Mark Pilgrim’s reappearance on Daring Fireball this week prompted me to revisit this essay I wrote 20 years ago. Holds up pretty well, I think.

This bit, in particular, seems particular apt w/r/t Tahoe:

I’m deeply suspicious of Mac users who claim to be perfectly happy with Mac OS X. Real Mac users, to me, are people with much higher standards, impossibly high standards, and who use Macs not because they’re great, but because they suck less than everything else.

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac back on January 28:

Halide and Lux co-founder and designer Sebastiaan de With announced today that he is joining Apple’s human interface design team. This marks a return to Apple for de With, who previously worked as a freelancer for the company on projects including Find My, MobileMe, and iCloud.

The last time I mentioned De With here on Daring Fireball was back in June, on the cusp of WWDC, when I linked to his resplendently illustrated essay, “Physicality: The New Age of UI”, wherein he speculated on where Apple might be going. It’s very much worth your time to revisit De With’s essay now, knowing that he’s joined Apple’s design team. My own comments on his essay hold up well too — especially my concern that a look-and-feel centered on transparency doesn’t seem a good fit for MacOS, where windows stack atop each other.

When De With published his essay, it was as an idea for where Apple might go. Now that we’ve seen and been living with Liquid Glass, his essay works even better as a roadmap for the direction Liquid Glass should head.

Also worth pointing out that despite De With’s departure for Apple, Lux is going strong. Developer Ben Sandofsky recently released a preview of the upcoming Mark III version of Halide.

“Mr. Macintosh”, on Twitter/X last week:

Small change:

Looks like Apple updated the keyboard on the new M5 16‑inch MacBook Pro. The Backspace, Return, Shift, and Tab labels are gone, replaced with symbols instead.

All the new MacBook keyboards sport this same change, including the M5 Air and A18 Pro MacBook Neo. I’m not a fan. I like the words on those keys. But I’m willing to admit it might just be that I’ve been using Apple keyboards with words on those keys since I was like 10 years old. iOS 26 switched from the word “return” to the “⏎” glyph on the software keyboard (and removed the word “space” from the spacebar — which, in hindsight, seemed needless to label).

The Escape key is still labelled “esc”, and the modifier keys (Fn, Control, Option, and Command) still show the names underneath or next to the glyphs. I suspect this is because documentation — including Apple’s own — often uses names for these keys (Option-Shift-Command-K), not the glyphs (⌥⇧⌘K). It’s only in the last few years that Apple began including the glyphs for Control (⌃) and Option (⌥) — until recently, those keys were labelled only by name. They added the ⌃ and ⌥ glyphs between 2017 and 2018. And until that change in 2018, Apple added the label “alt” to the Option key — a visual turd so longstanding that it dates back even to my own beloved keyboard.

Outside the U.S., Apple has been using glyphs for these key caps for a long time. The change from words to glyphs is new only here.

Dr. Drang, back in 2017:

If you write about Mac keyboard shortcuts, as I did yesterday, you should know how to do it right. Just as there’s a proper order for adjectives in English, there’s a proper order for listing the modifier keys in a shortcut.

I haven’t found any documentation for this, but Apple’s preferred order is clear in how they show the modifiers in menus and how they’re displayed in the Keyboard Shortcuts Setting.

The order is similar to how you see them down at the bottom left of your keyboard. Control (⌃), Option (⌥), and Command (⌘) always go in that order. The oddball is the Shift (⇧) key, which sneaks in just in front of Command.

Perhaps this wasn’t documented in 2017, but at least since 2022 (per the Internet Archive), Apple has documented the correct order for modifier keys in a keyboard shortcut in their excellent Apple Style Guide, under the entry for “key, keys”:

If there’s more than one modifier key, use this order: Fn (function), Control, Option, Shift, Command. When a keyboard shortcut includes a mouse or trackpad action, use lowercase for the mouse or trackpad action.

• Option-click
• Option-swipe with three fingers

There’s all sorts of good stuff in this Style Guide entry, including an explanation for why the shortcut for Zoom Out is ⌘- (using the lower of the two symbols on the “-/_” key) but the shortcut for Zoom In is ⌘+ (using the upper of the two symbols on the “=/+” key):

If one of the characters on the key provides a mnemonic for the action of the command, you can identify the key by that character.

While I’m at it, here’s a pet peeve of mine. When you write out a keyboard shortcut using modifier key names, you connect them with hyphens: Command-R. But when using the modifier glyphs, you should definitely not include the hyphens. ⌘C is correct, ⌘-C is wrong. For one thing, just look at the shortcuts in the menu bar — the shortcut for Copy has been shown as ⌘C since 1984. For another, consider the aforementioned shortcuts that most apps use for Zoom In and Zoom Out: ⌘+ and ⌘-. Both of those would look weird if connected by a hyphen, but Zoom Out in particular would look confusing: Command-Hyphen-Hyphen?.

(How do you write those out using words, though? Apple uses “Command-Plus Sign (+)” and “Command-Minus Sign (-)”. Me, I’d just go with “Command-Plus” and “Command-Minus”.)

Pay no attention to Drang’s follow-up post, or this one from Jason Snell. The correct order is Fn, Control, Option, Shift, Command — regardless if you’re using the words or the glyphs.

When I re-read my 2006 piece “And Oranges” today before linking to it, I paused when I read this:

And while it is easy to find ways to complain that Apple is not open enough — under-documented and undocumented security updates and system revisions, under-documented and undocumented file formats — it would be hard to argue with the premise that Apple today is more open than it has ever been before. (Exhibit A: the Web Kit project.)

It’s not often I get to fix 20-year-old typos, and to my 2026 self, “Web Kit” looks like an obvious typo. But after a moment, I remembered: in 2006, that wasn’t a typo.

Jason Snell:

So here we are: Six Colors now has three Jeopardy! players as contributors.

Come on, Moltz, get your shit together.

Marcin Wichary:

There are fun things you can do in software when it is aware of the dimensions and features of its hardware. [...]

The rule here would be, perhaps, a version of “show, don’t tell.” We could call it “point to, don’t describe.” (Describing what to do means cognitive effort to read the words and understand them. An arrow pointing to something should be easier to process.)

I just learned the word proprioception a few weeks ago, in the context of how you can close your eyes and put your fingertip on the tip of your nose. Perfect word for this sort of hardware/software integration too.

Alex Weprin, reporting for The Hollywood Reporter:

In a sign of strength for the streaming platform, Apple’s senior VP of services Eddy Cue tells The Hollywood Reporter that viewership for last week’s Australian Grand Prix was up year over year compared to the 2025 race, which aired on ESPN.

“The 2026 Formula 1 season on Apple TV is off to a strong start, with fans responding positively and viewership up year over year for the first weekend, exceeding both F1 and Apple expectations,” Cue says.

As is typical for Apple, the company declined to give any specific numbers, though last year’s Australian GP averaged 1.1 million viewers for ESPN.

So we don’t know the viewership number, but we know it’s higher than 1.1 million. That’s like a semi-Bezos number.

Apple Platform Security Guide:

MacBook Neo combines system software and dedicated silicon elements within A18 Pro to provide additional security for the camera feed. The architecture is designed to prevent any untrusted software — even with root or kernel privileges in macOS — from engaging the camera without also visibly lighting the on-screen camera indicator light.

That’s the whole note, I believe. There aren’t any technical details regarding how exactly this is achieved. Until reading this new note in the Platform Security Guide, I thought the only visible indication of camera usage was the green camera icon in the menu bar. But on the Neo, there’s also a green dot in the upper right corner of the display. That green dot is the secure camera-use indicator, and it’s visible next to the time in the menu bar, and still visible when the menu bar is hidden, like in this screenshot I just took from Photo Booth in full-screen mode. What Apple is stating in this note in the Platform Security Guide is that if the Neo’s camera is being used, that corner of the display is guaranteed to light up with the green dot.

One of the reasons I failed to notice this green dot until today is that with Tahoe’s transparent menu bar and the default green-and-yellow desktop wallpaper for the citrus Neo I’m reviewing, a green dot doesn’t stand out. It’s much more prominent if you enable “Reduce transparency” in System Settings → Accessibility → Display, which gives the menu bar a traditional solid appearance.

Mahdi Bchatnia:

Accents is an app that lets you use the iMac/MacBook Neo accent colors on any Mac.

It’s a fun idea from Apple to have default accent colors that are, by default, exclusive to specific Mac hardware. But what exemplifies the Mac is that a clever developer like Bchatnia can make these accent colors available to any user on any Mac via a simple utility like Accents. (Via Michael Tsai.)

Les Orchard:

I started programming in 1982. Every language I’ve learned since then has been a means to an end — a new way to make computers do things I wanted them to do. AI-assisted coding feels like the latest in that progression. Not a rupture, just another rung on the ladder.

But I’m trying to hold that lightly. Because the ladder itself is changing, the building it’s leaning against is changing, and I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly where it’s going.

What I do know is this: I still get the same hit of satisfaction when something I thought up and built actually works. The code got there differently than it used to, but the moment it runs and does the thing? That hasn’t changed in my over 40 years at it.

I’ve been thinking about a different divide than the one Orchard writes about here. (The obvious truth is that the AI code generation revolution is creating multiple divisions, along multiple axes.)

The divide I’m seeing is that the developers who are craftspeople are elated because their productivity is skyrocketing while their craftsmanship remains unchanged — or perhaps even improved. They’re achieving much more, much faster, than ever before. It’s a step change as great, or greater than, the transition from assembly code to higher-level programming languages. The developers who are hacks are elated because it’s like they’ve been provided an autopilot switch for a task they never enjoyed or really even understood properly in the first place. The industry is riddled with hack developers, because in the last 15-20 years, as the demand for software far outstripped the supply of programmers who wanted to write code because they love writing code and creating software, the jobs have been filled by people who got into the racket simply because they were high-paying jobs in high demand. Good programmers create software for fun, outside their jobs. Hack programmers are no more likely to write software for fun than a garbage man is to collect trash on his days off.

Orchard’s fine essay examines a philosophical divide within the ranks of talented, considerate craftsperson developers. The divide that I’m talking about has been present ever since the demand for programmers exploded, but AI code generation tooling is turning it into an expansive gulf. The best programmers are more clearly the best than ever before. The worst programmers have gone from laying a few turds a day to spewing veritable mountains of hot steaming stinky shit, while beaming with pride at their increased productivity.

Craig Mod, on creating his own custom accounting software with Claude Code:

Simply put: It’s a big mess, and no off-the-shelf accounting software does what I need. So after years of pain, I finally sat down last week and started to build my own. It took me about five days. I am now using the best piece of accounting software I’ve ever used. It’s blazing fast. Entirely local. Handles multiple currencies and pulls daily (historical) conversion rates. It’s able to ingest any CSV I throw at it and represent it in my dashboard as needed. It knows US and Japan tax requirements, and formats my expenses and medical bills appropriately for my accountants. I feed it past returns to learn from. I dump 1099s and K1s and PDFs from hospitals into it, and it categorizes and organizes and packages them all as needed. It reconciles international wire transfers, taking into account small variations in FX rates and time for the transfers to complete. It learns as I categorize expenses and categorizes automatically going forward. It’s easy to do spot checks on data. If I find an anomaly, I can talk directly to Claude and have us brainstorm a batched solution, often saving me from having to manually modify hundreds of entries. And often resulting in a new, small, feature tweak. The software feels organic and pliable in a form perfectly shaped to my hand, able to conform to any hunk of data I throw at it. It feels like bushwhacking with a lightsaber.

Don’t get distracted by the mountains of steaming shit that hacks are using these tools to spew. There are amazing things being built by these tools that never would have, or in some cases could have, been built before.

Business Insider, one year ago:

Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic, said on Monday that AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the code in our software in a year.

“I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday.

I’d marked this one on my claim chowder calendar a year ago, suspecting it would make for a laugh today. But while Amodei wasn’t exactly right, I think he was only wrong insofar as his remarks were too facile. It may well be true that 90 percent of the lines of programming code that are written today, Friday 13 March 2026, will have been generated by AI. If anything, it’s probably a higher percentage.

But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of code that would have been written by human programmers are now generated by AI models. That’s part of it, for sure. But what’s revolutionary — a topic I’ve been posting about twice already today — is that AI code generation tools are being used to create services and apps and libraries that simply would not have been written at all before. It may well be that the total number of lines of code that will be written by people today isn’t much different from the number of lines of code that were written by people a year ago. But there might be 10× more code generated by AI than is written by people today. Maybe more. Maybe a lot more? And a year or two or three from now, that might be 100× or 1,000× or 100,000×.

In that near future, human programmers are likely still to be writing — or at least line-by-line reviewing and approving — code. But as a percentage of all code being generated, that will only be a sliver.

Dade Hayes, reporting for Deadline:

While the rise of sports programming in recent years has been well-documented, new figures from Nielsen illustrate the extent of its dominance. The measurement firm said sports accounted for 29.2% of all advertising-supported TV viewing by people 25 to 54 years old during the fourth quarter. The stat, spanning broadcast, cable and streaming, was part of a report on viewership trends in the fourth quarter of 2025, released Thursday in the runup to upfronts.

Looking at the rest of the pie without sports, broadcast accounted for just 9.8%, with cable coming in at 18%. Streaming drew by far the largest tune-in, with 43% of all non-sports viewing, a reflection of the overall growth of advertising on streaming services like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max and others.

Eli Tan, reporting for The New York Times:

Meta’s new foundational A.I. model, which the company has been working on for months, has fallen short of the performance of leading A.I. models from rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on internal tests for reasoning, coding and writing, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential matters.

The model, code-named Avocado, outperformed Meta’s previous A.I. model and did better than Google’s Gemini 2.5 model from [last] March, two of the people said. But it has not performed as strongly as Gemini 3.0 from November, they said.

As a result, Meta has delayed Avocado’s release to at least May from this month, the people said. They added that the leaders of Meta’s A.I. division had instead discussed temporarily licensing Gemini to power the company’s A.I. products, though no decisions have been reached.

The two facts in the last paragraph don’t square with me. May is only two months away. If they might ship then, why license Gemini? To me, the “we may need to pay Google to license Gemini” scenario is a sign that Avocado might be a bust and they might be a year or longer away from their own competitive model.

Mr. Zuckerberg, 41, has staked the future of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, on being at the cutting edge of A.I. His company has spent billions hiring top A.I. researchers and committed $600 billion to building data centers to power the technology. In January, Meta projected that it would spend as much as $135 billion this year, nearly twice the $72 billion it spent last year.

The difference between Meta and Apple might be that Meta is merely a few months away from rolling out its own best-of-breed AI model. But the difference could be that Meta has blown hundreds of billions of dollars pursuing their own frontier models, and Apple has not, and both just license Gemini from Google.

Tim Cook:

At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday. But we couldn’t let this milestone pass without thanking the millions of people who make Apple what it is today — our incredible teams around the world, our developer community, and every customer who has joined us on this journey. Your ideas inspire our work. Your trust drives us to do better. Your stories remind us of all we can accomplish when we think different.

If you’ve taught us anything, it’s that the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

This is a perfectly cromulent letter to mark a big anniversary for Apple. And it is very Tim Cook. It’s short, earnest, honest, to the point, and uses plain simple language. But what also makes it so Cook-ian is that it’s so utterly anodyne. It’s inoffensive to the point of being unmemorable. The best part of Cook’s letter is when he harks back and explicitly quotes from an Apple ad campaign from 30 years ago.

Ten years from now, when Apple is celebrating its 60th anniversary, no one is going to quote from Tim Cook’s “banger of a letter” commemorating their 50th. 25 years from now, when Apple is celebrating its 75th, that future CEO won’t be quoting from any of the ad campaigns Apple ran while Cook was CEO, because there are no lines worth remembering from them.

Basic Apple Guy:

Where I and the rest of the internet take this from here remains to be seen. All I know is that Apple should definitely keep this Lil Finder around.

But no, I do not think this is the last we’ve seen of Lil Finder Guy…

Apple’s MacBook Neo ad campaign on TikTok — and seemingly exclusive to TikTok — is the most fun they’ve had with a campaign in ages. I love it.

Maggie Harrison Dupré, writing for Futurism:

Earlier this month, Ars retracted the story after it was found to include fake quotes attributed to a real person. The article — a write-up of a viral incident in which an AI agent seemingly published a hit piece about a human engineer named Scott Shambaugh — was initially published on February 13. After Shambaugh pointed out that he’d never said the quotes attributed to him, Ars’ editor-in-chief Ken Fisher apologized in an editor’s note, in which he confirmed that the piece included “fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them” and characterized the error as a “serious failure of our standards.” He added that, upon further review, the error appeared to be an “isolated incident.”

Shortly after Fisher’s editor’s note was published, Edwards, one of the report’s two bylined authors, took to Bluesky to take “full responsibility” for the inclusion of the fabricated quotes.

Edwards:

I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an Al reporter being tripped up by Al hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part.

When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own.

Ars fired him at the end of February.

Antonio G. Di Benedetto, The Verge:

Somehow, the PC makers still don’t see it coming. Here’s how [Asus CFO Nick] Wu described the MacBook Neo, specifically its 8GB of RAM limitation:

“I think when Apple positioned the product, it’s probably focused more on content consumption. This differs somewhat from mainstream notebook usage scenarios, because in that case, the Neo feels more like a tablet — because tablets are mostly for content consumption.”

Hang on. Can we hold up for a second here? [...]

The proof of the MacBook Neo’s performance for the money is in the numbers. In single-core benchmarks tests — which most accurately measure the kinds of everyday tasks you do on a computer — the Neo’s A18 Pro chip beats out all manner of Windows laptops, including the new flagship Intel Panther Lake chip in Asus’ own $2,400 Zenbook Duo. Is a Zenbook Duo more capable than the MacBook Neo for heavier tasks, like photo and video editing or playing more graphically demanding games? Yes, and it’s part of why I loved that dual-screen laptop when I reviewed it. But the Zenbook Duo also costs four times as much. And, again, the Neo can hang with it for most common tasks, even with its 8GB of RAM.

This idea that because it’s “an iPhone chip” the Neo is not capable of, say, editing 4K video is utterly ignorant. You know what computers are fully capable of editing 4K video? iPhones. So of course the same chip that enables smooth 4K video editing in an iPhone can do the same in a Mac.

It’s folly to look at the MacBook Neo and presume that an Apple laptop with iPad-like specs must be iPad-like in its capabilities. Anyone who finds iPads limiting for work — and I’m one of them! — isn’t limited because of the hardware. It’s because iPadOS isn’t designed to suit the way we work. The MacBook Neo is a full-fledged kick-ass Macintosh. It really is. If PC makers think it’s something akin to an iPad in a laptop enclosure, they’re even dumber than I thought, and I’ve long thought most of them are pretty dumb.