Daring Fireball

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Jason Snell: Apple’s most valuable asset is its brand. Not its real estate, not its intellectual property, not even any particular product. Even the mighty iPhone has no value if, over time, the traits that differentiate it from competitor products are erased. Apple’s brand has always stood for higher quality products — you pay more, but you get more. Apple has never wanted to be the low-price leader. It didn’t put stickers on the first Intel Macs to get some marketing dollars from Intel. It doesn’t load up new Macs with loads of lousy bundled third-party software like so many PCs do. Those ar

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF to promote their MCP server. Debugging SSO, managing users, adjusting auth policies, configuring branding: every configuration task has lived behind a UI that only a human can drive. The WorkOS MCP server gives agents the same access as your dashboard login. Hundreds of operations, discoverable at runtime. Connect in one command via OAuth, with scoped tokens instead of a master API key. Pass a screenshot of your marketing site and ask your agent to match the login page. If a human had to do it before, an agent can do it now. Connect your agent

Regarding my recent pieces regarding Apple’s shitty ads in the App Store and Apple News (and, perhaps soon, Apple Maps), a friend sent me this pithy take: The ads Apple is happy to inflict on us in its apps are the equivalent of the stickers it would never allow on its physical products. Bullseye. That’s what those stickers on PCs are: they’re ads. Intel pays for the “Intel Inside” stickers that booger up PC laptop palm rests. Longtime readers will recall that back in August 2007 , Apple held a Town Hall event to introduce new iMacs and some iLife and iWork software updates. In a post-event Q&

Fascinating essay by Nikhil Suresh: On a trip overseas, I had the privilege of a meeting with one of the Fortune 500 executives mentioned at the beginning of the post, who will remain anonymous so that they are not executed by firing squad by their board. As we were chatting, it became clear that they were very switched-on and technically competent, and they also happened to be at a company that had committed to the usual battery of exorbitant claims about their recent innovations — we’ve 100×’d our productivity, AI is the future of everything, I am but a vessel for OpenAI to make love to my w

Today, the European Commission took two decisions finding non-compliance by Google with the DMA for self-preferencing its own services on Google Search, and for putting in place restrictions on businesses to direct consumers to alternative, often cheaper, purchase channels on Google Play (steering).

Julien Khaleghy, CEO of SerpApi: The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted our motion to dismiss Google’s lawsuit, marking a win not just for SerpApi, but for all who depend on an open internet. We’re pleased that the court rejected Google’s attempts to expand the DMCA to assert control over access to public pages. The internet’s founding principle — open access to usable information — is essential to driving innovation and ensuring everyone benefits from the promise of data. SerpApi will continue supporting developers, AI companies, researchers, and businesses th

Apple and Ford announced Apple Maps will be integrated directly into Ford’s UEV Platform through the MapKit for Automotive SDK.

For a long time the best native Mac IRC client was Textual , but although Textual still works, it’s been sunset by the author. Not to fear, however. Fredrik Blank just launched bIRC: Creating an IRC client in 2026 is not something that will pay the bills : ) It would be just for the joy of programming. But the amount of work involved always made me throw the thought aside. But one night when I had nothing better to do, I started implementing the good old spec in Swift (RFC 2812). And then I got motivated to continue, adding IRCv3 extensions and UI. Been working on it on and off on it since the

Teddy Rosenbluth, reporting for The New York Times: On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that there have been 2,318 confirmed cases of measles so far this year. The case count toppled the record set last year , when measles infected more than 2,200 Americans and killed two unvaccinated children . More measles cases have been reported in the United States in the last two years than in all the years from 2000 through 2024 combined. Reversing course on measles would require a nationwide push to improve vaccination rates, a prospect that experts said seemed unlikely

Following up on the previous item today, re: content blockers and ad-blocking , I ran into a weird situation a few weeks ago with my column “ John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope ”. That article contains this sentence, in Markdown: And -- at this writing, still "coming soon" -- Apple is launching [ads on Apple Maps][🗺️]. [🗺️]: https://ads.apple.com/maps The problem is that anyone reading that article in NetNewsWire saw it rendered like this, with the words “ads on Apple Maps” 1 omitted: It looks like I forgot to finish writing that sentence. But I did.

Speaking of dickovers , here’s Cory Doctorow, writing this week at Pluralistic: Seizing the means of computation isn’t theft, it’s bargaining . Commercial surveillance companies will tell you that by spying on you, they are simply engaged in a marketplace exchange in which you swap your privacy for access to online services. But they are running a very curious sort of market: it’s a “market” where as soon as you stop to browse someone’s wares, the stallholder gets to reach into your pocket and clean out your wallet. In “markets,” prices are announced and bargained over, not set unilaterally an

James, a future Hall of Famer and the NBA's all-time leading scorer, has made his decision: He's coming to Philly.

Here’s a real gem that a reader sent me. Tomtoc is a maker of laptop bags and sleeves. Visit their homepage and, of course, you’ll get a dickover asking you to join their mailing list “for exclusive updates and get a chance to win a free tech pouch every month.” But here’s the gem. If you do subscribe, and you decide later to unsubscribe, you get this: ★


Explore six decades of cinematic espionage locations—from remote island lairs to the tailors of Savile Row.

Kirk McElhearn, back in February : I use Apple News to keep up on topics that I don’t find in sources I pay for (The Guardian and The New York Times). But there’s no way I’m going to pay the exorbitant price Apple wants for Apple News+ — £13 — because, while you get more publications, you still get ads. And those ads have gotten worse recently. Many if not most of them look like and probably are scams. Here are a few examples from Apple News today. One of the ads he examined was, supposedly, from a small company going out of business because the proprietor — supposedly a straight-out-of-Centra

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Legendary technology columnist, pundit, author and podcast host John C. Dvorak has died, age 80. He is survived by his wife Mimi Dvorak.

The European Commission, last week : Today, the European Commission has issued two sets of binding specification measures to Google under the Digital Markets Act. The aim of the first specification measures is to ensure that competitors’ Artificial Intelligence (AI) services can compete with Google’s own AI services, such as Gemini, by having equal access to features on Google’s Android devices. The aim of the second specification measures is to rebalance the playing field by giving third-party search engines access to search data that only Google Search can collect at scale. They provide sepa

Ben Thompson, on the hype regarding Kimi K3, at Stratechery: This is a point that bears repeating: because U.S. open weight model makers must follow the frontier labs’ terms of service, they (1) are worse than Chinese alternatives and (2) end up distilling the distillation, just with a detour through Chinese labs. Wouldn’t it be better if western open weight model makers could go to the source? To that end, here’s an even more interesting question around distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Inter

My thanks to Paper for sponsoring last week at DF. Paper is a new professional design tool where every layer is real HTML and CSS. Your design is already code, which means fewer handoffs, translations, and layers of abstraction between what you design and what you actually ship. Paper works both ways: code to design, and design to code. Connect any AI agent through MCP and the agent can read and edit your designs. Or use Paper Snapshot to capture your live site as editable layers and make new iterations. Agents handle the tedious work so you can focus on your craft and the decisions that matte

9to5Mac: Brazilian users browsing the App Store rankings in categories such as Navigation, Travel, and Weather have noticed a growing number of poorly made games appearing among the top results, many of them featuring AI-generated illustrations of animals as their app icons. As it turns out, these are so-called jacket apps, which are just a front for hidden betting and gambling apps. A 9to5Mac investigation has uncovered more than 60 apps that behave exactly as depicted in their App Store screenshots when accessed from virtually anywhere in the world, except Brazil. When opened from a Brazilia

‘It Seems You Have a Different Policy’ Ben Thompson, in a subscriber-only Stratechery update Tuesday : I got a fun email from former Apple executive, Nest founder, and one-time Stratechery Interview subject Tony Fadell in response to yesterday’s Update about Apple suing OpenAI (published with permission): Good article as always… This is Apple’s typical tactic to scare Apple employees — either former or current. I heard this lawsuit was driven by the Apple board. Steve threatened to file a lawsuit against Nest for poaching 80-100 Apple employees. He called me, screamed for a while with lots of