A Lament for Aperture, the App We’ll Never Get Over Losing ⇥ ikennd.ac

Daniel Kennett:

If you’re not familiar with Aperture, it’s an app for organising, managing, editing, and exporting images. If you’re familiar with Apple’s Photos app, it’s that. But for professionals! Aperture is a complex app — its PDF user manual is over 900 pages long — so to keep this manageable I’ll focus on one particular aspect of it via two short excerpts from said manual.

Two excerpts that hide an astonishing amount of engineering effort.

If you had asked me from 2007 why I saved a huge amount of money to buy a MacBook Pro, one explanation I would have given you would have been about Aperture. When I bought another Mac in 2012, I would have again cited Aperture as a motivating factor. It was a far better reason to keep buying stuff from Apple than the kind of mandated stickiness of a paid iCloud account.

The 2015 discontinuation of Aperture continues to break my heart for two reasons: the loss of support for a tremendous piece of software, of course, and also for what it represents. It was, for reasons Kennett writes about and plenty more, a pinnacle of software design and engineering. It felt like it was built by people who took two crafts — software and photography — very seriously. Times change, though, and it seems like Apple has lost the soul of what made Aperture excellent. It should really figure out what that is. Questionable user interfaces, mediocre icon design, tolerance for lagginess and bugs — these are all bad things, but they are symptoms of a greater loss.

‘Your Search Button Powers My Smart Home’ ⇥ tomcasavant.com

Tom Casavant:

You see, what I hadn’t considered that night when I was messing around with this website’s chat bot was that the existence of a public user facing chat bot had the requisite of having public LLM API endpoints. Normally, you probably wouldn’t care about having a /search endpoint exposed on your website, because very few (if any) people would care to abuse it. Worst case scenario is someone has an easier way of finding content on your site…which is what you wanted when you built that search button anyways. But, when your /search endpoint is actually just talking to an LLM and that LLM can be prompt injected to do what I want it to do, suddenly I want access to /search because I get free access to something I’d normally pay for.

If you have administrative access over a website and you have had reason to dig into the access logs, you have no doubt seen an avalanche of automated requests looking for common security vulnerabilities. Now imagine that but with a bunch of plain language attacks on the very expensive new website feature you added. It is going to be a wild several years as more people begin to integrate these sophisticated yet — to anthropomorphize — gullible text boxes without understanding how much it is going to cost them directly and indirectly.

A Canadian’s Call to Arms ⇥ aaron.vegh.ca

Aaron Vegh:

Most governments in Canada and around the world rely on Microsoft’s software. Most businesses route their applications through AWS. Most people tap away their lives on devices built and sold by American businesses, running American operating systems.

It’s like waking up and finding yourself ensnared. And it makes me mad as hell!

I get it.

This is, of course, a massively difficult problem. I love the MacBook Pro I am using right now, and it would be unbelievably difficult to get me to switch to some crappy product just to fight with driver incompatibilities again. A big problem is that trying to build a competitor to these established, widely supported, and well-integrated companies is a daunting task no matter where it takes place. The most valuable companies in the world rely on each other. The fact that we are in a situation where we must consider the consequences of our dependence on a handful of corporations showing a dictator-like level of obsequiousness to the U.S. president is also a big problem.

This can be a long-term goal. In the nearer term, we — the rest of the world — should take reasonable regulatory steps to curtail the influence and control of U.S. companies where we are. Any understanding that there was a great responsibility aligned with the great power of the U.S. has vanished, at least for now.

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: Block Ads in iPhone, iPad, and Mac Apps ⇥ magiclasso.co

Do you want to block ads and trackers across all apps on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac — not just in Safari?

Then download Magic Lasso Adblock — the ad blocker designed for you.

Magic Lasso: No ads, No trackers, No annoyances, No worries

The new App Ad Blocking feature in Magic Lasso Adblock v5.0 builds upon our powerful Safari and YouTube ad blocking, extending protection to:

  • News apps

  • Social media

  • Games

  • Other browsers like Chrome and Firefox

All ad blocking is done directly on your device, using a fast, efficient Swift-based architecture that follows our strict zero data collection policy.

With over 5,000 five star reviews, it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers, and is 100% supported by its community of users.

So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.

‘Every Data Centre Is a U.S. Military Base’ ⇥ policyalternatives.ca

Paris Marx, writing for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives:

It can be easy to believe that all this pressure [on governments by the United States] is a product of the way Trump’s return to office emboldened U.S. tech companies, but it’s simply brought a longstanding process out into the open. The U.S. government has long recognized how much it benefits from ensuring other countries are dependent on products and services made by companies in its jurisdiction. For years, it used trade negotiations to insert clauses in agreements that limit foreign governments’ ability to regulate its tech companies and has used its diplomats to apply pressure in other ways.

A common complaint, mostly from U.S. politicians and think tanks, about competition policies designed to address the influence and control of massive technology companies is that they are anti-American. This is a tacit acknowledgement that the current state of affairs advantages U.S. companies, and an expectation that the rest of the world should be completely fine with that.

Google Gemini to Provide Foundation for Some Apple Intelligence Features ⇥ ft.com

Samantha Subin, CNBC:

Apple is joining forces with Google to power its artificial intelligence features, including a major Siri upgrade expected later this year.

The multiyear partnership will lean on Google’s Gemini and cloud technology for future Apple foundational models, according to a joint statement obtained by CNBC’s Jim Cramer.

Apple and Google, in the statement that still has not been corrected to change Al to AI, but I presume it is about artificial intelligence rather than Google’s Albert technology:

After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.

Michael Acton, Stephen Morris, and George Hammond, Financial Times:

The deal would be structured in the form of a cloud computing contract, which could lead to Apple paying several billion dollars to Google over time, a person familiar with the agreement told the FT.

[…]

“I think that the ChatGPT integration is going to die on the vine … having two large models, given the economies of scale, wouldn’t make a ton of sense for Apple,” said Gene Munster at Deepwater Asset Management, who estimated the Gemini contract could be worth $5bn for Google.

Or, to put it another way, Gemini is worth to Apple roughly what a few months of default search placement in Safari are to Google, assuming these figures are in the right ballpark.

This announcement is vague. It seems to imply the Siri features that were supposed to roll out last year have been rebuilt on a new architecture that, turns out, has Gemini at its foundation. Apparently some other features are coming in mere months, like an ability to “tell more stories”, which will be a welcome distraction while Siri fails to text the right person in my contacts. Max Weinbach, of the well-connected Creative Strategies analysis team, is optimistic for what this means. I think it is super weird that Apple has teased Gemini integration alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT since WWDC 2024, but it is unclear whether this deal will include that capability.

The Exact Same Things Were Said About Smart Glasses Ten Years Ago

Jeremy Freed, of GQ, in an article with the provocative headline “You Won’t Be Able to Escape Smart Glasses in 2026”:

“If AI glasses are going to go mainstream, 2026 will be the year that we start to see that,” says Sinead Bovell, a futurist and the founder of tech education company, WAYE. Meta introduced its first line of Ray-Ban AI Glasses in 2021, and has sold more than 2 million pairs since launching the second generation in 2023. By the end of 2026, the company plans to sell 3 million more while ramping up production to 10 million pairs annually. As hard as it is to imagine 10 million people — the combined populations of NYC and Philly — buying Meta AI Glasses every year, it may well come to pass. “The iPhone came out in 2007 and by 2011 BlackBerry was still the number-one smartphone,” says Bovell. “The iPhone wasn’t seen as a phone, it was seen as a toy. The exact same things that were said about it in 2008 are being said now about [smart] glasses.” Likewise, no one knew they needed an Apple Watch when the product launched in 2015, but the company has reportedly sold hundreds of millions of them since then.

This article was published a day after people from, presumably, Meta or EssilorLuxottica told Bloomberg they were going to double production to 20 million units by the end of this year in response to overwhelming demand. So from two million since 2023, three million this year alone, to twenty million next year — that is quite the forecasted sales curve. It is almost enough to make you think Meta has a hardware hit on its hands.

Bovell is from Canada, where the BlackBerry was indeed still the top smartphone brand through 2010, but that was not a worldwide trend. By 2011, Android phones were outselling BlackBerries in the United States; worldwide, RIM was never the best-selling smartphone vendor.

As for Bovell’s claim that the “exact same things that were said about it [the iPhone] in 2008 are being said now about [smart] glasses”, the problem is that there is a far better comparison given we have already had an example of smart glasses in Google Glass, and the same things were being said about those a decade ago. In 2012, CBC News quoted a researcher saying Glass is “the mainstreaming of this kind of device”. In 2013, Jessica Guynn, of the Los Angeles Times, wrote that they “may still be on the fringes of mainstream consciousness. But they are not going to stay there very long”. The following year, Paul Saffo lamented for CNN that while “[i]nfo-glasses today are like PCs in 1984 – they look cool but perform a few functions that aren’t all that useful, such as taking pictures or surfing the Web while sitting in a bar with friends” — yes, “they look cool” is presented as a factual statement — in the very near future from 2014 “we are certain to be astonished by the capabilities of the device sitting on the bridge of our nose”.

Well, it has been nearly twelve years since Saffo wrote that, and the killer capabilities of smart glasses remain based entirely around the camera. And you know what? It is a pretty good feature — but it alone is not as compelling today as was a smartphone in 2008. I do not think the question is are smart glasses today akin to smartphones in 2008?; the question is more like what is different about today’s smart glasses compared to Google Glass?. To his credit, Freed attempts to answer this in noting that Meta’s Wayfarer shape instead of a sci-fi is an obvious upgrade, but I think he underplays the advancements in image, language, and speech detection since Google Glass by calling it “a Siri-like voice assistant”. GQ is not a technology publication, true, but that is among the biggest changes for a device so dependent on real-time interaction with the surrounding environment, like for translation features.

But there are problems with today’s smart glasses that remain unchanged from those that affected Google Glass. Most obviously, they are still a privacy nightmare for yourself and for others. Meta says the externally-visible recording LED must not be obstructed to record video, but people are modifying the glasses to remove that restriction. They must effectively be treated like spy glasses because they could be recording anywhere — in a public area running facial recognition software, to the apparent privacy of a massage room.

Meta is far from the only company producing glasses like these. Snap has its Spectacles and Xiaomi’s A.I. Glasses are available in China. All of these companies are responsible for developing a selfish future that prioritizes selling buyers on the advantages of an unobtrusive camera while barely acknowledging the societal impact of the same. Google is taking another kick at the can, and rumours consistently indicate Apple and Samsung are each working on their own, too. They may all say the right things about privacy, but the fundamental fact is that a barely-visible camera is a tool for abuse as much as it is entertainment.

Freed:

Whether the possibilities presented by smart glasses sound fun and appealing or like the tipping point into a dystopian nightmare is a matter of perspective. There are the obvious doubts about what happens if someone hacks your glasses and what companies like Meta are planning to do with your data (spoiler alert: it’s being used to train AI), but these aren’t so different from existing concerns around other internet-enabled devices. “Every piece of technology ever created has been used for good and bad things,” says Edward R. McNicholas, a Partner at Ropes & Gray in Washington DC who leads the firm’s global data, privacy and cybersecurity practice. “Just think of the Internet itself — it helps bad actors, but it brings the globe together, creates enormous economic opportunity, and inspires millions.” What will ultimately decide the fate of smart glasses, he says, is regulatory friction — and cultural embrace. “That is, what’s the rizz? Do the 20-somethings deem it based or cringe?”

McNicholas was admitted to the Maryland bar in 1996. His career as a lawyer is at least Millennial-aged and, as a Millennial myself, I feel pretty confident in saying he cannot use “rizz”, “based”, or “cringe” like this. It is not, in fact, lit.

I find it difficult to believe it is a coincidence there are two stories promoting Meta’s A.I. glasses appearing in the news the same week Meta laid off ten percent of its Reality Labs employees, and reallocating funds to the team developing those glasses. I am sure these things have their defenders, and may be more popular than Meta expected given the company’s long run of hardware flops. The relative success of the glasses means Meta can jettison its original messy concept of the metaverse and redefine it to suit its needs today.

But this does not feel like the nascent days of the iPhone, nor like we will not “be able to escape smart glasses” this year. I knew lots of people with smartphones in the mid-to-late-2000s, including some with original iPhones despite them not being available in Canada. Anecdotally, I do not personally know anyone who owns or is even thinking about buying smart glasses. Mind you, I know plenty of people with an Apple Watch today who did not consider it compelling even years after it launched. Maybe it is like the early days of smartwatch ownership, after all, and I simply do not notice because Meta’s glasses just look like Ray-Bans. That is, I guess, the whole point.

Despite the concept of smart glasses being the product of so much hype and excitement, it never seems to have materialized in something you can buy. Maybe that will change; maybe that has changed without me noticing it. But one of the other biggest shifts of the past ten years is how much people say they want more distance from technology. One of the predictions for 2026 in a list from the New York Times is the rise of the “dumb phone” as a status symbol. Some people who have tried smartwatches have found them more demanding over time than helpful; I stopped wearing one after four years because I need less technology in my life, not more. There is a vast gulf between what people say they want and their actual behaviour, of course, but I cannot shake the feeling this technology is still too much of an imposition. We will not need to “escape smart glasses” if people still choose not to buy them.

Adequate Red Teaming of A.I. Models Requires Better Policy ⇥ nytimes.com

Riana Pfefferkorn, in an op-ed for the New York Times:

A.I. companies like xAI can and should do more not just to respond quickly and decisively when their models behave badly, but also to prevent them from generating such material in the first place. This means rigorously testing the models to learn how and why they can be manipulated into generating illegal sexual content — then closing those loopholes. But current laws don’t adequately protect good-intentioned testers from prosecution or correctly distinguish them from malicious users, which frightens companies from taking this kind of action.

To the extent A.I. companies are truly “red teaming” their models — this term has been misused by the industry, which often outsources the work to contractors in developing nations — current laws restrict the limits to which they can be taken. On this I agree with Pfefferkorn, and I think she is right to call for a change in policy.

But I am not convinced xAI is much interested in ensuring its model is that much safer. CSAM is obviously over the line and I would be surprised if anyone there were to defend Grok on that. Most anything else, however, is something I think xAI would find permissible albeit perhaps unseemly for Grok to generate. Remember: Grok is supposed to be “unfiltered”. Does it offend you? Because it should, buddy. That is the freedom you get when you look at the world through the lens of a mall-grade edgelord who will be turning 55 years old in June.

Updating the Record on iOS 26 Usage Share

I made a mistake on Friday: instead of waiting to polish a more comprehensive article, I effectively live-blogged my shifting understanding of how StatCounter was collecting its iOS version number data by way of updates and edits to existing posts. In my own defence, I did not know the rate of users updating to iOS 26 would become as much of a story unto itself as it has. So allow me to straighten this out.

Here is the background: StatCounter publishes market share data by country and user technology based on statistics it collects from its web analytics package which, it says, is used by over a million websites totalling around five billion page views monthly. I have not heard of many of the sites using its analytics, but it seems to be a large enough and generic enough sample that it should be indicative — more so than, say, visitors to my audience-specific website. Ed Hardy, over at Cult of Mac, used StatCounter’s figures to report, on January 8, that “only about 15% of iPhone users have some version of the new operating system installed”. Hardy compared this to historical StatCounter figures showing a 63% adoption rate of iOS 18 by the same time last year, 54% on iOS 17 the year prior, and 62% on iOS 16 the year before that. If true, this would represent a catastrophic reluctance for iPhone users to update.

If true.

I do not think the iOS 26 uptake rate is about 15%. I think it is lower than the 54–63% range in previous years, but not by nearly that much. I think StatCounter has been misinterpreting iOS 26’s user base since last year because of a change Apple made to Safari.

If the phrase “user agent” does not make you respond by tipping your head to the side like my dog did when I asked him if he knew what I meant by that, you can skip this paragraph. A user agent string is a way for software to identify itself when it makes an HTTP request on behalf of a user. A user agent might describe the type and version of a web browser, the operating system, and have other information so that, in the old days, websites could check for compatibility. This leads to user agent strings that look a little silly:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/134.0.0.

This does not represent a Firefox user, despite starting with “Mozilla”, nor does it represent a Safari or Chrome user, despite the mentions of “Safari”, “Chrome”, and “AppleWebKit”. It is a user agent string for Microsoft Edge, which is begging to be treated like its competitors.

This is a simplified explanation, but it is important for how StatCounter works. When someone browses a website containing its analytics code, it reads the user agent string, and that is how StatCounter determines market share. The above user would be counted for Edge market share (“Edg/134.0.0”) and Windows. Which version of Windows? Well, while “NT 10.0” suggests it is Windows 10, it is also used by Edge running on Windows 11 — that part of the user string has been frozen. The Chromium team did the same thing and reduced the amount of specific information in the user agent string. This removes a method of fingerprinting and is generally fine.

This movement was spearheaded by Apple in 2017, when Ricky Mondello announced Safari Technology Preview 46 “freezes Safari’s user agent string. It will not change in the future”. But this remained a desktop-only change until September 2025, when Jen Simmons and others who work on WebKit, announced that the version of Safari shipping in iOS 26 would have its user agent stuck on the previous version of iOS:

Also, now in Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS 26 the user agent string no longer lists the current version of the operating system. Safari 18.6 on iOS has a UA string of:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.6 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

And Safari 26.0 on iOS has a UA string of:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

Apple justified this change only by implication, writing “we highly recommend using feature detection instead of UA string detection when writing conditional code”. But, as Jeff Johnson points out, this change does not eliminate version detection entirely:

[…] because Safari is always inseparable from the OS, so it’s possible to derive the iOS version from the Safari version, which continues to be incremented in the User-Agent. On macOS, in contrast, the latest version of Safari typically supports the three latest major OS versions, so Safari 26 can be installed on macOS 15 Sequoia and macOS 14 Sonoma in addition to macOS 26 Tahoe, and therefore the User-Agent — which actually says “OS X 10_15_7”! — is a little more effective at obscuring the OS version.

I noticed this, too, and it led to a mistake I made in my first guess at understanding why StatCounter was reporting some iOS 26 traffic, but not a lot. I thought StatCounter could have made a change to its analytics package to interpret this part of the user agent string instead, but that it may not have rolled out to all of its users. I was wrong.

What actually appears to account for iOS 26’s seemingly pitiful adoption rate is that third-party browsers like Chrome and Brave produce a user agent string that looks like this, on my iPhone running iOS 26.3:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 26_3_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/144.0.7559.53 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

Safari, meanwhile, produces this user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_7 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.3 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

“iPhone OS 26_3_0” on Chrome, but “iPhone OS 18_7” in Safari. And iOS 18.7 also exists, with a similar user agent string as Safari, albeit with “Version/18.7” in place of “Version/26.3”. The operating system version is the same in both, however: “18_7”. StatCounter’s iOS 26 data is not reflective of all iOS users — just those using third-party browsers that still have the current iOS version in their user agent string.

Even though third-party browsers are available on iOS, most users browse the web through Safari. And that means StatCounter is almost certainly counting the vast majority of people on iOS 26 as iOS 18.7 users. I retrieved those user agent strings using StatCounter’s detection utility, which is how it says you can validate the accuracy of its statistics. And it seems they are not. (I asked StatCounter to confirm this but have not heard back.)

The actual rate of iOS 26 adoption is difficult to know right now. Web traffic to generalist websites, like the type collected by StatCounter, seems to me like it would be a good proxy had its measurement capabilities kept up with changes to iOS. Other sources, like TelemetryDeck, indicate a far higher market share — 55% as I am writing this — but its own stats reported nearly 78% adoption of iOS 18 at this time last year, far higher than StatCounter’s 63%. TelemetryDeck’s numbers are based on aggregate data from its in-app analytics product, so they should be more accurate, but that also depends on which apps integrate TelemetryDeck and who uses them. What we can see, though, is the difference between last year and this year at the same time, around 23 percentage points. For comparison, in January 2024, TelemetryDeck reported around 74% had updated to iOS 17 — iOS 26 is 19 points less.

If its reporting for this year is similarly representative, it likely indicates a 20-point slide in iOS 26 adoption. Not nearly as terrible as the misleading StatCounter dashboard suggests, but still a huge slide compared to prior years. Apple will likely update its own figures in the coming weeks for a further point of comparison. However, even though there are early indications iOS 26 is not as well-received as its predecessors, what we do not know is why that is. Fear not, however, for there are obvious conclusions to be drawn.

Hardy, later in the same Cult of Mac article:

It’s not that millions of iPhone users around the world have somehow overlooked the launch of iOS 26 followed by iOS 26.1 and iOS 26.2. They are holding off installing the upgrades because this is Apple’s most controversial new version in many years. The reason: Liquid Glass — a translucent and fluid new interface. Many elements of the UI go semi-transparent, while clever effects make it seem like users are looking through glass at objects shown on the screen behind the Control Center and pop-up windows.

David Price, of Macworld, made the same assumption based on Hardy’s story — twice:

It’s debatable whether the egregious design of last year’s OS updates falls under the category of arrogance or incompetence; perhaps it’s both. But the takeaway for Apple should be that customer loyalty is finite, and there are consequences when you consistently lower your quality-control standards. When your entire business is built on people liking you, it’s best not to take them for granted.

I have no particular affinity for Liquid Glass. I am not sure its goals are well-conceived, and I do not think it achieves those objectives.

Even so, I think the aversion to Liquid Glass is so strong among some commentators that erroneous stats are fine so long as they are confirmation of their biases. Put it this way: if just 15% of users had, indeed, upgraded to iOS 26 and the reason for so many people remaining on previous versions is Liquid Glass, surely that should mean a corrected percentage — perhaps 55%, perhaps lower — is indicative that most people are not actually bothered by Liquid Glass, right?

Yes, there is a likely 20-point gap and, if that is due to Liquid Glass, it should be cause for worry at the highest levels of Apple. iOS is a mass-market operating system. The audience is not necessarily obsessed with information density or an adequate contrast ratio. If a redesign of iOS were exciting, people would race to update, just as they did when iOS 7 was launched. They appear hesitant. Maybe the reason is Liquid Glass, or maybe something else. Or maybe there are further measurement errors.

Whatever the case, I would avoid believing articles making sweeping conclusions based on a single data point. After all, if that number is shown to be incorrect, it destabilizes the whole argument.

Wishing for a More Flexible Apple Display Strategy ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

I’ve been thinking about Apple’s relationship with computer displays lately. Maybe it was the report that the iMac Pro might somehow return, combined with John Voorhees of MacStories detailing how he gave up the Studio Display for an ASUS monitor? And, of course, there’s the prospect that we may be seeing new Apple-made standalone displays in 2026.

I don’t want to go back to a world where Apple no longer makes standalone displays. But that said, I think the company’s approach to display technology needs a serious upgrade.

Co-signed. When I bought my iMac 5K in early 2019,1 it was the only big desktop display Apple sold. Now, as I think about an update, I am dismayed I will not officially be able to use it as an external display, though it seems like Luna Display might be worth a shot over Thunderbolt 3. If that does not work, it is gutting to me that I will have to effectively re-purchase this same 5K panel for my desk. And then there is the question of what I should do with my otherwise-good-just-outdated iMac.

I have been keeping an eye on Michael Tsai’s posts about displays, particularly those regarding non-Apple 27-inch 5K models. I know I have to adjust my expectations. Even so, these all look pretty tacky. Imagine being from Asus or ViewSonic and thinking I want to look at an ugly logo all day long. Still, a near-thousand-dollar difference is hard to dismiss, especially since Apple’s expensive display continues to have software problems.

And, of course, the only other display Apple sells is a 32-inch model that is over-engineered for most people, costs nearly eight thousand dollars in Canada with a stand, and has not been updated in over six years. Asus’ comparable 6K display is under $2,000, though it is not as bright and it looks pretty tragic.

  1. Arguably the worst time in modern Apple history to be shopping for a new Mac. Butterfly keyboards in all the laptops, stale desktops, and on the verge of the last batch of Intel-based Macs. ↥︎

Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai Are Cowards ⇥ theverge.com

Elizabeth Lopatto, the Verge:

Less than five years ago, I sat through the interminable Epic v. Apple antitrust trial. Real heads will remember that Apple’s lawyers heavily implied that a naked bananaman called Mr. Peely was somehow inappropriate for court. This came after a week where Apple argued that an indie storefront that users could install via Epic was a problem because it hosted porny games, calling games on Itch.io “offensive and sexualized.”

You know what’s “offensive and sexualized,” you worthless fucking cowards? Nonconsensual AI-generated images of women in bikinis spreading their legs, and of children with so-called “donut glaze” on their faces — which, by the way, were being generated at a rate of one per minute. I’d also call that “offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste” and *especially *“just plain creepy”! Do you need a back brace to stand up straight, buddy? Because at this point, I am certain you haven’t got a single vertebra.

Correctly righteous anger. That there has barely been any reckoning with this from Apple, Google, or even xAI despite at least a week of mainstream media coverage shows a callous indifference to the ongoing effects of the victims of this abuse. The best argument I can imagine — and it is a terrible argument — is that Apple’s lawyers advised the company against doing anything that looks anticompetitive since it is currently being sued by xAI. This is why it is a bad idea to rely on private corporations to do the job of regulators and law enforcement — but, still, Apple and Google should not be carrying apps from this company for as long as it continues to be a mass-scale abuse generator.

Third-Party Browsers Report Different iOS Version Numbers Than Safari ⇥ macrumors.com

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

In the first week of January last year, 89.3% of MacRumors visitors used a version of iOS 18. This year, during the same time period, only 25.7% of MacRumors readers are running a version of iOS 26. In the absence of official numbers from Apple, the true adoption rate remains unknown, but the data suggests a level of hesitation toward iOS 26 that has not been seen in recent years.

The numbers being reported — 15% from StatCounter, 26% from MacRumors, and 55% from TelemetryDeck — are all over the place, but there is a clear-ish direction: people are not updating to iOS 26 like they have previous versions of iOS. There are lots of possible reasons why. Liquid Glass is the most visible explanation, but it is also possible the growing size of iOS plays a role. Apple Intelligence alone consumes nearly 7 GB of disk space on my iPhone.

Even so, the differences in these numbers are wild, especially compared to previous years where there was tighter agreement between different reports. For example, in January last year, TelemetryDeck reported about 78% were running iOS 18, StatCounter said it was 63%, and Apple itself said it was 68% of all iPhone users interacting with the App Store,1 rising to 76% adoption among users of devices four years old or newer. That is a fifteen point spread between. This year, with only third-party data so far available, it is a forty point spread between StatCounter’s 15% and TelemetryDeck’s 55%. Something is not adding up.

Update: My iPhone running iOS 26.3 is detected by StatCounter’s user agent detection tool as an iOS 18.7 device. This reflects how StatCounter says is how it collects its figures. Two other devices running iOS 26 were also detected by StatCounter as iOS 18.7 devices; however, on one of them in the Chrome browser, StatCounter correctly detected it as iOS 26.1. I also see this effect in my own limited analytics, where the only reports of iOS 26 versions are non-Safari browsers. If an analytics package relies on the OS version string in the user agent, it will also misreport iOS 26 Safari users.

  1. I corrected the description of iPhone users here thanks to a comment on Michael Tsai’s site. I am not sure what Apple means by “as measured by devices that transacted on the App Store”, though — does that include device users making in-app purchases, or recurring billing, or even automatic app updates? Or is it strictly devices purchasing or downloading apps from the App Store? ↥︎

Possible Inaccuracies in StatCounter’s Safari-Based Version Number Reporting ⇥ webkit.org

Yesterday, I linked to a report from Ed Hardy, Cult of Mac, pointing to a shockingly low iOS 26 adoption rate compared to previous years. Hardy relied on date from StatCounter, which uses web traffic at massive scale to measure all kinds of stuff, including operating system versions.

Given that StatCounter’s data has been similar to Apple’s own reporting of version adoption in previous years, I wrote:

[…] StatCounter’s figures might be off, but it would be shocking if they were out by 40-plus percent. That would point to a serious measurement error that, somehow, did not impact previous reporting.

Well, it turns out there is likely a measurement difference that would not have impacted iOS 18 or before.

Jen Simmons and others who work on WebKit, in September:

Also, now in Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS 26 the user agent string no longer lists the current version of the operating system. Safari 18.6 on iOS has a UA string of:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.6 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

And Safari 26.0 on iOS has a UA string of:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

In both, you will notice iPhone OS is set to “18_6” despite only one of them actually running iOS 18.6. If StatCounter was relying on this part of the user agent string for calculating operating system version number, it could be inaccurate. There is still a Safari version number that could be a proxy for the operating system version in the latter part of the user agent string, however. On my iPhone, running iOS 26.3, the relevant section reads Version/26.3 Mobile/15E148 Safari. The iPhone OS string also reads “18_7”, which is also true for users running iOS 26.2.

It is not like StatCounter has no data for iOS 26. It shows traffic from iOS 26.1 and 26.2, indicating it likely updated its tracking metrics. It is possible some of the 18.6 and 18.7 traffic is also iOS 26 — we just do not know how much.

Data from TelemetryDeck seems more robust, and suggests about 55% of iOS users have updated to iOS 26, compared to about 78% of users one year ago running iOS 18. Not as bad as StatCounter’s figures, but still a twenty-point gap between latest version uptake last year and this year.

Thanks to Sam Gross for pointing me in this direction.

The Telegram Group Jailbreaking Grok ⇥ 404media.co

Emanuel Maiberg, of 404 Media, has been following a Telegram group in which members find workarounds to guardrails in generative A.I. products. Instead of finding interesting exploits to do clever things, though, the loopholes are being harnessed mostly to harass, abuse, and bully women. It is pretty revolting.

Maiberg:

It’s good and correct for people to be shocked and upset when they wake up one morning and see that their X feed is flooded with AI-generated images of minors in bikinis, but what is clear to me from following this Telegram community for a couple of years now is that nonconsensual sexual images of real people, including minors, is the cost of doing business with AI image generators. Some companies do a better job of preventing this abuse than others, but judging by the exploits I see on Telegram, when it comes to Grok, this problem will get a lot worse before it gets better.

It is clear Maiberg is just as disgusted with this as any person should be, so I am not trying to um, actually this, but I am not sure treating it as a “cost of doing business” is correct. The design and capabilities of these products matters immensely and, by permitting a relatively open-ended environment, xAI allows for experimentation to find its weak points. This is true of any generative A.I. product with a text box as its input. (As opposed to, say, a generative object removal tool in an image editor.) The degree of impact may also vary depending on the quality or style of the image — though, personally, I would still be alarmed if someone were harassing me with images even if they were cartoons.

Matt Burgess and Maddy Varner, Wired:

Unlike on X, where Grok’s output is public by default, images and videos created on the Grok app or website using its Imagine model are not shared openly. If a user has shared an Imagine URL, though, it may be visible to anyone. A cache of around 1,200 Imagine links, plus a WIRED review of those either indexed by Google or shared on a deepfake porn forum, shows disturbing sexual videos that are vastly more explicit than images created by Grok on X.

Caroline Haskins, Wired:

Over the past two years, Apple and Google removed a number of “nudify” and AI image-generation apps after investigations by the BBC and 404 Media found they were being advertised or used to effectively turn ordinary photos into explicit images of women without their consent.

But at the time of publication, both the X app and the stand-alone Grok app remain available in both app stores. Apple, Google, and X did not respond to requests for comment. Grok is operated by Musk’s multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence startup xAI, which also did not respond to questions from WIRED. In a public statement published on January 3, X said that it takes action against illegal content on its platform, including CSAM. “Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content,” the company warned.

X’s threat of “consequences” would be more convincing if it had functional site moderation generally.

Apps have been kicked off the App Store for far less than what X is today. Removing it — and the rest of xAI’s apps — would be a good start, but we should not expect private companies to do the job of law enforcement and regulators. There is a good case for banning X as long as it continues to permit this poorly-moderated image generator. People should be criminally charged, too.

iOS 26 Adoption Reportedly Lagging iOS 18 in Same Timeframe, According to StatCounter ⇥ cultofmac.com

Ed Hardy, Cult of Mac:

Nevertheless, iOS 26 adoption is extremely low. Roughly four months after launching in mid-September, only about 15% of iPhone users have some version of the new operating system installed. That’s according to data for January 2026 from StatCounter. Instead, most users hold onto previous versions.

For comparison, in January 2025, about 63% of iPhone users had some iOS 18 version installed. So after roughly the same amount of time, the adoption rate of Apple newest OS was about four times higher.

As far as I can tell, Apple updates its own iOS version stats twice annually — once with summer numbers, and again in the winter. Last year, it updated its stats on January 24, and it indicated 68% of iPhone users who transacted with the App Store on January 21 were using iOS 18. This is pretty close to StatCounter’s 63%. In February 2024, 66% were using the then-newest iOS 17; as Hardy writes, StatCounter reported it was around 54% at the time. A greater gap, to be sure, but it was clear well over half of iPhone users had updated. StatCounter’s figures might be off, but it would be shocking if they were out by 40-plus percent. That would point to a serious measurement error that, somehow, did not impact previous reporting.

Update: Turns out there might actually be large measurement differences that did not impact previous years’ reporting.

Update: Relying on StatCounter’s data could be flawed because Safari and third-party browsers report different iOS version numbers due to a change in iOS 26.

Duolingo Displayed Ads in Live Activities, Dynamic Island ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Language learning app Duolingo has apparently been using the iPhone’s Live Activity feature to display ads on the Lock Screen and the Dynamic Island, which violates Apple’s design guidelines.

According to multiple reports on Reddit, the Duolingo app has been displaying an ad for a “Super offer,” which is Duolingo’s paid subscription option.

I saw this, too.

Clover points to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, which once advised “avoid using a Live Activity to display ads or promotions”, but now explicitly say “don’t use a Live Activity” to show ads. But the HIG is not the App Store Guidelines, and there is nothing in there expressly prohibiting this behaviour, as far as I can see. Tacky.

CSAM Generator xAI, Run by Elon Musk, Raises $20 Billion ⇥ nytimes.com

Kate Conger, New York Times:

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, said on Tuesday that it had raised $20 billion from investors to fund its expansion in the race to train the most intelligent chatbot.

[…]

Investors in xAI’s latest funding included Fidelity, the Qatar Investment Authority and Valor Equity Partners, a firm led by Mr. Musk’s friend and former Tesla board member Antonio Gracias. Nvidia, the maker of A.I. chips, also participated. In total, xAI has raised more than $42 billion, according to PitchBook.

Twenty billion dollars is a ghastly sum of money to give anyone, let alone someone who, in his official capacity, cut funding and killed over half a million people. This feels less like an investment for direct financial gain, and more like a way for a select group of people to find influence through a company connected to a transparently corrupt government.

If you are wondering about the timing — immediately after a wave of coverage about xAI’s Grok generating a flurry of abusive and heinous imagery — it turns out this is not the first time Grok’s output has not affected major investment news. In July, shortly after Grok began parroting praise of Adolf Hitler, the U.S. government’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced xAI would be one of several A.I. companies receiving up to $200 million. As of today, Grok’s stream of replies on X are still full of it generating sexualized images of real women, mostly without their consent. People with lots of money seem to think all of this is completely fine.

Grok Is Being Used to Depict Horrific Violence Against Real Women ⇥ futurism.com

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

Over the last week, users of X realized that they could use Grok to “put a bikini on her,” “take her clothes off,” and otherwise sexualize images that people uploaded to the site. This went roughly how you would expect: Users have been derobing celebrities, politicians, and random people—mostly women—for the last week. This has included underage girls, on a platform that has notoriously gutted its content moderation team and gotten rid of nearly all rules.

Ananya Bhattacharya, Rest of World:

On January 2, India’s IT ministry issued a 72-hour ultimatum to X over its artificial intelligence chatbot generating “obscene” content — specifically, sexualized or manipulated images of women and, in some cases, minors.

Maggie Harrison Dupré, Futurism:

In addition to the sexual imagery of underage girls, the women depicted in Grok-generated nonconsensual porn range from some who appear to be private citizens to a slew of celebrities, from famous actresses to the First Lady of the United States. And somehow, that was only the tip of the iceberg.

When we dug through this content, we noticed another stomach-churning variation of the trend: Grok, at the request of users, altering images to depict real women being sexually abused, humiliated, hurt, and even killed.

It is extraordinary yet, sadly, predictable to me that xAI is not treating this as a problem. Setting aside the fundamentally offensive capability that any user can tell Grok to generate photorealistic images based on someone else’s likeness — something it should be prohibited from doing — there appears to be no rush to fix this high-res misogyny on demand. A basic corporate response would be to turn off image generation capabilities until better safeguards are in place. Yet I just opened the Grok account on X, switched to the Replies tab, and it took almost no scrolling at all to find it generating images like these mere seconds ago.

The kinds of images Grok is generating should be criminal, and the people who oversee it should be held liable as should those who are prompting Grok. In my eyes, though I am not a lawyer, it is no less a case of harassment when a robot is directed by a user than when the user does it themself. I know A.I. is a nascent industry and there are things people are worried about over-regulating, but this should not be one of them. xAI is clearly overseen by adolescent-brained people who think it is sufficient to make it against company policy for users to make heinous requests, rather than sufficiently restricting its own software.

A Viral Reddit Post About Food Delivery Apps Was an A.I. Scam ⇥ hardresetmedia.com

Elissa Welle, the Verge:

A viral Reddit confessional about a “major food delivery app” posted January 2nd is most likely AI-generated. The original post by user Trowaway_whistleblow alleged that an unnamed food delivery company regularly delays customer orders, calls couriers “human assets,” and exploits their “desperation” for cash, among other indefensible actions. Nearly 90,000 upvotes and four days later, it’s become increasingly clear that the post’s text is probably AI-generated.

The link from “viral Reddit confessional” is not to the thread itself, but to a link post from the Verge. That post, from Andrew J. Hawkins, still asks “[w]hich company do you think this is about?” and has not been updated to reflect the fictional status of this story.

Alex Schultz, Hard Reset:

But the allegations in the Reddit thread are not true. They are fabricated. The original post was generated by AI and was intended to defame Uber Eats. I know as much because I traded Signal messages with Trowaway_whistleblow, who additionally used AI to prepare a fake-but-sophisticated-looking “internal document” of other supposedly damning allegations; Trowaway_whistleblow circulated the document to journalists, hoping someone would take the bait and publish a libelous “scoop.”

I was shocked to see so many people posting a link to this thread credulously. I write that not to scold anyone, only out of genuine surprise that an evidence-free anonymous Reddit post with clear inconsistencies was being spread so widely. There is so much existing evidence that so-called “gig economy” workers are exploited, underpaid, and endangered, and that food delivery platforms specifically are bad for restaurants, that we simply do not need to add questionable Reddit posts to the mix. This scam played into that reputation perfectly. If anything, that is why it makes sense to be even more skeptical. Being too credulous undermines the documented failures of these platforms through the confusion it creates.

MacOS Tahoe Menu Icons Are Inconsistent, Confusing, and Illegible ⇥ tonsky.me

You may remember Jim Nielsen’s exploration last month — previously linked — of the various icons in MacOS Tahoe menus, and comparing them to Apple’s long-time recommendations for icon use.

Nikita Prokopov went even further:

In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.

But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.

And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.

This is a gallery of elementary problems. None of this should have shipped if someone with power internally had a critical eye for consistency and detail. If Apple deems it necessary to retain the icons, though I am not sure why it would, it should be treating this post as one giant bug report.

Update: Speaking of illegible, I think Prokopov should reconsider both the automatically-enabled snow animation and the searing yellow background.