Jason Snell, Six Colors: On Monday, Apple announced record fourth-quarter earnings, with total revenue of $114.5B, up 12 percent from the year-ago quarter. iPhone revenue was up 17.5%, Mac revenue was up 23.7%, and Services revenue was up 9.8%. Wearables revenue was down 7.9% and iPad revenue was down 10.4%. [...] And now, to help you visualize what Apple just announced, here is our traditional barrage of charts and graphs. As usual, Snell also has a transcript of the analyst call — Ternus’s fir [more]

Simon Willison: The October Inflection Point for Vibe Game Development. “The thing I find both exciting and shameful about this is that I have got interesting results from so little creative input.”

“I didn’t see you put that in the diary.” Sound familiar? Shared calendars solved scheduling, not communication. OurCal connects any calendar, new or existing, to a group chat. Changes post there automatically, so nobody misses them. Because it’s a messenger, we made everything End-to-End Encrypted, certified by France’s cybersecurity agency. It’s native SwiftUI across Apple’s platforms, and the App Store just featured it in “Great apps on iPhone Duo”. We’re Apple people, but we think it’s the b [more]

Arkivism is a search and visual discovery engine for millions of public domain works from the collections of the Smithsonian, The Met, NASA, Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum, and more.

Ted Chiang: “There’s no way to write fiction and guarantee your readers will understand it correctly. There is no way you will ever be able to write something so straightforward that Elon Musk will understand it the way that you intend it.”

Let’s get this out of the way: Olivia Colman will be great as Mrs. Bennet in the new Pride and Prejudice series; here’s the trailer. But the rest of it has some awfully large shoes to fill — both the 1995 and 2005 adaptations are rightly beloved.

Read to the end for a real good Halloween costume

Are contemporary technologies like GPS, phones, and AI deskilling the human body? “In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending.”

Love the idea of a volta, a pivotal point. “The moment when an acquaintance becomes a friend, when a song goes from background noise to what I will demand people play at my funeral.” Or when a novel goes from boring to incredible.

The Drawn Maps are the borders of the countries, state, provinces, and other official territories collectively drawn by more than 300,000 people playing an online daily game called Borderline. There’s a world map as well as maps of the USA, Canada, Italy, and more. There are also timelapse versions of some of the maps. Tags: art · infoviz · maps

Babe, wake up! New potato just dropped. It tastes like roast chicken.

Trailer for season four of The Gilded Age, which started yesterday. I love this show for reasons that are unclear to me. But I don’t care! The heart wants what it wants!

Readwise announces Readwise Books. “We’ve built Readwise Books: our very own ebook store and app. In simple terms, you can think of it as a cross between the Kindle and Goodreads apps, where you can buy, read, and track books.”

In the wake of Patrick Stewart’s death the other day, I watched a couple episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation — the two-part series finale All Good Things… in fact.1 Wanting to add more Picard-centric episodes to my watchlist, I did some research. There are several lists out there of the episodes of ST:TNG and Star Trek: Picard where Captain Jean-Luc Picard particularly shines. Some episodes appear on nearly every list; these are the consensus favorites: The Inner Light. “Captain Jean-Luc [more]

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. An agent can’t click through a signup page built for humans, so give it something it can read instead. Publish an auth.md file and agents register themselves without ever touching a browser login, and the user never gets pulled out of what they were doing. With WorkOS auth.md, enroll in the dashboard and AuthKit publishes the file. Agents read it, register, and get scoped, short-lived credentials you control. Make your app agent-ready today.  ★

Sponsorships have continued selling briskly, of late. Knock on wood. As of yesterday, the next opening on the schedule wasn’t until the last week of December, and the Q1 2027 schedule is already filling up. However, due to some schedule rejiggering, next week is now open. Update: OK, next week has been sold, but Christmas week remains open. That’s a good week at DF. I keep posting and readers are often more bored than usual. Also a good week to promote games. If you’ve got a product or service y [more]

Apple’s dynamic configuration UI in their online store doesn’t hide or disguise the pricing or configuration options, but it doesn’t present all of the options at a glance. I find it useful to organize all of the configuration options into tables on a single page, and I figured it might be useful to share this now, before I finish writing my full thoughts on the redesigned hardware and displays for the PROLED XDR models. Notes: The old-style (mini-LED, no touchscreens, heavier) M5 Pro and M5 Max [more]

Great Art Explained: Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio. “Even Matisse wasn’t entirely sure what he had created and nobody wanted to buy it.”

The top 10 paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes. “I feel like Artemisia has actually thought through the logistics of overpowering a grown man and hacking his head off.”

Marcin Wichary on the original iPod easter egg on Apple Music’s website 404 page: I am usually not a fan of easter eggs — most of them are poorly made — but this might be the best iPod recreation I’ve seen, and it’s an interesting thing to study: I think it generally covers all the modes etc. (with small exceptions) the typography looks accurate, it has the little “haptic” beeps, it has proper acceleration and the scrollbar, it has a little music library with various playlists, I have only notic [more]

Read to the end for a beautiful tribute to Patrick Stewart

Jonathan Stempel, reporting for Reuters: General Motors will pay $220 million to settle ​allegations that it illegally sold drivers’ private behavior and location data to brokers, who then sold the information to insurers that used it to set and sometimes increase rates. The settlement, announced on Thursday, resolves claims by the attorneys general of 35 US states and the District ​of Columbia over the automaker’s Smart Driver program, which enrolled millions of drivers ​between 2016 and its di [more]

There are no generalized solutions to the three-body problem. Say you have three planets orbiting each other: it’s impossible to calculate how they will move using Newton’s laws of motion and gravity. Unlike the two-body problem, the three-body problem has no general closed-form analytic solution. The differential equations that govern the motions of three gravitating bodies are not integrable and cannot be solved to give explicit formulas for the positions of the bodies as a function of time. F [more]

Aaron Couch, The Hollywood Reporter: Patrick Stewart, the sophisticated actor who brought a Shakespearean touch to Star Trek and X-Men as he made an otherworldly transformation from British stage veteran to sci-fi icon, has died. He was 86. Stewart died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles following “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia,” longtime spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak announced. There’s an old adage that everyone’s favorite SNL cast is the one fro [more]

James Bridle on making chairs with LLMs. “What we have here is, quite literally, a chair designed by someone who has read a lot about chairs but never actually sat in one.”

In a late-stage trial, personalized mRNA vaccines for melanoma “reduced the risk of death or recurrence by 42 percent compared to standard treatment”.

After years in the making (or more accurately, years in the wanting), I finally figured out how I wanted to do search for KDO posts. I’ve been tinkering with this specific implementation since the beginning of the summer and it finally all came together. If you’re a member, please help me to kick the tires on this for a few days. (That link, as well as the search links below, will 404 for non-members for now.) Hopefully it’s pretty close and then I can open it up to everyone. I’ve been using it [more]

A DJ named Ralph Lawson, who hosted a radio show called Trans Europe Express, found an incredible time capsule in his collection: an hour-long mixtape sent to him by Daft Punk in 1997, shortly after the release of their debut album, Homework. The tape was badly damaged, but he worked with a specialist to restore it and has put the whole mix up on Soundcloud. As I write this, the mix has been up for a little over a day and has just over 7000 plays. It’s unclear whether Lawson ever even played it [more]

AI search is underperforming for Google, and it's killing Reddit's traffic. What now?

Sir Patrick Stewart, best known for his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, has died at the age of 86. He passed at home in Los Angeles from Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. He was largely considered an unknown when the “Star Trek” offer came along. At the invitation of a friend, a university professor, Mr. Stewart had been in Los Angeles conducting master classes on Shakespeare when, one evening, he gave a lecture and performed some bits of the plays in [more]

Apple Developer News: Apple is making changes to the Taiwan storefront of the App Store, following discussions with the Taiwan Fair Trade Commission. As of October 31, 2026, the commission rate for standard Apple In-App Purchase and paid app transactions will be 26% on the Taiwan storefront of the App Store on iOS and iPadOS. Currently, that rate is 30%. Well there we go. The App Store in Taiwan — just like in Japan — is fixed.  ★

An Italian farmer planted some decades-old seeds he found in his attic. Wheat with seven ears per stalk came up and the farmer found a reference to this type of nutritious, drought-resistant wheat in the Bible’s book of Genesis.

Craig Hockenberry: If you noticed that the Iconfactory sites were kinda broken last week, now you know why. It’s because I was kinda broken last week. Now I’m finishing this post from a comfy chair on our deck. Typing into the latest version of WordPress and PHP. And I couldn’t be happier. No, you teared up a little reading this. Very good news from a very good friend.  ★

Rolfe Winkler, in a crackerjack story for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Blevins, who left Apple in 2022, sometimes set up back-to-back meetings with suppliers so that rival sales teams might run into each other, stoking competitive tension. Sales representatives learned to pack nutrition bars to sustain them through negotiating sessions that Apple executives sometimes pushed past midnight without a dinner break. Blevins’s bad-cop reputation gave his staff leverage: They threatened to call [more]

Somehow I’d never heard of this before: NPR produced and aired1 radio dramatizations of the films in the original Star Wars trilogy. The first program was particularly popular, garnering NPR hundreds of thousands of new listeners. The original versions are available in full on The Internet Archive: Star Wars: A New Hope (1981) Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1983) Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi (1996) Or get all three parts ripped from the CD. All three programs contain elements of John W [more]

Dumpster Archeology. “Lew Blink’s passion for dumpster diving, his tenacity in connecting the dots, and his magnetic charisma as he unearths the secrets of others were a captivating lens through which to explore themes of privacy, waste…”

What’s the largest tweetable number? You’ve got 280 characters. So: “9999…” or “one centillion” or “googol!!!!!!…” or an image of a number? Turns out it’s complicated!

Rolling Stone: The 200 Greatest Rock Songs of the 21st Century So Far. I cannot argue with the top pick: Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. There’s a Spotify playlist with all 200 songs…a great way to spend 15 hours and 25 minutes.

How Jason Snell beat me to linking to this, I don’t know. But like I said back in February, when it comes to signage, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” ought to be “Mind your H’s and S’s”.  ★

I’ve been reading a bit about the recent election in Serbia and some of the details are fascinating. A student-led coalition toppled the 12-year corrupt reign of “the increasingly authoritarian leader” Aleksandar Vučić in recent elections. But in order to ensure voters and allies that this wasn’t a grab for power on the part of the students, the students ruled themselves out. Supporters had the votes, but they needed the losing side to stay. The strict rules were a promise: to those who had oppo [more]

The NY Times recently asked readers “what they can no longer afford, or have given up on having”. Among the answers: medication, car repairs, new clothes, having more kids, eating out, and contact lenses.

This is great: Annie Rauwerda (of Depths of Wikipedia fame) sifted through the archive at newspapers.com to find the goings on of long-ago celebrity name doppelgängers (follow-up post). A few of my favorites: Tags: Annie Rauwerda · celebrity · language

I made a small tweak to Prometheus (gift link discovery site) that kinda kicks ass: NYT Cooking is now a separate source (which you can filter by). The Rigatoni With White Bolognese recipe is a favorite of mine. 🤌

Steven Levy, writing at Wired with the scoop on the new MacBook Pros (News+ link): This turnaround is a big deal to Apple fans. Ternus shrugs off the drama. “The Mac is first and foremost an indirect input device, built around the trackpad and keyboard. But I think there’s times when it’s comfortable and handy to have touch.” Ternus and Apple want to make sure that the Mac faithful don’t panic that the 42-year-old franchise is losing its identity to Apple’s gangbusters mobile products. “We neede [more]

Errol Morris shot ads for Theranos and recently revealed he has a two-hour interview with Elizabeth Holmes that he’s considering releasing. “Did I have any reason to believe that she was a fraud? I did not. Did that change as time went on? It did.”

Remember the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game? Turns out: “Kevin Bacon is not the center of Hollywood. In fact, he never has been, and almost certainly never will be.”

Read to the end for Chicken Soup For The Hole

A bunch of items from Stanley Kubrick’s personal archive will be auctioned off early next year, including Jack Torrance’s axe & the sisters’ blue dresses from The Shining, Kubrick’s director’s chair, and a chess set owned by the director.

The Moving Image Archive is a collection of over 120,000 clips from almost 2300 archival films drawn from public domain collections. The internet is full of forgotten films, and this archive is a growing library of that collection. When synthetic footage can now fabricate the past, preserving verifiable history matters more than ever before. A few things I found while poking around: [Amateur film: Chicago World’s Fair] (1933). “This 1933 amateur film features Chicago’s Century of Progress Wo [more]

It’s Hard To Be A Rich Radical. “It was disappointing how easily money turned a lot of them into sudden conservatives, full of right-wing doctrine about bootstraps and the fantasy of a black capitalist utopia…”

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: A teaser video shared by Apple CEO John Ternus today hints at a potential name for the rumored MacBook models with touch-enabled OLED displays: MacBook Studio. [...] Apple is expected to show off the new MacBooks to selected tech reporters and content creators at an experience in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. Pacific Time today, and that is the home of Hollywood movie studios after all. I went to bed last night thinking “MacBook Studio” was the best guess. I woke up this morni [more]

Scientists are studying whether “many chronic diseases we treat as separate failures of separate organs may share one deeper problem: cells struggling to extract and use energy from food” (diabetes, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, etc.)

I’ve been vaguely aware for awhile that researchers had traced the origins of HIV/AIDS back to Sub-Saharan Africa. But I didn’t know the whole story, which turns out to be really fascinating. For decades, one man was blamed for bringing AIDS to America. But the “Patient Zero” story was wrong. This is the story of how genetic detective work traced HIV’s true origins — from chimpanzees in Central Africa to a global pandemic — and how science unraveled one of the biggest myths in modern medicine. [more]

They Stopped 57 Shootings. Everyone Was Just Fired. “A program called Peace Orlando hired neighborhood residents closest to the violence…who could see a shooting coming and talk people down.” It worked…and then the program was shut down.

Sprout is planning to sell replacement motherboards for certain iPods. “Sprout only replaces the motherboard and uses your iPod’s original parts. No soldering required, and fully reversible.” Bluetooth, WiFi, 500K songs, USB-C, even streaming.

Voters have other things on their minds — for now. PLUS: OpenAI’s clever policy to fight deepfakes, and the Anthropic S-1

Apple Newsroom yesterday: With the 27.2 software updates released today, Siri AI — an entirely new version of Siri that is profoundly more capable, conversational, and personal — is expanding to more people around the world, with availability now in the French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish languages. [...] Siri AI is currently unavailable in the EU in iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS. Apple is working constructively with the EU in an attempt to find a path forward. Don’t hold your breath. ( [more]

Apple Newsroom, with software news for Apple’s “Pro and Tell” week: Apple today introduced transformative updates to Apple Creator Studio, the powerful collection of creative apps designed to put studio-grade tools into the hands of modern creators across Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Final Cut Pro for Mac now includes built-in MotionVFX — an expansive collection of visual effects, plug-ins, transitions, templates, and motion graphics tools — as well as seamless editing in Pixelmator Pro. Apple’s cura [more]

From 713 Magazine on Instagram: In a world where cultural knowledge has become its own form of social currency, knowing the right designers, listening to the right music, and recognizing the right references can make someone appear just as creative as the people actually producing the work. We’ve reached a point where an entire identity can be built around what someone consumes, collects, wears, and shares. And while developing good taste requires curiosity, knowledge, and an understanding of cu [more]

One of the many small pleasures of my job is when someone else writes a good take on a subject that I have been meaning to write myself. Occasionally this stings, because it was something I really wanted to write myself. But usually it’s just awesome, because it’s an article I wanted to exist, didn’t really want to do the work of writing myself, and now it exists and I can just link to it, perhaps with commentary. It’s like finding money on the ground or in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t wor [more]

“Local Wikipedia is Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you.” There is also Walkipedia.

John Oliver on the Republican Party and the Far Right (redundant).

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: Apple on Wednesday will announce 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models featuring touch-enabled OLED displays with thinner bezels, a Dynamic Island instead of a notch, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and a lighter and slightly thinner design, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports. Apple is hosting a private “Pro and tell” experience in Los Angeles starting at 10 a.m. Pacific Time tomorrow. I’m here in LA for the press shindig tomorrow. One thing I’ve been thinking about regarding th [more]

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement of African-American artists in the 1920s and 30s. In 1972, filmmaker William Greaves threw a party in Duke Ellington’s apartment for some surviving members of the movement and recorded the whole thing. The footage sat unused for 50 years until Greaves’ son David picked up the project. The result is the documentary film, Once Upon a Time in Harlem; here’s the trailer. A decade after his death, genre-defying filmmaker William Greaves [more]

Apple Music’s 404 page features a fully functional iPod simulator.

Just a speed bump, but speed bumps are good. Pricing and configurations: M6 with 2 Thunderbolt ports: Base price: $1500 RAM: 16 GB +0 24 GB +200 SSD: 256 GB +0 512 GB +200 1 TB +500 M6 with 4 Thunderbolt ports: Base price: $1700 RAM: 16 GB +0 24 GB +200 SSD: 256 GB +0 512 GB +200 1 TB +500 2 TB +1000 Base price: $2300 RAM: [more]

An agent can’t click through a signup page built for humans, so give it something it can read instead. Publish an auth.md file and agents register themselves without ever touching a browser login, and the user never gets pulled out of what they were doing. With WorkOS auth.md, enroll in the dashboard and AuthKit publishes the file. Agents read it, register, and get scoped, short-lived credentials you control. Make your app agent-ready →  ★

Apple Newsroom’s “Pro and Tell” announcement week continues: Apple today announced the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, delivering even more performance, powerful on-device AI capabilities, and faster connectivity for college students, business users, creators, and more. M6 features an advanced 12-core CPU with the world’s fastest CPU core, so everything from productivity tasks to more demanding pro workflows feels incredibly fast and responsive. The 12-core GPU delivers up to 30 percent faster [more]

Short video teasing an new collab between Daft Punk and Lego, including a forthcoming Lego set based on this fan-submitted entry.

PRRI’s 2026 American Values Survey reveals some, uh, interesting views on whether Americans think empathy is a good thing or not. Those respondents unaffiliated with a religion were much more inclined to think that empathy is “a foundational moral value that helps build a healthy society”. With the exception of white evangelical Protestants (42%), around two-thirds or more of all major religious groups believe that empathy is a foundational moral value for a healthy society, including about eigh [more]

OMG, the height of these waves hitting a seawall in Taiwan as Typhoon Champi hit the island nation a few days ago. That’s gotta be close to 100 feet. Waves also inundated this 75-foot-tall lighthouse and a crane 164 feet tall, knocking it over.

Michael Pollan reflects on what has and hasn’t changed in the 20 years since he wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “Looking at the landscape of food and farming today, I’m sorry to report that things haven’t changed all that much.”

Matt Webb is bunkering down, bracing for more LLM-driven security exploits. “Realistically, let’s say the internet gets infested with AI worms and we need to turn it off and on again, could we do it?” I had not heard of the air-gapped LLM communication 😳

Alexandra Alter, in the lede for her profile of Marissa Mayer’s new AI startup Dazzle for The New York Times (gift link): Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task. Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by [more]

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: Here is Apple’s full statement: The response to iPhone Duo from early users has been incredibly positive, and we are seeing exciting things from developers who are rapidly updating their apps to take advantage of its unique form factor. We are aware of an issue impacting the inner display on a small number of iPhone Duo units. If users experience issues with their iPhone Duo display, they should contact AppleCare for a replacement. The company says the problem affects a v [more]

Harry Kane is this year’s men’s winner of the Ballon d’Or. 100% the right choice — he had the best season of anyone. Like, almost ever.

A poignant short documentary about a mother who only knows her son is alive by the new graffiti tags he leaves around town. Eventually, she started tagging back…

Glenn Fleishman, writing at Six Colors, “Why Notes Will Never Let Us Edit Markdown”: The Notes app added Markdown import and export in the version 26 operating system releases, and the macOS 27 Golden Gate update lets us copy and paste as Markdown. Why can’t we just write natively in that hoary, simple format? I use Markdown all day, every day. In fact, I’m writing these words in Markdown without you even knowing it. All content-management systems (CMSes) I’m aware of support native Markdown ent [more]

From Charles Mann, a quick history of porcelain, which is basically what his pricey induction stovetop is made from. (Fun fact: I went to grad school for ceramic engineering before dropping out after a semester to teach myself web design.)

Read to the end for good Tumblr post

Princeton houses a large digital collection of posters from Russia and Eastern Europe, almost 5000 total item spanning 101 years (1904-2004). This album on Flickr contains nearly 1500 Russian & Soviet posters from 1917-1991 — not sure how much overlap there is between the two. Tags: art · design · propaganda · Russia · Soviet Union

Ten of the most bizarre films and their posters, as chosen by Eternal Family. I linked to Eternal Family recently and this is a good guide to some of their weirdest stuff.

How Tree Rings Challenged the Myth of American Wilderness. “When one revisits colonial accounts of North America, one finds a striking amount of evidence that Native Americans set fire to the landscape.”

Apple Newsroom announcement. iPad Mini (A20 Pro) product page. Tech specs page (PDF archive). iPad comparison page showing new A20 iPad Mini, previous A17 iPad Mini, and the 11-inch M4 iPad Air PDF archive]. One-minute commercial. Available in two colors, starlight and midnight (which does not seem very dark), and three storage capacities: 128, 256, and 512 GB. Pricing, with the previous-generation A17 Pro model for reference, both before and after Apple’s June 25 price hikes: IPAD MINI [more]

Federico Viticci: Don’t like that the iPhone Duo doesn’t auto-lock when you close it? You can fix it with this simple Shortcuts automation. Two steps: A conditional for when the iPhone is Closed. Lock the screen. I mentioned in my review that I kept closing the Duo expecting it to lock, like when closing a book (or a laptop, for that matter). And it didn’t occur to me that I could simply add this feature via Shortcuts. That’s cool. But I also mentioned in my review that I wouldn’t want that to h [more]

According to NASA, the Perseverance rover has driven just over 28 miles on the surface of Mars, making it the vehicle that has driven the farthest distance outside of Earth. On Oct. 11, the rover’s odometer reached 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometers), eclipsing the record of 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers) set by NASA’s Opportunity rover, which explored Mars from 2004 to 2018. Perseverance reached the mark on the 2,006th Martian day, or sol, of its mission, covering in five and a half years a distance [more]

Simon Willison: “Battle Drones is heavily vibe coded — I’ve reviewed almost none of the code, and it’s built in a language (TypeScript) that I’ve hardly used myself.” There’s a French steampunk version too.

If you’ve got or get a Duo and don’t try this out, you’re not hooked up right. Update: But as Cabel Sasser notes, though incredibly fun, this was clearly made by a young Claude-aided developer who never used any of these actual old computers. Let’s just say there are a lot of ahistorical details.  ★

This exhibition of ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) by Utagawa Hiroshige at the Tokyo National Museum was great. Awesome to see these prints in person.

London’s Natural History Museum has announced the winners of the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year, a competition that has been going since 1965. You can see a gallery of all the winners on the competition website (and also places like The Guardian and The Atlantic.) Photos above by Kutub Uddin, Amelie Davis, Michał Michalski, James Lewin, and Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas. Tags: best of · best of 2026 · photography

How to Install an App on Your Commodore 64. “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll just need to type in the code for that program. There’s an article explaining what MLX is, which you can read really quickly on page 93, and then you’ll find the code for it on page 94.”

My thanks to Sunnny for sponsoring last week at DF. Sunnny’s pitch to B2B companies is simple: you store valuable customer information across a myriad of systems, making it hard to get a simple overview. Sunnny consolidates your customer data, cleans it, resolves identities, identifies relationships, and presents it neatly for you, your team, and your AI model. Early access is open now.  ★

Some guy on Reddit (with an illustration video): Saw this online, tried it, and it works beautifully. Basically, I registered the lowest part of my right index finger. That part of the finger sits naturally when you go to swipe up at the phone. This resolves a major issue I had where I couldn’t easily just look at my phone to glance through notifications on the lock screen. Now, it’s never been easier (shown at the end of the video). This is arguably better than Face ID. The speed is up there, a [more]

Special guest: Joanna Stern. Sponsored by: Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year, while supplies last, with code talkshow50off. Notion: The collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side, with a developer platform teams can build on.  ★

Speaking of Johnnie Manzari, he wrote a post yesterday marking the 10 year anniversary of Portrait Mode: Initially, Portrait mode was seen as a giant math problem. You’d do disparity calculations on the two sensors and output a depth map. The problem was this approach feels and looks digital; it feels fake. In areas without texture, it’s impossible to do this calculation. In areas with ultra fine detail, a lower resolution depth map leads to terrible transitions and a full resolution depth map t [more]

The Tiny Computers app lets you play with old computers on the iPhone Duo. Ten machines included: “Macintosh, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Amiga 500, Windows 95, ThinkPad, iMac G3, iBook G3, PowerBook G4 and Windows XP.” XP even crashes sometimes. Love this.

Nicole Nguyen (also with a 5-minute video), writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Every time I used the Duo in phone mode, one-handed, I felt its heft. It’s wider and thicker than a Pro iPhone — and heavier, even compared with competing foldables. My hand actually hurts after using the Duo nonstop, straining to grip the device securely while trying to reach the far edge of the screen. An Apple spokesman pointed to the Duo’s titanium frame for durability. Other folding models use a lig [more]

Aditya Soni, Christine Chen, and Will Russell, reporting Friday for Reuters: CEO Ternus played greeter at a store in Austin, Texas, throwing open the doors and high-fiving customers as they streamed in, a video ​posted on X by CBS Austin showed. A known car enthusiast, Ternus’s Austin visit coincides with this weekend’s Formula 1 US Grand Prix in the city, with Apple holding exclusive US broadcast and streaming rights to the racing series. I was wondering why Ternus and retail chief Deirdre O’Br [more]

Jay Peters, The Verge: The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange bright line (or lines) across the right side of the display. This crack problem doesn’t seem to be widespread, but it’s seemingly more than a handful.  ★

Marques Brownlee thinks the lack of Face ID will be the biggest gripe. I agree. And I love his central framing for the review: that the Duo is extremely polished around the edges (figuratively, but also true literally) but rough in the middle. But he spends more time griping about third-party apps that haven’t been optimized for the Duo than most other reviews, because he oddly seems to personally rely on a lot of apps from shitty iOS developers, like Discord and Google Calendar. I get it, Googl [more]

I hadn’t heard of Tim Pan or Mediastorm until running across his 24-minute video review of the Duo. It’s a good and fair review, but what struck me are the rather astonishing production values. Amongst other things, they stress-tested the hinge with an industrial robot by opening/closing it 10,000 times. (That’s less than one-third the folds tested by Joanna Stern’s Hingey, but still.) It’s an incredible piece of work, especially given the one-week time constraint. English is Pan’s second langua [more]

It seems like this amazing Easter egg only launched yesterday, to celebrate the original iPod’s 25th anniversary. Exquisitely well done. More like this, please.  ★

Chan Karunamuni, human interface designer at Apple, on X: iPhone Duo is here! Excited to have worked on the design of our open/close transition. It’s designed to make the two displays feel like one seamless experience by perceptually bending the focal plane, not the content, so that it feels like opening a window onto a singular view. Karunamuni thanks a few engineers by name, which is always good (and for Apple employees, far too rare) to see. Johnnie Manzari, HI designer formerly of Apple, now [more]

Read to the end for a great Tubi find

Nilay Patel and Allison Johnson (also: 26-minute video review on YouTube): This means almost every time you open the phone you instinctively rotate it, and while it will work no matter how it’s rotated, it’s better to rotate it counterclockwise so the cameras are on top and the volume buttons are on the top left. Over our week of testing, this started feeling more natural, but it’s exactly the opposite of what you’d initially expect. It’s especially odd in Apple’s bumper case, which has a large [more]

The One Question I Can’t Stand at Restaurants. “The idea of a restaurant I’d never been to using a dossier on me to decide, say, where I should sit, what I was likely to order, even whether I should be given a reservation at all, gave me chills.”

Joanna Stern’s video review packs a ton into 16 minutes. She commissioned a custom robot to fold/unfold the thing over 32,000 times in a week, to see if it loosened the hinge. (I won’t spoil the answer.) She took it on a yacht on the Hudson. She took it to a dark bar to test the cameras. And she really, really missed Face ID. I don’t know how she makes these videos in just a week, along with all the actual testing. So good. We rank our complaints (and praise) in different order, but overall her [more]

Why we're betting on AI realism. PLUS: The hell of PHP2Shell

Apple Newsroom: New editorial collections for iPhone Duo apps and games will go live on the App Store this Friday, with additional app updates rolling out throughout the year. Apps optimized for iPhone Duo are easy to identify with a Made for iPhone Duo badge on product pages across the storefront. This story highlights dozens of apps that have been optimized. This sort of transition happens every time Apple introduces a major screen change. It happened with the iPhone X in 2017, it happened whe [more]

Nothing major, but since publishing at 7:00pm last night, I’ve made a few additions and changes to my iPhone Duo review. I’m calling them out here, so that if you’ve already read it, you can see the changes. If I make more, I’ll add them to the top. Regarding the camera, added and/or clarified the following (in bold): As for the camera itself, it’s terrific. It’s clearly not of the same caliber as the iPhone 18 Pro, but it’s good. The technical specs of the Duo’s main 1×/2× camera are nearly ide [more]

The very nature of the iPhone Duo raises numerous obvious questions about what it’s like to use. Does it not feel thick and heavy, awkward both to pocket and unpocket? Doesn’t the outer (cover) screen feel small and cramped, with an unfamiliar squat-rather-than-tall layout for UI controls in every app you use? Isn’t it weird that when you open it up to use the inner screen, that all the hardware buttons on the edges of the device are in the “wrong” places for a tablet? For anyone who’s gotten us [more]

Read to the end for "I coulds get yooshed ta this" rat son or "cheesed to squeak you" mouse daughter

Long a voice for Republicans inside the company, he played a leading role in pushing Meta to the right

Get your copy of the book, and come see me in your city!

Barack Obama, in a 430-word essay: It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. [...] The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congressw [more]

Back in 2022, I quoted from an interesting post by Ben Schlappig at One Mile at a Time, where he wrote: I’ve had the opportunity to interact with quite a few senior airline executives over the years, and I find that their knowledge about competitors is typically one extreme or the other: Some airline executives literally couldn’t tell you the first thing about their competitors, and have no knowledge of their passenger experience, fleet, etc. Some airline executives know literally everything abo [more]

Greg Joswiak, on X: Can’t wait to pro and tell next week. Juli Clover, MacRumors: Rumors suggest Apple is planning to debut the new MacBook Pro with an OLED touchscreen display, an M6 entry-level MacBook Pro, an M6 iMac, an iPad mini with an OLED display.  ★

Yesterday I posted the same question to my followers on X, Threads, and Mastodon:1 Poll, only for people who have pre-ordered a Duo. When is your delivery/pickup date? October November December January The results were interesting; I’m glad I asked. XThreadsMastodonTotal October36%38%39%37% November35%42%45%39% December10%9%8%10% January19%11%8%14% Responses1,3821,0344492,865 Observations: There were way more people who successfully got October ship dates than I expected. It’s [more]

Read to the end for Viral Cheez-It Girl

I’ll start with a nomenclatural sidenote: Apple seems to be going with “Apple HomeView” as the product’s name. E.g., the URL slug for it on Apple.com is apple-homeview/, not just homeview/. Few people notice and no one who doesn’t work in Apple product marketing cares, but they actually do the same thing with Vision Pro — in Cupertino, it’s “Apple Vision Pro” (once again including the URL slug). Yet this week’s new HomePod Mini is just “HomePod mini 2” and the existing 2nd-generation HomePod is [more]

Read to the end for egg lowkey slaps

Will the approach that beat Meta in New Mexico work against ChatGPT?

Read to to the end for an unfortunately really catchy AI-generated ad for dog bowls

Why the onetime global town square now feels more like a clubhouse

Read to the end for an amazing mashup

OpenAI’s math breakthroughs may trigger an identity crisis for mathematicians. Who’s next?

Read to the end for 500 hours of YouTube train footage

Calls for a new kind of slowdown were the talk of The Curve. PLUS: Slinking back to X

Preorder your copy to get the full story on the AI-fueled data center buildout

Read to the end for a really good storefront

Here's your Garbage Intelligence for September 2026

Read to the end for Matt Portner's Pro Skimboarder

With safety questions still swirling, the company introduces a more business-focused take on agents

On the eve of the company's developer conference, it cancels a new model over safety fears

Read to the end for FlubberLover01

Generative AI is harming people today. We don’t need to waste time fantasizing about science fictional scenarios.

Read to the end for an introduction to puns

Meta has a new vision to sell, but it may be getting ahead of itself. (The VR Glasses are amazing, though)

Read to the end for a machine we must create

Are consumer agents the future — or a mirage?

Read to the end for a good meme

Under the new CEO, products are more expensive and AI comes with more surveillance

Read to the end for your granddad Cyclops

Saying goodbye to some old friends — and hello to Machine Gods

Read to the end for a really good video about garlic bread

The leaders of AI labs agree that the United States to act, and soon. But the president and the speaker of the House aren't interested

Once a fringe obsession of Bay Area rationalists, existential risk is suddenly all anyone is talking about

Plus, good reads you might have missed in August 2026

We were promised a transport revolution. Instead we got cars tracking us and serving us ads.

His criticisms are responding to industry hype, not the real harms of generative AI

Plus, a recap of tech stories you missed in July 2026

Why does the media keep debasing itself for a man who despises them?

The imperial project of Silicon Valley and the US government is out in the open. Countries need to reclaim their sovereignty.

16 books for you to consider bringing on your vacation

How apps like Uber make taxis seem unappealing

Preorder my new book about the growing cost of data centers

Plus, a recap of top stories you missed in June 2026

The many problems with Mark Carney’s AI strategy for Canadians

And you're getting a free month!

PLUS: A rich and evocative Iraq War (?) rom-com

PLUS: The "forklift model" of A.I. education

Roundup 05/03/2026

A Read Max re-run

Roundup 04/27/2026

With Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff, and John Ganz

Let’s pretend it’s January, because I’m ready and excited to present to you the #new chips, cookies, cereals, and assorted garbage I found in the wild during 2025!! Last year, we started a new (temporary?) Panic tradition — at the very end of our Monday status meeting, I run through all the new snacks I’d found […]

Roundup 04/20/2026

PLUS: Has Forum Brain crossed the gender divide?

Roundup 04/14/2026

Video of our conversation from Night of IDeas

Roundup 04/06/2026

On a weird few weeks of A.I.-writing scandals

Roundup 03/29/2026

A Read Max re-run

Roundup 03/23/2026

A recording of our livestream for paying subscribers

Roundup 03/17/2026 (Plus: a bonus book rec!)

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Roundup 03/09/2025

This post is about a found mural, a lost artist, and a conference talk. It’s the full story of Wes Cook and The McDonald’s Mural. Grab a beverage, sit back, relax, and thank you for joining me. Ten years after giving my first talk at XOXO, Andy (Baio) and Andy (McMillan) asked if I’d like […]

When I was kid, on a road trip with my family, we stopped in Vacaville, California. And there, drawing us off the freeway with a wooden glow, was a brand new roadside attraction: Wooz. The pitch? It was a maze. A big maze. Wooz stood for “Wild Original Object with Zoom” (!), opened in 1988, […]

Long ago, I was in the studio audience of a local PDX TV kids show called Ramblin’ Rod. “Local kids show” is a format that is completely lost to time, which is pretty wild, because it was such a thing. Think Krusty the Clown — kids sitting in a studio, a goofball host, time filled with […]

Welcome to 2025. The vibes are a little heavy, so, I’m trying very hard to focus on the things I can control — and yes, that includes remembering to share things that delight me like the latest #new snacks and cereals I find at the grocery store!! Yeah. It’s an age-old, very-odd Cabel tradition. This time, […]