Apple unveiled iPadOS 26 at its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, introducing what appears to be the most significant productivity overhaul in the tablet operating system's history. The update brings dynamically resizable windows that users can drag by their corners, a menu bar accessible through swipe gestures or cursor movement, and Expose for viewing all open windows in a tiled array.

The new windowing system allows users to seamlessly close, minimize, resize, and tile app windows while maintaining the iPad's touch-first interface. When users reopen apps, windows return to their last position and size. The menu bar, a longtime Mac staple, provides access to familiar commands like File, Edit, and View through either touch or trackpad controls.

Apple is also enhancing the Files app with resizable columns and collapsible folders, while bringing the Preview app to iPad for the first time with PDF editing capabilities and Apple Pencil support. The update introduces Background Tasks for computationally intensive processes and new audio features including Voice Isolation and Local capture for video calls.

AppleInsider reports: The engineer behind much of the Mac's early graphical user interfaces, QuickDraw, MacPaint, Hypercard and much more, William D. "Bill" Atkinson, died on June 5 of complications from pancreatic cancer...

Atkinson, who built a post-Apple career as a noted nature photographer, worked at Apple from 1978 to 1990. Among his lasting contributions to Apple's computers were the invention of the menubar, the selection lasso, the "marching ants" item selection animation, and the discovery of a midpoint circle algorithm that enabled the rapid drawing of circles on-screen.

He was Apple Employee No. 51, recruited by Steve Jobs. Atkinson was one of the 30 team members to develop the first Macintosh, but also was principle designer of the Lisa's graphical user interface (GUI), a novelty in computers at the time. He was fascinated by the concept of dithering, by which computers using dots could create nearly photographic images similar to the way newspapers printed photos. He is also credited (alongside Jobs) for the invention of RoundRects, the rounded rectangles still used in Apple's system messages, application windows, and other graphical elements on Apple products.

Hypercard was Atkinson's main claim to fame. He built the a hypermedia approach to building applications that he once described as a "software erector set." The Hypercard technology debuted in 1987, and greatly opened up Macintosh software development.
In 2012 some video clips of Atkinson appeared in some rediscovered archival footage. (Original Macintosh team developer Andy Hertzfeld uploaded "snippets from interviews with members of the original Macintosh design team, recorded in October 1983 for projected TV commercials that were never used.")

Blogger John Gruber calls Atkinson "One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history." If you want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore.org site and (re-)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here's just one, with Steve Jobs inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect. Here's another (surely near and dear to my friend Brent Simmons's heart) with this kicker of a closing line: "I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied."

Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware... In addition to his low-level contributions like QuickDraw, Atkinson was also the creator of MacPaint (which to this day stands as the model for bitmap image editorsâ — âPhotoshop, I would argue, was conceptually derived directly from MacPaint) and HyperCard ("inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985"), the influence of which cannot be overstated.

I say this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best computer programmer who ever lived. Without question, he's on the short list. What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us.

Meta's Facebook and Instagram apps "were siphoning people's data through a digital back door for months," writes a Washington Post tech columnist, citing researchers who found no privacy setting could've stopped what Meta and Yandex were doing, since those two companies "circumvented privacy and security protections that Google set up for Android devices.

"But their tactics underscored some privacy vulnerabilities in web browsers or apps. These steps can reduce your risks." Stop using the Chrome browser. Mozilla's Firefox, the Brave browser and DuckDuckGo's browser block many common methods of tracking you from site to site. Chrome, the most popular web browser, does not... For iPhone and Mac folks, Safari also has strong privacy protections. It's not perfect, though. No browser protections are foolproof. The researchers said Firefox on Android devices was partly susceptible to the data harvesting tactics they identified, in addition to Chrome. (DuckDuckGo and Brave largely did block the tactics, the researchers said....)

Delete Meta and Yandex apps on your phone, if you have them. The tactics described by the European researchers showed that Meta and Yandex are unworthy of your trust. (Yandex is not popular in the United States.) It might be wise to delete their apps, which give the companies more latitude to collect information that websites generally cannot easily obtain, including your approximate location, your phone's battery level and what other devices, like an Xbox, are connected to your home WiFi.

Know, too, that even if you don't have Meta apps on your phone, and even if you don't use Facebook or Instagram at all, Meta might still harvest information on your activity across the web.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, classic computer collector Joe Strosnider announced the availability of a new 3D-printer filament that replicates the iconic "Platinum" color scheme used in classic Macintosh computers from the late 1980s through the 1990s. The PLA filament (PLA is short for polylactic acid) allows hobbyists to 3D-print nostalgic novelties, replacement parts, and accessories that match the original color of vintage Apple computers. Hobbyists commonly feed this type of filament into commercial desktop 3D printers, which heat the plastic and extrude it in a computer-controlled way to fabricate new plastic parts.

The Platinum color, which Apple used in its desktop and portable computer lines starting with the Apple IIgs in 1986, has become synonymous with a distinctive era of classic Macintosh aesthetic. Over time, original Macintosh plastics have become brittle and discolored with age, so matching the "original" color can be a somewhat challenging and subjective experience. Strosnider said he paid approximately $900 to develop the color. "Rather than keeping the formulation proprietary, he arranged for Polar Filament to make the color publicly available [for $21.99 per kilogram]," adds Ars.

Apple's upcoming macOS 26 operating system may abandon support for several older Mac models, according to AppleInsider. The casualties will include 2018 MacBook Pro models, the 2020 Intel MacBook Air, the 2017 iMac Pro, and the 2018 Mac mini -- all currently the oldest machines compatible with macOS Sequoia, the report said, citing a source familiar with the matter. The 2019 MacBook Pro models and 2020 5K iMac models will retain compatibility with the new system, codenamed "Cheer," said AppleInsider.

Earlier this month app developer Guilherme Rambo had a warning for iPhone users: If you try to send an audio message using the Messages app to someone who's also using the Messages app, and that message happens to include the name "Dave and Buster's", the message will never be received.

In case you're wondering, "Dave and Buster's" is the name of a sports bar and restaurant in the United States... [T]he recipient will only see the "dot dot dot" animation for several seconds, and it will then eventually disappear. They will never get the audio message.
"The issue was first spotted on the podcast Search Engine..." according to an article in Fortune: Rambo's explanation of the curiosity goes like this.

"When you send an audio message using the Messages app, the message includes a transcription of the audio. If you happen to pronounce the name 'Dave and Buster's' as someone would normally pronounce it, almost like it's a single word, the transcription engine on iOS will recognize the brand name and correctly write it as 'Dave & Buster's' (with an ampersand)," he begins. So far, so good." [But ampersands have special meaning in HTML/XHTML...] And, as MacRumors puts it: "The parsing error triggers Apple's BlastDoor Messages feature that protects users from malicious messages that might rely on problematic parsing, so ultimately, the audio message fails to send."
To solve the mystery, Rambo "plugged the recipient device into my Mac and captured the logs right after the device received the problematic message." Their final thoughts... Since BlastDoor was designed to thwart hacking attempts, which frequently rely on faulty data parsing, it immediately stops what it's doing and just fails. That's what causes the message to get stuck in the "dot dot dot" state, which eventually times out, and the message just disappears. On the surface, this does sound like it could be used to "hack" someone's iPhone via a bad audio message transcription, but in reality what this bug demonstrates is that Apple's BlastDoor mechanism is working as designed.

Many bad parsers would probably accept the incorrectly-formatted XHTML, but that sort of leniency when parsing data formats is often what ends up causing security issues. By being pedantic about the formatting, BlastDoor is protecting the recipient from an exploit that would abuse that type of issue.

Montana has passed a bill allowing licensed clinics to offer experimental medical treatments that haven't been approved by the FDA, provided the drugs have passed phase I safety trials. MIT Technology Review reports: The bill, which was passed by the state legislature on April 29 and is expected to be signed by Governor Greg Gianforte, essentially expands on existing Right to Try legislation in the state. But while that law was originally designed to allow terminally ill people to access experimental drugs, the new bill was drafted and lobbied for by people interested in extending human lifespans -- a group of longevity enthusiasts that includes scientists, libertarians, and influencers. These longevity enthusiasts are hoping Montana will serve as a test bed for opening up access to experimental drugs. [...]

Supporters of the bill say it gives individuals the freedom to make choices about their own bodies. At the same event, bioethicist Jessica Flanigan of the University of Richmond said she was "optimistic" about the measure, because "it's great any time anybody is trying to give people back their medical autonomy." Ultimately, they hope that the new law will enable people to try unproven drugs that might help them live longer, make it easier for Americans to try experimental treatments without having to travel abroad, and potentially turn Montana into a medical tourism hub.

But ethicists and legal scholars aren't as optimistic. "I hate it," bioethicist Alison Bateman-House of New York University says of the bill. She and others are worried about the ethics of promoting and selling unproven treatments -- and the risks of harm should something go wrong. [...] At any rate, the clinics are coming to Montana, says [Dylan Livingston, founder and CEO of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives]. "We have half a dozen that are interested, and maybe two or three that are definitively going to set up shop out there." He won't name names, but he says some of the interested clinicians already have clinics in the US, while others are abroad."

Mac Davis -- founder and CEO of Minicircle, the company that developed the controversial "anti-aging" gene therapy -- told MIT Technology Review he was "looking into it." "I think this can be an opportunity for America and Montana to really kind of corner the market when it comes to medical tourism," says Livingston. "There is no other place in the world with this sort of regulatory environment."

Long-time Slashdot reader mbessey (a Mac/iOS developer) writes: As we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the first release of UCSD Pascal, I thought it would be interesting to poke around in it a bit, and work on some tools to bring this "portable operating system" back to life on modern hardware, in a modern language (Rust).
Wikipedia describes UCSD Pascal as "a version that ran on a custom operating system that could be ported to different platforms. A key platform was the Apple II, where it saw widespread use as Apple Pascal. This led to Pascal becoming the primary high-level language used for development in the Apple Lisa, and later, the Macintosh. Parts of the original Macintosh operating system were hand-translated into Motorola 68000 assembly language from the Pascal source code."

mbessey is chronicling their new project in a series of blog posts which begins here: The p-System was not the first portable byte-code interpreter and compiler system — that idea goes very far back, at least to the origins of the Pascal language itself. But it was arguably one of the most-successful early versions of the idea and served as an inspiration for future portable software systems (including Java's bytecode, and Infocom's Z-machine).
And they've already gotten UCSD Pascal running in an emulator and built some tools (in Rust) to transfer files to disk images. Now they're working towards writing a p-machine emulator in Rust, which they can they port to "something other than the Mac. Ideally, something small â" like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi Pico."

"Google-owned YouTube's revenue last year was estimated to be $54.2 billion," reports the Los Angeles Times, "which would make it the second-largest media company behind Walt Disney Co., according to a recent report from research firm MoffettNathanson, which called YouTube 'the new king of all media.'" YouTube, run by Chief Executive Neal Mohan since 2023, accounted for 12% of U.S. TV viewing in March, more than other rival streaming platforms including Netflix and Tubi, according to Nielsen... More people are watching YouTube on TV sets rather than on smartphones and computer screens, consuming more than 1 billion hours on average of YouTube content on TV daily, the company said on its website.
When YouTube first started its founders envisioned it as a dating site, according to the article, "where people would upload videos and score them. When that didn't work, the founders decided to open up the platform for all sorts of videos." And since this was 20 years ago, "Users drove traffic to YouTube by sharing videos on MySpace."

But the article includes stories of people getting rich through YouTube's sharing of ad revenue: Patrick Starrr, who produces makeup tutorial videos, said he made his first $1 million through YouTube at the age of 25. He left his job at retailer MAC Cosmetics in Florida and moved to L.A...

[Video creator Dhar Mann] started posting videos on YouTube in 2018 with no film background. Mann previously had a business that sold supplies to grow weed. Today, his company, Burbank-based Dhar Mann Studios, operates on 125,000 square feet of production space, employs roughly 200 people and works with 2,000 actors a year on family friendly programs that touch on how students and families deal with topics such as bullying, narcolepsy, chronic inflammatory bowel disease and hoarding. Mann made $45 million last year, according to Forbes estimates. The majority of his company's revenue comes through YouTube.
He tells the Times "I don't think it's just the future of TV — it is TV, and the world is catching on."

And then there's this... "My mom would always give me so much crap about it — she would say, 'Why do you want to do YouTube?'" said Chucky Appleby, now an executive at MrBeast. His reply: "Mom, you can make a living from this." MrBeast's holding company, Beast Industries, which employs more than 400 people, made $473 million in revenue last year, according to Business Insider. In the last 28 days, MrBeast content — which includes challenges and stunt videos — received 3.6 billion views on YouTube, Appleby said.

Appleby, 28, said he's since bought a Jeep for his mom.

Some developers are "crying foul" after Microsoft's C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code stopped working with VS Code derivatives like VS Codium and Cursor, reports The Register. The move has prompted Cursor to transition to open-source alternatives, while some developers are calling for a regulatory investigation into Microsoft's alleged anti-competitive behavior. From the report: In early April, programmers using VS Codium, an open-source fork of Microsoft's MIT-licensed VS Code, and Cursor, a commercial AI code assistant built from the VS Code codebase, noticed that the C/C++ extension stopped working. The extension adds C/C++ language support, such as Intellisense code completion and debugging, to VS Code. The removal of these capabilities from competing tools breaks developer workflows, hobbles the editor, and arguably hinders competition. The breaking change appears to have occurred with the release of v1.24.5 on April 3, 2025.

Following the April update, attempts to install the C/C++ extension outside of VS Code generate this error message: "The C/C++ extension may be used only with Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio Code, Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Server, and successor Microsoft products and services to develop and test your applications." Microsoft has forbidden the use of its extensions outside of its own software products since at least September 2020, when the current licensing terms were published. But it hasn't enforced those terms in its C/C++ extension with an environment check in its binaries until now. [...]

Developers discussing the issue in Cursor's GitHub repo have noted that Microsoft recently rolled out a competing AI software agent capability, dubbed Agent Mode, within its Copilot software. One such developer who contacted us anonymously told The Register they sent a letter about the situation to the US Federal Trade Commission, asking them to probe Microsoft for unfair competition -- alleging self-preferencing, bundling Copilot without a removal option, and blocking rivals like Cursor to lock users into its AI ecosystem.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Whisky, a gaming-focused front-end for Wine's Windows compatibility tools on macOS, is no longer receiving updates. As one of the most useful and well-regarded tools in a Mac gamer's toolkit, it could be seen as a great loss, but its developer hopes you'll move on with what he considers a better option: supporting CodeWeavers' CrossOver product.

Also, Whisky's creator is an 18-year-old college student, and he could use a break. "I am 18, yes, and attending Northeastern University, so it's always a balancing act between my school work and dev work," Isaac Marovitz wrote to Ars. The Whisky project has "been more or less in this state for a few months, I posted the notice mostly to clarify and formally announce it," Marovitz said, having received "a lot of questions" about the project status. [...] "Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole," Marovitz wrote on the Whisky site.

He advised that Whisky users buy a CrossOver license, and noted that while CodeWeavers and Valve's work on Proton have had a big impact on the Wine project, "the amount that Whisky as a whole contributes to Wine is practically zero." Fixes for Wine running Mac games "have to come from people who are not only incredibly knowledgeable on C, Wine, Windows, but also macOS," Marovitz wrote, and "the pool of developers with those skills is very limited." While Marovitz told Ars that he's had "some contact with CodeWeavers" in making Whisky, "they were always curious and never told me what I should or should not do." It became clear to him, though, "from what [CodeWeavers] could tell me as well as observing the attitude of the wider community that Whisky could seriously threaten CrossOver's viability." "Whisky may have been a CrossOver competitor, but that's not how we feel today," wrote CodeWeavers CEO James B. Ramey in a statement. "Our response is simply one of empathy, understanding, and acknowledgement for Isaac's situation."

With macOS now 24 years old and Apple officially designating all Intel-based Mac minis as "vintage" or "obsolete," The Register takes a look at new internet tools that help keep vintage Macs online and surprisingly relevant: Cameron Kaiser of Floodgap Systems is a valuable ally. His retro computing interests are broad, and we've mentioned him a few times on The Register, such as his deep dive into the revolutionary Canon Cat computer, and his evaluation of RISC-V hardware performance. Back in 2020, he revived the native Classic Mac OS port of the Lynx web browser, MacLynx. Earlier this month, he came back to it and has updated it again, including adding native Mac OS dialog boxes. His account is -- as usual -- long and detailed but it's an interesting read. He also maintains some other web browsers for elderly Macs, including TenFourFox for Mac OS X 10.4 and Classilla for Mac OS 8.6 and 9.x.

If you're not up to git pull commands and elderly Mac OS X build tools, then there is a fork of TenFourFox that may be worth a look, InterWebPPC. It's not current with the new batch of patches, but we can still hope for another build. In other "Classic on the internet" news, although it's not a huge amount of use on its own, there's also a newly released Classic Mac OS version of Mbed-TLS on GitHub. This ports the SSL library -- also used in the super-lightweight Dillo browser -- to the older C89/C90 standard, so that it can build in CodeWarrior and run with OpenTransport from Mac OS 9 right back to later versions of Mac OS 7.

Modern macOS is UNIX certified and as such it's not all that dissimilar from other Unix-like OSes, such as Linux and the BSD family. Classic Mac OS is a profoundly different beast, which makes porting modern code to it a complex exercise -- but equally, it's a good learning exercise, and we're delighted to see 21st century programmers exploring this 1980s OS. That may be part of the motivation behind the newly announced and still incomplete SDL 2 "rough draft" that appeared a week ago. It builds on the existing SDL 1.2 port, but so far, it's less complete -- for instance, there's no sound support.

A communication error between GoDaddy Registry and Markmonitor took Zoom's services offline for almost two hours on Wednesday when GoDaddy mistakenly blocked the zoom.us domain. The outage affected all services dependent on the zoom.us domain.

GoDaddy's block prevented top-level domain nameservers from maintaining proper DNS records for zoom.us. This created a classic domain resolution failure -- when users attempted to connect to any zoom.us address, their requests couldn't be routed to Zoom's servers because the domain effectively disappeared from the internet's addressing system.

Video meetings abruptly terminated mid-session with browser errors indicating the domain couldn't be found. Zoom's status page (status.zoom.us) went offline, hampering communication efforts. Even Zoom's main website at zoom.com failed as the content delivery network couldn't reach backend services hosted on zoom.us servers. Customer support capabilities collapsed when account managers using Zoom's VoIP phones lost connectivity.

Resolution required coordinated effort between Zoom, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy to identify and remove the block. After service restoration, users needed to manually flush their DNS caches using command line instructions (including the sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder command for Mac users).

Apple has officially designated all Intel-based Mac minis as "vintage" or "obsolete," marking the end of an era. This means Apple no longer guarantees parts or service for these devices, as they've surpassed the 5- to 7-year support window. 9to5Mac reports: Apple periodically adds devices to its ever-growing list of vintage and obsolete products. That happened today, as spotted by MacRumors, with two noteworthy "vintage" additions: iPhone 6s and Mac mini (2018). The latter product is especially significant, because the 2018 Mac mini was the last remaining Intel model that was not yet labeled either vintage or obsolete.

So what are those timelines exactly? Per Apple's definitions: Vintage: "Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago." Obsolete: "Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 7 years ago." [...] Since these products are now considered vintage, Apple no longer guarantees that parts for repairs will be readily available.

Apple will begin analyzing data on customers' devices in a bid to improve its AI platform, a move designed to safeguard user information while still helping it catch up with AI rivals. From a report: Today, Apple typically trains AI models using synthetic data -- information that's meant to mimic real-world inputs without any personal details. But that synthetic information isn't always representative of actual customer data, making it harder for its AI systems to work properly.

The new approach will address that problem while ensuring that user data remains on customers' devices and isn't directly used to train AI models. The idea is to help Apple catch up with competitors such as OpenAI and Alphabet, which have fewer privacy restrictions. The technology works like this: It takes the synthetic data that Apple has created and compares it to a recent sample of user emails within the iPhone, iPad and Mac email app. By using actual emails to check the fake inputs, Apple can then determine which items within its synthetic dataset are most in line with real-world messages.

Apple is readying a substantial overhaul for iPadOS 19 that will transform the tablet experience to function more like macOS, according to Bloomberg. The update will focus on productivity features, multitasking capabilities, and app window management - areas where iPad power users have long requested improvements.

The software revamp comes approximately a year after Apple introduced the M4 chip to the iPad Pro lineup and coincides with the expected arrival of new iPad Pro models featuring M5 processors. According to Bloomberg, many users have expressed frustration that iPad hardware capabilities have consistently outpaced software functionality.

While the company won't fully port macOS to iPad as some users have wished, the changes will reportedly be substantial enough to satisfy much of the professional user base that has been pushing for more desktop-like functionality. The upcoming changes are expected to be highlighted at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

It was long-time Slashdot reader uninet who argued "Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia." (That is, Apple needs an upgrade to MacOS Sequoia that's like it's earlier "Snow Leopard" upgrade to "Leopard" OS — an upgrade that's "all about how little it added and how much it took away".)

"My recent column on Apple's declining software quality hit a nerve..." he writes in a follow-up. "So why do any of us put up with software that grows increasingly buggy?"

"One word: hardware. And that's where I'd love to see someone help Linux take the next step." Apple knows how to turn out very good quality pieces of hardware and, for many purposes, stands alone. That's been largely true for the last couple of decades. The half-decade of Apple Silicon has cemented this position. At any price point Apple contends, Macs, iPads and iPhones are either without peers or at the top of the market in build quality and processing power... [I]f only there were hardware that was as good and worked together as well as Apple's, jumping ship to Linux would be awfully attractive at this juncture...

For Apple aficionados troubled by the state of MacOS, the modern GNOME desktop on Linux beckons as a more faithful implementation of the ideals of MacOS than current MacOS does. GNOME is painstakingly consistent across its different apps and exudes the minimalist philosophy with which Apple's hardware shines... Now is a perfect moment for a modern Linux push to take that wind back. What it needs, though, is to solve its remaining weakness on the hardware side. One of the giants of electronics manufacturing, tired of being stuck between the Microsoft and Apple ecosystems, would only need to decide to commit the resources necessary to solve the hardware puzzle...

ChromeOS has grown to the extent it does because there is hardware designed for it. Take that and carry it further by making it good hardware utilizing the best Linux software and you'd have something disruptive... Initially, the hardware could be "good enough" for the software, much as Apple's software today is merely "good enough" for the hardware. Iterating from there could lead to a genuine third way of computing.
They titled their piece, "I Want a Better Mac, so I'm Cheering for a Better Linux." (Wondering if Dell or Sony could be the one to supply that good hardware...) "I say this not as someone who thinks Linux will ever dominate the personal computing world, but as someone who wants to see a spark of creativity and push beyond mediocrity in it again.

"Apple needs a real competitor, one alternatives such as GNOME on Linux could actually be, if only the hardware rose to the occasion."

Microsoft is testing a new Windows 11 feature that resizes taskbar icons dynamically like on macOS, with options to shrink icons when the taskbar is full or keep them small at all times. The Verge reports: If you're on the beta, under Taskbar settings - Taskbar behaviors, you can now select options under Show smaller taskbar buttons: Always, Never, or When taskbar is full. The third option will scale down icons so that they all can fit and not get hidden away in a second menu. The behavior appears to be similar to macOS where icons on the dock get smaller as more applications or minimized windows are added. Microsoft is also testing an update to the Start menu. "Now, it has a larger layout that includes the ability to hide the recommended recent apps and can show all of your apps on the page," reports The Verge.

uninet writes: The same year Apple launched the iPhone, it unveiled a massive upgrade to Mac OS X known as Leopard, sporting "300 New Features." Two years later, it did something almost unheard of: it released Snow Leopard, an upgrade all about how little it added and how much it took away. Apple needs to make it snow again. Current releases of MacOS Sequoia and iOS/iPadOS 18 are riddled with easily reproducible bugs in high-traffic areas, the author argues, suggesting Apple's engineers aren't using their own software. Messages can't reliably copy text, email connections randomly fail, and Safari frequently jams up. Even worse are the baffling design decisions, like burying display arrangement settings and redesigning Photos with needless margins and inconsistent navigation.

Apple's focus on the Vision Pro while AI advances raced ahead has left them scrambling to catch up, the author argues, with Apple Intelligence features now indefinitely delayed. The author insists that Apple's products still remain better than Windows or Android alternatives -- but "least bad" isn't the premium experience Apple loyalists expect. With its enormous resources, Apple could easily have teams focus on cleaning up existing software while simultaneously developing AI features.

Further reading: 'Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino' .

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has quietly released a new large language model that's already sending ripples through the artificial intelligence industry -- not just for its capabilities, but for how it's being deployed. The 641-gigabyte model, dubbed DeepSeek-V3-0324, appeared on AI repository Hugging Face today with virtually no announcement (just an empty README file), continuing the company's pattern of low-key but impactful releases. What makes this launch particularly notable is the model's MIT license -- making it freely available for commercial use -- and early reports that it can run directly on consumer-grade hardware, specifically Apple's Mac Studio with M3 Ultra chip.

"The new DeepSeek-V3-0324 in 4-bit runs at > 20 tokens/second on a 512GB M3 Ultra with mlx-lm!" wrote AI researcher Awni Hannun on social media. While the $9,499 Mac Studio might stretch the definition of "consumer hardware," the ability to run such a massive model locally is a major departure from the data center requirements typically associated with state-of-the-art AI. [...] Simon Willison, a developer tools creator, noted in a blog post that a 4-bit quantized version reduces the storage footprint to 352GB, making it feasible to run on high-end consumer hardware like the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra chip. This represents a potentially significant shift in AI deployment. While traditional AI infrastructure typically relies on multiple Nvidia GPUs consuming several kilowatts of power, the Mac Studio draws less than 200 watts during inference. This efficiency gap suggests the AI industry may need to rethink assumptions about infrastructure requirements for top-tier model performance. "The implications of an advanced open-source reasoning model cannot be overstated," reports VentureBeat. "Current reasoning models like OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1 represent the cutting edge of AI capabilities, demonstrating unprecedented problem-solving abilities in domains from mathematics to coding. Making this technology freely available would democratize access to AI systems currently limited to those with substantial budgets."

"If DeepSeek-R2 follows the trajectory set by R1, it could present a direct challenge to GPT-5, OpenAI's next flagship model rumored for release in coming months. The contrast between OpenAI's closed, heavily-funded approach and DeepSeek's open, resource-efficient strategy represents two competing visions for AI's future."