tahoe beta 3 due to a “swift-frontend” error. After three betas of this, I’m starting to worry that I won’t be able to release an updated build for Tahoe!

It looks like beta 3 may have fixed a problem I was having with Swift Testing, but it also brought a flurry of SourceKit crashes when editing code.

Sean Heber:

My Xcode beta 3 installed yesterday seemingly forgot I had the iOS 26 SDK installed today and I had to reinstall it.
Kinda feels like nothing on my computer is mine, ya know? It’s all being managed externally by unknown entities and changes on a whim. Can’t trust anything to just…. be left alone.

Previously:

Xcode 26 Beta 2

Update (2025-07-10): Matt Gallagher:

Following up on this: all but one of the hundreds of these warnings I had in Xcode 26 beta 2 are gone in Xcode 26 beta 3.

I think a Swift bug failing to detect a Task was MainActor isolated was the biggest cause.

Update (2025-07-11): Howard Oakley:

If you’re building apps using Xcode 26 beta on macOS 26 beta, you should beware of the combination of their third betas. If you’re unlucky like me, you’ll discover those shiny new app icons generated by Icon Composer no longer work on any older version of macOS. This is mentioned in the Xcode 26 b3 release notes, and the workaround given is “none”.

Update (2025-07-22): Frank Illenberger:

I’ve just spent an hour getting Xcode 26b3 to open my project on macOS Tahoe without crashing.
[…]
It shoes that while Xcode accessing the NSSpellChecker singleton for the first time on a background thread, some AppKit UI code is executed. This then runs into an assertion which protects against UI code running on non-main threads.
[…]
But I found a way to work around this issue: I created a new Xcode project with an RTF file and performed a spell-check in its editor.

Sam Rowlands:

Another thing I don’t like about Tahoe is the version number it returns. It should return 16 for lower SDKs and 26 when using the 26 SDK, just like what Apple did with macOS 11 (returned 10.16 if not using the 11 SDK).

This seemed to work in previous Xcode 26 betas, but it’s broken in beta 3.

Simon B. Støvring:

This took me by surprise. The code generated by the @Observable macro in Xcode 26 beta 3 is noticeably different from what Xcode 16 produced.

Previously:

Xcode 26 Beta 4

Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming Xcode

Barijaona Ramaholimihaso:

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Vienna RSS at 20

After some minor fiddling, I got the initial version of Vienna running on VirtualBox on my retro hack.
[…]
Founding father of Vienna, Steve contributed mostly from 2004 to 2008, made a short comeback in 2010, and is definitely at the root of Vienna’s ethics: making a clean, spartan, and highly useful app.
He almost never publicized his bio, but I finally found an “About me” (he was from the UK and a software developer working in the US for Microsoft Business Solutions), and some reflexions on writing software : part 2 and part 1.
[…]
While I was finishing the Google Reader support started by Adam Hartford and Salvatore Ansani, Google announced it would end Google Reader… That is far from being the single reason why Vienna 3 had 20 beta versions and 9 release candidate versions before being released in November 2014!

Previously:

Anniversary Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Open Source RSS Vienna RSS

Hearing Aids vs. AirPods Pro

Steve Hayman:

Apple has spent a ton of money getting AirPods Pro approved by the FDA and other regulators to work as over-the-counter hearing aids, including providing a hearing test app on the iPhone that tweaks the audio profile on the headphones. This feature is available in a whole lot of countries, not yet including Canada, but, um, … I don’t work there any more so I guess I can say “it’s not too hard to work around that.” So I’ve had my AirPods Pro 2 set up as hearing aids for a few months now and have been trying them sporadically for hearing assistance (and more frequently just for listening to music or podcasts or whatever.)
[…]
The hearing aids cost 25 times as much as AirPods Pro. Are they 25 times better? No. Maybe for some people. Not for me. AirPods might still be good enough in some situations. I have only mild hearing loss, so I’m probably on the edge of hearing aid utility here.
[…]
If you’ve got your AirPods in, it’s totally obvious to everyone, and they all assume you’re listening to music and not paying attention to them. Kind of a stigma there. Conversely, these hearing aids are pretty inconspicuous, especially because they match the colour of the wire to the colour of your hair.
[…]
I already miss the tight integration between AirPods and my phone. Apple is doing some proprietary Bluetooth things that these hearing aids can’t match. The hearing aids do let you answer phone calls or adjust volume by tapping a button, but they’re sure not as tightly integrated as AirPods+iPhone are.

Previously:

Accessibility AirPods Audio iOS iOS 18