Chance Miller with a big scoop at 9to5Mac:

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

The Mac Pro has lived many lives over the years. Apple released the current Mac Pro industrial design in 2019 alongside the Pro Display XDR (which was also discontinued earlier this month). That version of the Mac Pro was powered by Intel, and Apple refreshed it with the M2 Ultra chip in June 2023. It has gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price point even as Apple debuted the M3 Ultra chip in the Mac Studio last year.

In the PowerPC era, the high-end Mac desktops were called Power Macs and the pro laptops were PowerBooks. With the transition to Intel CPUs in 2006, Apple changed the names to Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. But unlike the MacBook Pro — which has seen major revisions every few years and satisfying speed bumps on a regular basis, and which has thrived in the Apple Silicon era — the Mac Pro petered out after a few years.

After its 2006 introduction, there were speed bumps in 2008, 2009, 2010, and lastly — sort of — in 2012. So far so good. (The “sort of” two sentences back refers to the fact that the 2012 “update” was very minor, arguably closer to a price cut than a speed bump.) But then came the cylindrical “trash can” Mac Pro in 2013. Perhaps the fact that Apple pre-announced it at WWDC in June before releasing it in October put a curse on the name. The cylindrical Mac Pro was never updated, and Apple being Apple, where the price is part of the product’s brand, they never dropped the price either. This culminated in a small “roundtable” discussion I was invited to in 2017, where Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi laid out Apple’s plans for the future of pro Mac desktops. Step one was the iMac Pro, a remarkable machine but a one-off, that arrived in December 2017. Then came the rejuvenated Mac Pro in 2019, the last Intel-based model and the first with the fancy drilled-hole aluminum tower enclosure. After that, there was only one revision: the M2 Ultra model in June 2023.

So after 2012 — and arguably after 2010 — there was one trash can Mac Pro in 2013, one Intel “new tower” Mac Pro in 2019, and one Apple Silicon Mac Pro in 2023. No speed bumps in between any of them. Three revisions in the last 14 years. So, yeah, not a big shock that they’re just pulling the plug officially.

The Good News First

Just this week I wrote about a hidden defaults preference you can set to turn off most of the insipid menu item icons in most of Apple’s first-party apps in MacOS 26 Tahoe. I bemoaned the fact that Safari — generally an exemplar of what makes a great Mac app a great Mac app — generally ignored this setting, leaving most of its menu item icons in place. I am delighted to report that that’s fixed in MacOS 26.4. With the preference set to hide these icons, Safari now only shows a handful.

Here’s a link to the screenshot of the old before/after, taken on MacOS 26.3.2. Boo hiss. Here’s the new before/after, taken on MacOS 26.4:

In Tahoe 26.3 (and presumably, earlier versions of Tahoe), 16 of 19 menu items in Safari’s File menu still showed an icon with this setting enabled. In 26.4, only 5 of 19 do.¹ The rest of Safari’s other menus have been updated similarly, and look so much better for it.

It’s interesting to me that Safari was updated to support this hidden preference in 26.4. I take it as a sign that there’s a contingent within Apple (or at least within the Safari team) that dislikes these menu item icons enough to notice that Safari wasn’t previously recognizing this preference setting. (And I further take it as a sign that within Apple’s engineering ranks, the existence of this defaults setting is widely known.) Keep hope alive.

Now the Bad News

Another recent Tahoe-related tip I’ve been writing about was using a device management profile to block the prompts in System Settings → General → Software Update to “upgrade” from MacOS 15 Sequoia to 26 Tahoe. I first wrote about it a month ago, linking to a post from Rob Griffiths. I then wrote about it again, just this week, linking to a YouTube video from Mr. Macintosh.

Ever since this technique started making the rounds, there was widespread commentary that it was taking advantage of a bug, not a feature, in MacOS 15 Sequoia. The 90-day “deferral” period to block the Tahoe update prompts was supposed to be from the date of the Tahoe major release (26.0), not from the most recent minor release. Welp, with this week’s release of MacOS 15.7.5, this bug is fixed, and Tahoe shows up in the Software Update panel in System Settings even if you have one of these device management profiles installed. Alas.

All is not lost, however. The same video from Mr. Macintosh shows a second, slightly less elegant way to banish all signs of Tahoe in Software Update (just after the 9:00 mark). The trick is to register your Mac for the MacOS Sequoia Public Beta updates (or the developer betas). This blocks all signs of Tahoe. You don’t actually have to install any future betas of Sequoia (at the moment, there are none available). Just make sure you have Automatic Updates disabled too. I’d rather risk inadvertently installing a public beta of 15.8 Sequoia than inadvertently “upgrading” to Tahoe.

Todd Spangler, Variety:

Under the new pricing, effective March 26 for new users and rolling out to current customers depending on their billing cycle, Netflix’s Standard plan (which has no ads and provides streaming on two devices simultaneously) is rising by $2, from $17.99 to $19.99/month. The ad-supported plan is going up a buck, from $7.99 to $8.99/month, and the top-tier Premium plan (no ads, streaming on up to four devices at once, Ultra HD and HDR) is increasing from $24.99 to $26.99/month.

I pay the full $27/month because I’d rather cancel Netflix than watch ads, and I suspect I’d notice the difference between 4K and 1080p. But also because money runs through my fingers like water.

Apple Newsroom:

Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.

Ads on Maps builds on Apple’s broader privacy-first approach to advertising, and maintains the same privacy protections Maps users enjoy today. A user’s location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user’s Apple Account. Personal data stays on a user’s device, is not collected or stored by Apple, and is not shared with third parties.

The privacy angle is good. I don’t want to take that for granted, because few, if any, of Apple’s $1-trillion-plus market cap peers have such devotion to user privacy.

But more and more it’s becoming clear that while Apple’s devotion to protecting user privacy remains as high as ever, their devotion to delivering the best possible user experience does not. Here’s Apple’s own screenshot showing what these ads are supposedly going to look like. It looks fine. But these ads seem highly unlikely to make the overall experience of using Apple Maps better. Perhaps, in practice, they will not make the experience worse, and it’ll be a wash. But I can’t help but suspect that they’re going to make the experience worse, and the question is really just how much worse. The addition of ads to the App Store has made the experience worse.

We shall see. I’m not going to prejudge the actual experience, and you shouldn’t either. I also do not begrudge Apple for wanting to monetize Maps. But if the addition of ads does make the Apple Maps experience worse, why won’t Apple let us buy our way out of seeing them? Netflix doesn’t force us to watch their ads. YouTube Premium is arguably the best bang-for-the-buck in the entire world of content subscriptions. Why should Apple One subscribers still see these ads in Apple Maps?

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for TechCrunch:

Almost four years after launching a security feature called Lockdown Mode, Apple says it has yet to see a case where someone’s device was hacked with these additional security protections switched on.

“We are not aware of any successful mercenary spyware attacks against a Lockdown Mode-enabled Apple device,” Apple spokesperson Sarah O’Rourke told TechCrunch on Friday.

Oliver Darcy, reporting for Status (paywalled, alas):

According to the data obtained by Status, BI ended 2023 with roughly 160,000 paid subscribers, a drop of about 14 percent from the prior year when it boasted about 185,000 subscribers. The slide did not stop there, however. In 2024, it closed the year with roughly 150,000 subscribers, a further six percent decline. And in 2025, the number fell again, to about 135,000 paid subscribers — another 10 percent drop.

All told, over roughly three years, BI saw its subscription base plummet by about 50,000, or a jarring 27 percent.

Not the sort of momentum you want.

The New York Post (I’m not sure if I should tell you to take this with a grain of salt, because it’s the Post and their journalistic standards are low, or, to assign this extra credibility because it’s the Post, a right-wing Murdoch rag that Trump lackeys actually talk to):

President Trump is prioritizing taking control of the Strait of Hormuz as he grows frustrated with the lack of help from allies to force open the crucial waterway. And once Trump ends Iran’s reign of terror over the shipping route, he’s considering rechristening it the “Strait of America” or even naming it after himself, sources told The Post. [...]

Trump told a Saudi investor forum Friday evening in Miami that he might decide to call the Strait after himself, rather than America.

“They have to open up the Strait of Trump — I mean Hormuz,” Trump said. “Excuse me, I’m so sorry. Such a terrible mistake. The Fake News will say, ‘He accidentally said.’ No, there’s no accidents with me, not too many.”

I suspect there are going to be accidents soon, as he descends further into dementia and needs adult diapers.

Alan Rappeport, reporting for The New York Times:

President Trump’s signature will appear on U.S. dollars later this year, the Treasury Department said on Thursday. The decision to have Mr. Trump’s John Hancock on America’s paper currency represented an unprecedented change, one that the department said was being made in honor of the United States’ 250th anniversary.

Mr. Trump is set to become the first sitting U.S. president to have his signature on the greenback. His name will appear alongside that of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. As a result, the U.S. treasurer, whose name has been on the currency for more than a century, will not appear on the currency.

Raquel Coronell Uribe, reporting for NBC News:

Trump’s signature will go on the bills in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary, the Treasury said. Historically, paper currency carries the signatures of the treasury secretary and the treasurer.

“The President’s mark on history as the architect of America’s Golden Age economic revival is undeniable,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. “Printing his signature on the American currency is not only appropriate, but also well deserved.”

It’s certainly news that the sitting president — a man whom psychologists have publicly described as showing clear “symptoms of severe, untreatable personality disorder — malignant narcissism” — is putting his signature on U.S. currency. But why parrot the administration’s obviously false line that this gross, embarrassing change in longstanding tradition has anything whatsoever to do with “honoring” the United States’s 250th anniversary?

It makes no more sense that putting Trump’s signature on greenbacks “honors the nation” or its history than it would to claim that doing so will cure the common cold, reverse male pattern baldness, or keep us safe from Bigfoot. Call it what it is: sycophantic ego fellatio for a deeply unpopular narcissist who is losing his already tenuous grip on reality.

Amanda Kondolojy, writing for Pocket-lint:

Though the Netflix app is largely the same on most platforms, over the weekend several Apple TV users on the unofficial Apple TV Reddit noticed some small changes to the tvOS version of the app that are making the app harder to use in subtle but very frustrating ways.

According to user iamonreddit, the most recent Netflix app update has made it slightly more difficult to use the fast-forward and rewind functions. Instead of clicking the back or forward button on the remote wheel to advance or return ten seconds, this button press now pauses the screen and brings up a frame selector. In order to actually go forward or go back, users then have to click the same button again. So essentially, what once required a single button press, now needs two.

These changes aren’t small, aren’t subtle, and don’t make fast-forwarding and rewinding merely “slightly” more difficult. (And what once required a single button press now requires three, not two.) The video playback interface in a streaming app is the most essential thing a streaming app does, and now Netflix’s tvOS player looks terrible and works wrong. The original report Kondolojy cites, from Reddit user “iamonreddit” (yes, you are), describes it as it is:

Did Netflix mess up the app? There are two extra clicks for a simple 10s rewind or fast forward. Instead of it going back 10s in one click, now it pauses and brings up the frame selector, and then you have to click again. Did they not do any research or usability testing before releasing this?

It’s also not smooth at all, it keeps spinning for a while and I have 1gig fiber optic internet. What a big downgrade!

They have some of the top paid employees in the world and this is what they come up with. Unless this was the result of some restrictions introduced by Apple.

Looks like they messed it up big time. Netflix used to set benchmarks for others. And here we are now. I’ve never had a single problem with their app so for, for over a decade of use.

Netflix’s gratuitously ugly new custom video player commits various crimes against accessibility. Two years ago I wrote about tvOS’s system accessibility shortcut that lets you assign triple-clicking the Back (“<”) button to toggle captions, and the fact that Netflix didn’t support it. This cursed new player, you will be unsurprised to learn, doesn’t support it either. It also does not support the wonderful standard platform convention of temporarily turning on captions when you rewind 10 or 20 seconds, for a “What did they just say?” moment.

Update: Switching to their own custom video player also broke Netflix’s integration with the iPhone. Until last week, playing video in the Netflix app on Apple TV would put a live activity widget on your iPhone lock screen with the name of the current program, scrub location, and player controls. Now that’s gone.

This regression dropping the same week that Netflix announced price hikes makes me so angry that I’m giving even more thought to downgrading my family’s Netflix account from the $27/month Premium plan to the $20/month Standard plan. Sending Netflix only $240 per year instead of $324 will show them.

This feature from Harry McCracken is just spectacularly good. (And it’s a gift link that’ll get you past Fast Company’s paywall.) 50 years is a long time and there are some key players in Apple’s origin story who are gone — but because everyone was so young at the time, it’s amazing how many of them are still alive. And, of course, in Chris Espinosa’s case, still working at Apple:

I was sitting there in the Byte Shop in Palo Alto on an Apple-1 writing BASIC programs, and this guy with a scraggly beard and no shoes came in and looked at me and conducted what I later understood to be the standard interview, which was “Who are you?” I said, “I’m Chris.” And he said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m writing BASIC programs on this Apple-1 for the owner.” And he said, “Are you any good?” I showed him my BASIC programs on the Apple-1.

He told me, “I’ve seen you around Homebrew. Woz is working on this second-generation computer, and instead of loading BASIC from cassette tape, we want to put it in ROM. And so it has to be perfect. I want you to come and test Woz’s BASIC, and I’ll give you 4K of RAM for that when you build your own computer.” That sounded like a good deal. Steve Jobs’s idea back then of recruiting was to grab a random-ass 14-year-old off the streets.

Apple is at its best when it’s infused with a bit of the spirit of the two Steves whose first joint venture were blue boxes that let you make long distance phone calls for free. The first public phone call Steve Jobs ever made on an iPhone was a prank call to the Starbucks next to Moscone West. I feel like that renegade spirit has been repressed in the Tim Cook era.

While I’m bitching about Netflix’s craptacular new video player on Apple TV, let me quote from a piece I wrote two years ago (also complaining about Netflix’s tvOS app):

Turns out there are two better ways:

1. If you use the Control Center Apple TV remote control on your iPhone, there’s a dedicated “CC” button.

2. In tvOS, go to Settings → Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut, and set it to “Closed Captions”. Now you can just triple-click the Menu/Back button on the remote to toggle captions. (On older Apple TV remotes, the button is labelled “Menu”; on the new remote, it’s labelled with a “<”.)

But here’s the hitch: Netflix’s tvOS app doesn’t support either of these ways to toggle captions. Netflix only supports the on-screen caption toggle in their custom video player. I get why Netflix and other streaming apps want to use their own custom video players, but it ought to be mandated by App Store review that they support accessibility features like this one.

What Apple should have done right from the start with the tvOS-based Apple TV a decade ago is require all apps to use the system video player. No custom video players. It’s too late for that, alas. But the tvOS App Store review process ought to insist on compliance with these accessibility and platform compliance features.

You want to use your own custom video player? Fine. But apps with custom video players must support the “CC” button in the iOS Control Center remote control, must support the triple-click accessibility shortcut, must support the platform conventions for fast-forwarding and rewinding using the Apple TV remote control, etc. If your video player doesn’t comply, your app update doesn’t get approved.

Apple should use the App Store approval process for the benefit of users. Isn’t that supposed to be the point?

Stephen Hackett, at 512 Pixels:

I’ve thought a lot about the bad timing Jones mentions. Had Apple stuck to the original timeline, and killed off the 2013 Mac Pro in favor of an iMac “specifically targeted at large segments of the pro market,” back in 2017, Apple could have avoided putting out the best Intel Mac ever, less than a year before the transition to Apple silicon.

Did Apple know in 2017 that 2020 was the year the M1 would make it out of the lab? Probably not, but it doesn’t make the timing any less painful.

Apple might not have had 2020 set in stone for the Apple Silicon transition, but in 2017, they definitely knew that Apple Silicon was the future. I think they knew that years before 2017, and in broad strokes, that’s why 2015–2020 was such a bad period for Mac hardware. They didn’t ship a retina MacBook Air until 2018. The 12-inch MacBook was beautiful but expensive and seriously underpowered. And nothing suffered more than the Mac Pro in that stretch. I think Apple knew that the future was on their own silicon, but in the meantime, they just couldn’t get it up for the last five years of the Intel era.

For your weekend listening enjoyment: Christina Warren returns to the show to discuss Apple big month of product announcements — in particular, the iPhone 17e and MacBook Neo. And we pour one out for the Mac Pro.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code TALKSHOW.
• Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits.

Look, I’m all for democracy, but a poll whose results currently have the Extended Keyboard II down at #47 is a poll that makes me angry.

For your weekend viewing enjoyment:

But in almost every way that mattered, the Macintosh was right. Right about how we’d use computers going forward. Right about the idea that computers needed to be less complicated. Right about the fact that caring this deeply about both hardware and software design would make a difference. Though Apple didn’t sell many of those original Macintoshes, there’s no question it changed computers forever.

On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the original Macintosh. David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber explain the strange corporate infighting that led to the project in the first place, the ways in which the Macintosh changed over time, and how Jobs and his team drove such massive hype for the device some people didn’t even want to ship. Then they debate the device’s true legacy, and whether the computer or the commercial is the true icon.

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring the week at DF. Their latest is a CLI that launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration into your codebase. No signup required. It creates an environment, populates your keys, and you claim your account later when you’re ready.

But the CLI goes way beyond installation. WorkOS Skills make your coding agent a WorkOS expert. workos seed defines your environment as code. workos doctor finds and fixes misconfigurations. And once you’re authenticated, your agent can manage users, orgs, and environments directly from the terminal. See how it works at WorkOS’s website.

See also: WorkOS just completed another Launch Week. This one, for Spring 2026, does not disappoint with its custom UI and theme. Even if you don’t have a need for WorkOS you should check out their Launch Week site just for fun.

Scott Knaster:

The Big Mac is about 22 times the size of the little Mac.

Paul Graham:

So when you have a world defined only by brand, it’s going to be a weird, bad world.

Graham’s thoughtful essay focuses on the mechanical watch industry. But I disagree with his conclusion. I think the market for mechanical watches has never been more fun or vibrant than it is today. The action, for me at least, isn’t with the high-end luxury Swiss brands. It’s with the indies, from companies like Baltic and Halios.

It’s also interesting to ponder Graham’s essay in the context of other industries. I think it’s self evident that the entire market for phones — the most popular and lucrative consumer devices in the world — is defined by a single brand, and every competitor just copies that one brand with varying degrees of shamelessness. That’s bad and weird.

Thereallo, after spelunking inside the APK bundle for the Android version:

• Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal’s servers.

• Loads JavaScript from a random person’s GitHub Pages site (lonelycpp.github.io) for YouTube embeds. If that account is compromised, arbitrary code runs in the app’s WebView. [...]

Is any of this illegal? Probably not. Is it what you’d expect from an official government app? Probably not either.

Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

The app is, at least temporarily, popular. As I type this it’s #3 in the iOS App Store top free apps list, sandwiched between Claude and Gemini. I don’t know how similar the iOS app is to the Android one, but I took one for the team and installed it, and after poking around for a few minutes, it hasn’t even prompted me to ask for location access. It’s a crappy app, to be sure. A lot of flashing between screen transitions. When you open an article, there’s a “< Back” button top left, and an “X” button top right. Both buttons seem to do the same thing. There’s no share sheet for “news” articles, which seems particularly stupid. You can’t even copy a link to an article and share it manually.

But the iOS version has a clean privacy report card in the App Store, and I don’t see anything in the app that makes me doubt that. It seems like the Android version is quite different.

Update 1: Someone on Reddit claims to have analyzed the iOS app bundle and discovered similar code as in the Android app, but I still don’t see any way to actually get the iOS app to even ask for location permission. I think there might be code in the app that never gets called. Like I wrote above, it’s clearly not a well-crafted app. If anyone knows how to get the iOS app to actually ask for location access, let me know how. Here’s another analysis of the iOS app.

Update 2: I installed the Android version of the app too, and just like on iOS, the only permission it asks for is to send notifications. Maybe they will in a future software update, but as far as I can see, the app never even tries to check the device’s location, on either platform.

The White House:

The Council will be co-chaired by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios. The following individuals have been appointed:

Marc Andreessen
Sergey Brin
Safra Catz
Michael Dell
Jacob DeWitte
Fred Ehrsam
Larry Ellison
David Friedberg
Jensen Huang
John Martinis
Bob Mumgaard
Lisa Su
Mark Zuckerberg

Under President Trump, PCAST will focus on topics related to the opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies present to the American workforce, and ensuring all Americans thrive in the Golden Age of Innovation.

Scientific American observes that 12/13 are executives, and only one, Martinis, is an academic researcher. But I mean, of course a council like this, from this administration, is going to be made up of big-cap corporate executives and founders. I’d say it’s more surprising there is even one academic researcher than that there aren’t more.

I’m more intrigued by the companies who aren’t represented: no one from Apple, no one from Microsoft, no one from Amazon. (That left room for two from Oracle, that well known bastion of corporate virtue.) Read into that what you will. Me, I can’t help but suspect that this administration is taking on a profound stink, and something like appointments to this council are akin to a game of music chairs where Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Andy Jassy, and Jeff Bezos are happy not to have gotten seats.