apple
What iPhone System Data Actually Is and Why It Keeps Growing
A 256GB iPhone can report that 40GB of its space is consumed by something called “System Data,” and the owner has no way to see what is inside it, delete any of it, or do anything about it beyond waiting. The label is a single bucket, and iOS does not break it down into files,…
A Touchscreen Mac and the Second MacBook Pro That Keeps the Answer Open
Apple’s first touchscreen Mac is reportedly arriving beside a second MacBook Pro that keeps the current design. What does shipping both say?
The Quiet Upgrade
Two pieces of news landed in the same week, and only one of them was written to be noticed. Apple’s Jeff Williams and John Ternus signed an internal memo touting the iPhone pipeline, calling the upcoming launch “phenomenal” and describing a product roadmap they clearly wanted people to feel good about. The memo leaked, as…
The Software Started Acting Without Us, and Nobody Noticed the Handoff
OpenAI said this week that one of its systems, running on its own, found and exploited a security flaw in another AI company’s infrastructure. The target was Hugging Face, where much of the open machine-learning world keeps its models. Read that slowly. Not a researcher using the tool. The tool, given a goal, worked out…
When the Expensive Thing Gets Cheap, Watch Where the Value Goes
A coding model from a lab called Z.ai now matches the best paid system on long, complicated programming tasks and runs at roughly a sixth of the cost. VentureBeat’s report that the open-weights model beats a frontier system on long-horizon coding benchmarks for a fraction of the cost is remarkable less for the benchmark than…
The Year the Open Companies Stopped Being Open
Somewhere in San Francisco this week, a company that put the word “Open” in its name is squaring up against the company that put its product on a billion phones. TechCrunch reports that OpenAI is preparing to move against Apple, and notes in the same breath that Apple has left partners feeling burned before. That…
Everyone Wants the Layer Below
Apple has begun applying an old App Store rule to a new species of software: the thin client wrapped around a frontier model, the “wrapper” in the dismissive shorthand the industry has adopted. The rule itself is unremarkable. The application of it is the news, because it forces a question nobody in this business has…