Friday, September 11, 2026

Golden Gate Release Candidate

Juli Clover:

The release candidate is the final version of macOS Golden Gate that developers and beta testers will get before the software sees a public launch.

Joe Rossignol (Reddit):

Apple this week announced that macOS 27, also known as macOS Golden Gate, will be released to all users with a compatible Mac on Monday, September 14.

iOS 27, iPadOS 27, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27 will be released on the same day.

Jeff Johnson:

I would like to note two bugs that I reported during the beta period that remain unfixed in the release candidates, and barring a last minute miraculous reprieve, will remain unfixed in the public releases on Monday. This is disappointing, because I thought the point of the betas was for Apple to fix the bugs found by beta testers. While these two bugs are not destructive—do not involve data loss or security issues, for example—they nonetheless did not exist in iOS 26 and macOS 26, so in this respect, Apple’s updates are making their software worse for users.

[…]

The AppleScript run by the test app requires Automation permission, so macOS shows a permission prompt. […] It actually doesn’t matter whether you select Allow or Don’t Allow! […] Either way, just selecting something in the automation permission prompt seems to trigger the bug, causing macOS to wrongly consider the app to be running in the background.

Paul Kafasis:

Unfortunately, Apple’s forthcoming tvOS 27 and HomePod OS 27 updates contain a critical bug that prevents Apple TVs and HomePods from playing AirPlay streams sent by Airfoil. If your devices update to the OS 27 versions, Airfoil will no longer be able to stream to them.

Ron Elemans:

FB24067183 Changing selection in NSTableView by moving the mouse and holding down left button, does not work anymore[…]

Kevin C:

Font Book has been crashing since beta 4 when resizing the Inspector or Sidebar. This was a further degradation over a related bug in Tahoe. So far it seems specific to Font Book.

Previously:

Developing for iPhone Duo

Craig Hockenberry:

It looks like Xcode 27.1 is needed to test the iPhone Duo resizability - and that hasn’t been uploaded yet.

Jordan Morgan:

Cupertino and Friends™️ dropped six new videos over developing, designing, and crafting great apps for the nascent device:

  1. Design for iPhone Duo
  2. Prepare your app for iPhone Duo
  3. Raise the bar with iPhone Duo
  4. Strike a pose with adaptive layouts on iPhone Duo
  5. Leverage multiple displays and scenes on iPhone Duo
  6. Build a great camera experience for iPhone Duo

Nathan Manceaux-Panot:

In the Duo dev video, they describe how text buttons can’t be moved to the new vertical sidebar, as opposed to icon buttons.

I wonder if that’s one of the reasons Liquid Glass pushed hard for icon buttons, even though these are harder to understand; they make the vertical layout possible at all.

Nico Reese:

Totally confusing to me how the toolbar is ordered completely different between both modes here.

Dennis Oberhoff:

I think the problem with the iPhone Duo for developers is mostly that it does not create any new opportunities in the form of a new market or a new audience.

Previously:

Thursday, September 10, 2026

iOS 26.6.2 and iPadOS 26.6.2

Joe Rossignol (iOS/iPadOS release notes, no security, enterprise, no developer):

Apple today released iOS 26.6.2 with a fix for “an issue that prevents downloading a software update over a cellular connection.”

Previously:

Audio Intelligence

Apple:

Audio Intelligence is a brand-new class of Apple Intelligence features that use the microphones of Apple Watch, the power of Apple silicon, and on-device and cloud-based AI models to help you detect sounds, identify music, and stay present and engaged — all while protecting your privacy at every step.

Hartley Charlton:

  • Siri Recap: Uses ambient listening to generate high-level notes from conversations, such as takeaways from a team meeting or a parent-teacher conference, producing an Apple Intelligence-generated title, summary, and key points reviewable in the Siri app.
  • Live Rewind: Lets users “go back in time for 15 seconds,” transcribing and displaying what was just said in a conversation with a double press of the Digital Crown.
  • Shazam: Automatically identifies music playing nearby and surfaces the song title and artist on the Music Recognition widget in the Smart Stack.
  • Sound Recognition: Brings sound alerts to Apple Watch for users who are deaf or hard of hearing, listening for sirens, alarms, doorbells, a baby crying, and more, even when their iPhone isn’t nearby.

Lily Hay Newman:

Apple is emphasizing that all of them are built to prioritize privacy and security using the extensive infrastructure the company has developed to protect its other Apple Intelligence and Siri services. As more and more of these types of features debut, though, the audio intelligence announcements are a reminder that AI-powered tools are becoming increasingly universal in all areas of computing and life.

“These features do not create or store audio recordings, and raw audio used for processing is completely inaccessible to the operating systems, apps, the user, or Apple,” the company wrote in a report shared with WIRED.

[…]

Apple emphasizes that its on-device capabilities for Apple watches have expanded thanks to the company’s new S11 chips. The chips include a special memory-protected space that Apple calls the Secure Exclave. Designed specifically for sensor data, the exclave is an isolated buffer that is inaccessible to the rest of the operating system where Apple Watch can hold and process audio data in a protected space.

[…]

To try to mitigate blatant privacy violations, Apple says that the watch produces an audible chime when a watch owner initiates a Live Rewind transcript to alert other people in the area—even if it is on silent mode or paired with headphones. And the features are built to omit or filter out potentially identifying information about speakers. But the sheer scope and breadth of the tools is extremely noteworthy.

Zac Hall:

If you want to really take a deep dive on privacy and the new features, Apple has published an 11-page privacy paper that goes even further.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-11): Dr. Drang:

Ron Huang introduced a couple of features of the Series 12 and Ultra 4 that struck me as both disturbing and possibly illegal. They certainly seem at odds with Apple’s commitment to privacy.

[…]

I’m sure Apple will argue that there’s no privacy issue because the recordings aren’t being saved. But if there’s a transcription, isn’t that a type of saving?

And then there’s the question of legality. A great variety of law, both in the United States and across the world, concerns the recording of electronic and in-person conversations. I’m sure Apple has considered this, but I have to think some jurisdictions will frown on Live Rewind. If Apple has to defend it, that’s fine. What’s one more squadron of lawyers to Apple? But if an Apple Watch owner has to defend a transcription made innocently—made with Apple’s encouragement, in fact—that seems like an unfair burden. Maybe Apple should indemnify all future Watch buyers from privacy-related legal action.

[…]

The hoops Apple jumped through to avoid certain words is pretty funny. […] You think your watch records the audio around you? No no no. The audio flows into the Secure Enclave, and flowing is definitely not recording because it’s a different word.

Juli Clover:

Live Rewind and other Audio Intelligence features do not generate audio recordings. Audio flows into the Secure Exclave, is processed, and then deleted.

According to Apple, Live Rewind text snippets “disappear permanently” from the Apple Watch approximately 30 seconds after the Apple Watch display dims, unless the info is saved to the Siri app.

Nick Heer:

But good luck explaining that to anyone around you after you read back an exact transcript of what they just said. Apple says they should be sufficiently notified Live Rewind is active because “an audible chime plays from the speaker on your Apple Watch, even if your Apple Watch is on silent or you have headphones connected”, plus the watch plays an animation, but it is not clear to me when this happens. It is not shown in Apple’s video. The impression I get is that Live Rewind is always running in the background and these notifications are only played after you double-click the Digital Crown to look at the text.

This feels like a glimpse of how Apple will market its inevitable wear-anywhere glasses product. I do not think it does enough to assuage privacy concerns. I think normal people will continue to react negatively when you tell them you have been passively recording them because, outside Silicon Valley, that is considered gross and invasive.

Saagar Jha:

I have to admit that the Siri Recap stuff all being “documented” using AI slop is really giving me confidence in the level of care that went into designing this feature

Matt Evans (Hacker News):

I’m frankly surprised Apple even went through with this feature at this time, considering the bans and backlash other AI-powered surveillance wearables are getting.

[…]

Apple is keen to evidence its trustworthiness, with on-device AI and Private Cloud Compute and an insistence that it doesn’t record or log audio and transcripts. However, if people think they’re being discreetly recorded without their permission, it’s possible Apple Watch wearers could experience their own slice of the abuse hurled at Meta Glasses wearers.

Dan Sugalski:

I… y’know, Betteridge’s law does, as always, apply.

Glenn Fleishman:

Given that Apple has to warn of this, it’s the surest sign the features shouldn’t be released in this form. Apple repeats the form of the warning I see regularly at my gym… but apparently it isn’t heeding it.

Jack Brewster:

Just called my HSA provider and upfront they say that calls may be recorded and transcribed by AI and then provide no means of opting out. So of course the person who finally answered says I have to give my social to verify my identity.

Health Sensing and Readyness

Apple (MacRumors):

The new Health Sensing System on Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 features new optical and electrical heart sensors, enabling higher-frequency heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) measurements, a new readiness score, a more comprehensive Vitals overview with the addition of HRV, and an updated Heart Rate app.

[…]

Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 introduce readiness — a new feature that analyzes a user’s recent activity, vitals, and sleep score, and then provides a single 0-10 score each day with a clear, actionable recommendation: Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready, or Go For It. This helps a user decide how to take on their workday or tackle their training plan.

[…]

A new Longevity tab analyzes a user’s longitudinal health data for deeper insights into heart health, sleep, mental wellbeing, movement health, metabolic health, hearing, and nutrition. The tab includes Health Age, a new feature that uses Apple Watch data to show users how their metrics are tracking relative to their chronological age, informed by the best available science.

Kuba Suder:

I wonder how much of this new health stuff will work with older / SE watches… probably not much?

Previously:

Apple Watch Ultra 4

Apple (video, MacRumors, Hacker News):

Engineered with the new Health Sensing System and S11 chip, Apple Watch Ultra 4 delivers the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable, higher-frequency heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) measurements, and a new readiness score to support athletes of all kinds. Apple Watch Ultra 4 also offers extended battery life to track outdoor workouts for up to 45 hours and the most accurate on-device GPS in a sports watch.

[…]

For everyday use, Apple Watch Ultra 4 now offers more than two days of battery life, up to 50 hours. In Low Power Mode, it offers up to 84 hours of battery life. Charging is now faster than ever: Just 15 minutes adds up to 18 hours of additional battery life.

[…]

The pedometer model has been completely redesigned with new machine learning algorithms and the S11 chip to provide more accurate distance measurements during indoor walk or run workouts, and more accurate step counts all day.

[…]

Apple Watch Ultra 4 starts at $799.

pilif:

The Ultra 2 was sold to me as the watch that can do Siri without network connectivity. That was very useful to me to leave reminders for stuff I think about while on a run without the phone.

3 years later, Apple releases the OS 27 versions and Siri got improved to the point where it can’t work on-device any more on said Ultra 2

So to get the feature back which I paid for and which was specifically used to sell me the device and which now has been taken away from me, I just have to… buy the next hardware generation?

And how long will that last before they decide to remove the feature again?

Does it still work offline in the EU?

Previously:

Apple Watch Series 12

Apple (video, MacRumors, Hacker News):

With the new Health Sensing System and S11 chip, Apple Watch Series 12 delivers higher-frequency heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) measurements, which power an enhanced suite of health and fitness features including a new readiness score.

[…]

Apple Watch Series 12 is designed to be as individual as the person wearing it and is available in an array of beautiful finishes, including dark bronze, black, light gold, and space gray aluminum, and radiant gold and natural titanium. It is also available in a stunning ceramic material, in pearl white and night blue. Aluminum models now feature Ceramic Shield 2, which is tougher than any smartwatch glass and 60 percent tougher than the Ion-X of previous aluminum models.

[…]

Apple Watch Series 12 continues to offer up to 24 hours of everyday battery life and now offers up to 10 hours of battery life during an outdoor workout — 25 percent more than the previous model.

[…]

Apple Watch Series 12 starts at $399.

It sounds like the S11 is the biggest update to the SOC in a while, but I haven’t seen much coverage of it yet.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-11): Joe Rossignol:

While the Apple Watch Series 12 with a 42mm case maintains a starting price of $399, the 46mm model has received a $20 price increase and now starts at $449.

Wednesday, September 9, 2026

iPhone Duo

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

Apple today introduced iPhone Duo, the first foldable iPhone. Opened, it is the thinnest iPhone ever, with a 7.6-inch inner display that provides a large canvas for viewing content, gaming, and multitasking, and a special nano-texture finish that minimizes glare for an unparalleled viewing experience. Closed, the 5.4-inch outer display delivers 90 percent of the screen area of iPhone 18 Pro in a compact, pocketable design. Both displays share the same aspect ratio, so content scales proportionally, ensuring visual continuity. iPhone Duo is built to last with an innovative hardware design and a precision hinge that offers a smooth, satisfying feel with every use.

[…]

The 48MP Fusion Ultra Wide camera — the same as on iPhone 18 Pro models — captures wider fields of view and enables macro photography, while the Center Stage front camera can automatically take photos and videos in any orientation, so users don’t have to rotate iPhone for landscape selfies. Upgraded Photographic Styles with new texture and grain controls let users further dial in their desired appearance and have more creative control over their photos. […] The foldable design with dual displays unlocks camera experiences that are not possible on any other iPhone.

[…]

Lock Screen controls, the Dock on the Home Screen, and app navigation and controls now appear on the side to maximize vertical space for content. When iPhone Duo is open, the display shows two Home Screen pages with Today View — a vertically scrolling list of customizable widgets — on the left. The status bar includes a circular, flexible system that nestles into the corner of the screen, showing relevant information like Wi-Fi, cellular strength, battery, and more.

[…]

The expansive display supercharges productivity, letting users do more at once with new multitasking capabilities. Split View allows users to open two apps side by side on iPhone for the first time.

[…]

iPhone Duo is available in star white and night sky, and starts at $1,999, or $83.29 per month for 24 months, in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB storage capacities.

I love the idea of the larger screen and how it can be balanced half-folded like a laptop, upside-down, or on the short side. The camera is better than I expected. The price is high enough to make me lose interest but perhaps not unreasonable if it can actually replace your iPad. My main concern is that the wide passport-style shape doesn’t look very comfortable to hold or keep in your pocket. It’s great that it can unfold, but the compact form factor is how most people will probably hold it most of the time. How well does the side Touch ID work if you’re left-handed?

Ron Elemans:

The release notes of Xcode 27 RC doesn’t contain the phrase ‘Duo’…

Apple:

Learn how to update and optimize your app for the foldable display of iPhone Duo. Discover how to opt in to the full-screen experience, adopt flexible layout best practices, and simulate poses in Device Hub with Xcode. Find out how to use size classes instead of interface orientation, handle asymmetric safe areas, and test Split View multitasking to ensure your app shines in all the ways people use it …

Steve Troughton-Smith:

This is like a whole new platform dropping with a month’s lead time

Louie Mantia:

The app design implications alone that are now basically forced onto app developers is nuts. Vision Pro was opt in but… all iPhone apps have to support this new device right? What a nightmare. Ugh, websites? New safe areas?

Greg Pierce:

ToolbarItem(placement: .somewhereDepends)

Steve Streza:

As an anecdotal data point, I’ve had my foldable OnePlus Open for over 2 and a half years. It’s fallen on tile and cement, been kicked accidentally, and swatted across a room by my cat. The hinge and screens have no problems.

Imthaz Ahamed:

Here’s the list of tech products that have the Duo moniker[…]

Previously:

Update (2026-09-11): Tim Hardwick:

In a joint interview with Tom's Guide and TechRadar, new Apple CEO John Ternus and marketing chief Greg Joswiak explained why the company waited until now to release a foldable, its design philosophy, and how it kept the iPhone Duo under wraps.

Kelly Guimont:

So here are my biggest unanswered questions from yesterday:

They said the iPhone Duo will fit in a pocket and is great for one handed operation.

Whose hands?

WHOSE POCKETS!?

Juli Clover:

The iPhone Duo does not include an Action Button, according to the device’s technical specifications page.

Tim Hardwick:

“The iPhone Duo’s under-display camera wasn’t placed in the top-right corner of the inner screen because of engineering difficulties,” said the leaker in a Weibo post this morning.

Dan Moren:

In the end, every Apple product—and probably every product—is a story of trade-offs. So, the thinking went, what will we give up to get the benefit of a small iPhone that unfolds into a larger iPhone?

The answer: some things, but less than I’d feared.

Dan Moren:

The company’s view is clear: the iPhone Duo, even when open in all of its glory, may evoke an iPad, but it is very much not an iPad.

[…]

It’s not an iPad that you fold up to put in your pocket. Or an iPad with a little iPhone glued to the front. It’s not running iPadOS. You won’t be installing or running iPad apps.

Tim Hardwick:

Apple’s iPhone Duo is the first iPhone that can run two apps side by side, but anyone expecting the sort of freedom that Split View offers on iPad might want to temper their expectations.

Matt Birchler:

I’ve been using Samsung’s latest folding phone that has a very similar form factor to what Apple just announced, and it’s gotten me accustomed to what the folding phone experience is. I personally very much like it, and it’s the most joy an Android phone has brought me in close to a decade. That said, I just watched Apple’s iPhone Duo unveiling, and it immediately made my Samsung phone feel behind the curve.

Rui Carmo:

Most of the UX we saw so far was both predictable and familiar to anyone who’s played with a Samsung Z Fold (Apple did not invent screen splits, app swaps or drag and drop), and so was the camera placement.

Ruffin Bailey:

Imagine an iPad mini in your pocket. This is my dream!

Well, you had me in the first half; not going to lie. It’s a dream, but not at $2200.

[…]

Now admittedly part of me doesn’t trust the IP68 rating Apple claims for the Duo.

Juli Clover:

Apple says that you need the Apple Pencil with USB-C for the iPhone Duo, so if you have the Apple Pencil Pro, you may be out of luck.

John Gruber:

Charging is the least of the problems. Because the Duo doesn’t have the magnetic attachment for Pencil Pro, there’s no way to even pair a Pencil Pro.

[…]

Imagine you own an iPad Pro and a Pencil Pro, and you love using the Pencil. You’ve always wanted to be able to use a Pencil with your iPhone. Now you can, if you buy a Duo. But you also have to buy a different Pencil — and then pack two different Pencils whenever you leave the house with both your iPad and iPhone. That’s ridiculous.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Also let’s not forget that the USB-C Apple Pencil doesn’t have pressure sensitivity, so the artists are already posting their disappointed reactions. I feel like this backs up that @markgurman report that they were planning on creating a bespoke Apple Pencil for the iPhone Duo that later got cancelled, and the USB-C version is the fallback.

Previously:

AirPods 5

Apple (video, MacRumors, Hacker News):

Apple today announced AirPods 5, delivering the industry’s best Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) in an open-ear design and even better sound quality, at an outstanding value. AirPods 5 feature an all-new multiport acoustic architecture and next-generation Adaptive EQ for even more immersive sound. Their breakthrough open-ear ANC removes up to 50 percent more external noise compared to AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation, alongside a more natural Transparency mode. Combined with Siri AI and iPhone, AirPods enable users to draw on their personal context and get answers with broad world knowledge, entirely hands-free. Users can also respond to Siri using head gestures, or use Live Translation to help connect across languages.

[…]

For users who want even more, AirPods 5 with Wireless Charging Case deliver great improvements to the AirPods experience. Force sensor with volume swipe arrives on AirPods 5, a first for the open-ear form factor, adding the ability to quickly adjust volume by swiping up or down on the stem.

Battery life is also improved, with up to five hours of playback with ANC on a single charge — one hour longer than AirPods 4 with ANC, thanks to a redesigned battery.

ANC is now available in the base model with the same $129 price, and the higher model is now $149 instead of $179.

Joe Rossignol:

Apple unveiled the first AirPods on September 7, 2016, meaning the iconic wireless headphones are now 10 years old. However, the AirPods did not launch until December that year.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-10): Ivan Pavlov:

AirPods 5 case not getting UWB for “Find My” precise location is a huge 👎️

iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max

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

Apple today announced iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, delivering the most advanced pro camera system in an iPhone, and huge leaps in battery life and performance. The new 48MP Fusion Main camera, now with variable aperture, brings creative control that wasn’t possible before, and new Pro controls let users customize their experience in the Camera app. Both models feature a smaller and even more useful Dynamic Island, as well as A20 Pro and a next-generation vapor chamber that together deliver the highest sustained performance in iPhone history.

[…]

Pro controls is a new customizable experience in the Camera app for iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max that makes it easier than ever for users to access their most used settings and introduces new options for manual control.

[…]

When a photo is taken in the new Reference mode, the camera captures signed sensor data that Private Cloud Compute develops into an unalterable reference image.

[…]

The upgraded Dynamic Island can now show three Live Activities at once[…]

[…]

eSIM-only models deliver up to 36 hours of video playback on iPhone 18 Pro and up to 45 hours of video playback on iPhone 18 Pro Max.

[…]

iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max will be available in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB storage capacities. Available in burgundy, glacier, silver, and black, iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199 or $49.95 per month, and iPhone 18 Pro Max starts at $1,299 or $54.12 per month for 24 months.

What I’m most happy to see is the ability to increase the depth of field. I don’t understand what Apple Reference Image is doing that it needs to be uploaded/offloaded to Private Cloud Compute.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-11): Hartley Charlton:

Pro Controls is built around the variable aperture on the new Main camera. Six laser-cut blades move smoothly between four aperture settings, and the Camera app can adjust aperture automatically based on depth of field and lighting, or users can take manual control themselves for what Apple calls “truly unique shots that weren’t possible before” on an iPhone.

Pro Controls works across both photo and video capture. It also introduces Smart Focus Tracking, which uses on-device AI models to lock onto a subject and maintain focus even if that subject briefly leaves the frame and comes back into view.

Tuesday, September 8, 2026

TestFlight Sort Order

Zac Hall (July):

Apple just updated TestFlight for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and more. The new version, 4.3, introduces “a search field to quickly find apps.”

John Gruber:

But when Apple implemented this change, they also changed the sort order of the list of apps you’re registered to test. Starting with this update, the list is sorted in alphabetical order. For as long as I can remember — perhaps dating back to when TestFlight was a third-party utility — the list was ordered by recency. The most recently updated app was at the top; the oldest at the bottom. Sorting by recency is really the only sort order that makes sense when you’re registered for dozens (or more) of apps. For me, trying to see if there is an update to a new app whose name starts with U now requires scrolling through over 100 items.

[…]

Also, if I consider the broader view, this really speaks to how much we’ve lost in terms of UI vocabulary. For decades, any list of items with names and dates could be sorted by name or date, ascending or descending, through the standard use of clickable headers at the top of every list. This was true for almost any such list in any app, on any platform — Mac, Windows, Unix, Amiga, whatever. This was just basic GUI stuff.

[…]

iOS in 2007 introduced a simplified UI vocabulary that omitted many of these baseline GUI features. That seemed like a reasonable trade-off for a device with a 3.5-inch display and fat fingers as the only input device. But then iOS became popular and Apple stopped bringing the richer UI vocabulary of the Mac to iOS[…]

And it starting bringing iOS limitations to the Mac.

It certainly shouldn’t have taken until July 2026 to be able to search in TestFlight, either. And being able to search, and see the results sorted alphabetically, shouldn’t mean you can no longer view the full list sorted by recency.

John Gruber:

Whatever is going on with this sort order, it isn’t affecting everyone. John Siracusa, amongst many others, has the same problem I do — his list is now alphabetical, and it’s driving him nuts too. Ryan Booker, amongst many others, still has his list sorted by recency.

John Gruber (September):

For both of us, yesterday’s v4.3.1 update fixes the bug.

But there should still be more sort options.

Previously:

Asahi Linux Supports M3 Macs

James Calligeros (Hacker News, Phoronix):

Asahi Linux now officially supports Macs with an M3 series SoC!

Linux support for M3 series SoCs and the machines powered by them is now in a state where almost everything supported on the M1 and M2 series machines just works. This includes the webcam, internal microphones, USB (up to the hardware limit of USB 3 10 Gb/s), hardware accelerated video decoding including support for AV1, WiFi, Bluetooth, and much more! The only major exceptions remain full DCP support and the GPU, which we will have more news on in the coming months.

[…]

Sleep currently does not work due to limitations with the firmware-provided framebuffer. This will be addressed once full DCP support is wired up for M3.

[…]

Although MacBooks and iMacs are supported (M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max), the Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) is not yet supported.

Previously:

NSToolbar in Golden Gate

John Brayton:

NSTrackingSeparatorToolbarItem adds a white band over the top of the leading split view panes when in full screen mode on macOS 27 [beta 3]. That white band appears to have the height of the toolbar.

He says this was fixed in Beta 4.

John Brayton:

macOS 27 developer beta 5 (26A5406e) introduces a bug that causes a white bar to appear over window content if the window’s toolbar has an NSTrackingSeparatorToolbarItem. I filed FB24266969 with Apple describing this.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

NSSearchToolbarItem has been screwed last minute in Catalyst with less than a month to go? Cool, cool…

That’s the kind of thing that can halt my release plans entirely 🫠

Ron Elemans:

Also screwed up in AppKit, with the macOS 27 beta 5 release.

Also, the titlebarSeparatorStyle setting seems to be ignored. Toolbars in beta 5 always have a separator line and a blurred slightly lighter background.

Weirdly enough Apple’s own apps don’t have these issues.

John Brayton:

In macOS 27 developer beta 5, search fields in toolbars (NSSearchToolbarItem instances) have their placeholder text, search strings, and magnifying glass icons vertically off-center. I reported this as FB24286690.

Mario Guzmán:

Beta 6 also fixes the UI issues with NSSearchToolbarItem. Elements are now re-aligned again, the recents menu is in a good position, and the focus ring is perfectly outlining the entire bounds. :D

Previously:

SwiftUI Toolbars

Natalia Panferova:

I thought it would be useful to have a single reference for the different ways we can style the toolbar in SwiftUI on macOS 26.

Phil Zakharchenko:

The toolbar id creates a stable customization domain, and each item id gives the framework something stable to persist when the user adds, removes, or reorders controls. This identifiability of toolbar items is a requirement for customization. Under the hood, when SwiftUI inevitably bridges your toolbar contents to NSToolbar, these identifiers will be directly translated to the NSToolbarItem’s itemIdentifiers.

As we continue the migration to a customizable toolbar, we are likely to encounter a few surprises related to this model.

[…]

After a closer inspection, and perhaps a few minutes of digging through the documentation, we come to the bleak realization: there is no customizable ToolbarItemGroup API.

[…]

The regular toolbar model and the customizable toolbar model overlap, but they are not interchangeable. You cannot give a ToolbarItemGroup an id, and you cannot place one directly inside toolbar(id:content:).

Majid Jabrayilov:

Let’s take a look at another example. This one is a bit tricky, because on macOS, you will get Action 1 in the top trailing position and the whole group of actions centered in the navigation bar. On iOS, you will get Action 1 pinned to trailing and all other items collapsed.

[…]

The final addition to the Toolbar API is the toolbarMinimizeBehavior view modifier allowing us to minimize toolbars while scrolling up or down. You can minimize tab, bottom, window and navigation bars with it.

With new modifiers SwiftUI gives us a much better balance between system-driven adaptation and explicit control. We can now decide which actions are more important, which items should always stay visible, which groups should intentionally live in the overflow menu, and how toolbars should react to scrolling.

Natalia Panferova:

iOS 27 includes a few smaller additions that make toolbar content easier to configure.

We can remove the default padding around an item whose content should extend to its edges with contentMarginsRemoved(_:)[…]

[…]

The status bar is now represented by ToolbarPlacement.statusBar, so its visibility can be controlled through the same toolbar API as other bars[…]

[…]

ForEach now conforms to ToolbarContent, which means we can generate toolbar items directly from a collection[…]

Natascha Fadeeva:

Together, the toolbar APIs let us express the importance of each action while SwiftUI continues to handle the toolbar’s layout across different sizes.

Previously:

Monday, September 7, 2026

McKinley 1.0

Amy Worrall (Mastodon):

McKinley is an all-in-one studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols. It bundles vector tools with knowledge of the SF Symbols structure, so you can edit one set of objects across multiple weights, sizes and colours. Import SVG or start from scratch, live preview your work using Apple’s own renderer, and export directly to Xcode, so you never need touch the SF Symbols app again!

[…]

Gone are the days of converting your strokes and shapes to outlined paths before export. Keep everything how you drew it, and let McKinley handle the output.

[…]

Link your project’s asset catalog to your McKinley document. Then when you make a change, hit the Sync keyboard shortcut and it’s immediately populated with your latest version.

[…]

McKinley is a Mac-assed Mac app: a native AppKit UI, Quick Look previews and thumbnails for your documents, a full AppleScript dictionary for batch work, and the whole user guide offline in Help.

$60, no subscription. It’s been a while since I had to deal with custom SF Symbols, but I remember it being a major pain. I haven’t had the chance to try McKinley with a real project yet, but it looks very well done. I love seeing a new app ship with documentation and extensive AppleScript support, including sample scripts that you can install right from its script menu.

Mario Guzmán:

The icon isn’t just a symbol but a whole artistic creation on a canvas.

Look at how your tools are on panels that could be individually opened on their own auxiliary window. I can’t stand the single-window, everything buried into a single-sidebar design we get these days.

Amy Worrall:

SF Symbols rendering does a surprising amount behind your back: it interpolates nine weights from three masters, applies optical size adjustments, resolves hierarchical opacity ladders, and changes some of this between OS releases. Any preview I rendered myself might diverge from the real thing in ways nobody would notice until the symbol was in an app looking subtly wrong. (Obviously I aim to get my canvas rendering with the exact same nuance as Apple’s renderer, but programmers are fallible and the fewer ways things can diverge, the better.)

Apple provides no API for “here’s my SVG, render it as a symbol”. For a normal app using a custom SF Symbol, the symbol is compiled from an Asset Catalog in Xcode into a .car file (a compiled asset catalog) at build time. But there’s no ‘build time’ when I want to update a preview in McKinley.

My workaround involves compiling your symbol into a .car file at runtime, on every edit, by patching bytes into a template, then loading that temporary .car file into McKinley via NSBundle.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-08): John Gruber:

I mean just look at McKinley. It’s both beautiful and quite obviously a serious professional tool.

Update (2026-09-11): Amy Worrall:

Anyone used any great implementations of dockable palettes? (Adobe’s don’t count, I don’t think they’re great!)

I’m not going to go back to sidebars, but some kind of options/flexibility might work, if it doesn’t get in the way!

Ternus and the App Store

Mark Gurman (tweet, John Gruber, Mastodon, 9To5Mac):

The Schiller exit is a bit more notable. Unlike Maestri, he still had a real job: The veteran executive ran the App Store and Apple Events. The App Store portion alone is no joke. It generates an estimated $30 billion a year and can be very challenging to manage. Apple’s app marketplace is loved by many consumers, but often criticized by developers and subjected to increasingly onerous regulations. It was a busy, all-encompassing gig and nowhere near a semiretirement.

[…]

But there’s a bit more to the story, I’m told. Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.

“Product guy” dreams about margins, forgets that people buy Apple hardware because of the software.

Tim Hardwick:

Apple admitted during its July earnings call that regulatory changes have started to weigh on its Services growth. Apple reported services revenue of $30.7 billion for the June quarter, a record for the period but short of the $31.4 billion that analysts expected.

Patrick Smith:

The hardware guys treating third-party developers like they do their suppliers has stifled Apple’s software platforms

M.G. Siegler:

I thought that perhaps with the move to John Ternus as CEO, it could also be an obvious time to revisit such policies. But I hadn’t considered that Apple could actually be in favor of making them more onerous.

See also: Mario Guzmán and Indie Simulator.

Previously:

Banktivity Document Model and Rewrite

Ian Gillespie (2025):

Banktivity has traditionally been what’s known as a document-based app. It lets you create and open independent files (or documents), each with its own data. In contrast, many modern apps—Music, Calendar, Photos—are library-based. These apps typically have a single window and a unified data set.

We’ve long appreciated the flexibility our document model provides. But in practice, most of our customers use only a single file. And more critically, this architecture makes it much harder to integrate Banktivity with the broader Apple ecosystem.

[…]

The shift from a document-based model to the new Organizer framework marks a major step forward for Banktivity. It simplifies how users interact with their data while laying the foundation for deeper system integration, background syncing, and a more seamless multi-device experience.

This follows MoneyWell also getting rid of the document model. From my perspective, it’s a shame. I prefer the flexibility of being able to have different accounts in different documents, choosing where to store the documents, and even splitting the same account across multiple documents for performance reasons.

Ian Gillespie (2025):

Ledgers contain an entire, independent set of accounts, categories, investments, goals, budget and so on. Many customers will only have one Ledger for the finances they manage. But we also know there is a good number of customers out there that manage finances across family members, non-profits and small businesses – for these customers, support for multiple Ledgers is crucial.

[…]

While UI is what you see, most of the hard work has been in the architecture. The Library framework — the backbone that replaces our old document system — is in place. That means we can now reliably connect your Banktivity User Account with all of your Ledgers, whether local or synced to the cloud.

Ian Gillespie:

Refactoring Banktivity from a document-based app into a library-style app was a significant undertaking. It changed some very fundamental assumptions in the code. Ledgers can now be opened and closed in the background, multiple windows and scenes can be active at once, and the Organizer has to coordinate local files, cloud sync, user accounts and application state in ways the old document architecture never had to.

Banktivity 10.0 laid the foundation for that transition. With Banktivity 10.1, a major focus has been strengthening that foundation. We’ve spent a lot of time simplifying the underlying architecture, eliminating race conditions and threading issues, and improving how ledgers are opened, closed and managed.

Previously:

Friday, September 4, 2026

.name Termination

Neil Fraser (via Hacker News):

Nearly twenty-five years ago I registered neil.fraser.name to provide a stable presence on the Internet. It has been the home of this website, my email address, and a server for APIs.

[…]

On 15 April 2026 Verisign proposed the destruction of the entire 3rd level of the ‘.name’ hierarchy in order to simplify their administration. Astonishingly, on 28 July 2026 ICANN approved this action.

[…]

One of my original reasons for choosing ‘.name’ was that it was run by Global Name Registry -- more specifically, it was not run by Verisign. I had history with Verisign and did not trust them. Unfortunately, Verisign acquired Global Name Registry a few years later.

He’s going to lose his site and e-mail address, and someone else could potentially register the domain and hijack his accounts.

Previously:

SoundSource Support Follow-Up

Chris Barajas:

To spread the word, we announced SoundSource 6 on our blog and sent a mass mailing to our customer list. We also took a more targeted approach, contacting both existing and potential customers who’d previously reached out to us with specific requests. We went back to those folks to let them know about the changes that would interest them most.

[…]

A real live person writes every email response our support team sends, and that human touch takes time. The process is helped along by text snippets, replies that we write once and then reuse and adapt to answer common questions.

[…]

To decide if an email should be sent to a customer, we checked Help Scout’s conversation history, as well as our own custom app for their order history. For example, if someone requested several features across different emails, we’d pick the one that was most impactful, then delete other drafts to avoid inundating them with multiple messages.

Previously:

UK App Tracking Transparency Lawsuit

Reuters:

Apple is facing a £2 billion ($2.7 billion) London lawsuit brought on behalf of app developers over its app ​tracking rules, with the iPhone maker accused of abusing its power to unfairly impose greater restrictions on third parties.

[…]

Lawyers bringing the new lawsuit ​against Apple, though, say the feature imposed stricter requirements on third-party app developers ​than on Apple’s own services, giving its advertising ecosystem a competitive advantage.

Via Ben Lovejoy:

The latest lawsuit has an interesting twist: it’s being brought by Ann Pope, who was previously a senior official with the regulator behind today’s case.

Kris Holt (Slashdot):

The company told Reuters it was “bound by the exact same requirements as all developers.”

However, regulators across Europe including in France, Italy and Poland have investigated ATT. Germany’s competition regulator, the Federal Cartel Office, last month determined that Apple was favoring its own apps over those from external developers.

Amy Worrall:

The EU is saying “you’re big enough that you have to treat your other business models like third parties” and Apple replies with “but we know we’re solid, so that makes no sense!”

Previously:

App Tracking Transparency Changes in Germany

Joe Rossignol (Hacker News):

Apple has agreed to make changes to its App Tracking Transparency feature in Germany, according to the country’s competition regulator.

[…]

In Germany, Apple has agreed to remove “possibly discouraging symbols and wording” from the App Tracking Transparency prompt, the regulator said. Apps will also be “given more scope to explain to users what significance personalized advertising has for their offering and their business model,” and the “freedom to combine the consent request required by Apple with the consent requests required under data protection law.”

Ben Lovejoy:

The FCO’s objection appears to be that Apple’s existing prompt is making app tracking sound scarier than it really is. The iPhone maker will make eight changes in order to address this – including removal of the word “track.”

Nick Heer:

The regulator helpfully offers an illustration of the differences between these prompts on the fourth page of its FAQs (PDF) about the case. There are many things they say could be deterrents in the App Tracking Transparency dialog, and I do not think Apple would deny that they are suggesting that users opt out of tracking. The definition of “tracking” Apple uses is self-serving, which would not matter so much if it did not also have a parallel desire to grow its advertising business.

[…]

A particularly damning finding in that comparison, to my eyes, is the way Apple puts “Ask App Not to Track” as the topmost button in the App Tracking Transparency dialog, but puts the option to “Turn Off Personalised Ads” at the bottom of it its own advertising prompt.

Previously:

Thursday, September 3, 2026

Preparing to Update to Golden Gate

Howard Oakley:

As those new models start shipping on 22 September, the window for the first public release of Golden Gate has narrowed to 15-22 September, with greatest likelihood on the same day as the arrival of those new Macs.

[…]

At the same time as the release of Golden Gate, we should get Tahoe 26.7 and Sequoia 15.8, but it looks increasingly likely that the final version of Sonoma has been 14.8.9, released on 6 August.

Howard Oakley:

As we prepare to flee from the visual horrors of macOS Tahoe at last, this article is a reminder that it wasn’t the first major release of macOS that has had blatant bugs in its interface, although I suspect it may be unique in that those were intentional. While progress in Golden Gate has been limited, I hope you’ll find it rectifies some of the worst errors of Liquid Glass.

Many Macs will be left behind, as Golden Gate drops support for Intel.

Normally, I update around January. With Tahoe I waited until July. This time, I’m considering updating to Golden Gate soon after its release. The downside is that Xcode 26 doesn’t run on Golden Gate, so I would have to drop support for many older macOS versions (about 3% of my customers’ Macs). But it seems like Apple’s going to force that soon, anyway, as one of the next Xcode 27 updates will likely drop support for Tahoe. I want to get off Xcode 26, both to use the newer SDK and because there are various debugging/testing things that don’t work properly.

Mario Guzmán:

I am working on a new app. Right now, I am targeting back to macOS Sequoia. I think that would be a good OS to target but becoming quite old with Golden Gate just around the corner. […] I wonder if I should just target macOS Golden Gate and focus testing on that.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-04): Isaiah Carew:

i’m in the exact same boat. i’d really like to stay on macOS 15 and whatever Xcode works there. it means i can still build things in the old UI and mostly Tahoe and GG respect it.

but recent bug reports from beta testers and the inability to see these bugs on my VM has made me feel very stuck here — like apple has purposefully made it difficult to move forward and support older versions too.

Update (2026-09-11): Howard Oakley:

What if any preparations do you need to make before upgrading or updating then, or in the coming weeks?

Google Ads Remedies

Ryan Whitwam:

A US federal judge has sided with Google, ruling that the company will not have to sell its online advertising exchange (previously known as AdX). The US Department of Justice (DOJ) sought this remedy in the long-running ad tech antitrust trial, which Google lost in 2025. However, the remedies imposed upon Google for that loss are shaping up to be minimal.

[…]

While divesting the ad exchange would have been the most serious penalty, the government also asked for fines and court-ordered changes to Google’s business practices. It’s likely that the DOJ will get a lot of that, but we don’t know the specifics yet. Judge Leonie Brinkema has sealed the order for 14 days, giving the parties a chance to request redactions.

[…]

After all these years of hearings, appeals, and decisions, Google’s market power will remain largely unchanged going forward.

Previously:

Google and Epic Cancel Settlement, Third-Party App Stores

Ryan Whitwam (Slashdot):

The settlement between Google and Epic that aimed to put to rest the companies’ long-running antitrust battle is being withdrawn, and that means third-party app stores are coming to the Play Store.

[…]

While Apple suffered little penalty in its Epic case, Google was tripped up by its anti-competitive management of the supposedly open Android ecosystem. Google used its market position to discourage device makers from promoting or pre-loading non-Google app stores and attempted to hide that conduct. The remedies set by Judge James Donato included lower fees, mirroring Google Play apps in other stores, and most vitally, placement of alternative app stores in Google Play.

[…]

Google and Epic were set to return to court on July 16 to argue in favor of the settlement. However, the writing may have been on the wall. In a recent expert analysis provided to the court, MIT economics professor Nancy Rose noted that the settlement was “unlikely to enable Google Play’s potential competitors to overcome their long-standing network-effect disadvantage in a timely manner.”

[…]

Under the terms of Judge Donato’s original injunction, these stores will have access to the full catalog of Google Play apps by default. […] Google will also require approved stores to block malware, respect intellectual property, and include mechanisms to update and uninstall apps.

John Gruber:

My guess is that all the big app developers will opt out of this. Games, though, maybe not?

Previously:

Wednesday, September 2, 2026

Apple’s New Evidence in OpenAI Lawsuit

Juli Clover (Hacker News):

Liu downloaded the circuit schematic from Apple in March, two months after he left the company. Liu used the schematic to run a simulation using electrical engineering tool LTspice, and then messaged people telling them he ran the simulation for power conversion development work.

[…]

Liu used the Apple schematic on a Mac mini that later synced to the MacBook he took from Apple, which is why Apple knows about it. Apple now wants to investigate the Mac mini and other devices Liu still has in his possession.

Apple says the “shocking evidence” is proof that its trade secrets are in active use and evidence is being destroyed, which is why expedited discovery is needed.

John Gruber:

The first point seems really bad for OpenAI. On the fourth point, I’m not sure what Apple is alleging here — I think they’re alleging that Liu took an Apple internal engineering app with him over to OpenAI?

William Gallagher and Mike Wuerthele (MacRumors):

OpenAI has responded to Apple’s latest filing about the theft of confidential information, by filing its own rebuttal which again accuses the company of trying to stop employees leaving. According to Reuters, OpenAI is now also calling out Apple for being behind on AI.

[…]

“[Employees] can leave a company like Apple that has struggled to adopt AI and move to an exciting startup that builds innovative products,” says OpenAI in its new filing. “Apple may not like those choices. But it cannot claim those choices are unlawful, and it cannot use its own sloppy procedures to blame others for its own mess.”

Ben Lovejoy:

On the face of it, the evidence Apple provided yesterday does appear damning. OpenAI doesn’t seem to be denying that confidential Apple information was used by the company, but rather claiming that the iPhone maker failed to properly protect it.

It sounds like there’s a lot of evidence against Chang Liu, but Apple is suing OpenAI.

Previously:

Pitching Apps in the AI Era

Adam Engst:

So I was quite surprised earlier this year when I started to receive personalized pitches from indie developers, a few at first, and now several per week. Many seem to be building apps with AI assistance, but more to the point, they seem to be getting AI help with promoting the apps as well. They often reference our still-current prohibition on press releases with a nominally personal email, but for someone as steeped in words as I am, it’s obvious that an AI is doing the writing.

[…]

At first, this reliance on AI rubbed me the wrong way. But then I realized that it wasn’t really any different than a software company outsourcing its media relations to a PR firm. Those communications had a certain form and set of expectations, and while these new AI-generated messages have a different form, the expectations (coverage) are pretty much the same. AI is simply the new PR agency. Which undoubtedly dismays PR professionals, but there’s still room for those doing PR right.

The problem I have with these new pitches isn’t that the developers used AI to generate them; it’s that they often don’t do it very well.

I’ve noticed a huge increase this year in people pitching me their apps. Many of them seem to have been coded with the assistance of AI. For some app categories, this worries me, and there also seems to be less care taken in following Mac platform conventions. But it’s also exciting to see such a flurry of development, both totally new ideas and fresh takes on old niches. I have a large backlog that I’d like to write about. (There are also many almost indistinguishable variations in certain categories.)

Separately, as Engst says, many of the pitches (and sometimes even the sites) are obviously written by AI. This rubs me the wrong way. I don’t mind at all receiving a generic press release or even a one-liner with a link. But these lengthy e-mails, customized for me, purport to be personal communications when they really aren’t. Sometimes I’ll reply with questions or feedback, and it feels like the entire conversation is with an AI.

When people put in some effort to pitch me their product or article, I’ve always tried to give them a decent reply. Often, I end up learning something or wanting to follow their other work even if I don’t end up writing about what was pitched. This is unfortunately no longer sustainable. There are too many pitches, and it’s demotivating talking to bots. I have to be much more selective about interactions. I appreciate hearing about all the apps, but I’m focusing on the ones that particularly interest me, and I’m less likely to even click the link if it seems like an AI pitch.

Previously:

Tuesday, September 1, 2026

TipKit for the Real World

Craig Hockenberry:

Then, when you look at the sample code, it’s all SwiftUI. At least the sample compiles and runs because it uses a completely different syntax than what was shown at WWDC.

[…]

Eventually I stumbled upon TipUIPopoverViewController which inherits from UIViewController. That should work! […] But it didn’t: the close button on the popover didn’t work.

[…]

Until you realize that any changes you make are stored in a SQLite database, debugging is very confusing. It’s also easy for your own state to get out-of-sync with the Tip state: there is not a single source of truth.

[…]

Unfortunately, that sample code doesn’t scale well. If you have a view with multiple tips, you’re going to be littering your code with tip instances, observation tasks, and popover controllers. It’s a mess and a clear sign that the TipKit developers didn’t think much about UIKit.

Fatbobman:

In the previous article, we introduced the basic usage of TipKit. In this article, we will discuss some advanced topics related to TipKit, such as how to fully customize Tip views (not using TipView and popoverTip), how to use TipKit with UIKit, and how TipKit can share data across different applications, as well as how to reuse Tip declaration code. Additionally, we will attempt to address some common questions and concerns about TipKit.

Previously:

John Ternus Is CEO

Joe Rossignol:

Apple’s former hardware engineering chief John Ternus officially became CEO of the company today, with the change now reflected on Apple’s leadership page.

[…]

Tim Cook is now executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors, after a 15-year run as CEO.

Apple:

John joined Apple’s product design team in 2001 and became a vice president of Hardware Engineering in 2013. He joined the executive team in 2021 as senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. Throughout his tenure at Apple, John has overseen hardware engineering work on a variety of groundbreaking products and was instrumental in the introduction of multiple new product lines, including iPad and AirPods, as well as many generations of products across iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch.

John has led much of the company’s focus in areas like reliability and durability, introducing new techniques that have made Apple products remarkably resilient. He has also driven much of Apple’s innovation in materials and hardware design that have reduced the carbon footprint of its products, including the creation of a new recycled aluminum compound that has been introduced across multiple product lines, the use of 3D-printed titanium in Apple Watch Ultra, and advancements in reparability that have increased the life spans of several Apple products.

Prior to Apple, John worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Myke Hurley (9To5Mac):

This feels like Apple really trying to remind us of a previous product-focused CEO.

[…]

I would not have predicted this [reliability and durability] angle being so prominent, so I can only assume it’s something that’s important to Ternus.

[…]

One of the key tenets of the Cook era was Apple making a series of environmental pledges. I am very happy to see this called out as something Ternus is interested in.

There’s no mention of software.

Juli Clover:

Ternus sent his first memo as CEO to employees this morning, praising Cook and sharing his excitement for Apple’s future.

Benjamin Mayo:

The 5 GB free iCloud tier lasted Tim Cook’s entire career as CEO, how will Ternus stack up?

Previously:

Update (2026-09-02): Juli Clover:

Apple has set new CEO John Ternus’ target compensation at $58 million, according to an updated SEC filing [PDF]. Tim Cook’s target compensation is $47 million in his new role as executive chairman.

Update (2026-09-07): Ryan Christoffel:

But a new profile published today at the Financial Times adds fresh details and insights to the story.

Regarding Ternus’s reputation inside Apple, it says he “is known within the company for being both highly competent and unshowy.”

It doesn’t seem like there was actually much insight, but I’m linking to this for completeness.

Previously:

Swift 6.4: Warning for Weak Captures Within Nested Closures

John Sundell:

New in Swift 6.4 […] is a warning which is emitted when a nested closure performs a weak capture while the parent closure implicitly captures that object as a strong reference.

At first glance, that new diagnostic could be a bit puzzling, since it might seem unnecessary to have to specify such a weak capture twice (or, alternatively, move it to the parent closure’s capture list), but it turns out that it’s an incredibly useful new warning that can help us avoid a quite common kind of memory management bug.

[…]

Finally, in situations where capturing self strongly doesn’t actually lead to a retain cycle, we can silence the new warning for nested weak captures by explicitly adding self to the outer closure’s capture list, such as when creating a Task within the following example[…]

Previously:

Ending the Golden Era for Backward-Compatible Apps

Matthias Gansrigler-Hrad:

I don’t appreciate being forced by Xcode 27 to drop support for macOS 10.13-11.0. It’s my decision which OSes I want to support, not Apple’s. Yes, I can keep Xcode 26 around until submissions require Xcode 27, but what then?

Originally, Xcode 27 was documented as supporting Big Sur on Intel Macs, but now the earliest is Monterey.

I’m frustrated, too, but it’s more honest than the recent releases that claimed to support deployment on older macOS versions when Apple clearly hadn’t tested that it actually worked. I filed bugs, and Apple kept responding that they’d fixed it, when they hadn’t.

Using old versions of Xcode isn’t a great solution because they aren’t supported on Golden Gate. Swift also makes it more difficult to call newer APIs when using an older SDK. You can’t just copy/paste a method prototype or constant value and conditionally use it when running on a newer OS.

Ighor July:

I eventually found a hidden workaround that changes the errors back into warnings. That is good news, but it does not make the concern disappear. The setting is undocumented, absent from the normal Xcode interface, and currently being tested only in a beta toolchain. The larger question is what Apple intends to enforce when Xcode 27 is final and, later, when App Store submission requirements move to its SDKs.

[…]

Apple’s current Xcode system requirements list Xcode 26 with deployment targets beginning at iOS 15 and macOS 11. Yet developers have been able to enter older targets manually. In an Apple Developer Forums discussion about Xcode 26, an Apple product manager explained that the published deployment target range is aligned with simulator support and on-device debugging. The accepted answer confirms that an iOS 13 target can still build even though it falls below the range in Apple’s table.

My own tests went further. Xcode 26.5 compiled a project targeting iOS 9.0. It warned that the target was older than the supported range, but the build succeeded. On macOS, I have compiled current apps with deployment targets as old as macOS 10.9. Xcode warned me, but it still produced working applications.

[…]

For iOS and iPadOS, staying on Xcode 26 is not a lasting option. Apple has repeatedly made a current Xcode and SDK mandatory for new App Store submissions. […] If any one of those conditions fails, iOS and iPadOS developers will have no normal App Store path for publishing new updates that still support versions older than 15.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-07): Léo Natan:

Just want to remind you guys that if you move to Xcode 27, the only “officially” supported and sanction Xcode for GG, UIDesignRequiresCompatibility is no longer respected across the 27 OSes (apps built with older Xcodes still are). So you might suddenly find out you have a lot of work ahead of you, adding support for the dreaded Glass. And 27 Glass is not the same as 26 Glass. That can be an issue if you skipped 26 altogether but still want to support it.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-11): Nick Lockwood:

I mostly ignored the Xcode 27 betas (mainly due to the barely-usable Device Hub) so I didn’t realize the passive-aggressive prompts to drop support for iOS < 15 that you get when submitting apps is being backed up by Xcode 27 refusing to compile apps at all unless you bump the deployment target 😧

Monday, August 31, 2026

App Store Moves From Phil Schiller to Eddy Cue

Juli Clover:

As Apple Fellow, Schiller continued to oversee the App Store and Apple events, but the role may not have left him with sufficient time for his own endeavors. In 2024, The Wall Street Journal said Schiller was working close to 80 hours a week.

[…]

Schiller is stepping down from overseeing the App Store and Apple product launches just as John Ternus is set to take over as Apple CEO.

[…]

Apple is moving the App Store to Eddy Cue, who oversaw it until 2015. Cue is Apple’s services chief and will reportedly be taking a more influential role under Ternus’ leadership. Carson Oliver, who has long been on the App Store team, will oversee its day-to-day operations.

Mr. Macintosh:

Phil Schiller was right there with Steve Jobs and Tim Cook at the start of Apple’s comeback in 1997-1998.

He is officially stepping back to only his Apple Fellow role.

Phil has a combined 35 years of service to Apple 1987 - 1993 & 1997 - today

Previously:

SuperDuper’s “Follow-Up”

Dave Nanian:

Recent versions of xOS (that is, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, etc) have Data Protection Classes from A to D that get assigned to files and folders.

[…]

The thing is, though, is that these files and folders are inaccessible unless the user is logged in, and the screen is unlocked. A few seconds after the screen locks (or you log out), the keys are purged, and they cannot be read.

[…]

That means the files any application considers to be worth protection cannot be accessed when a backup usually happens.

[…]

You may have noticed that if you had an overnight backup, when you unlock your screen, a copy starts to run. It’s typically quite brief, thanks to ⚡️Turbo Smart Update, but it might surprise you anyway. […] During your overnight copy, SuperDuper kept track of the files that it couldn’t access due to their protection class. And now that it can access them, it’s making sure they get backed up.

This seems like the right thing to do. Time Machine also does it. A backup app should try to make as faithful a backup as possible. I kind of find it annoying, though. Sometimes it can’t do a Turbo Smart Update, and so the backup that should already be done may end up taking another 30 minutes or more. The best thing to do is schedule backups while you’re using your Mac to avoid SuperDuper needing to do such “follow-ups.”

I wrote some code to try to figure out which files I have that are using data protection. Interestingly, the URLFileProtection API seems to not work on macOS. I used the lower level getattrlist() instead. Nanian recommends fcntl(). I didn’t find any protected files that I actually care about, just caches and derived data from Apple’s own apps. But, in theory, Apple or a third-party app could be saving actual user data using data protection.

Previously:

Friday, August 28, 2026

Indie Podcast Apps Not Growing

Dustin Bluck:

Independent podcast apps are not growing as a category. This is not a particular secret, but perhaps you haven’t seen it stated explicitly. It’s the sort of thing that has to be inferred, but there’s plenty of available data if you look for it. While the podcasting sector has seen growth, this has occurred almost entirely on platforms like YouTube, and the independent podcast app userbase has mostly just stood still.

[…]

I’m sure somewhere out there a 21-year-old just downloaded Castro or Pocket Casts for the first time and thinks RSS feeds are awesome (if you are this person, please email me). But every number I can see indicates the userbase is both static and aging. Every new customer I talk to has used some combination of Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or Castro for at least the last 5 years if not the last 10.

[…]

Perhaps there are healthy businesses that get very few new users but instead gracefully age with the ones they have. Ferrari maybe? Buddy, smartphone apps are not one of those businesses.

[…]

I would rather work on flashy features to capture new users, but, reality being what it is, I have to think about things in terms of both the health of the ecosystem and what will actually help retain existing podcast app users.

Nick Heer:

Anil Dash wrote, in 2014, that the simple phrase wherever you get your podcasts is a “radical statement”:

[…] Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.

Video podcasting changes that. In its simplest form, it is just a YouTube channel, which means it is siloed and controlled by Google. Spotify also supports video but only in its app.

Ilya Birman:

So Marco described a problem. What if someone manually asks to download an episode when they already have three downloaded? You can’t just immediately delete it to keep things tidy. So what do you do? Marco added a special hidden “episode downloaded manually” flag to the database, so those episodes would not count towards the limit.

This is one more example of how even the most seemingly trivial features require thinking through and accounting for different cases that may not be obvious at first glance. Every user interface designer and product designer should collect and absorb examples like this.

[…]

Finally, Marco’s wife Tiff suggests a solution to all the problems: just don’t let users download more episodes, she said, and show them a message, roughly: “Your episode limit is three, but this would be the fourth, denied”.

Marco liked the solution. I didn’t. Sure, it solves Marco’s problems, but not the user’s.

Marcin Wichary:

Birman presents this as “Let me click,” but I wanted to offer two alternative/​complementary principles that helped me before:

  • Let me do things in any order. Here’s Google Home app, where I can change the temperature and the time for holding – but if I change the time first, it frustratingly resets when I subsequently change the temperature. It forces one specific order in an interface that suggests any order is okay[…]
  • The current action has the most momentum. The user is right there, active, tapping on things, wanting to get stuff done. If Overcast indeed throws a “your episode limit is three” message, then it forces the user to remember how to get to the settings and change it. The momentum is lost. The decisions of past me should not be as important as the decisions of present me.

Marco Arment:

FWIW, the entire strict-limit feature is gone in the pending update (awaiting App Store review). EVERYONE hated it.

Now I’m just displaying the added-manually status in the UI and allowing it to be toggled manually in the “…” menu.

Marco Arment:

I’ve needed to evolve my expectations for what my role in Overcast is.

After building up a large, passionate userbase over a very long time, it’s not really entirely mine anymore. I can’t just do whatever I want with it.

And the growth era of open/RSS/indie/whatever podcast apps is over. The business is now about serving and retaining my existing customers for as long as possible.

So I can add things here and there, very carefully, but I can’t really change anything significant.

Previously:

Aren’t Snapshots Purgeable?

Howard Oakley:

Since High Sierra and APFS snapshots, accounting for purgeable space has been inconsistent and often misleading. I first reported this over eight years ago in Sierra 10.12.6 and High Sierra 10.13.3, and most recently three years ago in Ventura 13.3.1. This article looks at how this is handled now in Tahoe 26.6.2.

[…]

There is disappointingly little documentation on space management in macOS, and the closest Apple comes to defining purgeable space is in Disk Utility’s Help pages, where it’s stated to be “space that macOS can free up when needed by removing files from your computer (you can’t manually remove the files that are designated purgeable, but macOS removes them as space is required)”.

On the face of it, that includes cache files but not snapshots, as they can be manually removed in Disk Utility, as I’ve discussed in detail here. This is contradicted when using tmutil localsnapshot to make Time Machine snapshots, which reports that “local snapshots are considered purgeable and may be removed at any time by deleted(8)”, as deleted is the purgeable space and cache management service in macOS.

APFS snapshots can also be created by third-party apps that have the appropriate restricted entitlement. Apple doesn’t explain whether those too can be purged by macOS when additional free space is required.

Howard Oakley:

Before macOS will start copying a file to a volume, it checks whether there’s sufficient free space available. I believe this is normally performed by the FileCoordinator API in Foundation, and appears in the log with the subsystem com.apple.foundation.filecoordination.

If there isn’t sufficient free space to accommodate the file to be copied, deleted in the subsystem com.apple.cache_delete checks whether enough space can be freed by purging items known to be purgeable in the destination volume. deleted has a fixed set of services that can be called on to purge items, listed in /System/Library/CacheDelete.

[…]

Space-based purging of Time Machine local snapshots is unreliable. The reason for this is that Time Machine CacheDelete fails to report purgeable space when it’s available. Even when it does work, it can take nearly half an hour for Time Machine CacheDelete to recognise the appearance of purgeable space.

Sometimes you need to do it yourself with Disk Utility.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-03): Howard Oakley:

  • When purgeable space is required, deleted (subsystem com.apple.cache_delete) first discovers purgeable space for each caching service, to determine whether it’s sufficient.
  • If it is, and the decision is taken to purge caches, caching services are called on to free up space by purging their caches as required.
  • Purging may then take place in phases until sufficient space has been freed.
  • Purging is frequent during installation of macOS updates, even when there’s ample free space available.

Update (2026-09-08): Howard Oakley:

In the event that you’re caught out by circumstances, such as the combination of recent large snapshots and exceptionally large caches, macOS does try to manage as well as possible even when there’s just a few GB free. But once free space falls to around 1 GB you should see a warning notification.

[…]

From then on, most file operations, even creating a new folder, will fail. That applies to all apps, regardless of whether they handle those failures gracefully and warn you of the error. Actions like taking a screenshot start normally, but after their image has floated across the display, they just vanish and can’t be saved.

[…]

The worst combination of problems occurs when a Mac runs out of free disk space and physical memory at the same time. macOS memory management then wants to allocate space in the VM volume as its backing store for virtual memory, but in the absence of free space to do so, that fails and should propagate as a memory allocation error.

Update (2026-09-09): See also: Accidental Tech Podcast.

GitHub Outage

Vlad Fedorov (Hacker News):

On August 17, GitHub experienced an outage that lasted 7 hours and 47 minutes. It disrupted github.com, authentication, GitHub Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues, and Copilot, affecting developers and organizations around the world.

[…]

Neither outage was caused by a code or configuration change. Both incidents were capacity failures at their core. We failed to scale critical components before demand exceeded their capacity. Since April, monthly commits have grown from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion. That growth explains the pressure on our systems, but it does not excuse these outages.

[…]

As part of the reliability commitments we made earlier this year, we have focused on three priorities: adding capacity, improving efficiency, and removing architectural bottlenecks. We have since added more than 3 million CPU cores, 120 petabytes of high-speed storage, and significant network capacity. We installed as much hardware as available power allowed in our existing data centers while accelerating our migration to Azure.

Alejandro Forero Cuervo:

This is the wrong way to think about this because there’s no such thing as infinite capacity. A large distributed system will be simultaneously mostly idle and (in some subcomponents) overloaded. The root cause is not “a component didn’t have enough capacity (because of auto scaling failures)”, but rather “this complex system collapses (rather than degrade gracefully) when demand exceeds capacity”.

When components reach capacity limits, the excess traffic of the lowest priority should be rejected. Rejected traffic should not be retried — in fact, not only should clients not retry these errors, these errors should cause client-side throttling. Traffic isolation should be applied — if the cause of the overload is a single client/customer system, no other system should be affected.

Nearly a decade ago I wrote about some of the techniques we applied at Google to implement these protections. Most other large internet services have since copied them, afaik.

Previously:

Thursday, August 27, 2026

Testing Tip: Make Your Keyboard Fast

Marcin Wichary:

By default, on a Mac, the initial delay is 500ms, and the key repeat rate 1000ms.

[…]

My suggestion is to make them both as short as possible for testing.

[…]

First, it’s good to test whether your keystrokes behave well when repeated. Occasionally you might want your interface to suppress repeating, or do something special if the key is held longer.

Second, it’s a good test not just of repeating, but just the user pressing keys really fast.

Previously:

Magic Keyboard 2026

Hartley Charlton:

On the new keyboards, the tab, caps lock, shift, return, and delete keycaps are labeled with glyphs rather than edge text. On the full-size models with a numeric keypad, the change goes further, with the home, page up, page down, end, clear, and enter keys also swapping their text labels for symbols.

Four models have been updated: the Magic Keyboard, the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, and the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad in both white keys and black keys.

David Deller:

Why, why, WHY won’t they fix the arrow keys? I use the version without numpad (for RSI reasons) and the L/R keys are full height, with half-height up/down keys. This is TERRIBLE and it causes me problems on a daily basis.

[…]

They fixed this problem with the laptops years ago. But refresh after refresh, they refuse to fix it with the external. WHY?

The left and right arrow keys should be half-height when there’s no numeric keypad, so that you can find them by feeling for the inverted T.

Daniel Luz:

My impression is that they’re limited by the self-imposed problem of making the corners so rounded that they can no longer fit a half-height right arrow key.

This is literally the only reason I haven’t bought one! Just return to the previous radius, dammit.

Previously:

Apple Polishing Cloth 2026

Joe Rossignol (Hacker News):

Apple today released a new version of its Polishing Cloth on its online store. In the U.S., pricing is now set at $9, down from $19 for the previous version of the cloth.

Starry Horizon (via Hartley Charlton):

new polishing cloth and comparison with the old one, dimensions are pretty much the same. a lot less stiff, it’s more like the nanotexture or apple vision pro one.

Thomas Brand:

In a brilliant bit of marketing spin, Apple distracts from Mac price hikes with a new $9 polishing cloth.

ceejayoz:

My favorite feature of this product is the store’s “compatibility” matrix that gets updated with every new Mac/iPhone release.

Emma Roth:

Curiously, the products Apple released alongside the new cloth aren’t compatible with it — namely, because they don’t have screens.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-02): See also: Hacker News.

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Cyber Resilience Act

European Commission:

From baby-monitors to smart watches, from apps to computer programs, connectable hardware and software are omnipresent in our daily lives. Less apparent to many users is the security risk such products may present.

The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) aims to safeguard consumers and businesses buying software or hardware products with digital elements. The CRA addresses the inadequate level of cybersecurity in many products, and the lack of timely security updates. It also tackles the challenges consumers and businesses currently face when trying to determining which products are cybersecure and in setting them up securely, making it easier to identify hardware and software with the proper cybersecurity features.

The CRA introduces mandatory cybersecurity requirements for manufacturers, covering the planning, design, development and maintenance of such products. These obligations must be met at every stage of the value chain. The CRA also requires manufacturers to handle vulnerabilities during the lifecycle of their products. Some products of particular relevance for cybersecurity may need to undergo a third-party assessment by a notified body before they are sold on the EU market.

Via Ron Elemans:

[…] the extremely heavy future requirements that are due on December 11, 2027.

For example, free security updates must be provided for at least five years without changes regarding the operating system requirements—a period that resets every time someone purchases an app of a particular version.

Here’s the text of it, which was approved in 2024.

Previously:

Omarchy and Omacom Foundation

Omarchy:

Omarchy is an omakase Linux distribution based on Arch, the tiling window manager Hyprland, and the desktop construction-kit Quickshell. It ships with everything a modern, savvy computer user needs to be productive immediately. From Neovim (btw) to Chromium, Obsidian to LibreOffice, and Kdenlive to OBS Studio. Hell, even a retro Winamp-style music player is there!

This isn’t just a grab bag of preinstalled packages, though. It’s a complete system designed with both aesthetics and productivity in mind.

[…]

Omarchy isn’t like Windows and it’s not like macOS either. It’s not trying to be as familiar as possible. It’s trying to be beautiful and better.

I do not find this, or Linux on the desktop in general, very appealing. I don’t agree that it’s beautiful, though neither is current macOS. But I do find this effort interesting. The concept—preconfigure a well designed system and try to make it different and better—is good. This is not your average open-source project. It has $10M in backing from the founders of Shopify, Stripe, Dell, Twitter, Cloudflare, Sesame, and 37signals, and now (Hacker News):

Drew Houston, cofounder and co-CEO of Dropbox, and Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw.

[…]

And OpenClaw has essentially provided the roadmap for how Omarchy should tackle its explosive growth. How do you deal with PR backlogs that suddenly go parabolic? What about security around plugins?

Many of these were/are Mac users.

Eduardo:

Run the upstream Omarchy desktop as a native, hardware-accelerated app on an Apple Silicon Mac.

Try Omarchy packages a project-built ARM64 Arch Linux image configured with Omarchy Quattro, a QEMU runtime using Apple Hypervisor Framework, and a small Swift/AppKit launcher into one macOS app.

One Happy Fellow (Hacker News):

Omarchy 4.0 shipped with a collection of security issues which I can only describe as regrettable (because I promised my mum I would swear less). There are bangers like video title bash injection or all notifications being able to run arbitrary bash on your machine.

All projects have security issues but not all projects have such predictable security issues. We know how to deal with untrusted inputs. We know we should not use AI-generated bash scripts for processing untrusted input, particularly with seemingly no review.

And you can’t get to a reasonably secure system by starting with a pile of bash slop and hoping others will catch and fix the issues before they are exploited.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-31): David Heinemeier Hansson:

I don’t think people truly understand just how determined I am at making Linux succeed on the desktop.

0xCC (Hacker News):

A security issue in Omarchy’s default Docker configuration meant that essentially every program running in the user’s desktop session could escalate to root without a password, sudo, or a privilege prompt.

If you use Omarchy, the most important takeaway is simple: update to 4.0.1.

lain:

The exploit has been submitted to CERT/CC, because as it turns out, it affects many other distros as well :)

David Heinemeier Hansson:

Omarchy is blowing up. I’ve never been involved with anything in my career that has grown this fast.

[…]

Now it’s time to build a proper institution. Durable, resilient, and competent. That’s what we’re doing here on Basecamp now. I’m spinning up teams for every facet of responsible distro management, and I’m getting an absolute outpouring of interest for all of them.

[…]

There are many people who’d love to see this rocket blow up before it reaches the moon. Aggrieved Linux users who don’t like the sudden attention their exclusive hobby has received. Competing Linux distributions that are seeing our numbers explode. Mac stans who’ve sunk their identity into an apple. And, of course, any of the haters I’ve picked up in my quarter-century career speaking bluntly on the internet.

[…]

[The Year of Linux on the Desktop] has been a joke for two decades. But by the end of the year, nobody at Apple or Microsoft is going to be laughing. They’re going to be scrambling. Because neither of these proud organizations currently has any method to counter the speed, vision, or ambition with which we’re going to accelerate into the future of personal computing.

[…]

For thirty years, we’ve been subject to one OS overlord or another. Dictating how we compute. Choking off competitors through platform malfeasance. Tollboothing the distribution. That ends now. Because Linux is going to win.

Who knows whether they’re going to be the ones to finally do it or whether this will be an embarrassing flameout, but I respect the energy and ambition. For a long time, it’s felt like Apple is more interested in thwarting than enabling and that they kind of resent even having to continue making a desktop OS. These guys actually like computers. However, there’s a big difference between recognizing that the mantle is falling and being able to pick it up.

See also: Dithering.

David Heinemeier Hansson (Hacker News):

The Omacom Foundation has its first two Distinguished Corporate Patrons! 1Password and 37signals are each contributing $100,000 a year for the next three years, which takes the foundation’s funding to $12.6 million.

ok123456:

What exactly is the Mozilla Foundation developing these days? What is their budget?

Jason Meller:

Omarchy Quattro is already the #3 Linux distro by active 1Password users. Even crazier, on the weekends it’s #1, beating out Ubuntu for the first time on Saturday.

Twitter Shuts Down Nitter

Richard Speed (Hacker News 3):

XCancel’s home page now contains some minimal text stating: “On Monday 24th August at 8 PM EST, we received at [sic] letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.”

It says the service has been halted “until further notice.”

[…]

Nitter provided a way for users to read posts on X without requiring an account. There was no JavaScript or ads, a user’s IP could not be tracked, and it was generally a good deal snappier than the official X client, just read-only. It was the service behind platforms such as XCancel.

The only thing surprising about this is how long it took.

Nick Heer:

Companies like X and Meta are very happy to scrape the web at unprecedented scale and without permission, but have zero tolerance for the same to be done to them by, in effect, individual users. That is not because they are protective of the creative works users have contributed to these platforms. It is simply because users are not trusted to use the platforms. X does not permit third-party readers, and neither does Instagram, because their value does not come from us using these services as we wish, but from how they dictate we must.

Previously:

Update (2026-09-07): There are currently twelve working Nitter instances (Hacker News).

zedeus (Hacker News):

Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue.

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Mac Studio 2026

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors):

Mac Studio with M5 Max features an 18-core CPU, an up-to-40-core GPU with Neural Accelerators built into each core, and up to 128GB of unified memory, accelerating complex pro and AI workloads. With the powerful M5 Ultra, Mac Studio scales up to a 36-core CPU, up to an 80-core GPU, and a staggering 512GB of unified memory, enabling users to run enormous LLMs entirely on device. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 come to Mac Studio for the first time, while Thunderbolt 5 rounds out its extensive connectivity, so users can take advantage of blazing-fast external storage, PCIe expansion chassis, and powerful hub solutions for the most intense workloads. Thunderbolt 5 also enables multiple Mac Studio systems to be clustered, bringing up to 3x faster performance for distributed AI inference when compared to a single system.

[…]

Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at $2,499 (U.S.) and $2,299 (U.S.) for education.

[…]

Mac Studio with M5 Ultra starts at $5,499 (U.S.) and $5,099 (U.S.) for education.

It’s not shipping until September 22, with the 512 GB configuration in late October.

John Gruber:

Here’s my attempt to put all of the RAM/SSD configurations into condensed tables, so you can see which storage and memory options are available for each chip, and how much they cost.

[…]

It kind of stinks that there are no RAM options for the Studio between the 96 GB base and the $4,000 256 GB upgrade.

Jason Snell:

The Mac Studio is effectively the replacement for the Mac Pro, and it’s alone in offering the Ultra-class chip. Apple has positioned the Mac Studio as ideal for local AI workflows, and the new models will still be able to cluster via Thunderbolt 5 to create even larger collections of memory and performance. Apple representatives pointed out that a four-Mac Studio AI cluster, like the one I saw on display at WWDC earlier this summer, is so efficient that it can be powered from a single standard wall outlet. (They even showed us a picture of four Mac Studios plugged into a power strip that was plugged into the wall.) In an era of data center excesses, Apple is clearly leaning into the possibility of small, efficient Macs being used to do local AI work rather than relying on huge, power-hungry cloud models.

Federico Viticci:

If these numbers hold up and scale linearly, a local Mixture-of-Experts model such as Qwen 3.5-35B-A3B, which would run at ~17 tokens/sec on average on a base M4 Mac mini with 16 GB of RAM, could realistically generate output at over 60 tokens/second with the base model M6 Mac mini.

Based on what we’ve seen so far, the one downside of the M6 Mac mini is that it does not have Thunderbolt 5 ports; those are exclusive to the M5 Pro model, also announced today.

[…]

Speaking from personal experience, I know that my M3 Ultra Mac Studio using oMLX can run DeepSeek-V4-Flash locally with generation averaging 35 tokens/second. Assuming a linear 4x increase, that would put the same model at over 120 tokens/second on an M5 Ultra Mac Studio. To put things in perspective, that kind of performance would be faster than any AI chatbot website, it’d be faster than many providers who offer a “fast” mode for their models, and it’d only be second to either dedicated NVIDIA PC clusters at home or specialized inference providers such as Cerebras or Groq…which are running in full-blown data centers. Sure, you would need a computer that is likely going to cost more than $20,000 to make it happen, but it’d still be possible on a single machine that is small, quiet, and that – in theory – any consumer can buy off the shelf.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-26): John Gruber:

That upgrade is labeled “+ $300”, which makes it look as though the starting price for the 18/40-core model is $2,800. That’s the price I put in the original version of my chart.

But if you select that option, you’ll notice that the actual starting price jumps from $2,500 to $3,100 — a $600 difference, not $300. The reason is that the $2500 18/32-core version only comes with one option for RAM: 32 GB. The 18/40-core chip has three tiers for RAM: 48, 64, and 128 GB.

Update (2026-09-02): Joe Rossignol:

Apple’s press release for the new Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips last week initially stated that the computer had “next-generation SSD architecture built on PCIe Gen 6.” However, as spotted by the French blog MacGeneration, Apple removed the PCIe 6.0 mention from the announcement shortly after it was published.

Mac mini 2026

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors, Slashdot):

With M6, Mac mini now delivers up to 4x faster AI performance, 2x faster storage and graphics, and 40 percent faster CPU performance. Everything on Mac mini with M6 feels incredibly fast, from everyday productivity tasks to agentic AI workflows. Mac mini with M5 Pro delivers even more pro-level performance to breeze through demanding projects, from video production to game development. And this new level of performance takes on business workflows with ease whether Mac mini is being used as a primary desktop or for always-on, deskside agentic computing. Both Mac mini models include Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, as well as upgraded 2.5Gb Ethernet, with a 10Gb option available.

[…]

Mac mini with M6 starts at $899 (U.S.) and $799 (U.S.) for education.

[…]

Mac mini with M5 Pro starts at $1,699 (U.S.) and $1,599 (U.S.) for education.

Rui Carmo:

The M6 tops out at 170GB/s and 32GB of unified memory, whereas the M5 Pro offers 307GB/s and up to 64GB–nearly twice the bandwidth, as well as twice the memory ceiling. That is the number to watch for AI inference, not just CPU and GPU benchmark deltas.

John Gruber:

Here’s my attempt to put all of the RAM/SSD configurations into condensed tables, so you can see which storage and memory options are available for each chip, and how much they cost.

[…]

If you configure an M6 Mac Mini with 2 TB of storage, the SSD upgrade ($1,000) costs more than the entire base model computer ($900). So too with the 4 TB SSD upgrade for the M5 Pro Mini ($1,800 upgrade for a $1,700 computer).

Nick:

Almost double (in Canadian dollars) what I paid for my M4 mini 18 months ago.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-26): Jason Anthony Guy:

Why announce (and take pre-orders) today, but not ship for a month? Perhaps Apple is using pre-orders to gauge interest and adjust its product mix. With huge prices for memory and storage, Apple does not want to build high-cost configurations that end up sitting around. Or, perhaps the “Fall iPhone” event will be a “new products” event, and Apple is clearing the decks of interesting-but-hardly-important hardware it doesn’t want distracting us from more exciting Macs (like the expected MacBook Pro “Ultra”).

Juli Clover:

The Mac mini now starts at $899, $300 over the original starting price of the M4 Mac mini when it launched in October 2024.

[…]

The Mac mini and Mac Studio support genlock over USB-C, so there’s no need for a separate sync box. Genlock is used in multi-camera shoots and virtual production to lock timing to a shared reference signal.

Tim Hardwick:

Apple’s newly announced M6 and M5 Pro Mac mini models still support up to three external displays, but there’s now support for higher refresh rates, according to Apple’s published technical specifications.

Chance Miller:

Another interesting tidbit is that even though Apple raised Mac mini prices today, it’s still excluded from Apple Upgrade leasing.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-31): Imthaz Ahamed:

Now after the price hikes, the Neo starts at £699 and the Mini at £899. So to answer the question, is the best feature of the M6 Mini the price?

I don’t think so, and that’s not because of the increased price to £899 but because of the Macbook Neo. The Mac Mini used to be the computer that everyone bought to get a taste of macOS. A lot of my friends have purchased Mac Minis just because it was the cheapest way to get into a Mac. But now I think the Neo fills that role.

The Mac Mini hasn’t become a bad deal. It’s become a different kind of deal. If you already have a monitor and a keyboard, if you want real desktop performance without paying for an Macbook Pro or a Mac Studio, the M6 Mac Mini is still probably the best price-per-performance computer Apple sells.

Apple M6 and M5 Ultra

Apple (MacRumors M5 Ultra and M6, Hacker News):

M6 is built using cutting-edge 2 nm process technology, packing greater transistor density into a smaller die for a major leap in performance and power efficiency. M6 also introduces a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, providing up to 2x the peak compute over previous generations to make on-device AI workflows run even faster. System frameworks can automatically utilize both engines simultaneously, enabling applications to see faster model execution.

M6 has a brand-new 12-core CPU complex — two more cores than M5 — that consists of 2 super cores, 4 performance cores, and 6 efficiency cores. It delivers the world’s fastest single-threaded performance and up to 1.2x faster multithreaded performance as compared to M5, and up to 2.4x faster than M1.

[…]

M5 Ultra uses UltraFusion to connect two dual-die M5 Max chips to form the quad-die architecture — a first for Apple silicon. UltraFusion increases the inter-die bandwidth to over 4.4TB/s and the connection density by over 6x. Together, these ultra-low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects allow the four dies to behave as a single unified processor. M5 Ultra also features a large up-to-36-core CPU consisting of 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, delivering up to 1.25x higher single-threaded performance and up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance than M3 Ultra.

M5 Ultra features a next-generation GPU with up to 80 cores, incorporating a Neural Accelerator in each core to offer up to 4.5x the peak GPU compute for AI compared to M3 Ultra and over 6x more than M1 Ultra.

ghostly_s:

It was not long ago all the illustrations in an M chip press release were graphs showing it flouncing the competition. Now it’s just random screenshots of desktops. Skimming this I didn’t see a single claim of performance advantages over competitors. The massive thing Apple still needs to solve is making sure customers don’t miss being able to plug the latest greatest GPU into their tower, they should not be resting on their laurels.

Greg Pierce:

I’m so old I remember when Apple PR benchmarks were all like “Photoshop Gaussian Blur in only 48 seconds!”

Previously:

Update (2026-08-26): Hartley Charlton:

The most significant architectural change is in the CPU. The M5 splits its ten cores into performance and efficiency groups, which is an arrangement Apple silicon has used since the M1. The M6 adds a third tier called “super cores,” which handle single-threaded workloads and which Apple says give the chip the world’s fastest single-threaded performance.

[…]

Apple did not publish real-world benchmarks comparing the M6 to the M5 directly, instead framing its Mac mini figures against the M4 and M1 models[…]

[…]

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported in July that Apple has no plans to release “M6 Pro,” “M6 Max,” or “M6 Ultra” chips, having decided to accelerate development of the AI-optimized M7 generation.

Adam Engst:

As with previous Ultra generations, the M5 Ultra combines two M5 Max chips, but since they’re dual-die chips, the result is Apple silicon’s first quad-die architecture. (The M3 Ultra connected two single-die M3 Max chips.) There’s no practical benefit to users in a quad-die architecture, but it’s a huge win for Apple. The larger the die, the more difficult and expensive it is to manufacture because a defect can ruin the entire die. Dividing the design into smaller dies can substantially improve manufacturing yield and reduce costs.

[…]

The M5 Ultra dispenses with efficiency cores entirely, devoting all CPU resources to super and performance cores.

Monday, August 24, 2026

Unforgetful 1.0

Marco Arment:

Unforgetful isn’t a new productivity system to learn.

[…]

This is designed for a small number of short-term tasks. What do you need to do today, tomorrow, this week, or this month?

[…]

If you want tagging, folders, archives, or other ways to organize or file away tasks, this isn’t the app you’re looking for.

Unforgetful is for people who know that if they file away a task, it never gets done.

I’m an OmniFocus person. I love tagging, folders, and archives; I never want to see a notification for a to-do item. I prefer pull to push. So this is absolutely not the right tool for me. But I like the fresh thinking behind this app and how the various design choices interact to make it an opinionated tool for the right type of person.

Marco Arment:

Calendar alarms changed my life. Events without alarms don’t happen.

[…]

Most of my Reminders interaction has always been via Siri and notifications. And that fits me very well, with three major exceptions:

  1. If I say “Remind me to buy milk,” but I forget to specify a time (or Siri misses it), Reminders will never notify me, and I’ll never check the app, so it’ll be lost.
  2. If I inadvertently dismiss a Reminders notification without snoozing it, Reminders will never notify me about it again, so it’ll be lost.
  3. When I do snooze a Reminders notification, which I do a lot, the snooze options suck.

He has good solutions to these and other problems. I’m tempted to try out Unforgetful just for the purported quick capture of dictated reminders, however there’s no watch app.

Listen to Accidental Tech Podcast to hear about unfortunate limitations of EventKit. Reminders itself is interesting to me in that the (private) data model is now so rich, but I’m put off by the UI, the lack of export, and the limited support for driving it from the keyboard.

Previously:

Apple Vision Pro and Software Layoffs

Juli Clover:

In addition to cutting dozens of Vision Pro employees who worked on features like immersive video and gaming, Apple is laying off people who worked on Siri and AI, reports Bloomberg.

Apple is “largely shutting down” the Vision Pro team focused on gaming, and it is paring down the team that makes immersive video content. Approximately 100 employees who were part of the Vision Products Group have been laid off, with Apple also cutting 100 people from its Siri and software groups.

[…]

Despite the cuts to the Vision Products Group, employees were told that the Vision Pro and visionOS operating system are not being eliminated.

Alexei Oreskovic:

Apple told Bloomberg that it was realigning some teams in order to “evolve” the business to provide the best experience for users. “While we will create new roles as part of this change, it will also impact a limited number of existing roles,” Apple said.

The job cuts are tiny in relation to the overall company, which had 166,000 full time employees in September 2025 (the last time Apple disclosed its headcount). But as John Ternus prepares to take the CEO job just over one week from now, the timing seems designed to get some unpleasant work out of the way and let the new boss come in with clean hands.

It’s hard to find good people, Apple has plenty of work that needs doing, and it just reported a record quarter. Maybe they don’t need more immersive video content, but it’s not clear to me why the other employees couldn’t be reassigned. And I’m really wondering what’s going on with the general software group, where they’re getting rid of legends like Keith Stattenfield:

So, I posted yesterday on an another place that I had been just laid off at Apple after 37 years. ( Surprise! I got laid off. It was unexpected. I am still coming to terms with it. Yes, I will be ok. ) And I mentioned some of the things I’d done, and mused that I’d thought I’d finish out my career in a few years having passed along the knowledge to younger engineers. Alas, that’s going to get left unfinished.

Jim Luther:

I felt much the same way, because I’d also hoped to slowly ease into retirement instead of being given options that led me to retire a few years early.

Chris Hanson:

Laying off anyone working on anything related to Apple Vision Pro is a gross strategic blunder, because it signals a lack of confidence in the product. Put them to work fixing bug backlogs if you don’t want them working on what they were doing, but don’t lay them off and let that show up in the press, that’s fucking amateur hour shit.

[…]

And the same goes for the Software Engineering layoffs, which don’t seem to be reported much upon because the layoffs have been described as “Apple Vision Pro, Siri, and software” where perhaps people don’t get that the latter is how Apple refers to the Software Engineering (SWE) org. There are so many bugs that should be fixed, that users encounter in their everyday lives, just reassign people to work on them. It’s stupid to lay people off when they could do that.

Plus, maybe retaining that institutional knowledge would help forestall future bugs.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-25): Louie Mantia:

Laying off employees who were working on a product that largely “failed” in the market is extremely hurtful to those employees, because the product’s failure is not their fault. They were directed to do that work. Apple should find new places for every single one of the employees who worked on Vision Pro. They owe it to the people who they directed to work toward the goal of making and maintaining Vision Pro. They can afford to do that.

Steven Huang:

Apple didn’t even work that hard to take care of the iPod employees who were once half the company’s revenue. In the end they basically gave Nest a free engineering team.

Update (2026-08-28): See also: ArsTechnica.

Update (2026-09-02): Hartley Charlton:

Recent layoffs of Apple employees working on the Vision Pro were broader than previously thought, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports.

[…]

Gurman reports that people inside the Vision Pro group have spent months lobbying new CEO John Ternus to stay the course on the platform even as sales continue to underwhelm. Colleagues who have discussed the headset with Ternus say he was skeptical of it from the start, seeing it as too bulky and too costly to reach a mass audience.

Interestingly, since visionOS apparently runs on Apple’s upcoming smart glasses, the wider layoffs impact software shared across both product lines rather than the headset alone.

Marko Crnković (tweet):

I was recently informed that I am being laid off from my position at Apple. It was unexpected, especially coming right after WWDC, where several of the projects I led and features I contributed to were announced.

[…]

You can find my resume here.

Previously:

Friday, August 21, 2026

Huge RTCReporting Logs and Dropbox

One of our Macs kept filling up its SSD even though there isn’t supposed to be anything more stored on it. Photos is set to optimize its storage, and Messages is set to only keep messages for a year. It should be pretty much in a steady state, but we kept getting alerts from Mail that it couldn’t launch because there wasn’t enough free space. It’s an M4 MacBook Air used mostly for Web stuff, but somehow it felt as slow as the Intel one it had replaced.

I deleted unused apps and offloaded photos. Restarting sometimes helped, so I thought maybe it was an issue with Time Machine snapshots not being reclaimed promptly, which has been an issue before. But what data would even be changing so much to create large snapshots?

The problem kept getting worse, so I broke out OmniDiskSweeper. It didn’t find anything unusual, except it showed that the totals for the main folders added up to about 90 GB less than was reportedly used on SSD. Disk Utility showed that there were no snapshots taking up space. There must be real files but not ones that the app could see.

I relaunched OmniDiskSweeper using sudo, and it found a huge amount of stuff hidden in the root account: /private/var/root.

I had thought that wasn’t really used except when running Terminal from macOS Recovery. But apparently various daemons store all kinds of stuff there now. The /private/var/root/Library/Logs folder alone was using 74 GB, and there were also several multi-GB cache folders.

The logs were almost entirely from RTCReporting, and I’m not the only one to run into this.

I deleted the files using OmniDiskSweeper, but that didn’t help. It turns out that by default it moves files to the trash, and I guess since it was running under sudo this meant the invisible trash folder for the root account. It’s better to hold down the Option key to Delete Immediately.

After deleting the files and restarting the Mac, the free space looked right at first but then steadily dropped. Pretty soon there were again 5 GB of RTCReporting logs with the Mac just sitting there. I started using sudo du -h -d 2 /private/var/root/ to track how the sizes were changing. Within a day it was back up to 27 GB.

Activity Monitor showed that rtcreportingd and fileproviderd were each using almost 100% CPU constantly. I immediately suspected Dropbox because it had been working poorly on this Mac for a year or so. It wouldn’t keep files offline and constantly seemed to be syncing even when files weren’t changing. Sure enough, turning off Dropbox stopped the CPU use and the ballooning log files.

This was our last Mac still using Dropbox, so it seemed time to migrate it to iCloud Drive. The syncing problems ended up not being limited to keeping files offline. It couldn’t even reliably download most of them from the cloud to move them out of the Dropbox folder, instead reporting I/O errors for most files. And the files that I did move to the Documents folder never synced that deletion up to the cloud. I ended up just downloading the whole folder from the Web interface. iCloud Drive uploaded everything quickly and then settled into a state of no CPU use.

Previously:

Walmart to Support Apple Pay

Joe Rossignol:

After years of holding out, Walmart today announced that it will finally begin accepting tap-to-pay options like Apple Pay in some of its Walmart and Sam’s Club stores in the U.S. starting Monday, August 24. The retailer plans to roll out tap-to-pay support to all of its U.S. stores by the end of 2026 and to its gas stations by mid-2027.

Previously:

The Best Worst E-mail Client

Rui Carmo:

Apple Mail is the first app open every day and the one I find hardest to defend, and I’ve been defending it for twenty years (longer if you remember the original NeXT mail client).

The broader story is one of abandonment.

[…]

Apple deprecated that API, replaced it with a (much more restrictive) MailKit surface in 2021, and proceeded to lock MailKit down so hard that barely anyone shipped an extension.

[…]

In particular, in this age of desktop AI agents, I come time and again across the fact that AppleScript support in Mail has been left to rot.

[…]

And searching for messages is such a mockery of a user experience that I’m not even sure how to describe it[…]

Watts Martin:

The last email program I truly loved was Bare Bones’ Mailsmith.

[…]

Now, I’ve tried a lot, like, a lot, of “modern” email clients. The built-in Apple email client is extremely straightforward, but underpowered. Thunderbird is too lumbering and heavyweight for what I want. Hipster ones like Spark are pretty, but focus on things I don’t care about. Mimestream is solid, but it’s Gmail-only. Microsoft Outlook is, unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook. MailMate is nerdy and, in some ways, the most obvious spiritual descendant of Mailsmith, but I find some of its UX inscrutable. Yes, I am aware of the irony of saying this just before describing an Emacs-based client.

And increasingly, commercial email clients are expensive and/or subscription-only.

Nick Heer:

I almost never use Mail on iOS 26. I just tried to insert an image from my photo library, and I could not figure out how to get back to seeing a keyboard. What a bizarre workflow. Still shocked some of this stuff shipped.

Rosyna Keller:

I haven’t been able to use Mail on macOS since macOS 15.4. It hangs on launch if any accounts are enabled. It feels like it’s been so many years since I filed feedback with sample logs and still Apple hasn’t fixed the hang.

Helge Heß:

I wonder whether I will ever see a time where Mail clients report accurate unread counts (spoiler: clicking on Inbox shows no new mall)

Well, I guess most other mail clients, Thunderbird or Outlook, get this right. But it never worked in any of the Apple mail clients. Like for decades now 🙃

Rishi Ó summarizes the promises for Mail later this year:

  • Improved Top Results

  • More reliable search indexing

  • Improved unread badge accuracy

  • Improved list formatting

Juli Clover:

iOS 27 has an overhauled search system that extends to the Mail app. Instead of surfacing results based on keywords and recency, Mail app search ranks results by relevance and intent.

I never found the problem to be relevance ranking but rather that it simply didn’t find certain messages at all.

Long press on any email and you can ask Siri to summarize, find an item in the email, track a package, get a flight number, save a photo, and more.

I guess that’s fine, but as Carmo notes there’s just a whole list of basics that need attention in iOS Mail.

Messages in Mail load faster, search indexing is more reliable, and unread badges between platforms like iOS and macOS sync more reliably.

Rayn Jones:

Mail search is still garbage in iOS 27. 😞 It’s just not better like they claim.

Previously:

Thursday, August 20, 2026

The End of EWS in Mail and AppleScript in Outlook

Microsoft:

Exchange Web Services (EWS) is approaching end of service in Exchange Online. We first announced this change was coming in 2018, when we announced that Exchange Web Services (EWS) will no longer receive functionality updates. In 2023, we announced that EWS will be disabled in Exchange Online in October 2026.

Today we’re announcing we will use a phased, admin controllable disablement plan that starts in October 2026 and concludes with a complete shutdown of EWS in 2027.

Apple:

Microsoft announced the upcoming end of service for Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online. Apple is actively working with Microsoft to update Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, and Reminders to use the Graph API in a future update to macOS 27, including a declarative configuration for device management services.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting Apple’s migration to Microsoft’s newer Graph API because EWS support in Apple Mail has long been buggy. It seems to have gotten worse in recent months, presumably due to server side changes as Microsoft prepares to shut it all down. Unfortunately, Apple is not as far along in the transition as I’d expected.

Jonathan Harbourne (and, alas, Claude):

What made a Mac feel like a Mac at work was the software that came with it. Mail that you could actually scan. A Calendar that was a separate application, so it could live permanently on a second screen instead of hiding behind a tab. Quick Look. Smart mailboxes. Spotlight that found things. Share sheets that worked everywhere. The system behaving as one coherent thing rather than a collection of vendor silos.

[…]

iOS and iPadOS Mail no longer depend on EWS. macOS Mail still does. Same company, same deadline, same protocol, and only one of the two platforms got the work done in time. Microsoft ended up writing the guidance Apple should have written, telling administrators in February that Apple Mail for Mac users would have to switch to Outlook until the applications were updated. […] Apple had years. It had a public deadline. It had, by Microsoft’s own account, one of the most widely used EWS applications in existence. And it let the clock run out.

[…]

Somewhere in every one of these migrations is a line in a change log that reads “users to move to Outlook”, as though a mail client were a fungible commodity, like swapping a stapler. […] This is not the death of the Mac at work. […] It is the death of the Mac experience at work.

Outlook for Mac feels very different from Apple Mail, and users are being squeezed from the Microsoft side, too. Microsoft will be ending the transition to New Outlook in October, but the new version is still missing many features that were present in Legacy Outlook (as well as Apple Mail). Microsoft had long promised that it would implement AppleScript in New Outlook before dropping support for the old version, but last week it changed course:

AppleScript workflows vary widely across organizations and often depend on behaviors from the classic app that don’t exist in the New Outlook. Because these patterns can’t be standardized, full compatibility isn’t feasible. We have decided not to move forward with this feature. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Back to Harbourne:

Access only ratchets one way. Mail was allowed because it worked, quietly, for years, over a protocol nobody was auditing. It has now been formally removed under a named cybersecurity policy. Getting it back would require someone in a security function to write a positive case for re-admitting a broad-permission third-party client to the corporate mail estate, and then put their name on it. Nobody’s career improves by doing that. Saying no costs nothing and is never wrong in hindsight.

So if Apple ships Graph support in Mail next year, the people who lost it will not get it back. The door didn’t swing shut. It was bolted, and the reason it was bolted is now written down in a policy document that will outlive the protocol that prompted it.

Apple has no leverage to change that, either. The organisations deploying Macs by the tens of thousands are not Apple partners in any meaningful sense. They are customers who buy boxes. There is no relationship to call on, no joint roadmap, no account team, nobody at Apple whose job it is to notice that a hundred thousand people just lost Mail.

October is when administrators will have to opt back into allowing EWS for a few more months, but some (like Harbourne’s) will be switching off support sooner.

Apple Mail and Outlook aren’t the only options, though. MailMaven supports both Graph and AppleScript.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-21): See also: Reddit and Mac Power Users.

Update (2026-08-24): See also: Mac Power Users.

Previously:

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

Mojo 1.0

Modular (tweet, beta, Hacker News):

Today, the Mojo language officially reaches 1.0: a milestone the language has been building toward since its first release in 2023. Mojo has grown into a general-purpose language with a vibrant developer community writing their own libraries, tools, and applications on top of it. With Mojo 1.0, developers can now build for the long-term on a stable, production-ready language foundation.

[…]

Importantly, Mojo 1.0 does not mark the end of the language’s evolution, but it is an important milestone on a longer journey. During the 1.x timeframe, changes should primarily be additive, giving developers confidence that the language will not continually shift beneath them. Breaking changes may still be made, but will be managed with care, following the standards of how mature languages (e.g. C++) evolve over time.

Modular (Hacker News):

We are happy to announce that the Mojo🔥 language is now fully open source under the Apache 2.0 license (with LLVM exceptions)! The source code for the Mojo compiler, tooling, and everything else you need to build the language are now available in our modular GitHub repository.

[…]

The Mojo standard library has been accepting contributions since 2024, and we’re grateful for everyone that has helped advance the language. One learning (particularly in today’s era of AI coding) is that we need to be deliberate about how we handle contributions. As such, we aren’t ready to take contributions to the compiler and tooling. We aim to accept contributions to the compiler and tooling by the end of this year, and we’ll share more details when we can.

Abdul Dakkak, Chris Lattner, and Jeff Niu (2023):

This talk will give an overview of Mojo 🔥, a new programming language in the Python family built on MLIR and LLVM. Mojo aims to bridge the programmability and performance gap in systems programming by combining Python’s ergonomics and ecosystem with C++ and CUDA-level performance into a single language. We will describe how Mojo leverages the MLIR and LLVM infrastructures to provide meta-programming, user-defined code transformations, hardware backends, adaptive compilation, and auto-tuning to enable developers to achieve performance without sacrificing programmability.

Gergely Orosz (2025, tweet):

Chris Lattner is one of the most influential engineers of the past two decades. He created the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Swift programming language – and Swift opened iOS development to a broader group of engineers. With Mojo, he’s now aiming to do the same for AI, by lowering the barrier to programming AI applications.

I sat down with Chris in San Francisco, to talk language design, lessons on designing Swift and Mojo, and – of course! – compilers.

See also: LPython (Hacker News).

Previously:

Sudoku in Turing-Complete Unicode Transliteration Rules

Nicolas Seriot (Hacker News, Reddit):

The core Unicode algorithms (normalization, casing, bidi, collation) are deliberately bounded, but UTS #35 transliteration rules, under their natural unbounded semantics, are not. This is a result I haven’t found published before.

These rules ship as locale data in ICU, the Unicode library shipped in operating systems, browsers, runtimes, and databases. Whether a given rule file terminates on a given input is undecidable.

[…]

To prove UTS #35 universality, we compile 2-tag systems (Post, 1943), a model proven universal (Cocke & Minsky, 1964), into transliteration rules.

[…]

Transliteration rules were designed to turn “é” into “e”. Three lines of them can compute the Collatz function.

KT_Music:

Inspired by this, I tried creating an implementation that “solves #Sudoku” using only UTS#35 transformation rules 😎

Previously:

Jira Is Turing-Complete

Nicolas Seriot (Hacker News):

Engineering folklore holds that Jira (Atlassian’s project-tracking tool) is Turing-complete. Existing claims point vaguely at automation features without exhibiting a reduction. This article supplies a proof, with setup instructions and execution trace.

[…]

Minsky proved this model Turing-complete (1967). Exhibiting it in Jira’s automation language therefore establishes the reduction. Here is how the model maps onto Jira:

Minsky Machine Jira
Register A Count of linked issues of type Bug
Register B Count of linked issues of type Task
Program Counter Status of a single Epic issue
Dispatch Table Jira Automation rules, one per instruction state
Clock Automation-triggered transitions, or external re-triggering past chain caps

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

New EU App Store Terms to Comply With DMA

Apple (developer, details, Hacker News, TechCrunch, The Verge, 9To5Mac):

These changes resolve Apple’s disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution. They also reduce complexity by moving every developer that distributes apps in the EU to a single set of business terms.

[…]

The Core Technology Fee, a per-install fee for developers that achieve extraordinary scale, will be replaced by the Core Technology Commission, a simple 5 percent commission on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store. The new terms also eliminate the initial acquisition fee and store services fee.

[…]

Under the updated terms, developers can now offer Apple In-App Purchase alongside alternative payment options, which had not previously been permitted in the EU.

[…]

Apple is also expanding who is eligible to operate an alternative app marketplace or distribute apps via the web in the EU.

[…]

Apple will continue to require every alternatively distributed app to go through Notarization[…]

Juli Clover:

Apple will charge a 26% fee for apps distributed through the App Store that use in-app purchase.

[…]

Apps in the App Store that use in-app alternative payment processing will pay 20%.

[…]

Apps that link to a website purchase option will pay 15%.

Apps using Web Distribution or App Marketplaces would pay the 5% CTC (and report transactions). I like that the new terms are simpler and that the fees are slightly lower, but it seems like the EU got tricked or surrendered here.

EMIRELADERO:

This is bonkers, I can’t believe the EU Commission agreed to it. The main issue that the DMA was about still remains: Apple retains ultimate control over app developers’ dealings with users.

The status quo that the EU should have pushed for, and which Article 6(7) of the DMA requires, is one where a developer can distribute iOS apps to users without ever entering into any contractual relationship with Apple.

mjorgers:

All in all, still extremely anti-consumer. If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone? Why would one computing platform be different from the other?

Ben Lovejoy:

However, while Apple hopes it will be allowed to charge these lower commissions, it has admitted in a new regulatory filing that it may not be allowed to charge any commission at all on purchases made through third-party app stores and other external platforms.

Tim Hardwick:

The commission Apple earns from the App Store is shrinking in markets where it has been forced to relax its grip on in-app purchases, based on new analytics data.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-20): M.G. Siegler:

Notably, this isn’t a proposal, it’s the announcement of actual changes that Apple will implement (starting October 1) after “close collaboration” with the EC. And lest we think Apple is overplaying that last aspect, that group gave a statement to Bloomberg backing up the assertion[…]

[…]

This feels like mainly a way to keep the all-important big gaming fees – which make up most of in-app payments, and as such, most App Store fees – mostly intact.

[…]

It sure looks like Apple knew this EU deal was coming down the pike and that the bloc agreeing to their terms would bolster the case that these are “fair”. The US judge still gets to decide that, and Epic has already pushed back as Apple seeks to negotiate directly. One big reason for pushing? Epic wants to ensure any changes Apple tries to negotiate be put in place for all developers.

Juli Clover:

The European Commission has since confirmed that it approves of Apple’s changes to its App Store policies, giving a statement to the Irish Independent[…]

Richard Speed:

Epic Games, a longstanding critic of Apple’s App Store practices, called the scheme “junk fees,” adding that the plan did “nothing to open up the mobile app ecosystem to competition, as required by Digital Markets Act.”

“The law makes it clear that Apple must allow developers to offer link outs to the web for purchases ‘free of charge’ and has to allow ‘effective use’ of competing stores,” the company wrote.

Rui Carmo:

This changes effectively nothing I care about and continues to be completely laughable.

Kyle Howells:

Apple still in complete control over what is allowed in any iOS app.

Fabian Pimminger:

It’s so weird to me that the regulation that is explicitly against gatekeepers still allows Apple to be the gatekeeper.

Thomas Clement:

I hope this isn’t the end of DMA. Apple taking a cut of out-of-store apps revenue makes as much sense as app developers taking a cut of iPhone revenue.

[…]

And also I still want to live in a world where anyone can write a program and run it on the devices they own and send it to friends, without having to pay $100/year of developer account and do the whole notarization thing (which considering the amount of scam in the app store we know is pretty useless in terms of security). Not everybody is a professional programmer, some people are just doing programming as a hobby, some are also young people that don’t even own a credit card yet.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I have refused to sign any of Apple’s EU DMA agreements thus far, because I think they are illegal, and they have been optional.

I still think their new terms are illegal — they don’t meet the minimum requirements of the DMA, and will not be approved by stakeholders — but they are no longer optional, so the choice now becomes accept the updated developer agreement or stop being a developer.

Update (2026-08-21): John Gruber:

This is a near-total victory for Apple.

[…]

Thanks to the DMA’s sprawling scope, complexity, and overreach, Apple came out of this conceding only 4 percent of the App Store’s 30 percent commission, and no reduction at all to the 15 percent for subscriptions after the first year.

Update (2026-08-24): Jesper:

The CTC is preferable to the CTF in much the same way that a fire burning down your kitchen is preferable to a fire burning down your entire house.

[…]

The Digital Markets Act was introduced to ensure that sideloading would be an available alternative, to essentially force open platforms that have been closed. Debates about the wisdom of this notwithstanding, in the biggest case, and up until recent developments in Android app marketplace governance also only case, it has failed to deliver the promises that were the entire point of the law.

Update (2026-08-25): John Gruber (Mastodon):

I’m sure some of you think I’m all wet in my argument that the point of the DMA was merely to impose ongoing bureaucratic complexity. But my view jibes with the reality of how it’s worked out.

In other words, maybe we who had high hopes were the ones who got tricked, not the EU Commission.

Update (2026-08-28): John Gruber:

I don’t recall seeing POSIWID before, but I love the concept. A friend sent this to me, with the quip that I forgot to include a link to it in my “What Is the Point of the DMA?” piece this week. Indeed, it encapsulates my arguments about the DMA specifically and the European Commission generally. The purpose of the DMA is what it does, not what you imagine it is intended to do.

I admit to being primed by seeing Jeff Johnson’s post, but I’m certain that my mind would anyway have immediately gone to our favorite scam promoting toll booth, the place that “gives people around the world a safe and trusted place to discover apps that meet [Apple’s] high standards for privacy, security, and content.”

Also consider which apps have to pay the toll and which ones show their own ads for free.

macOS 26.6.2

Joe Rossignol (release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW):

macOS 26.6.2 delivers security fixes that were first made available in the macOS Golden Gate 27 beta.

Howard Oakley:

There don’t appear to any matching security updates to Sequoia or Sonoma, though.

See also: Mr. Macintosh.

Previously:

iOS 26.6.1 and iPadOS 26.6.1

Joe Rossignol (iOS/iPadOS release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer):

Apple today released iOS 26.6.1, iPadOS 26.6.1, visionOS 26.6.1, and macOS 26.6.2, with all of the updates containing security fixes.

Apple also released iOS 18.7.10 and iPadOS 18.7.10 with security fixes.

The version numbers are now out of sync with macOS because macOS 26.6.1 fixed an important screen sharing vulnerability a few weeks ago.

Juli Clover:

There are fixes for an audio vulnerability that could allow an app to leak sensitive user information, an image vulnerability that could allow for arbitrary code execution, a trio of kernel vulnerabilities, and several WebKit bugs that could cause memory corruption or Safari crashes. Of the 29 CVEs outlined in the document, 21 are WebKit-related, and nine are credited to OpenAI Codex Security.

On iOS, Apple also fixed a telephony bug that could allow an attacker in a privileged network position to bypass IPSec authentication and intercept network traffic.

Previously:

Monday, August 17, 2026

Apple Proposes 15% External Purchase Fee

Juli Clover (AppleInsider):

Apple has again failed to earn a stay for fee calculations in its ongoing legal fight with Epic Games. Apple's case will be heard by the Supreme Court in the term that begins in October, and Apple asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to pause proceedings until then, but the court said no [PDF].

Juli Clover:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan today granted Apple a one-day stay in its legal fight with Epic Games, giving Apple more time to outline the fees it wants to charge developers for linking out to purchase options on the web.

M.G. Siegler:

Apple tried to freeze the entire thing while they appealed to the Supreme Court – and the Supreme Court denied the freeze. But they didn’t deny hearing the case – yet. That’s why they’re pausing the proceedings for now (after Judge Gonzalez Rogers denied the same request), while they weigh Apple’s appeal. But before they do that, they’re basically likely to decide today – again, it was just a 24-hour delay – whether they should grant a longer stay. Presumably if the court thinks they’re unlikely to hear Apple’s appeal, they may not grant that longer stay. Or if they think Apple filing their number won’t harm their business, they’ll let it proceed. But Apple will argue that if the longer stay isn’t granted, it will cause major harm to their business because again, it will effectively end the App Store cut as we know it.

Juli Clover (Engadget, The Verge):

Apple today submitted a court-ordered proposal outlining the commission it believes is reasonable to collect from U.S. apps that link to purchase options outside of the App Store.

Apple is asking for half of its commission on standard apps, so apps that would pay 30 percent for an in-app purchase would pay 15 percent when linking to a web purchase option. Small Business Program participants that would normally pay 15 percent would pay 5 percent.

[…]

The appeals court suggested the commission could be limited to the direct costs of facilitating link-outs, and under that approach, the fee would be zero. Apple says a zero commission would not reflect the value that it provides developers, and its suggested commission gives it fair compensation for the App Store platform.

[…]

The district court will now evaluate Apple’s fee proposal and hear a response from Epic Games , and Apple will need to implement the fee the court sets.

Apple:

Unlike cost-only based commissions, Apple’s revenue-based commissions incentivize continued investment. Apple charges developers a $99 annual fee for the Apple Developer Program. May 17, 2021 Trial Tr. at 2762:21–2763:13. This modest fee—designed to prevent fraud and expressly not intended to compensate Apple for the use of its IP-protected tools, technologies, and services (id.)—allows developers to build apps using Apple’s offerings and deliver experiences to iOS and iPadOS users worldwide.

The annual developer fee is nominal. Apple relies on percentage-based commissions to recoup and profit from its investments. See id. ¶¶ 87–93. Apple is incentivized to invest in IP- protected tools, technologies, and services that generate revenue for developers (and benefit users).

[…]

Dr. Carlton explains that “reduc[ing] Apple’s incentive to invest and provide the technology and services that benefit users and developers” would harm users and developers, as well as Apple.

I like the part where Apple’s expert argues that its normal commission rates are so high that it would still be profitable for developers to pay the proposed linking commissions on top of what they would pay to Stripe or Paddle. In other words, paying Apple for “IP” almost twice what it admits the other companies charge for “full-service, turnkey payment processing.”

Jeff Johnson:

If the point [of the $99] is just to prevent fraud, why do we need to keep paying $99 yearly FOREVER? Is 10 years not enough to prove I’m not a fraud?!?

If the fee doesn’t help pay for Apple IP, then it’s even more blatantly unfair that a minority of apps have to pay for ALL apps to access Apple IP. Free apps, no matter how big or how much $ they make via ads, get access to Apple IP from OUR REVENUE CUT, and not even their $99 counts.

Matt Garber:

That’s what that enormous hardware margin from customers is already supposed to be paying for — Apple IP! In the early 00’s, I gladly paid the “Apple tax” (PowerBook G4) to get access to the Mac OS X software/ecosystem, including all the Unix and dev tools. I’m not sure why anyone thinks that double-dipping is fine on all the non-Mac platforms, App Store or not.

Jeff Johnson (2):

Schiller’s [previous] testimony about the previous program is extremely misleading, because the new program began in 2008 at the same time as the App Store, so there was no previous iOS developer program, and Mac Developer ID did not begin until 2012, so Apple Developer Program membership was not actually required to distribute Mac apps!

Jeff Johnson:

Fourth, it appears that Steve Jobs was wrong: the $99 fee didn’t prevent developers from flooding the App Store with a lot of junk.

I want to quote another remarkable passage from Schiller’s testimony, again with questions from Apple’s own lawyer.

Q. And Mr. Jobs says, “And also just to make it a little clearer, we don’t intend to make money off the App Store. I mean, we don’t make a lot of money off iTunes, and the split with the music companies is about the same, so in the case of the iTunes Music Store, we give all the money to the content owners, and we are basically giving all the money to the developers here. And if that 30 percent of it pays for running the store, well, that will be great, but we just want to create a very efficient channel for these developers to reach every single iPhone user.” Is that a statement that Mr. Jobs made back in March 2008?

A. He did.

[…]

I won’t quote the following passage in which Schiller testifies about his internal email suggesting that Apple limit itself to $1 billion per year in profit from the App Store, hand-waving away the suggestion as merely “spurring conversation.” Of course the email also seems to contradict Schiller’s (absurd) testimony that Apple does not specifically calculate profit from the App Store, only company-wide profit. Apple’s public financial statements also appear to contradict Schiller’s claims.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-20): Marcus Mendes:

On the same day, Apple submitted another motion, asking Judge Gonzalez Rogers to order the parties to attend a settlement conference.

[…]

Epic has now responded to Apple’s motion, stating that although the company “has been, and remains today, willing to entertain any direct approach from Apple with a serious settlement proposal that would introduce competition and benefit all developers,” it “does not believe the prospects of such settlement would be meaningfully advanced through referral to a settlement conference at this juncture.”

Update (2026-09-03): Marcus Mendes:

In addition to the proposal itself, Apple submitted supporting expert reports, alongside a request to seal portions of those filings containing financial data, link-out adoption estimates, developer survey results, and other information Apple considers commercially sensitive.

Epic has now filed an opposition to Apple’s request, arguing “Apple again seeks to conceal information from the public and unnecessarily hamper proceedings.”

Zoom Screen Sharing Attack

Lily Hay Newman (via Ben Lovejoy):

As AI models gain advanced capabilities to find vulnerabilities in software, develop ways to exploit them, and even carry out autonomous hacking sprees, researchers offered a sobering new example on Tuesday, disclosing vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform Zoom that could have been exploited to take over targets’ devices. Anyone on a call that involved screen sharing, whether participants or the host, would have been vulnerable to a silent attack that could be carried out with no indication and no interaction from the victim.

Researchers from the digital defense firm A Security say the bug was discovered in early June using publicly available AI models, and that it took fewer than 20 prompts to uncover the vulnerabilities and create a working attack. Zoom issued a security advisory on Tuesday, including details about fixes the company has already begun rolling out to address the flaws, which affected devices running all operating systems that Zoom supports—Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.

[…]

The vulnerabilities were specifically in the protocol used to facilitate real-time annotation during screen sharing.

I don’t understand how it could take over an iOS device when Zoom’s iOS screen sharing feature only allows observation, not control.

Previously:

Friday, August 14, 2026

TabControl Scam and the App Review Queue

Jeff Johnson:

Despite my history of uncovering App Store frauds, I rarely go looking for these things intentionally! They’re just so pervasive and obvious, they jump out at me. In this case, I was looking at the list of top paid Safari extensions in the Mac App Store, because two of my own extensions are currently on the list, when I noticed the TabControl Extension.

[…]

The Mac App Store “screenshot” for the app is not actually a screenshot at all. If you look closely, that’s not the real Safari: the toolbar elements are wrong. I suspect that the image was AI-generated.

[…]

Another thing you should note in the fake screenshot is the “4.9 out of 5” stars, giving the impression that this is the App Store user rating of the app.

[…]

These purported reviews, all but one of which is 5 stars, are all in English. Yet none of them is in the US App Store. […] If you’ve ever looked through App Store user reviews, it’s unusual to find this naming format. […] the dates on the reviews, such as “Mar 12,” predate the release of TabControl Extension in the App Store!

John Gruber:

God only knows what this obvious AI slop scam is doing with the data from users’ Safari tabs. It’s currently the 12th or 13th most popular Safari extension in the App Store.

Jeff Johnson:

Coincidentally, on the same day well-known developer Marco Arment complained on social media that his new, unreleased Mac App Store app had been waiting 12 days for review by Apple.

Arment ended up waiting on hold—listening to an odd choice of music—to talk to App Review, which I didn’t realize was an option. His Unforgetful app is now approved.

Johnson continued browsing Safari extensions in the store:

The apps’s privacy policy is again on Google Drive, but the developer website link goes to https://aee5e5015.app-ads-txt.com, a suspicious URL. This website is barren and simply redirects back to the App Store[…] Did App Store review ever bother to click the developer website link?

[…]

In addition to the 41 apps, each of which required at least one submission to App Store review, I count across those 41 apps at least 327 updates, almost all of which have the same generic description for what’s new in the update: "Bug fixes and performance improvements." So that’s at least 368 submissions to App Store review, most within the past 12 months, from a single developer. In other words, the developer is averaging almost one submission per day. We can count only approved submissions; we have no idea how many submissions by the developer were privately rejected by App Store review.

I get the impression that Apple is asleep at the wheel. Is anyone at Apple counting submissions per developer? How many is too many? How many resources is one developer allowed to consume?

[…]

You may view it as a noble, democratic ideal to treat every app developer the same, but in reality this is the path to the crApp Store, full of scams and slop.

John Voorhees:

There’s no doubt that there is spam on the App Store, but the way to remove it is to target the spammers, not new developers, students, and hobbyists looking to build their ideas. I know that being an indie developer isn’t an easy way to make a living, but erecting barriers to submitting apps is the surest way to starve Apple platforms of fresh, innovative ideas.

John Voorhees:

I’d like to see App Store spam cleaned up as much as anyone, but the way to do it isn’t preferring well-known developers and those who can afford to pay more for special treatment.

Marc Palmer:

I don’t agree with paid tiers either. However it feels like there should be a natural brake applied to new developers and new apps. It’s no big deal if your first app takes a week or two to review (often did 10y ago), and as it matures & receives meaningful updates in the store, turnaround increases as trust and “value” (active users?) builds up. Like “tarpitting” new accounts. I think limiting the # of new apps you can add per month to say 1 or 2 would also help…

Jeff Johnson:

I was a new App Store developer myself ten years ago. My previous article didn’t propose any new barriers for those groups. To be clear, I did imply that no developer, whether new or not, should have more than 40 apps and average a new App Store submission every day of the year. I’m not aware of any prominent developer who has that many. Apparently, checking just now, Microsoft by my count has 38 App Store apps between iOS and Mac, which is a lot but still less than the 41 apps of the developer I discussed in my previous article who is definitely not one of the largest software developers in the world along with Microsoft. I do think it’s reasonable for Microsoft to pay a significantly higher developer fee to have those 38 apps reviewed than a smaller developer pays to have one app reviewed by Apple.

[…]

My contention is that Apple is actually wasting its own resources treating every developer like a potential spammer or scammer, even the developers who are known to be trustworthy, and this wasting of resources makes it harder on everyone, including new developers, students, and hobbyists. App review is grossly inefficient, and it’s clearly failing to scale to the increase in App Store submissions. What I propose is not raising the gates but rather lowering the gates for developers who have already proven trustworthy, so that Apple can focus its review efforts where they’re most needed.

I’m not sure that paying more would help anything. If scams are profitable, surely it would be worth them paying more, and then we’re back to square one. And I don’t want to create another situation like App Store Search Ads where providing poor service makes the revenue numbers go up. But I like the general idea of considering the account’s history, e.g. the way the Discourse forum gradually increases trust over time. It should count for something if you have a long history of following the rules and submitting updates to a small number of apps on a reasonable schedule vs. frequent spamming of submissions that don’t even have real release notes. It would not be fair for Microsoft to be able to cut in line, but giving spammers equal access to the review queue means they’ll use more than their share of Apple’s resources. That also seems unfair. The current system encourages frequent submissions, which also increases the overall load on the reviewers. I think the incentives need to be changed somehow. Maybe each account should get a certain number of “fast” submissions per month or year, after which you can still submit but it goes into a lower priority queue.

William Gallagher:

Even among more legitimate-seeming apps, though, Apple is ignoring clear problems. In AppleInsider research, for instance, we found that many price tiers listed for the “Simply Piano” app bore no relation to what the developer actually charges.

[…]

You shouldn’t have to be the one to investigate apps you want to try. That is the future of third-party App Stores, and that is a future to be fought.

But that future is here with the first-party App Store we already have. And this inability to trust an App Store is here, right now, because Apple will not do what it keeps saying it is doing and what it is charging developers to do.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-20): Eric deRuiter:

I wonder if there is already a separate queue, not for Marco or other established indies, but for the huge companies: Facebook, Spotify, Google, etc.

Jeff Johnson:

Apparently the App Store developer in question saw my article in the news, because the fake App Store reviews posted on the developer’s website were quickly removed, as reported by AppleInsider and confirmed by me. Until yesterday, the misleading “4.9 out of 5 stars” claim remained in the App Store. However, the developer released an update only hours ago with new screenshots that no longer include the misleading claim, thereby erasing all evidence of the previous fraud. Apple approved the developer’s update and, needless to say, did not remove the app from the App Store.

[…]

There are 59 reviews [of Authenticator ℠], 54 of which are 1 star, and 3 of which are 2 stars. Two of the reviews are 5 stars; of those, one is titled “space jam” and goes on to say, “i believe i can fly and touch the sky.” Anyway, the question is, how did the app manage ratings of 4.1 out of 5 when the reviews average 1.2 out of 5? (That’s a rhetorical question. I think we all know the answer.)

SQLite WAL-Reset Bug

Alex Chan (Hacker News):

Many of these outages were caused by a single bug, deep in SQLite. It took months of intense forensics to track it down.

[…]

This lack of reliable trigger conditions meant we couldn’t reproduce the bug synthetically. Instead, we had to rely on deploying passive, forensic telemetry in our live environment to catch the corruption red-handed. Gathering live diagnostics for a database issue is the last thing we wanted to do, but we had no choice.

[…]

As an additional complication, the corruption didn’t occur on a regular schedule. Sometimes incidents would be hours apart, other times weeks. This made it difficult to predict progress or plan further work, because we were never sure when we’d get our next diagnostic dump. We had a six-week period between October and December when there were no corruption incidents, before they returned as an unwelcome Christmas present.

[…]

In two incidents, our transaction logs failed to replay cleanly. Upon closer inspection, we discovered that data written and committed by one transaction was inexplicably invisible to later transactions. A write had vanished into thin air without raising an error.

SQLite:

The bug is likely present in all version of SQLite from 3.7.0 (2010-07-21) through 3.51.2 (2026-01-09). It is fixed in version 3.51.3 (2026-03-13) and later. Backports of the fix are available for some earlier releases: 3.44.6 and 3.50.7.

The bug only affects databases in WAL mode when there are two or more database connections open on the same file, in separate threads or processes, and when those two connections attempt to write or checkpoint at the same instant.

Alex Chan:

This investigation is a useful reminder: running boring technology in a non-standard way is a risk. The common paths and standard configurations are incredibly well-tested and reliable. Most people use SQLite in a standard configuration and never face this sort of issue. Everything we were doing was a public, documented, supported configuration—but by taking manual control of the checkpointing process and running at our own aggressive pace, we stepped off the well-trodden operational path.

Scott Perry:

I spent the last two years of my time working on SQLite trying to chase this bug down. It was so rare that I never got an internal report; my assessment of the number of customers affected was “about a county’s worth”, some of whom were generous enough to allow their local Genius Bar to send me backups of the affected databases. I spent so many hours in a hex editor staring at the wreckage.

Top three data corruption bug of my career for sure, and the other two weren’t bugs in SQLite.

A former Tailscale employee got in touch and shared that they were checkpointing these databases every 250ms. Multiplied across a fleet of servers that is a fantastic way to surface a super rare bug—they basically built our test rack as a product, but two orders of magnitude more effective (partially due to scale, but mostly because our rack also panics devices at random in order to test the filesystem, NAND controller, etc. and rebooting takes a while)

[…]

13/10 fantastic bug. proof that 100% test coverage is a good start, and that formal methods are needed for critical applications.

Carl Sverre (Hacker News):

I whipped out my phone, and asked Claude to get to work. I had it get SQL 3.51.2 – still buggy – set up in Antithesis, and then instrument the code with a bunch of Antithesis assertions. You can see the instrumented version here.

Then I asked it to write a simple workload which exercised the WAL insert and checkpoint code. Notably, this is a completely generic workload. It just runs writes and checkpoints concurrently – things you’d expect to actually happen in production, all the time. The assertions are also generic to the bug, they’re all standard assertions you’d add to any database, things like “no lost committed writes” and “database is not corrupt” (called integrity check in sqlite).

On my first run, Antithesis caught the bug in 15 mins. Here’s the report.

Of course, it helps that he knew to look in the checkpoint code, but you could imagine using tools like this to quickly investigate hypotheses when you don’t already know the answer.

Copyright © 2000–2026 Michael Tsai.