HomeKit’s Biggest Update in Years iOS 27 is built around Siri AI and general polish, but HomeKit owners

Sam Altman has described himself as a “mega Apple fanboy” while discussing the trade secrets lawsuit now dividing two companies that were close technology partners only two years ago.

Speaking with journalist Alex Heath on the Sources podcast, the OpenAI CEO said he was “very sad” when he learned about the case. His admiration for Apple, however, did not soften his rejection of the allegations against OpenAI and two former employees.

Altman said the company does not want another business’s intellectual property and would dismiss anyone found to have improperly brought confidential material into OpenAI. He also said an internal investigation left him convinced that the employee at the center of the dispute had not acted improperly.

That is OpenAI’s account, not a resolution of the lawsuit. Apple alleges that trade secrets connected to hardware design, manufacturing and supply-chain operations were taken for the benefit of OpenAI’s consumer-device program. The defendants deny wrongdoing, and the court has not settled those competing claims.

Sam Altman Separates Personal Admiration From the Case

Altman’s response was unusually personal for a dispute of this scale.

Technology executives normally leave active litigation to lawyers and carefully written company statements. Calling himself a fanboy places Altman on familiar ground with millions of customers who admire Apple products while disagreeing with a corporate decision.

His first reaction, he said, was to assume that the accusations sounded serious enough that someone must have behaved badly. OpenAI then examined the matter and reached a different view.

Altman said the company would act if it found that someone had taken another company’s intellectual property. At the same time, he argued that an employee who had done nothing wrong deserved a defense.

That distinction is central to OpenAI’s public position. It does not deny that former Apple employees now work on its hardware initiative. Instead, the company disputes the allegation that their movement between employers brought protected information into the program.

Personal admiration cannot answer the evidentiary questions. Being a customer, praising a company or enjoying its products has no bearing on whether confidential files were accessed or used. Altman’s comments are more revealing as an account of how sharply the relationship has changed.

OpenAI once promoted its work with Apple as a partnership built around safety, innovation and access to advanced AI. It now describes the lawsuit as aggressive, inaccurate and unnecessary.

From ChatGPT Partnership to Hardware Rivalry

In June 2024, both companies announced an agreement to integrate ChatGPT into experiences across iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Siri could ask for permission to send certain requests to ChatGPT, while Writing Tools could use the model for composition and image generation. The integration gave OpenAI direct exposure inside some of the world’s most widely used personal devices without requiring every user to create an account.

At the time, Sam Altman said the partnership would introduce ChatGPT to users in a new way. Apple presented the external model as an optional extension of Apple Intelligence, keeping permission and privacy controls between the user and the third-party service.

The arrangement made sense while the companies occupied complementary positions. Apple controlled the devices and operating systems; OpenAI supplied a widely recognized generative model.

Consumer hardware changed that balance.

OpenAI is developing a family of AI-native devices with designer Jony Ive, whose work at Apple helped shape products including iPhone, iMac, iPod and Apple Watch. Tang Tan, another longtime hardware figure who previously worked on major Apple products, is now OpenAI’s chief hardware officer.

Once OpenAI began recruiting deeply from Apple’s hardware organization, the relationship was no longer limited to providing a model inside Siri. The companies were moving toward competition over the physical objects through which people may interact with AI.

That competition helps explain why the lawsuit reaches beyond an ordinary employment disagreement. Hardware development depends on manufacturing knowledge, component choices, testing systems, supplier relationships and production methods that can take years to build.

Apple’s complaint alleges that OpenAI benefited from confidential information in those areas. OpenAI argues that the case is being used to slow a potential rival and discourage employees from leaving.

What Apple Alleges Against OpenAI

Apple filed its lawsuit in July against OpenAI, Tang Tan and former electrical engineer Chang Liu.

The complaint alleges that former employees misappropriated trade secrets connected to product development and shared them with OpenAI as it accelerated its consumer-hardware ambitions. Apple has also sought a preliminary injunction intended to prevent the use of disputed information while the case proceeds.

According to Associated Press reporting on the original complaint, Apple accused OpenAI of encouraging recruits to provide confidential knowledge and advising them on how to avoid scrutiny during the transition between companies.

Those are allegations. OpenAI has denied that it requested, received or wants Apple’s trade secrets.

In its public response, OpenAI disputed several details surrounding Apple’s communications and treatment of departing employees. It argued that continued access to some files resulted from Apple’s own account-management practices and said former employees had attempted to handle that access responsibly.

OpenAI also said Tan had instructed his team not to use confidential material belonging to previous employers. Its motion to dismiss asks the court to reject Apple’s case, while its opposition to the requested injunction challenges the evidence and need for immediate restrictions.

Reuters reported that roughly 400 former Apple employees had joined OpenAI’s hardware initiative, according to figures appearing in court filings. Headcount alone does not establish misuse of trade secrets. It does illustrate the scale of the talent movement and why the dispute has become a defining fight over the next generation of personal hardware.

OpenAI’s Device Work Is Continuing

Sam Altman said he does not expect the lawsuit to slow the company’s device program.

That is the most direct business claim in his interview. It suggests that OpenAI has separated disputed material and personnel questions from the work it believes can continue without relying on protected Apple information.

Whether the schedule remains unaffected may depend on the court. A preliminary injunction could impose restrictions before a full trial, depending on its scope. A denial would allow development to proceed without that requested intervention, although the wider lawsuit would remain active.

OpenAI has revealed little about the devices themselves. The company has discussed an AI-native hardware family rather than a single conventional phone replacement, and Altman has spoken about the privacy discomfort created by products that visibly point cameras at other people.

That leaves the design, release timing and commercial strategy largely unknown. No product has been publicly introduced, and Altman’s assurance that development continues does not amount to a launch announcement.

The lawsuit also does not automatically end ChatGPT’s role across Apple platforms. The existing integration remains a separate customer-facing arrangement unless either company announces a change.

For people using ChatGPT through Siri or Writing Tools, the legal conflict currently produces more drama in court filings than difference on the screen. The stranger question is how long two companies can remain software partners while preparing to compete over the device sitting on the table beside that screen.

The post Sam Altman Calls Himself a ‘Mega Apple Fanboy’ Amid Lawsuit appeared first on AppleMagazine.

Ugreen’s HomeAgent shows how local AI could transform the smart home before Apple’s long-awaited hardware push even begins.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Apple is seeing another high-profile executive from the Tim Cook era scale back his remaining responsibilities, as former chief financial officer Luca Maestri has dropped his role overseeing corporate services.

Maestri, who handed the CFO title to Kevan Parekh at the end of 2024, had stayed on as a vice president running corporate services. That group covered information systems and technology, information security, and corporate real estate. According to Bloomberg News‘ Mark Gurman, Maestri stepped away from those duties in recent weeks. He remains on Apple’s payroll, but now has no operational responsibilities beyond teaching a class at Apple University. He visits the office about once a week and is winding down toward retirement.

The corporate services portfolio has shifted to current CFO Kevan Parekh. Maestri previously reported to Cook and does not report to new CEO John Ternus, who took over this week. Cook often kept departing senior leaders in reduced roles; it is unclear whether Ternus will follow the same practice.

Maestri’s earlier tenure as CFO also drew scrutiny over Apple’s artificial-intelligence pace. Reports have said that in 2023, after Cook approved a plan to roughly double the company’s GPU budget for AI work, Maestri reduced the increase to less than half of what had been requested and pushed the team to extract more efficiency from existing chips. Critics have argued that the more conservative spending left Apple with fewer modern accelerators than rivals and contributed to the company falling behind in the generative-AI race.

Apple has since ramped up AI investment under its Apple Intelligence initiative and a leadership transition that puts greater emphasis on the technology. Maestri’s latest step back marks one more change as Ternus begins reshaping the company’s senior ranks.

MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully Ternus will drop Cook’s milquetoast habit of keeping longtime executives known for poor, costly decisions on the payroll in low-responsibility jobs. Cut ’em loose and focus in the future, John!

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The post Former Apple CFO Luca Maestri relinquishes corporate services duties as Ternus era begins appeared first on MacDailyNews.

Learn how you to build your own Safari extensions with just simple text prompts on iPhone, iPad, and Mac using Apple Intelligence.

Dave Nanian:

The new version of SuperDuper is a ground-up rewrite, a tip-to-tail reinvention of what SuperDuper looks like, how it works, what it can do, and where I can take it in the future.

[…]

Documents have been retired and replaced with Copy Jobs, which are stored internally and organized by source. If you want to copy Macintosh HD, that’s where you start. Click, and you’re presented with one or more template copy operations, or you can start from scratch.

Configuration is done right inline by clicking bold, underlined link elements and selecting options from pop-ups. The effect of your choices is immediately reflected in What’s going to happen?, ensuring you know what to expect when you click Copy Now.

SuperDuper has been around for 22 years, and I’ve been using it since version 2 in 2006. Shirt Pocket had always been great about keeping the copy engine up-to-date with all the changes in macOS and its increasingly baroque file system structures. But the outward appearance of the app hadn’t changed much, aside from losing the brushed metal, and neither had the feature set. I know all too well how much work it can be as a solo developer just to keep an app working. Ironically, the better you are at adapting to the changing OS, hiding the complexity, and presenting a simple interface, the more it looks like you aren’t doing much. Actually, if you follow Nanian’s blog, you can see a fraction of all the stuff going on under the hood—tricky edge cases, macOS bugs, and undocumented behaviors that must be handled so that you can essentially just press a button and get a proper bootable backup.

Eventually, he found the time to rewrite the app, both the engine (which is faster and more robust) and the user interface (which is greatly expanded). My first reaction was: this is SwiftUI, isn’t it? And it is. You can just tell by the way the text reflows, all the different colored buttons and blobs, the hover effects, and how the design heavily emphasizes scrolling. (Like System Settings, it doesn’t remember scroll positions. Nor does it remember which disclosure triangles are expanded.) The keyboard navigation and focus behavior are off in places. For reasons I don’t understand, SwiftUI gets a lot of this wrong out of the box. In some cases, like the outline view for creating a copy rule, keyboard support was manually added and works as expected. But there are other places where arrow keys and type-selection don’t work. Sometimes I need extra clicks to get the proper focus. Sometimes the arrow keys scroll the window instead of changing the selection.

That said, this is one of the best SwiftUI interfaces I’ve seen. I think it successfully preserves the spirit of the app, making it really easy to configure things and see what’s going to happen, while streamlining the way documents/jobs are managed and expanding what you can do. It’s still essentially one window (plus a Settings with one checkbox), and you can still use it in the old way, but now you can also run multiple jobs at once and inspect their histories.

Click the Preview button and SuperDuper will run the copy without making changes and present you with a report that shows exactly what would have been updated, added, deleted, etc., had this been a real run.

This is great to have. If there are particular folders or files you want to check, you can browse the source tab of the preview to see what’s excluded or find them in the destination tab to see whether they would be added, updated, removed, or kept. The interface to browse this is a sort of columns view with only one column. It’s fast and easy enough to use, but keyboard navigation doesn’t work properly. I longed for it to be an outline view so that I could quickly expand an entire subtree and see at a glance which files would be changed. I also wished that it would show how much data would be copied.

SuperDuper 4 is much faster than before. And I’m not just talking 20% or 30% faster. Smart Updates are between 2x and, with the new Turbo feature, an order of magnitude faster.

It’s hard to benchmark such things, but my general impression is that this is true. The longstanding Smart Update feature copies only the files that have changed. This seems quite a bit faster than before and slightly faster than Carbon Copy Cloner. The new Turbo feature uses the FSEvents log to optimize finding such files. If macOS knows which folders might contain changes, SuperDuper can focus on those and not waste time scanning ones that are identical. When this works, it feels almost impossibly fast. SSD-to-SSD backups of my Mac’s boot drive will take 1–3 minutes instead of more like 20 minutes. This also seems to be faster than Carbon Copy Cloner’s similar Quick Update feature.

Unfortunately, for reasons seemingly out of the app’s control, sometimes Turbo isn’t possible. This can happen if you’ve modified the copy job or if there’s been a huge amount of file system activity since the last backup so that FSEvents doesn’t contain the necessary information. In such cases, SuperDuper will fall back on doing an old-school Smart Update. I found that excluding my destination drive from Spotlight made it much more likely that Turbo would work.

As much as I like Turbo, I don’t end up using it except for the daily scheduled backup of my boot drive to an always-connected SSD. For my other backups, I have multiple destination drives for each source, and I find that the user interface doesn’t scale so well to configuring a separate job for each. That leads to lots of scrolling. So, instead, I use just one job per source and select the destination I want before starting each backup. This counts as editing the job, so it won’t be able to Turbo, but I find that backups to slow spinning hard drives take a long time either way and are dominated by the copying speed rather than the scanning speed.

Successful and failed runs are shown at the bottom of the copy job, with color-coded dots that can be clicked to display details.

This is my favorite bit of interface design in the new version. It very compactly shows you the recent history for that copy job using the same format that’s used for showing the completion status of the most recent run. I can quickly see all the information I usually care about, and you can click a button to see more detailed information if necessary. The downside is that you can’t see as much information at once—or across multiple jobs—as if there were a dedicated log window, and it only shows the most recent 7 runs. But I think this tradeoff is well in keeping with the app’s spirit of making things simple and clear rather than offering every possible option.

The most baffling part of the interface is that after each backup completes or fails it shows an “Apple Intelligence Summary”. Much space is devoted to labeling this and to assuring you that none of your data went into the cloud. I just don’t see what the point of this is. 99+% of the time, my backup either succeeded or failed for a very predictable reason like running out of space. Why do we need AI for this? I trust the AI summary less than I would a hard-coded string from the developer. Perhaps in an obscure situation that the developer didn’t anticipate Apple Intelligence would be able to offer a useful interpretation, but I have yet to see that.

At a technical level, SuperDuper has been split into a “helper” or “server”, which runs the copy, and an interface, which is the part you interact with. That means that, once registered, you can quit the SuperDuper application and your backups will still run. They’ll even run if you log out!

It doesn’t much matter to me that it can back up without launching the app—I like to see its progress—but I appreciate the new architecture for scheduled copies. Schedules are now much better integrated into the app proper rather than being driven through AppleScript.

You can run any number of copies at the same time. If you have four backups you need to do, just click Copy Now for each, and they’ll all run simultaneously.

This is the most important new feature for me. I used to do all my clone backups with SuperDuper. But, over years, my backup needs grew. I now have five main source drives to back up. They are much larger than before, and APFS on spinning hard drives is really slow. Thus, the backups, even with Smart Update, can take a long time. That was a lot to manage with old versions of SuperDuper. Carbon Copy Cloner has long supported multiple simultaneous backups so that I could connect a bunch of destination drives, tell it to start, and when I came back they’d all be done. I didn’t have to be there to wait for each backup to finish and then start the next.

It was just so much easier, so I started using Carbon Copy Cloner for most of my backups. But I still liked SuperDuper and trusted its copy engine, so I continued to use it to do some of the backups of my most important drive (the internal SSD). I think it’s good backup practice to have redundancies, not just in terms of multiple physical drives and storage locations but also for the software creating the backups. Both are quality apps, but it’s possible that there’s a bug or a misconfiguration on my part that might prevent the copying of a file that I need. Why put all my eggs in one basket? Now that SuperDuper also supports multiple simultaneous backups, I’m using it for half the backups of all my drives. On one backup day I’ll do all SuperDuper backups, then the next time I’ll do all Carbon Copy Cloner backups. (I continue to use Time Machine and Arq for additional redundancy.)

If you try this, I strongly recommend writing down which app you used for each destination drive and then doing all future backups to that drive using that same app. And it works better to do the first SuperDuper backup with Erase and Copy rather than trying to Smart Update a Carbon Copy Cloner backup.

There are a variety of reasons for this, but the main one is the different ways that the apps deal with APFS snapshots. Both use snapshots on the source to ensure they’re copying from a consistent state. And both mark completed copies with snapshots on the destination. But the retention of the destination snapshots is very different.

Carbon Copy Cloner can keep them around essentially as long as you have enough free space. It can also prune them out of order, so that you have daily snapshots for the last month and weekly ones going back further. This is managed by the app, though you can also manually delete snapshots yourself using Disk Utility.

SuperDuper’s snapshots are automatically managed by the macOS. I’m personally less fond of this design because in practice the system will choose to clean up old snapshots almost right away. I can’t count on being able to restore from any backup but the most recent. To me, this is a shame because APFS supports multiple snapshots, and there’s plenty of space on the drive to store them, but I can’t use them. It’s just not a design goal of the app.

Again, this ties back to how SuperDuper values simplicity. If it made longer-lived snapshots that weren’t cleaned up automatically, you might get into a situation where you (or another app) wanted to add files to a drive and couldn’t because it seemed to be full. You’d have to understand snapshots or have an app that could delete the SuperDuper snapshots to free up space. Third-party apps aren’t supposed to delete snapshots belonging to other apps, which is why you don’t want to mix SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner on the same destination. If the former needs more space to complete a backup, it won’t be able to purge snapshots created by the latter.

The status information for the backups that are in progress is shown right in the Sources section of the main window. You can see at a glance which drives are being copied and when they’re all estimated to finish. I haven’t found the estimates very accurate, so I’d prefer to see the start time and the percent complete. Flipping between multiple active jobs to check their detailed progress is kind of a chore, but if all you need is the summary information you can close the app and monitor it from the new menu bar icon.

SuperDuper 4 now supports copying to and from any file system the Mac supports. Using a “Photos” drive with both Windows and Mac that’s formatted as exFAT? No problem: you can copy it.

It can also copy individual folders rather than just entire volumes, if you drag them into the sidebar.

I’ve added Shortcuts support, so you can create a shortcut that runs before or after a copy, on success, or on error. Want to send an email on success or failure? Beep when copies are done?

[…]

Not only does SuperDuper let you call a shortcut from a copy—you can create, run, and check on a copy job from a shortcut!

There’s a lot of potential here, and the completion shortcut receives a bunch of JSON describing what happened so that it can make decisions about what to do. On the other hand, I would rather see AppleScript support, as I find Shortcuts confusing and inconvenient. I wish that common completion actions like sending e-mails were built into the app so that they were easier to set up. (You can choose to eject the drive, post a notification, or sleep the Mac without having to write a shortcut.)

In all the years SuperDuper has been on the market, we’ve never charged for updates and never even raised the price. That’s 22 years of free updates.

The Apple Silicon version was a paid upgrade, but you could run SuperDuper 3 in Rosetta with an old license and still get all the features.

Version 4 costs $43.95, with various upgrade discounts based on the purchase date. There’s no discount if you purchased before July 2020, but us old timers got so many years of free updates it was one of the best deals ever in Mac software. Regardless, it’s not a high price for peace of mind. The new version is, I think, a massive improvement, maintaining the spirit of the original while modernizing and expanding it.

I’ve already said that I use both SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner. I think both are excellent—great apps with great customer support. With SuperDuper 4 they’re more similar than in the past, but they remain very different. If you must pick one, I would say that Carbon Copy Cloner is better if you want lots of options and control; if you want persistent snapshots, verification, copying of cloud-only files, or detailed logging; or if you have a very large number of backups. (It does have a Simple Mode, but it’s arguably too simple and limiting.)

SuperDuper is better if you care about bootable backups or want something simple but not too simple. There’s documentation, but you probably won’t need it because so much is explained within the app’s interface. It’s just really easy to set up a backup, see what it’s going to do, see what it’s currently doing, and see what it did before. Pretty much everything happens in a single window, without tabs or separate modes. SuperDuper is all about striking a good balance for most people, doing the right thing with a minimum of fuss.

See also: Adam Engst and Accidental Tech Podcast.

Previously:

• Parachute Backup Acquired
• Backblaze No Longer Backs Up Dropbox
• Carbon Copy Cloner 7.1.3
• SuperDuper 4.0 Beta
• CrashPlan Consumer Is Back
• ChronoSync 10
• Arq 7
• SuperDuper 3.1 Supports APFS Snapshots for Both Source and Destination
• SuperDuper and APFS
• Synchronize Pro X 4.1.1
• My New Backup Strategy

Update (2026-08-14): The developer wrote in to say that SuperDuper does try to remember the scroll position in the main window, just not across launches. With the current version, 4.0.2, I find that this mostly works but that it gets thrown off if I’ve expanded any of the triangles to see more details about the currently running job. Then my carefully positioned view will be shifted a bit when I come back to it. It’s hard to get this exactly right.

He also had a great tip about a hidden feature that can relieve some of the scrolling issues I encountered: you can click multiple times on a drive in the list of sources to have it jump to the next active job for that drive, scrolling it to exactly the right spot. When the sidebar has keyboard focus, you can also do this by pressing the Spacebar.

See also: Dan Moren.

Update (2026-08-20): SuperDuper 4.0.3:

For those with a lot of volumes, there’s now a sort control for the source list: you can alphabetically by type, or purely alphabetically.

There’s now an option in the sort pop-up that adds a few sections to the source list.

I like being able to separate the source drives from the destination drives. The update also improves VoiceOver support.

Update (2026-09-09): See also: John Gruber.

Previously:

• SuperDuper’s “Follow-Up”

Update (2026-09-16): SuperDuper 4.0.6:

Click the n copies running pill to filter to just those jobs. If you have a lot of copy jobs for a given source, you can filter the list with a click.

[…]

SuperDuper now picks a band size that suits the image’s size, balancing the number of bands with their size.

[…]

There’s now a third-party application, Open Backup, that can notify mobile devices (iPhone and Android) when backups run.