Greg Bensinger, reporting for Reuters:

The latest effort, known internally as “Transformer,” is being developed within its devices and services unit, according to four people familiar ​with the matter. The phone is seen as a potential mobile personalization device that can sync with home voice assistant Alexa and serve as a conduit to Amazon customers throughout the day, the people said. [...]

As envisioned, the new phone’s personalization features would make buying from Amazon.com, watching Prime Video, listening to Prime Music or ordering food from partners like Grubhub easier than ever, the people said. They asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters.

The problem with this pitch is that it’s not hard at all to buy from Amazon.com, watch Prime Video, listen to Prime Music, or order food from Grubhub using the phones we already have. All of those things are ridiculously easy. I mean, I get it. On an Amazon phone, your Amazon ID would be your primary ID for the system. So those Amazon services would all just work right out of the box. But you can’t get people to switch from the thing they’re used to (and, in the case of phones, especially iPhones, already enjoy) unless you’re pitching them on solving problems. No one has a problem buying stuff or using Amazon services on the phone they already own.

A key focus of the Transformer project has been integrating artificial intelligence capabilities into the device, the people said. That could eliminate the need for traditional app stores, which ​require downloading and registering for applications before they can be used.

This is just nonsense. No matter how good Amazon’s AI integration might be, it isn’t going to replace the apps people already use. If you use WhatsApp, you need the WhatsApp app. If you want to watch video on Netflix, you need the Netflix app. If you surf Instagram and TikTok, you need those apps. If Amazon tries shipping a phone without any of those apps — let alone without all of them — this new “Transformer” phone will be a bigger laughingstock than the Fire phone was a decade ago. And we’re all still laughing at the dumb Fire phone. Which means they can’t eliminate “traditional app stores”.

People aren’t clamoring for the elimination of app stores. People like app stores. If Amazon, or anyone else, is going to introduce a new type of “AI-first” phone to disrupt the iPhone/Android duopoly, it has to offer something amazingly appealing. Nothing in Reuters’s description of Transformer fits that description. Also, it’s not like Amazon has market-leading AI. At the moment that feels like a three-way game between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

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Stuart Breckenridge, examining a web page at PC Gamer:

Third, this is a whopping 37MB webpage on initial load. But that’s not the worst part. In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads.

This is so irresponsible and unprofessional it beggars belief. Web browsers ought to defend against this. Why not cap page loads by default at, I don’t know, 5 MB? And require explicit consent to download any additional content?

The sitting president of the United States, on his blog:

Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP

As the elderly descend further into dementia, they lose their sense of propriety and simply speak their mind. (They also get confused and think they need to “sign” their text messages and social media posts.) Say what you want about Trump’s truthfulness generally, but here, he’s just being brutally honest. Let’s keep his “Good, I’m glad he’s dead” post bookmarked for when Trump himself finally keels over — after he chokes on a hamburger or whatever it’ll be that finally does him in — and the good people of the world rejoice and celebrate.

What a lovely thing to drop amidst my recent consternation over the state of web design.

To paraphrase Richard III: A horse, a horse! My kingdom for native app developers with the conviction of the artist-developers in The HTML Review.

Here’s a post from 2015, linking to Rene Ritchie, then still at iMore, explaining how iMore found itself serving ever worse (and more reader hostile) ads. Not much has changed regarding the state of web advertising in a decade, and iMore — once a truly great site — is defunct.

Apple Newsroom:

WWDC kicks off with the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union on Monday, June 8. The conference continues online all week with over 100 video sessions and interactive group labs and appointments, where developers can connect directly with Apple engineers and designers to explore the latest announcements. The conference will take place on the Apple Developer app, website, and YouTube channel; and on the Apple Developer bilibili channel in China.

I’ve never before heard of Bilibili, which seems to be a Chinese equivalent to YouTube.

As usual, there’s a lottery of sorts to attend the keynote in person.

I love a single-purpose website like this. (I had no idea gas was so expensive in Hong Kong.)

Steven Troughton-Smith, over the weekend:

Here’s one for the icons-in-menus haters on macOS Tahoe:

defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool NO

It even preserves the couple of instances you do want icons, like for window zoom/resize.

You do not need to restart or log out after applying this setting, but you will need to quit and relaunch any apps that are currently running for it to take effect.

If this worked to hide all of these cursed little turds smeared across the menu bar items of Apple’s system apps in Tahoe, this hidden preference would be a proverbial pitcher of ice water in hell. As it stands, alas, it’s more like half a glass of tepid water. Still quite welcome when you’re thirsty in hell, though.

The problem is that while some of Apple’s system apps obey this setting across the board, others obey it only scattershot, and others still ignore it completely. Apple’s AppKit apps — real Mac apps — are the most likely to obey it. In the Finder, Notes, Photos, Preview, and TextEdit, it pretty much kills all menu item icons, leaving behind only a few mostly useful ones. (Among the random inconsistencies: Preview still shows an icon for the File → Print command — a stupid printer icon, natch — but none of the other apps listed above show an icon for the Print command.)

Mail and Calendar are more scattershot. Calendar hides most menu item icons, but keeps a few in the File menu. Mail is more like half-and-half, with no apparent rhyme or reason to which menu items still show icons. In the Mailbox menu, nearly all items have their icons removed; in the Messages menu, most keep their icons even with this setting set to hide them.

Safari is a heartbreak. It’s one of my favorite, most-used apps, and generally, one of Apple’s best exemplars of what makes a great Mac app a great Mac app. But with this setting enabled, only a handful of seemingly random menu items have their icons hidden. For example, here is the File menu in Safari v26.3.1, before and after applying this setting:

So, after applying a setting that should hide almost all menu item icons, 15 out of 18 menu items still have icons in Safari’s File menu — with no rhyme or reason to the 3 that are omitted. Safari’s other menus are similarly noncompliant. Like I said, heartbreaking.

(All is not lost in Safari, however — the setting does remove the icons from Safari’s contextual menu.)

Apple’s non-AppKit (Catalyst/UIKit/SwiftUI) Mac apps are mostly lost causes on this front. Messages, Maps, and Journal keep all their icons, except for the Window menu. The iPhone Mirroring app hides the icons from its Edit and Window menus, but keeps all of them in the View menu.

So it’s a mixed bag. But even a mixed bag is better than seeing all of these insipid ugly distracting icons. Apple should fix these apps so they all fully support this global preference (that’s what the -g switch in Troughton-Smith’s command-line incantation means), and should expose this setting as a proper, visible toggle in the System Settings app. And of course, in MacOS 27, Apple should remove most of these icons from these apps, leaving behind only the handful that add actual clarity to their menu items. There’s an outcome just waiting to be had where the MacOS menu bar is better than it used to be, not worse, by carefully adding icons only next to commands where the icons add clarity.

My favorite example: commands to rotate images, like the Tools → Rotate Left and Rotate Right commands in Preview, and Image → Rotate Clockwise and Rotate Counterclockwise in Photos.¹ The rule of thumb should be that menu items should have icons if the icon alone could provide enough of a clue to replace the command name. That’s very much true for these Rotate commands, and the icons help reduce the cognitive load of thinking about which way is clockwise.

And but so what about third-party Mac apps? I think the best solution is for third-party apps to ignore Apple’s lead, and omit menu item icons on apps that have been updated for the new appearance on MacOS 26 Tahoe. That’s what Brent Simmons has done with NetNewsWire 7, using code he published as open source. Rogue Amoeba Software has adopted the same technique to improve their suite of apps when running on Tahoe, and published this blog post, illustrated with before and after screenshots, to explain their thinking.

No one is arguing that icons never improve the clarity of menu items. But for the most part, menu commands should be read. If a few special menu items are improved by including icons, include just those. They’ll stand out, further improving clarity. Part of the problem with Apple’s “almost every menu item has an icon” approach with their own apps on Mac OS 26 Tahoe is that — as copiously documented by Nikita Prokopov and Jim Nielsen — the overall effect is to add visual clutter, reducing clarity. But a side effect of that clutter is that it reduces the effectiveness of the menu items for which icons are actually useful (again, like Rotate commands, or the items in the Window → Move & Resize submenu). If every menu item has an icon, the presence of an icon is never special. If only special menu items have icons, the presence of an icon is always special.²

Samsung:

Samsung is introducing AirDrop support to the Galaxy S26 series, making it easier for users to share content between devices using Quick Share.

The feature will begin rolling out from March 23, starting in Korea and expanding to more regions including Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, Latin America, North America, Southeast Asia, and Taiwan. AirDrop support will initially be available on the Galaxy S26 series, with expansion to additional devices to be announced at a later date.

I presume, but don’t know for certain, that Samsung is using the same reverse-engineered implementation of AirDrop that Google announced for its Pixel 10 phones back in November, and for which Google offered a wee bit of technical details to vouch for the security of the implementation. A month ago, Google expanded support to the Pixel 9 generation.

Apple has, to date, not commented on any of this. I get the feeling there’s nothing they can do about this without breaking AirDrop compatibility between existing Apple devices. It would be kind of funny if AirDrop — never intended as a public protocol — becomes a de facto standard, but FaceTime — which Steve Jobs impulsively announced would become an official standard at its introduction in 2010 (to the complete surprise of both Apple’s legal and engineering teams) — never does.

Good rundown of everything new and changed, as usual, from Juli Clover at MacRumors. This has been a noticeable change for me:

The App Store merges apps and purchase history, and has a dedicated section for app updates. It now takes two taps to get to app updates rather than having them available at the bottom of the profile page.

At first the extra tap irked me, but it really does make more sense for Updates to have its own section. I update apps manually, because I like reading release notes from developers who take the time to document changes, and I also like reading “Bug fixes and performance improvements” over and over and over again from developers who do not.

Sora, on Twitter/X:

We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.

We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.

Sora was kind of fun for a week or two. But, contrary to the above, nothing anyone made with Sora mattered. It was just a very (very) expensive lark.

Berber Jin, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

OpenAI is planning to unify its ChatGPT app, coding platform Codex and browser into a desktop “superapp,” a step to simplify the user experience and continue with efforts to focus on engineering and business customers.

Chief of Applications Fidji Simo will oversee the change and focus on helping the company’s sales team market the new product. OpenAI President Greg Brockman, who currently leads the company’s computing efforts, will help Simo oversee the product revamp and related organization changes, an OpenAI spokeswoman said.

The strategy change marks a major shift from last year, when OpenAI launched a series of stand-alone products that didn’t always resonate with users and sometimes created a lack of focus within the company. OpenAI executives are hoping that unifying its products under one app will allow it to streamline resources as it seeks to beat back the success of its rival Anthropic.

This sounds like an utter disaster in the making. Would it make any sense for Apple to merge Safari, Messages, and Xcode into one “superapp”? No, it would not. It makes no more sense for OpenAI to merge ChatGPT, Codex, and especially Atlas together. I use and very much enjoy ChatGPT because its Mac client is such a good Mac app.

Simo came to OpenAI by way of Shopify and Instacart — and before that, was Meta’s head of the Facebook app for a decade — so it doesn’t surprise me that she sees OpenAI’s existing product-first culture of creating well-crafted native apps as a problem, not a strength to build on. If this “superapp” plan is true, it’s going to tank everything that heretofore has been good about ChatGPT and Codex.

Claude:

In Claude Cowork and Claude Code, you can now enable Claude to use your computer to complete tasks. When Claude doesn’t have access to the tools it needs, it will point, click, and navigate what’s on your screen to perform the task itself. It can open files, use the browser, and run dev tools automatically — with no setup required.

This feature is now available in research preview for Claude Pro and Max subscribers. It works especially well with Dispatch, which lets you assign Claude tasks from your phone.

I think you’re nuts if you try this on your actual Mac, with all your actual data and files. But I thought people were nuts for using a lot of bleeding edge AI features before I tried them myself. It’s certainly notable that Anthropic has shipped agentic AI on the Mac before Apple has, after Apple originally promised it to arrive a year ago.

The Claude Mac client itself remains a lazy Electron clunker. If Claude Code is so good I don’t get why they don’t prove it by using it to make an even halfway decent native Mac app.

See also: Techmeme.

Apple Developer:

Analytics in App Store Connect receives its biggest update since its launch, including a refreshed user experience that makes it easier to measure the performance of your apps and games.

There’s a lot that’s new, but all the data is still collected with an emphasis on user privacy. There’s an all-new support guide that documents everything.

John Voorhees, writing at MacStories:

Since the changes rolled out, a couple of concerns I’ve seen expressed online are that there will no longer be a single place to view the aggregate performance of multiple apps and that the new default reporting period is three months. Those concerns are well founded. The changes are organized on an app-by-app basis, and as Apple says in a banner on App Store Connect, the Dashboards in the Trends section of Connect and related reports where that data was available are being deprecated later this year and next. So, while the data Apple offers is deep for each app, the aggregate data falls short by not providing a birds-eye view of a developer’s entire app catalog.

For what it’s worth, Apple is aware of the feedback regarding cross-app reporting. Also, the shorter sales reporting periods, such as the past 24 hours and seven days, are still available, but they’re less visible because three months is the new default.

When I first read this post from my friend Paul Kafasis last week — a One Foot Tsunami instant classic — I was hoping that I could think of an example that he missed. I can’t say I did.

The closest, though, is ShowBiz Pizza Place, a 1980s archrival to Chuck E. Cheese. (Instead of a pizza-cooking rat, ShowBiz had Billy Bob, a pizza-cooking hillbilly bear.) Place is an unusual noun to put in a restaurant name, but it isn’t a structure, so it doesn’t belong on Kafasis’s list. But what brings it to mind is that growing up, we had a ShowBiz Pizza Place near our mall, and I loved going there because it was a damn good arcade (and the pizza, I thought at the time, was pretty good — cut into small squares, not slices). They had the sit-down version of Star Wars, the best way to play the best coin-op game in history. (Two tokens to play that one, of course.) They had the sit-down version of Spy Hunter, too. Anyway, generally we all just referred to the joint as “ShowBiz”, but one thing that drove me nuts is that a few of my friends, when referring to it by its full name, called it ShowBiz Pizza Palace. It was like hearing someone call an iPod Touch an “iTouch”. And while I loved the place, trust me, it was not palatial — unless you’re familiar with palaces that are really dark and seedy, and had ball pits where bad things happened.

Nice 7-0 win last night over the San Francisco Giants.

The game was on Netflix, and it was the worst baseball broadcast I can recall watching in the HD era. The picture quality was just awful, with embarrassing dynamic ad injection. Yes, there was haze, but it’s not like crappy weather in San Francisco is a surprise. The game had the first Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) challenge in MLB history, but the broadcast missed it while it happened. And Netflix’s scorebug is without question the worst I’ve ever seen — as one guy on Reddit quipped, it was somehow “too big and too small at the same time”. I’d have to stand within arm’s reach of my TV to read those player names.

If this is the level of attention Netflix is going to pay to sports broadcasts, they should stick to bumfights.

One more nugget from last night’s 7-0 Yankees win over the Giants:

During the sixth inning of Wednesday’s Opening Night matchup between two historic franchises, the Giants and Yankees, all-time home run leader Barry Bonds joined the Netflix broadcast booth at Oracle Park and told an incredible story about just how close he came to signing with the Yankees in 1992. [...]

“Well, I would’ve been a Yankees [player],” Bonds said, “but Steinbrenner got on the phone and they called us and they told me, ‘Barry, we’re gonna give you the money — [make you] the highest-paid player … but you have to sign the contract by 2:00 this afternoon.’”

One thing you don’t do is give Bonds an ultimatum.

“And I said, ‘Excuse me?’” Bonds said. “And I just hung the phone up.”

The Yankees went on to play in six World Series from that moment until the end of Bonds’s playing career, winning four championships. Bonds played in one World Series with the Giants, losing a seven-game series to the Angels in 2002.

Jennifer Daniel, on her “Did Someone Say Emoji?” blog:

First came Melting Face 🫠, our collective surrender to the liquid state.

Then Dotted Line Face 🫥, the visual representation of sublimation: turning from a solid into a gas just to escape a conversation.

Now, we have Distorted Face (U+1FAEA), a moment defined by tension: where you aren’t just feeling an emotion — you are being physically altered by it.

I’ll live, but it feels a tad spiteful that Apple only adds new emoji to the current-year OS updates. So this year’s 8 new emoji are in MacOS 26.4, but not MacOS 15.7.5, despite both being released this week.