OpenAI Could End Googleās Gemini Moat with One Acquisition
I posted a tweet (yes I refuse to call it anything else) the other day proposing the idea that OpenAI ought to acquire Notion. It took off like a rocket ship. I really didnāt expect it to be something that resonated with so many people, but after having spent some time thinking more deeply about it I can see why.
Keynotes are Bad Because Products Canāt Speak for Themselves Anymore
That Google event yesterday was very strange, from Jimmy Fallonās general awkwardness to the uncomfortable QVC-style segment to the overuse of high profile celebrities. Thatās already been discussed at length, so I wonāt dwell on it. But it did get me thinking a lot about the state of product launches. Ever since the start of the pandemic weāve been in a weird limbo, where some brands do videos and some host live keynotes. Iām personally a proponent of everyone returning to their pre-pandemic live formats, there are still a few holdouts, Iām looking at you Apple. Though the live stage presence is important for consumer confidence, human empathy, and an overall sense of community I think thereās actually something deeper going on.
GPT-5 Pushes Vibe Coding Beyond My Wildest Dreams
I’ve spent the past 6 months learning how to vibe code both native and web applications after spending copious amounts of time figuring out the very best way for me to prompt each large language model. It’s been a busy year for me personally and I’ve spun up tons of projects that I hope to someday actually ship, either as fully built tools or as downloadable projects on Github. Most of the work that I’ve done has been working with GPT-4o, the o4 series of models, and various Claude models. They’ve been really good at helping me get started, at crafting the bones of each thing that I have wanted to make. But they haven’t been great at designing user experiences and every couple of prompts I would run into a bug that broke the app. I’ve been anxiously awaiting GPT-5 specifically for these two reasons and I was holding out hope that it would impress.
Tinted Liquid Glass Should be the Future of User Interfaces on Apple Platforms
It’s certainly no secret that I am a huge fan of Apple’s new liquid glass design language. I know that’s not technically the name of the design system, in fact there actually isn’t one. Liquid glass is simply the core material of the new user interface, not the actual language. But for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to call it liquid glass regardless. I find the new look and feel to be extremely refreshing after more than a decade of flat visuals that generally lacked personality. Because liquid glass is so fluid, it comes to life when user interface elements move or get tapped. The playfulness of liquid glass hasn’t been up for debate, it seems to be generally well-received. But the actual look of the material, the clear component that is the namesake liquid glass, is controversial to say the least. Over the past few days I’ve started to think about how it could evolve over the next few years and I think I might have figured it out.
Ollama's New App Makes Running Local Models Even Easier
As a lifelong Mac user, I have a particular affinity for native applications. For a long time, most of the AI models were only useable through a web browser. But the model providers have slowly been rolling out fully native apps for their products. We now have native apps for ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Perplexity, among others. If you’re really into large language models, you likely also know a bit about using them via command line tools. Ollama has been the go-to solution for easily running models on your Mac via the Terminal. There have been third-party solutions that integrate with Ollama to offer proper graphic user interfaces, but none of them have quite made an impression. All of this makes local models a bit tedious to start using for the average person. The good news is that starting today you can easily install a native macOS Ollama app with the click of a button and get yourself using local large language models without ever launching the command line.
Yes, That Appears to be a Real iPhone 17 Pro
It looks like we just got our first look at a real iPhone 17 Pro. In an unlikely encounter in San Francisco, an X user by the name of Skyfops stumbled upon what must be an Apple employee testing an iPhone 17 Pro in one of Apple’s signature disguise cases. While there is some (very fair) skepticism surrounding this leak, I have heard that it is real.
Good Wearable AI Gadgets Are Already Here, And You Might Already Own One
We’ve all been waiting for the first good AI wearables to come along. There have been tons of attempts, from wrist-worn recording devices to pins with lasers to glasses with cameras. Company’s are throwing everything at the wall to see what might stick. Some of these gadgets have been pretty decent, namely Meta’s Ray Ban collaboration. The idea is sound but the AI has been mediocre. As cameras, they’re wonderful but as an AI gadget they’re mid at best. Perhaps that’s why Mark Zuckerberg has been on a rampant AI hiring spree. While that was happening though, Google dropped something that might just shake up the game. Gemini has finally arrived on Wear OS watches like the Pixel Watch and Galaxy Watch. And guess what? It’s really freaking good.
18 Years Ago Today, iPhone Premiered and Everything Changed
On this day, 18 years ago, the iPhone went on sale for the very first time at Apple and AT&T Stores across the United States. I was going to write a long piece reminiscing about that special day, but I remembered that I already did that a few years ago when I was at 9to5mac for the 14th anniversary. I highly recommend returning to that piece to relive launch day and though you may have issues with images showing up, the text is still great too if I do say so myself.
Meta Goes on an AI Hiring Spree, What's Apple's Plan?
Apple should be the one on a hiring spree. Over the past few weeks, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have kicked the hiring and acquisitions machine into high gear. The man knows he can’t miss out on the next platform shift and it shows. It wasn’t the metaverse and it wasn’t goggles, but it’s almost certainly some form of personalized super intelligence.
F1 Marks Apple's Acceleration into a New Era of Entertainment
Appleās had a very good run with its string of successful streaming shows on TV+ over the past six years and has frequently been called “the new HBO." But the company has struggled to land a true hit with its feature films that it bestowed theatrical releases on. Sure, theyāve won Oscars for CODA and movies like Killers of the Flower Moon were well-received. But none of them have been able to capture the scale of a massive cultural moment. I have good news, I think F1 is finally that film.
The Curious Case of Apple and Perplexity: Do They Need Each Other?
Apparently itās the season of acquisitions and hirings. Thankfully, this time Apple is also in on the action. According to Mark Gurman, Apple executives are in the early stages of mulling an acquisition of Perplexity. My initial reaction was āthat wouldnāt work.ā But Iāve taken some time to think through what it could look like if it were to come to fruition. Let me share where my headās at.
On Dia, Arc, and "People Don't Know What They Want Until You Show it to Them"
I was absolutely captivated by the Arc web browser from the moment I started using it a few years ago and quickly became an evangelist. It really felt like an entirely new idea for how to use the internet, it was more organized while also somehow being more fun. It became an essential part of my workflow on the Mac and when it first came to iPhone, it became a cross platform obsession. The introduction of Arc Search and Arc Max signaled however, that The Browser Company was thinking bigger. With the advent of AI tools around the same time as Arc was taking off, it was becoming clearer and clearer that the internet was about to change dramatically. Arc continued to improve between 2022 and 2024, but at the end of the year they decided to pivot. Instead of building on Arc, they chose to build an entirely new browser. I suppose apt for a company literally called “The Browser Company."
āThe Talk Show Liveā Returns to FormāAnd It Was Great
While there was a lot of consternation heading into WWDC over Apple skipping John Gruberās live taping of The Talk Show, it might have all been for the best. Instead of sitting down with Craig and Joz, who were both unlikely to say much more than they did during the day, we got to hear a really fun conversation between John and two of my favorite people on the internet: Nilay Patel and Joanna Stern.
Apple Snuck an Endorsement for Ivory and Mastodon into WWDC
One of my favorite moments from WWDC 2025 was when Apple designer Billy Sorrentino introduced the changes to visual intelligence. The new screenshot features in iOS 26 are already among my favorites, but what really caught my eye was the surprising amount of screen time given to Tapbotsā Ivory.
WWDC 2025: Through Liquid GlassāNo Longer Behind, Just Off to the Side
I was unusually concerned heading into this yearās WWDC, fully prepared to be disappointed. I feared that Apple would continue to be on weak footing after the Apple Intelligence failures of the past year. To my surprise, I feel very differently post-keynote. I worried that they wouldnāt acknowledge what happened last year, but Craig addressed it right out of the gate. While the acknowledgement itself is appreciated, we still have to wait quite a long time for the new Siri to rear its faceā¦ or voice, I guess? Fortunately, Apple did deliver a combination of new AI features that are sprinkled throughout their new operating systems. I am largely relieved, albeit still slightly on edge for reasons weāll get into later. Over the course of the keynote, I began to relax as they subtly and intentionally introduced an array of practical AI use cases one by one. I am actually quite excited about some of these, but none of them compare to the triumph that is Appleās new universal design language: liquid glass.
Appleās Silence at "The Talk Show" Will Speak Volumes
If you follow Apple at all, youāve likely heard the news: Appleās skipping John Gruberās The Talk Show Live at WWDC this year. For a decade, itās been tradition for Apple executives to join John on stage at the annual conference to recap the the keynote and dive deeper into the announcements. It is one of my favorite parts of that week, something I look forward to every year.
A Tale of Two IOs: What it Looks Like When Apple Doesn't Lead
We are at more than just an inflection point; weāre at a moment where the global technological order may be about to fundamentally change. Don’t think about this just as an āiPhone momentā but as an āApple acquires NeXTā event. A NeXTus event if you will. When Apple acquired NeXT, it kicked off a series of technological shifts that were completely unforeseen. It led to products like iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch and technologies like Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, AirPort, Apple Silicon, among countless others. That acquisition fundamentally altered the course of human history and changed the technological landscape. I believe that the events of last week may have done the same.
Is Memory Going to Become the New iMessage Lock-in?
Raycast for iPhone is the Launch Center Successor I've Always Wanted
Before it was sort of abandoned I was a heavy user of Launch Center Pro. Apple enthusiasts and power users alike will almost certainly remember the powerful shortcut tool from Contrast that let you build out an extensive grid of quick ways to get things done. The app is technically still available on the App Store, but it has not been updated in years. I stopped using it once it appeared to fall by the wayside and after Apple began truly supercharging its own solution in Shortcuts. Launch Center Pro was very much a manually configurable tool, but had it kept up with the times I would imagine it would look something like the new Raycast for iOS. Funny enough, Raycast for iOS almost resembles the original version of Launch Center from 2011. We have sort of come full circle.
With Google's Defeat, the Time for Apple's Search Engine Has Arrived
Unless youāve been living under a rock, you know that Google was formally ruled an advertising monopoly this week. It could potentially be a catastrophic blow to the company that completely upends the web as we know it. A significant component of this case has been Googleās deal with Apple to be the default search engine in Safari. Google pays the Cupertino company nearly $20B a year to maintain dominance on Apple platforms. That is for good reason of course, Appleās users are some of the most valuable particularly when it comes to ad targeting. But it is also a flagrant way to squash any chance a competitor could have at growing to be a sustainable web search or ad business. Now that the verdict is in officially, I think it is time for Apple to do what has been long rumored. That is, to build their own search engine that powers Safari, Siri, and Spotlight.