Jeff and Fernando discuss the iOS 27 Public Beta, some of their favorite new iOS 27 new features, and whether or not people should consider installing it on their main device. The pair also talks about ChatGPT vs Siri AI, OpenAI vs Apple, the end of carrier-financed unlocked iPhones, and nine upcoming new emoji.
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When Apple finally responded to the dramatically increased costs of memory and other components, the company didn’t hold back. Some of the price hikes exceeded 50%, while memory and storage upgrades literally doubled in some cases.
There’s a strong possibility that these higher prices will remain in effect for years, and quite possibly permanently …
Meta has announced that parents can receive alerts when their teens discuss suicide or other forms of self-harm with its AI on Instagram, Facebook, or Meta Horizons.
You’ll need to opt in to Meta’s supervision tools for parents and guardians in order to select the family accounts you want to supervise …
Five Apple Watch models are able to measure your blood pressure in order to generate alerts for possible hypertension. However, they do not provide your actual blood pressure readings.
A few smart rings and other fitness devices do so, but rely on regular calibration with a traditional cuff monitor. The upcoming Signal Ring says that it delivers full blood pressure measurements without any calibration, and that a trial of thousands of people backs the claim …
There are few software limitations on anyone considering a switch from Windows to Mac. Not only do all the biggest PC apps run on the platform, but there are countless examples of useful apps that are exclusive to Mac.
The one big exception is gaming. However, new tests show that Windows games run better than ever on Mac, whether that’s being done officially or unofficially …
Apple chipmaker TSMC had already said that it would build a total of eight plants in Arizona, and has now announced an investment boost that could see that number increased to 12.
This could potentially see more chips for Apple devices made in the US, but there are reasons to be skeptical about this possibility …
Apple today launched its Back to School deal for 2026. Students can get a gift card worth up to $150 with the purchase of a MacBook Pro. $100 gift cards are available with the purchase of MacBook Air, iPad Pro, and iPad Air.
As is typical, you can usually save more money than the $150 gift card included in Apple’s promo by buying a new Mac from Amazon. However, it can still represent a reasonable deal for students who want to buy from the Apple Store directly.
Jony Ive and Sam Altman made a big promise when they teased the launch of a completely new concept in AI hardware more than a year ago.
The most recent report suggests that OpenAI may technically be delivering on this promise, but could end up at least partly competing with an upcoming AirPods model. If so, I can easily see AirPods Ultra proving the more popular choice …
While macOS is generally very stable, there are times when an app will crash and your Mac will offer to send a diagnostic report to Apple.
A new form of Mac malware has been discovered, which creates fake versions of this form, requesting your Mac password as part of the data collection. If you comply, it will get access to a huge range of personal data, including your password managers and cryptocurrency wallets …
The new Siri and other Apple Intelligence features are currently only supported in the iOS 27 beta in English in a small number of countries, but Apple has promised that they will “quickly expand” to additional countries and languages.
China posed a particular challenge for the company as the law there only permits partnering with a Chinese AI company. A report today says that Apple has now reached agreement on this, and will be using two different models …
Former Apple design chief Jony Ive always described his long-term vision for the iPhone design as “a single slab of glass.” Apple is believed to have retained that goal long after Ive left the company, with Liquid Glass representing the company’s software prep ahead of the new hardware.
We’ve already seen reports of a number of ways in which the 20th anniversary iPhone could take us significantly closer to Apple’s vision, and the latest of these may provide another piece of the puzzle …
Many X users have found that their feed is rather random, with comments on their posts similarly more from randos than those who follow you. The platform says it has finally noticed this and is fixing it with a “tweak” to the algorithm …
An online safety regulator has said that tech giants need to do more to combat sextortion (sexual extortion), naming Apple, Meta and Google among the companies who need to do better.
Victims of sexual blackmail tend to be younger, including children below the age of 16 …
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In this episode of Apple @ Work, Jitesh Ubrani joins the show to discuss IDC’s recent PC shipment report, where shipments declined, but revenue rose.
I noted Jason’s post awhile back about his reading routine with interest. My ears perked up again at the announcement of the audio newsletter for Six Colors members. And Glenn had a few words about history and his RSS journey. Surprisingly, all of these developments have left me with a take that still feels like my own.
I’m an avid combiner of RSS and a user of read-it-later services. And I read widely — tech, politics, Texas news, accessibility, and movies. I also consume as many words as possible as audio, rather than text on a screen. That’s an accessibility story I’ll get to in a bit. But even in our little Six Colors family, where RSS is mighty popular, it still means very different things to different people.
Here are my folders of RSS feeds, shown in Feedbin for the Web. I can select one, and either read it right away, or press a key to send it to Instapaper, or elsewhere.
The first step, it seems to me, is to know what kind of reading routine you want. Are you, like Jason, a fan of newsletters or newspapers, who wants a concentrated once-a-day digest? Or do you want to monitor feeds all day, allowing the river of news to wash over you as it arrives? Or maybe you’re like me — a scanner of feeds multiple times a day, who takes read-it-later at its word, putting most items aside for focused digesting in bunches?
Embracing my inner squirrel
So I gather and store the things I want to read. I like the two-pass approach: survey what’s available, mark the best, and read what I’ve curated when I have time. That can also include links folks send to me, or a look at Bluesky or Mastodon. These sources both do something RSS can’t quite replicate — they’re serendipitous, surfacing things my list of subscriptions doesn’t know I’m interested in.
Choosing a story I especially like from a long list — ideally with a single keystroke on the Mac, or a swipe on iOS — gives me a tiny dopamine hit, something like shopping does for some people. Oooh, a new Wired story on how AI will kill us all, or a review of an anticipated Broadway play from The New Yorker. Swipe!
Just me?
When I open Feedbin each morning, my Texas news folder often bulges with hundreds of articles. In the Tech category, I might need to process a dozen stories about electric vehicles, twice that many about Apple stuff, and whatever TechMeme has for me that day. I scroll the headlines and press 3 on my Mac keyboard to send an article to Instapaper — the best read-it-later service available directly in Feedbin, now that Pocket’s gone. From there, Instapaper syncs to an iOS text-to-speech app, which will turn my cullings into an audio playlist.
My approach works extremely well with my tool of choice: Feedbin on the Mac as collector of RSS feeds and reader. I use the Feedbin Web site, though there is a Mac app with a very simlar interface. It’s been a challenge to replicate the experience on iOS, because so many RSS readers force me to swipe or tap twice (or more) to get an article into Instapaper – more to go directly to a speech app, which I’d rather do.
I’ve recently started using ReadKit on my phone and iPad, because it’s fast, offers a good internal browser, is accessible to VoiceOver and allows me to theme my screen just the way I want. Instapaper is a swipe and a tap away, which is one more tap than I had to make when I used Reeder, but I prefer the ReadKit’s look, so I’ve adjusted to the extra step.
To send an article all the way through my preferred workflow with ReadKit, I swipe left on the story, then confirm I want it sent to Instapaper.
Instapaper operates as middleware, syncing to speech app like Voice Dream or Speech Central in turn. What I get on the other end is a playlist of spoken articles that will read to me continuously. Links from friends or from social media, I can pop directly into a speech app via the iOS share sheet.
This triage/gather/read-later method isn’t specific to my speech-based consumption. If you have squirrelish tendencies, various apps will take your saved articles and give you a pretty interface from which to read them using your eyeballs. If not for speech, I might just read everything in ReadKit, but I’d have to start the things I wanted to save for later, which isn’t as appealing to me as syncing, then automating the deletion of things I’ve read.
No to the newsletter (mostly)
My friction point is newsletters. Like Jason, I’ve subscribed to a number through Feedbin and a dedicated email address. But my nut-gathering method runs into an obstacle when I’m forced to view a newsletter’s full body in Feedbin, or save the whole thing to Voice Dream. To read the way I want, I’d have to scan the newsletter in a browser window, and make my article choices there — adding steps I’d rather not.
Voice Dream articles appear as a playlist. They can come from a synced read-it-later app, a shared link or even an ePub or PDF. Voice Dream can also load audio files.
RSS is so much simpler, and I use it whenever I possibly can. But as Jason points out, some content providers are ditching the standard to force readers into newsletters or apps. It’s made that ReadKit browsing experience more important to me, so I tend to read newsletter most often on my phone.
Audio for accessibility
I’m visually impaired, and text-to-speech isn’t a nice-to-have for me — it’s how I get through my reading list each day. I’ve appreciated sites that have added audio versions of their stories. If I happen to be alone, have earbuds in, and have time to read right away, I’ll press Play on a news site post. But that number of “ifs” makes it hard to integrate site-provided audio into my routine — which is exactly why having a dedicated pipeline from RSS to a speech app matters so much.
The happy squirrel
What I keep coming back to is this: the squirrel method works for me because it separates the act of finding from the act of reading. Those are two different cognitive modes, and collapsing them creates pressure that makes reading feel like a chore, or a distraction from taking in the amount of material I want to each day. It’s also what I’m used to. It’s aparently difficult to teach an old squirrel new tricks.
Roblox executives Nick Tornow and Vlad Loktev, on the Roblox blog:
Twenty years ago, Roblox launched with a simple idea: “You make
the game.” At the time, that was a radical proposition — most
games were made by studios and professionals, and the idea that
anyone could be a creator was far from obvious. But we believed
it. And the millions of creators who built on Roblox proved it. As
we look to a future where any one of Roblox’s 132 million daily
active users could come up with the next hit game, we’re taking
that original idea further than we ever have. Over the coming
months, we’ll share a series of announcements that will give every
creator a clear runway to go further and fulfill the promise of
“You make the game” for more people than ever before.
Today, we’re announcing Build, a new mobile-first creation tab
within the Roblox app, and a new suite of AI-powered tools within
Studio for creators of every level. On July 28, we’ll begin
testing these new agentic tools. With Build and Studio, creators
can delegate the parts of development that don’t require their
full attention.
This sounds really cool and fun. But you know what else was really cool and fun? AI coding apps that ran on iOS, like Bitrig, Replit, and Vibecode — all of which Apple put the kibosh on back in the winter. You of course are free to use any tool you want to build apps for iOS on a desktop computer, but Apple decided to disallowing building iOS apps on iOS.
But it’s OK for Roblox to allow AI-assisted game generation on iOS ... because Roblox is already so big and popular? How can Apple justify allowing Roblox to do this while disallowing anyone else?
OpenAI says it’s folding ChatGPT, its AI coding agent Codex, and
its developer-facing API into one core product team. The company
says that Codex is increasingly powering its consumer and
enterprise offerings, which are gaining the ability to perform
digital tasks autonomously on behalf of users.
Other OpenAI leaders are also taking on larger roles at the
company as part of the changes. OpenAI’s head of Codex, Thibault
Sottiaux, has been tapped to lead the company’s core product and
platform teams. Sottiaux was a key leader in building Codex into
one of the company’s fastest-growing products of all time. He’s
also one of the leaders overseeing development of OpenAI’s
forthcoming “super app,” which aims to combine Codex, ChatGPT, and
the company’s Atlas web browser into a unified desktop
application.
I’ll give them credit for sticking with a plan for two whole months to get this out the door. But the problem is they went the wrong way. Instead of putting the eggheads from Codex in charge of ChatGPT, they should have put the product-minded people from ChatGPT in charge of Codex. Codex, I’m finally learning, is sprawling and confusing. It needs a strong dose of focus, clarity, and coherence — attributes that ChatGPT exhibited in spades. Instead, by putting the Codex dorks in charge, they’ve injected ChatGPT with confusion, incoherence, and sprawl.
Claude, the app OpenAI’s leadership is obsessed with copying now, is so goddamn confusing that it has Extensions, Plugins, Capabilities, Skills, and Connectors — and they’re all different things. You’ve let your own AI overuse turn your brain to mush if you think that makes sense, but even more so if you think that’s the model to copy.
I’ve been waiting for a while now for someone to explain all of this clearly and succinctly, worried that maybe it was my job to figure it out and do the clear succinct explaining. All of this dogshit from OpenAI and Anthropic presents itself as though it can be explained clearly and succinctly. But it’s just a veneer of coherence. It’s all just been thrown together in an AI blender and poured out as mush.
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