Remember Sky, the app created by the former Shortcuts team at Apple? Well, guess what: OpenAI did what Apple should have done and acquired them.

At the time it was announced I ranted on about how Apple had managed to mis-manage this kind of talent and vision for Mac automation so badly that they ended up leaving the company and not having any of what they showed at the time incorporated in Apple Intelligence, and I am sticking to my guns on that one–Apple clearly has a talent management problem, and the departure of more and more of their AI talent to other companies should be ample proof of that.

But Tim Cook and company seem to be perfectly fine with that (and the declining quality of their software) as long as they keep selling new hardware, because that’s all the innovation they seem to care about these days.

Apple will never acknowledge how badly Liquid Glass failed as a design concept, but at least they’re trying to make it more usable. And this time they’re not even trying to disguise it as an accessibility feature, it’s actually a top level setting that should never have been needed in the first place.

Well, if you can’t fix it then flaunt it, I suppose.

All I need now is a “kindergarten mode” toggle to deal with the five different corner ratios and extraneous whitespace in macOS Tahoe windows, and someone with critical thinking skills overseeing their UX team. Maybe that would finally convince them to abandon this entire “design by committee” disaster.

Previously.

Nice to see Apple Silicon continues to evolve apace, although every year I have to add bigger pinches of salt to the performance claims.

I am interested in whether the GPU is finally up to snuff for gaming, and if the new Neural Engine will make a difference in real-world AI applications given Apple’s miserly take on what a suitable amount of RAM is for a “pro” machine–let alone the eye-watering prices they charge for storage.

But until someone else can actually compete in a way Apple feels threatened by, I don’t expect any changes in their pricing or product strategy, so… meh.

Still, I will be watching for Mac mini updates. Even though storage pricing is the mini’s Achilles heel, it’s still the only way to get a nicely compact, unobtrusive desktop Mac that isn’t completely over the top in price.

Looks pretty, although the fact that it cannot beat a 5090 in inference should tip you off that it’s designed to hold a lot of RAM, not necessarily be on the bleeding edge of performance.

In my mind it feels like the modern day equivalent of the NVIDIA Shield–not because it’s for media, but because it’s a small, self-contained box that will expand NVIDIA’s footprint well enough, and is easy to set up and use: No fiddling with CUDA versions, no worrying about dependencies, no need to do anything unusual to set up your development environment.

But unlike a Mac or a generic AMD box, these are a pretty beefy commitment–almost a single-purpose box…

I’m happy that sanity prevailed, although not in time to prevent me from getting a second (non-Synology) NAS–which I suspect is what many serious customers went out and did, if only to test the waters.

This was an amazingly bad own goal, especially it being absurdly obvious that their target audience would be knowledgeable enough to see through a lock-in strategy–they’re not selling shaving utensils with disposable blades, anyone who buys a NAS plans for expanding storage with the cheapest (or best fit) third-party disks.

The interesting thing for me here, having followed some of the less visible discussions, is that Synology was, if not openly hostile to some reviewers that criticized them, at least “more selective” of the influencers they partnered with, which seems par for the course these days but really doesn’t help restore confidence.

But as a customer, I welcome their change of plans. In the meantime, you can check out my small set of NAS reviews.

Mixed feelings. Lots of mixed feelings. Qualcomm has been promoting quite a few new development kits over the past year or so, and of course Arduino has tremendous mindshare, but that was built upon pretty agnostic and far-reaching microcontroller support, so it will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Their first product is another “split brain” board with a Linux-capable CPU and an MCU (very much like the Radxa X4 and other recent boards, including one I’m still testing) that is still in the Uno form factor, which is good news.

But the SBC market has been stretching in all sorts of unusual directions as low-end Intel CPUs drop in price and ARM boards become cheaper (and, paradoxically, less powerful, open or flexible), so I’m chalking this up to a new possible dimension and sitting back to wait until the dust settles.

HN is pretty vocal, though.

I did a double-take at this, and the implications of it became weirder and weirder as I read through it, since although packing 500 compute modules in oil and dropping them in a cellar should indeed generate a fair amount of BTUs, i have to wonder how useful this kind of relatively low-end and resource-constrained compute would be–there are no details on storage or internal connectivity, so only two things come to mind: serverless functions or a ready-made botnet.

I’m sure someone has drafted a commercial model for this, but who is that product for?

On the other hand, we might just have found a use for Pi-based Kubernetes clusters.

I absolutely love this. Never mind the quirky paper roll, the idea of having a fully open source inkjet printer I can tweak and maintain (and possibly get rid of the clunky, overpriced and creepily surveillance-centric pieces of junk HP sells) appeals tremendously to me, and I hope this comes to pass.

The announcement cast this as the ultimate all-in-one PC, and while that might be a stretch, the Raspberry Pi 500 Plus is indeed interesting.

The RGB keyboard is completely unnecessary (the Gateron grey switches and replaceable key caps are very welcome, though), and with 16GB RAM and an NVMe slot it has the makings of a nice “zero footprint” thin client/browser appliance, but the price point feels a bit off.

I’m watching the usual influencer shenanigans (teardowns, plugging in over the top peripherals, etc.) and there is a lot of 80s vibes in the mix, to the point where I am reminded of the Commodore revival since this would make a much better C64 equivalent.

If I get one, I’ll make sure to get a Dasher-style keycap set…

A hilarious satire of macOS Tahoe’s disastrous design changes as a fictional retrospective that compares them to other versions of macOS with a genial twist and a liberal sprinkling of mordant humor.

If, like me, you lived through most of macOS’s history, you’ll appreciate the references and the absurdity of some of the design choices that Apple made during that period, and how flipping time’s arrow can make them seem even more ridiculous.

Chef’s kiss, no notes.

Nostalgia, in the inimitable style of Jamie Zawinski: “HTML email is probably my fault”. All of it is a great read–full marks, absolutely no notes.

Thank you, Jamie, for everything you did for the web, even if this date also commemorates when Netscape unleashed the horrors of JavaScript upon the world.

On a more personal note, I remember using this on both Sun and HP machines, which was pretty amazing at the time. I also remember the Collabra fracas, which I had some hopes for, but it was just not to be (tangentially related: Hula, which Jamie also had some opinions about).

Note: due to Jamie’s strong opinions about linking, you might need to edit the URL to remove utm_ fields, even though I use them to provide sites with referral source information and no individual tracking whatsoever. If you know Jamie, please tell him to chill out a bit. Thanks!

Oh boy. I’m betting this wasn’t on AMD’s bingo card for 2025, especially now that their Ryzen AI Max APUs are making a splash with things like the Framework Desktop and because the “Intel x86 RTX SoCs” really sound like a direct challenge to AMD’s APU line.

If you had any doubts about where the PC market is going, this should put them to rest. Apple’s M-series chips may have changed the game, but the rest of the industry is clearly doubling down on catching up, even if they have to do chiplet/SoC-style integration (with high bandwidth exchanges via NVLink) instead of entirely new unified memory designs.

Of course the AI datacenter angle is interesting as well, but I am much more invested in seeing how edge and client devices evolve in the next few years than in watching people burn money on massive server farms because of AI.

These are probably Meta’s worst kept secret, since everyone was expecting them to put something like this together for a while now.

The glasses are prohibitively expensive (let alone with prescription lenses), but I would love to try these out as I think the myoelectric band is a genius input method.

I’ve also been looking at the Even Realities models and they are both hackable and actually available where I live, so these are exciting times…