A few words on Wednesday’s Apple event.
https://daringfireball.net/2026/09/thoughts_and_observations_on_apples_surprise_and_shine_event
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John Gruber
@gruber@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06I write Daring Fireball, host The Talk Show, and created Markdown.
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Joined August 10, 2018
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Good chart.
“It’s like wondering why all the screws in a building were hammered into the walls, and then finding out that the guy who oversaw construction founded and co-owns the world’s biggest hammer manufacturer. Windows uses Philips head screws, Linux uses hex screws, and MacOS requires Torx — but a hammer works the same way with all screws. That’s Electron.”
https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/claudes_criminally_bad_mac_app_is_an_inside_job
Fucking idiots over there at ChatGPT.
What gave Tim Cook's privacy letter heft in 2014 wasn't just the clarity of its plain language, but the fact that you didn't have to take his word for it that the ads Apple showed you respected your privacy, because Apple didn't show you ads in 2014.
https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/ternus_apple_slippery_slope
@MisterMoo@mstdn.social @delric@mastodon.social The thing to complain about isn't that they default to Google. It's that they only include search engines in the list that have paid TAC deals. Only search engines that agree to pay Apple for the traffic are in the list, and there's no option for users to add custom ones.
It’s an epidemic of hearing loss for AI-generated Fox News hosts.
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Just added the following, after paragraph 14:
Om was never impressed by who someone was, what they’d previously accomplished, what grand wealth they'd garnered, or stature they’d achieved. It’s human nature to be overwhelmed by awe in the presence of great people. Om was not. To impress Om, you needed to deliver impressive new work. He was impervious to riptides of hype. Those are superpowers in this racket.
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@caseyliss@mastodon.social @Gte@mastodon.social @BenRiceM@mastodon.social I repeat this obvious argument every few years:
Celsius: 0-100 scale for water's state of matter
Fahrenheit: 0-100 scale for human sense of comfort/safety
In the decades to come, when the Trump era is behind us, it’ll be hard to explain to young people that headlines like these made sense in the moment.
Boosted by @troberts@theblower.au
“You might think it counterintuitive that a movement obsessed with software would spearhead a severe decline in the design quality of software. But software brain is an obsession with software as a medium in and of itself. A means with no consideration for the end.”
https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/software_as_the_product_of_obsession_times_voice
My take on the Cook to Ternus transition:
I bet LeBron can fix this.
https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/odyssey-imax-kop-prussia-70mm-down-refund-reschedule/
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@BenRiceM@mastodon.social @caseyliss@mastodon.social @Gte@mastodon.social Another hypothetical rescaling would be to set 0 at water freezing (like Celsius) and 100 at average body temperature (like Fahrenheit). But air temperatures just below water freezing aren't all that remarkably cold, feel-wise, the way air temperatures above 100 are.
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@maxleibman @saltywizard @theogrin Exactly. And if markup is like getting dressed up, Markdown is like dressing down. Casual. Comfortable. Like it’s not even there.
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@dmitriid@mastodon.nu Private companies are just like governments. What a moron you are. That's another one-month muting for you.
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@timbray@cosocial.ca Updated, thanks! I feel like AI probably decided to put that on the Author page rather than the About page too.
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@gedeonm@mastodon.social @caseyliss@mastodon.social That's a good line. Terminal C (and D, which is identical) is soullessly brutalist.
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@pfandrade@mastodon.social What a great post. I finally got around to writing about it:
https://daringfireball.net/2026/06/swiftui_only_makes_it_easy_to_develop_bad_apps
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@Eggfreckles@mastodon.mit.edu It is a full article, but the ★'s come from my autoposter. This one I posted manually.
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@agiletortoise@mastodon.social @jimmylittle@hachyderm.io They don't have to require use of the system player, but they should require that custom players support most, if not all, of the standard UI features of the system player.
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@lmika Dickbox is too evocative of the classic SNL short:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt0spqQtMKg
D*** in a Box - SNL Digital Short
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@jsit@social.coop Very much. Check out GitHub:
https://github.com/nextpad-plus-plus/nextpad-plus-plus-macos/issues/73
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@brandon@masto.craftcms.com @Iconfactory@iconfactory.world I use Tot every day. (I have a whole workflow for saving links that is reliant on Tot that I really need to write up and release publicly.) I have thought often that it is the exception that proves the ZOI rule. Tot's violation of ZOI is the whole point of the app. If you're going to break a rule, shatter it.
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@ravigupta@mastodon.social @Daytonlowell@mastodon.social The name is right there, but Apple hasn’t named a new product with the i prefix since Steve Jobs was arrive to name the tablet “iPad”. They could bring it back for iBook here, but that doesn't seem right to me. They want you to know it's an iPhone.
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@jimmylittle@hachyderm.io @agiletortoise@mastodon.social You argument implies that someone who uses Netflix on Apple TV is more likely to care about using Netflix on *someone else's TV* than they are about consistency with the other apps on their own Apple TV. I don't know a single person like that.
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@TeeeBear @viticci @connected Microsoft had a Surface Neo too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Neo
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@paulmison@sfba.social Fair point. We had our exceptions too, but I think it’s clear that today’s global internet more resembles the mindset of 70s-80s US television.
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@cbowns@xoxo.zone I don’t think it has anything to do with the recent news, pretty sure everyone with an eligible card in Wallet gets that.
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@dkalintsev@infosec.exchange I forget how but I recently dismissed this for a new pair of AirPods. Maybe you hit Continue first?
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@bjkirton@mastodon.social No, it's like login/log in. A login in a noun, to log in is a verb. A dickover dicks you over.
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@chrisgrande@twit.social Correct. Good apps are usually native, but native apps aren't necessarily good at all.
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@nickheer@c.im Close but missed the cut. My brain reads it as too much like ding-a-ling which is itself a synonym for dick.
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@_MrJasonW@mastodon.social It's a popover but dicky, dicking you over from reading the article.
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@peymano@mastodon.social I don't think that's true at all. I don't think that's what executives at Apple think about MacOS, don't think that's what they think about the Neo's appeal, and it definitely does not seem to be something I'm hearing about first time Mac buyers buying Neos.
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@lensco@mastodon.world To me "dickbox" brings to mind this, and nothing else:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt0spqQtMKg
D*** in a Box - SNL Digital Short
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@jifarris@mastodon.social @lensco@mastodon.world "Dickbox" conjures the classic SNL video to me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt0spqQtMKg