Apple has announced dates for this year’s WWDC:

Apple today announced it will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) online from June 8-12, bringing developers together from around the world for a week of connection, exploration, and innovation. In addition to the online experience, developers and students will also have the opportunity to celebrate in person during a special event at Apple Park on June 8.

WWDC26 will spotlight incredible updates for Apple platforms, including AI advancements and exciting new software and developer tools. As part of the company’s ongoing commitment to supporting developers, WWDC will also provide unique access to Apple engineers and designers, and insight into new tools, frameworks, and features.

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.

See you there.

If you want your classic Mac to interact with Claude, Sean Lavigne has the project for you:

AgentBridge is a native Classic Mac OS application that lets AI agents (like Claude) interact with Mac OS 7–9 through structured commands and responses. It works on real hardware and emulators — no modifications to your Mac required.

Drop AgentBridge into a shared folder, launch it on your Mac, and an AI agent can list windows, open apps, type text, read the clipboard, browse files, and more — all through a simple text-based protocol.

This image in the Github documentation cracked me up:

It has happened: the Mac Pro is gone, and Apple will not be replacing it.

Chance Miller, 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 was introduced way back in 2006 as a replacement for the outgoing Power Mac G5. It had a good few years, then languished until the 2013 model was announced.

That machine was a dud, and it languished until the 2019 model was announced.¹

It came out in December 2019, which was less than a year before Apple silicon was announced and the M1 shipped.

The Mac Pro got one last update in June 2023, when Apple dropped the Intel version for one with an M2 Ultra inside. It’s been languishing again ever since.

It is clear that Apple sees the Mac Studio as the way forward for high-end desktop computing. Apple silicon did away with the graphics expansion that made the 2019 Intel machine so interesting, leaving all of those slots with far less to do for most users.

This news shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, even if it is a sad ending to what was once an amazing computer.

D. Griffin Jones, writing about yesterday’s news:

Apple decided to start caring about the Mac Pro again at the worst possible time. The Intel Mac Pro, while excellent, arrived just six months before the announcement that the Mac would transition to Apple silicon. After which, the Mac Pro didn’t offer any better performance than the Mac Studio. Just the card slots — which you couldn’t put a GPU in.

Due to Apple silicon’s all-in-one architecture, the Ultra-tier chip pushes the limits of what Apple can fabricate at a reasonable price. The bigger the chip is on the die, the lower the yield of good chips will be made, raising the cost further.

Apple reportedly experimented with making a higher-tier chip than the Ultra — often referred to as the “Extreme” chip, though the name is just speculation. It was canceled for being too expensive.

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.

Jones goes on to explore how an “Extreme” chip could be built, and offers some advice for the Mac Studio team:

Apple should design a custom enclosure for PCI card slots that can plug into the Mac Studio. It would have a custom connector so that it could work (nearly) as fast as internal slots in a Mac Pro.

Maybe this custom connector is on the bottom of the Mac Studio, so installation is as simple as plugging it into a Mac Studio-sized port in the top of the box.

I do not see any future in which Apple goes down this road.

Apple sees the Mac Studio and its industry-standard Thunderbolt ports as the way forward for adding hardware. Doing anything custom at this point just adds uncertainty to a market that has been repeatedly damaged by Apple’s flip-flopping.

The company yanked the pro market around for over a decade. The Mac Pro was old, then it was new! It did not support internal expansion, then it did! With every change of its mind, Apple lost more and more trust of would-be Mac Pro buyers.

Jeff Geerling’s newest video features using an old FireWire camera via a Raspberry Pi hat… a thing I never thought about being possible:

What a time to be alive.

I’m gonna have to dust off my Vision Pro for this.

Our buddy is back! Juli Clover:

Apple has continued posting short videos featuring its new Little Finder Guy mascot on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, taking advantage of the popularity of the anthropomorphized Mac Finder icon.

The short videos promote the MacBook Neo through a series of Mac tips, all of which include Little Finder Guy in cute poses. A video about journaling features the character with a book and a pen, while another about the Passwords app has Little Finder Guy with a magnifying glass.

I love that Apple is having fun with this, and think it’s some of their best marketing in ages, even if some folks are cranky about it. Anything that makes the Mac more fun and relevant to young users is a win in my book.