Nick Heer, writing at Pixel Envy, uses Pages (from 2009 through today) to illustrate Apple’s march toward putting “greater focus on your content” by making window chrome, and toolbar icons, more and more invisible:

Perhaps Apple has some user studies that suggest otherwise, but I cannot see how dialling back the lines between interface and document is supposed to be beneficial for the user. It does not, in my use, result in less distraction while I am working in these apps. In fact, it often does the opposite. I do not think the prescription is rolling back to a decade-old design language. However, I think Apple should consider exploring the wealth of variables it can change to differentiate tools within toolbars, and to more clearly delineate window chrome from document.

This entire idea that application window chrome should disappear is madness. Some people — at Apple, quite obviously — think it looks better, in the abstract, but I can’t see how it makes actually using these apps more productive. Artists don’t want to use invisible tools. Artists crave tools that look and feel distinctive and cool.

Clean lines between content and application chrome are clarifying, not distracting. It’s also useful to be able to tell, at a glance, which application is which. I look at Heer’s screenshot of the new version of Pages running on MacOS 26 Tahoe and not only can I not tell at a glance that it’s Pages, I can’t even tell at a glance that it’s a document word processor, especially with the formatting sidebar hidden. One of the worst aspects of Liquid Glass, across all platforms, but exemplified by MacOS 26, is that all apps look exactly the same. Not just different apps that are in the same category, but different apps from entirely different categories. Safari looks like Mail looks like Pages looks like the Finder — even though web browsers, email clients, word processors, and file browsers aren’t anything alike.

Google Threat Intelligence Group, earlier this week:

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a new and powerful exploit kit targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS version 13.0 (released in September 2019) up to version 17.2.1 (released in December 2023). The exploit kit, named “Coruna” by its developers, contained five full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits. The core technical value of this exploit kit lies in its comprehensive collection of iOS exploits, with the most advanced ones using non-public exploitation techniques and mitigation bypasses.

The Coruna exploit kit provides another example of how sophisticated capabilities proliferate. Over the course of 2025, GTIG tracked its use in highly targeted operations initially conducted by a customer of a surveillance vendor, then observed its deployment in watering hole attacks targeting Ukrainian users by UNC6353, a suspected Russian espionage group. We then retrieved the complete exploit kit when it was later used in broad-scale campaigns by UNC6691, a financially motivated threat actor operating from China. How this proliferation occurred is unclear, but suggests an active market for “second hand” zero-day exploits. Beyond these identified exploits, multiple threat actors have now acquired advanced exploitation techniques that can be re-used and modified with newly identified vulnerabilities.

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

Sponsorships have been selling briskly, of late. There are only three weeks open between now and the end of June. But one of those open weeks is next week, starting this coming Monday:

• March 9–15 (Update: Sold)
• April 20–26 (Update: Sold)
• May 25–31

I’m also booking sponsorships for Q3 2026, and roughly half of those weeks are already sold.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch — especially if you can act quick for next week’s opening.

Help us Obi-Wan Lemay, you’re our only hope.

(Also, as noted by Joe Rossignol, Eddy Cue got an updated headshot.)

Donald Knuth, who, adorably, effectively blogs by posting TeX-typeset PDFs:

Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 — Anthropic’s hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving. I’ll try to tell the story briefly in this note.

(Via Simon Willison.)

Simon Willison:

There are a lot of open questions about this, both ethically and legally. These appear to be coming to a head in the venerable chardet Python library. chardet was created by Mark Pilgrim back in 2006 and released under the LGPL. Mark retired from public internet life in 2011 and chardet’s maintenance was taken over by others, most notably Dan Blanchard who has been responsible for every release since 1.1 in July 2012.

Two days ago Dan released chardet 7.0.0 with the following note in the release notes:

Ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API — drop-in replacement for chardet 5.x/6.x. Just way faster and more accurate!

Yesterday Mark Pilgrim opened #327: No right to relicense this project.

A fascinating dispute, and the first public post from Pilgrim that I’ve seen in quite a while.

Naipanoi Lepapa, Ahmed Abdigadir, and Julia Lindblom, reporting for the Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten:

It is stuffy at the top of the hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. The grey sky presses the heat against the windows. The man in front of us is nervous. If his employer finds out that he is here, he could lose everything. He is one of the people few even realise exist — a flesh-and-blood worker in the engine room of the data industry. What he has to say is explosive.

“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording.” [...]

The workers describe videos where people’s bank cards are visible by mistake, and people watching porn while wearing the glasses. Clips that could trigger “enormous scandals” if they were leaked.

“There are also sex scenes filmed with the smart glasses — someone is wearing them having sex. That is why this is so extremely sensitive. There are cameras everywhere in our office, and you are not allowed to bring your own phones or any device that can record”, an employee says.

Delightful. And what a brand move for Ray-Ban and Oakley.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Featuring bubble-style lines with colorful gradients, the wallpapers come in Mac Purple, Mac Blue, Mac Pink, and Mac Yellow. The design and the colors spell out the word “Mac.”

They got me. I’m upgrading to Tahoe now.

Over the years I’ve been writing here, I’ve often used the term speed bump to describe a certain type of hardware update: a new version of an existing product where the new stuff is mostly faster components, especially the CPU and GPU, but where a lot of the product, including the enclosure, remains unchanged. I’ve been thinking about it all week, as I tested the iPhone 17e, because the 17e is the epitome of a good speed bump. But it’s a funny term, because in real life, a speed bump — on the road — is something that slows you down. But in computer hardware it’s about going faster, or doing more, even if only slightly.

The other thing I find mildly amusing about the word “bump” and the iPhone 17e is that it’s the one and only iPhone in Apple’s lineup that doesn’t have a camera plateau — a.k.a. bump. The lens itself does jut out, slightly, but it’s just a lens, not a plateau, harking back to iPhones of yesteryear, like the iPhone XR from 2018.

Speed bump hardware updates never update every component. That’s not a speed bump. Only some components get updated. In a good speed bump update, the parts that get upgraded are the parts from the old model that were most lacking. My review last year of the iPhone 16e was fairly effusive, but I noted one primary omission: MagSafe. There were, of course, other compromises made for the 16e compared to higher-priced models in the lineup, but MagSafe was the one feature missing from the 16e that really bothered me. I’m not sure there was a single review of the 16e that didn’t list the omission of MagSafe as the 16e’s biggest shortcoming.

Apple’s explanation, a year ago, for omitting MagSafe was that the customers they were targeting with the 16e were people upgrading from 4-, 5-, or even 6-year-old iPhones, so they were accustomed to charging their phones by plugging in a cable. I can see that. People who bought an iPhone 16e in the last year didn’t miss MagSafe because they never had a phone with it. But, for those of us who have been using iPhones with MagSafe, the lack of MagSafe on the 16e was the primary reason to steer friends and family away from getting one. It’s not just about charging, either. I use MagSafe in a bunch of places, in a bunch of ways. I have a dock next to my bed and another next to my keyboard at my desk. I have a MagSafe mount on the dashboard of my car (which is so old it long predates CarPlay). I have a handful of MagSafe accessories like this snap-on stand from Moft that I recommended last summer, and portable MagSafe battery packs like this one from Anker (battery packs like these make for great travel items — they double as bedside chargers in hotels). I don’t carry a MagSafe card wallet or use PopSocket-style attachments, but a lot of people do. MagSafe is just great, and the lack of it on the 16e was the biggest reason not to recommend it. Just because the target audience wouldn’t miss it — because their old phone didn’t have it — doesn’t mean they wouldn’t miss out by not having it on their new one.

Well, that’s over. The 17e has MagSafe, and supports inductive charging at speeds up to 15W. (The iPhone Air supports charging up to 20W, and the 17 and 17 Pro models up to 25W.) Apple could have stopped there — with the addition of MagSafe alone — and the 17e would’ve been a successful year-over-year update.

But that would’ve been only a ... err ... mag bump, not a speed bump. Apple also bumped the SoC from the A18 to the A19, the current-generation chip from the regular iPhone 17. This is not a huge deal, year-over-year, but faster is faster and newer is better. (The $599 iPhone 17e, with the A19, benchmarks faster in single-core CPU performance than the $599 MacBook Neo, with the year-old A18 Pro.)

The upgrade to the A19 enables a better image-processing pipeline for the camera, which allows the 17e to offer Apple’s “next-generation portraits”, which are an obvious improvement over the previous portrait mode offered by the 16e. But the camera hardware itself — lenses and sensors, both front and back — is unchanged year-over-year. The technical specs for the camera, as reported by Halide’s nifty Technical Readout feature, are identical to the 16e. It’s a fine camera, but not a great camera. Just like last year with the 16e, the camera’s limitations are most noticeable in low-light situations. Still, both of these things are true:

• The 17e camera is by far the weakest iPhone camera Apple currently offers. (It does not come close to the quality of the also-single-lens iPhone Air camera.)
• For the people considering the 17e, it’s probably the best camera of any kind they’ve ever owned, and a big improvement over their current, probably years-old, phone.

The 17e camera system remains limited to Apple’s original Photographic Styles; all the other iPhones in the new A19 generation — the 17, 17 Pro, and Air — offer the much improved “latest-generation” Photographic Styles. In practice, this means the system Camera app on the 17e only offers these styles: Standard, Rich Contrast, Vibrant, Warm, and Cool. The second-generation Photographic Styles, which debuted last year on the iPhone 16 models, offer a much wider variety of styles and more fine-grained control, all of which processing is non-destructive. To name one obvious scenario, the new generation of Photographic Styles offers several black-and-white styles. When you shoot with these B&W styles, you can subsequently change your mind and apply one of the color styles in the Photos app, because the styles aren’t baked-in. But with the original-generation Photographic Styles — the one the 17e is limited to — the styles you shoot with are baked into the HEIC (or JPEG) files. You can apply non-destructive filters in post, including black-and-white filters, but those filters are simplistic compared to the new-generation Photographic Styles — and unlike the new Photographic Styles, you can’t preview the old filters live in the Camera app viewfinder. If you care about any of this, you should spend the extra $200 to get the regular iPhone 17, or perhaps, the still-for-sale iPhone 16, both of which offer both better camera hardware and software than the 17e. If you don’t care about any of this, the 17e might be the iPhone for you.

Here’s a link to Apple’s ever-excellent Compare page, with a comparison of the 16e vs. 17e vs. 17. (For posterity, here’s that Compare page archived as a PDF.) Other than the addition of MagSafe, the next biggest change from last year’s 16e to the new 17e is that base storage has increased from 128 to 256 GB (while the starting price has remained unchanged at $600). Nice. Also, there’s a third color option, “soft pink”, in addition to white and black. Lastly, the 17e gains the Ceramic Shield 2 front glass, which Apple claims offers 3× better scratch resistance. That’s nice too.

That’s about it for what’s improved in the 17e compared to the 16e. But that’s enough. With the old iPhone SE models, Apple only updated the hardware every 3–5 years. The new e models are seemingly on the same annual upgrade cycle as the other generation-numbered models.¹ Adding MagSafe, going from the A18 to A19, increasing base storage, and adding a new colorway is a solid speed bump.

The next way to consider the 17e is by comparing it to the base iPhone 17. What do you miss if you go with the 17e — or, what do you gain by paying an extra $200 for the 17?

• The base 17 has a ProMotion display with dynamic refresh rates up to 120 Hz and an always-on display. It’s also a brighter display (1000 vs. 800 nits SDR, 1600 vs. 1200 nits HDR). The iPhone 17 is the first base model iPhone with ProMotion, and it also sports a slightly bigger display (6.3″ vs. 6.1″) despite the fact that the 17 is only 2mm taller and exactly the same width as the 17e — the increased screen size is mostly from having smaller bezels surrounding the display.

• The iPhone 17 comes with Apple’s second-generation Ultra Wideband chip for precision Find My support. If you track, say, an AirTag using the Find My app, the iPhone 17 supports the cool feature that guides you right to the device, with distances down to fractions of a foot. The iPhone 17e doesn’t support that — it just lets you do the old Find My stuff, like having the lost device play a sound, and showing its location on a map.

• Camera Control: On my personal iPhone 17 Pro, I only use the Camera Control button for launching the Camera app, and as a shutter within Camera (and other camera apps, like !Camera, Analogue,² and Halide). I don’t use it for adjusting controls, because it’s just too finicky. But I love it as a dedicated launcher and shutter button. I keep trying to invoke it on the 17e to launch the Camera app, even now, a few days into daily driving it.

• The iPhone 17 has the clever Dynamic Island; the 17e has a dumb notch. The Dynamic Island is nice to have, but despite having one on my personal phone for 3.5 years (it debuted with the 14 Pro in 2022), I can’t say I’ve particularly missed it during the better part of a week that I’ve been using the 17e as my primary phone. I actually had to double check that the 17e doesn’t have it while first writing this paragraph, because, over my first few days of testing, I just hadn’t noticed. But then I went out and ran an errand requiring an Uber ride, while listening to a podcast, and I noticed the lack of a Dynamic Island — no live status update for the hailed Uber, and no quick-tap button for jumping back into Overcast.

• And last, but far from least, the iPhone 17 has significantly better camera hardware: the 1× main camera is better; it offers a 0.5× ultra wide lens that the 17e completely lacks; and the all-new front-facing camera is vastly superior.

That’s a fair amount of better stuff for $200. But none of those things jumps out to me as a reason not to recommend the 17e for someone who considers price their highest priority. With 256 GB of storage, even the base model 17e is recommendable without hesitation. The omission of MagSafe on last year’s 16e was low-hanging fruit for Apple to add this year, as was the meager base storage of 128 GB. I don’t think there’s anything on par with MagSafe for next year’s iPhone 18e. (My first choice would be the second-generation Ultra Wideband chip — I’d like to see precision location make it into everything Apple sells sooner rather than later.)

Across several days of testing, 5G cellular reception was strong, and battery life was long. I ran Speedtest a few times, at different locations in Center City Philadelphia, and each time got download speeds above 500 Mbps and upload speeds around 40–50 Mbps. Apple’s in-house C1X modem is simply great.

Here’s a table with pricing for the iPhone models Apple currently sells:

iPhone	SoC	128 GB	256 GB	512 GB	1 TB	2 TB
17e	A19	—	$600	$800		—
16	A18	$700	—	—	—	—
16 Plus	A18	$800	$900	—	—	—
17	A19	—	$800	$1000	—	—
Air (17)	A19 Pro	—	$1000	$1200	$1400	—
17 Pro	A19 Pro	—	$1100	$1300	$1500	—
17 Pro Max	A19 Pro	—	$1200	$1400	$1600	$2000

This is a very compelling lineup, and the 17e shores up the lowest price point with aplomb:

• Good: iPhone 17e
• Better: iPhone 17
• Best: iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone Air, depending on how you define “best”.

In New York last week at Apple’s hands-on “experience” for the media, which was primarily about the MacBook Neo, I got the chance to talk about the 17e, too. Apple’s product marketing people tend to compare the 17e against the iPhone 11 and 12. Those are the iPhones most would-be 17e buyers are upgrading from. Things they’ll notice if they do upgrade to a 17e:

• Much better battery life. Not just compared to an iPhone 11 or 12 that’s been in use for 4–5 years, but against a factory fresh battery in those older iPhones. Apple’s “streaming video” benchmark goes from 11 hours to 21 hours comparing the 17e to the 12. And if they are upgrading from a phone with a 4- or 5-year-old battery that’s been through hundreds of charge cycles, they’re going to notice it even more.
• A noticeably brighter screen (800 vs 625 nits).
• A much improved camera. Even if they’re not serious about photography, the 17e camera is noticeably better than the cameras from half a decade ago.
• Everything will feel faster.

Frankly, I’m not sure who the year-old iPhone 16 is for today, especially considering that Apple is now only offering it with 128 GB of storage. People on a tight budget but who really want an ultra wide 0.5× second camera lens? The potential appeal of the still-available 16 Plus is more obvious: if you want a big-screen iPhone, it’s much less expensive than a 17 Pro Max. And, unlike the regular iPhone 16, the 16 Plus is available with 256 GB. But at that point, I’d encourage whoever is considering the $900 iPhone 16 Plus with 256 GB storage to pay an extra $100 and get the iPhone Air instead. The overall lineup would have more coherence and clarity if Apple just eliminated the two 16 models. I suspect Apple is on the cusp of completely moving away from the strategy of selling two- and three-year-old iPhones at lower prices, and updating their entire lineup with annual speed bumps.

Just over a decade ago, reviewing the then-new iPhones 6S, I could tell which way the silicon wind was blowing. Year-over-year, the A9 CPU in the iPhone 6S was 1.6× faster than the A8 in the iPhone 6. Impressive. But what really struck me was comparing the 6S’s GeekBench scores to MacBooks. The A9, in 2015, benchmarked comparably to a two-year-old MacBook Air from 2013. More impressively, it outperformed the then-new no-adjective 12-inch MacBook in single-core performance (by a factor of roughly 1.1×) and was only 3 percent slower in multi-core. That was a comparison to the base $1,300 model MacBook with a 1.1 GHz dual-core Intel Core M processor, not the $1,600 model with a 1.2 GHz Core M. But, still — the iPhone 6S outperformed a brand-new $1,300 MacBook, and drew even with a $1,600 model. I called that “astounding”. The writing was clearly on the wall: the future of the Mac seemed destined to move from Intel’s x86 chips to Apple’s own ARM-based chips.

Here we are today, over five years after the debut of Apple’s M-series chips, and we now have the MacBook Neo: a $600 laptop that uses the A18 Pro, literally the same SoC as 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro models. It was clear right from the start of the Apple Silicon transition that Apple’s M-series chips were vastly superior to x86 — better performance-per-watt, better performance period, the innovative (and still unmatched, five years later) unified memory architecture — but the MacBook Neo proves that Apple’s A-series chips are powerful enough for an excellent consumer MacBook.

I think the truth is that Apple’s A-series chips have been capable of credibly powering Macs for a long time. The Apple Silicon developer transition kits, from the summer of 2020, were Mac Mini enclosures running A12Z chips that were originally designed for iPad Pros.¹ But I think Apple could have started using A-series chips in Macs even before that. It would have been credible, but with compromises. By waiting until now, the advantages are simply overwhelming. You cannot buy an x86 PC laptop in the $600–700 price range that competes with the MacBook Neo on any metric — performance, display quality, audio quality, or build quality. And certainly not software quality.

The original iPhone in 2007 was the most amazing device I’ve ever used. It may well wind up being the most amazing device I ever will use. It was ahead of its time in so many ways. But a desktop-class computer, performance-wise, it was not. Two decades is a long time in the computer industry, and nothing proves that more than Apple’s “phone chips” overtaking Intel’s x86 platform in every measurable metric — they’re faster, cooler, smaller, and perhaps even cost less. And they certainly don’t cost more.

I’ve been testing a citrus-colored $700 MacBook Neo² — the model with Touch ID and 512 GB storage — since last week. I set it up new, rather than restoring my primary MacOS work setup from an existing Mac, and have used as much built-in software, with as many default settings, as I could bear. I’ve only added third-party software, or changed settings, as I’ve needed to. And I’ve been using it for as much of my work as possible. I expected this to go well, but in fact, the experience has vastly exceeded my expectations. Christ almighty I don’t even have as many complaints about running MacOS 26 Tahoe (which the Neo requires) as I thought I would.

It’s never been a good idea to evaluate the performance of Apple’s computers by tech specs alone. That’s exemplified by the experience of using a Neo. 8 GB of RAM is not a lot. And I love me my RAM — my personal workstation remains a 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64 GB RAM (the most available at the time). But just using the Neo, without any consideration that it’s memory limited, I haven’t noticed a single hitch. I’m not quitting apps I otherwise wouldn’t quit, or closing Safari tabs I wouldn’t otherwise close. I’m just working — with an even dozen apps open as I type this sentence — and everything feels snappy.

Now, could I run up a few hundred open Safari tabs on this machine, like I do on my MacBook Pro, without feeling the effects? No, probably not. But that’s abnormal. In typical productivity use, the Neo isn’t merely fine — it’s good.

The display is bright and crisp. At 500 maximum nits, the specs say it’s as bright as a MacBook Air. In practice, that feels true. (500 nits also matches the maximum SDR brightness of my personal M1 MacBook Pro.) Sound from the side-firing speakers is very good — loud and clear. I’d say the sound seems too good to be true for a $600 laptop. Battery life is long (and I’ve done almost all my testing while the Neo is unplugged from power). The keyboard feels exactly the same as what I’m used to, except that because the key caps are brand new, it feels even better than the keyboard on my own now-four-years-old MacBook Pro, the most-used key caps on which are now a little slick.

And the trackpad. Let me sing the praises of the MacBook Neo’s trackpad. The Neo’s trackpad exemplifies the Neo as a whole. Rather than sell old components at a lower price — as Apple had been doing, allowing third-party resellers like Walmart to sell the 8 GB M1 MacBook Air from 2020 at sub-$700 prices starting two years ago — the Neo is designed from the ground up to be a low-cost MacBook.

A decade ago, Apple began switching from trackpads with mechanical clicking mechanisms to Magic Trackpads, where clicks are simulated via haptic feedback (in Apple’s parlance, the Taptic Engine). And, with Magic Trackpads, you can use Force Touch — a hard press — to perform special actions. By default, if “Force Touch and haptic feedback” is enabled on a Mac with a Magic Trackpad, a hard Force Touch press will perform a Look Up — e.g., do it on a word in Safari and you’ll get a popover with the Dictionary app’s definition for that word. It’s a shortcut to the “Look Up in Dictionary” command in the contextual menu, which is also available via the keyboard shortcut Control-Command-D to look up whatever text is currently selected, or that the mouse pointer is currently hovering over — standard features that work in all proper Mac apps.

The Neo’s trackpad is mechanical. It actually clicks, even when the machine is powered off.³ Obviously this is a cost-saving measure. But the Neo’s trackpad doesn’t feel cheap in any way. You can click it anywhere you want — top, bottom, middle, corner — and the click feels right. Multi-finger gestures (most commonly, two-finger swipes for scrolling) — just work. Does it feel as nice as a Magic Trackpad? No, probably not. But I keep forgetting there’s anything at all different or special about this trackpad. It just feels normal. That’s unbelievable. The “Force Touch and haptic feedback” option is missing in the Trackpad panel in System Settings, so you might miss that feature if you’re used to it. But for anyone who isn’t used to that Magic Trackpad feature — which includes anyone who’s never used a MacBook before (perhaps the primary audience for the Neo), along with most casual longtime Mac users (which is probably the secondary audience) — it’s hard to say there’s anything they’d even notice that’s different about this trackpad than the one in the MacBook Air, other than the fact that it’s a little bit smaller. But it’s only smaller in a way that feels proportional to the Neo’s slightly smaller footprint compared to the Air. It’s a cheaper trackpad that doesn’t feel at all cheap. Bravo!

So What’s the Catch?

You can use this Compare page at Apple’s website (archived, for posterity, as a PDF here) to see the full list of what’s missing or different on the Neo, compared to the current M5 MacBook Air (which now starts at $1,100) and the 5-year-old M1 MacBook Air (so old it still sports the Intel-era wedge shape) that Walmart had been selling for $600–650. Things I’ve noticed, that bothered me, personally:

• The Neo lacks an ambient light sensor. It still offers an option in System Settings → Display to “Automatically adjust brightness”, which setting is on by default, but I have no idea how it works without an ambient light sensor. However it works, it doesn’t work well. As the lighting conditions in my house have changed — from day to night, overcast to sunny — I’ve found myself adjusting the display brightness manually. I only realized when I started adjusting the brightness on the Neo manually that I more or less haven’t adjusted the brightness manually on a MacBook in years. Maybe a decade. I’m not saying I never adjust the brightness on a MacBook Air or Pro, but I do it so seldomly that I had no muscle memory at all for which F-keys control brightness. After a few days using the Neo, I know exactly where they are: F1 and F2.

And, uh, that’s it. That’s the one catch that’s annoyed me over the six days I’ve been using the Neo as my primary computer for work and for reading. Once or twice a day I need to manually bump the display brightness up or down. 
That’s a crazily short list. One item, and it’s only a mild annoyance.

There are other things missing that I’ve noticed, but that I haven’t minded. The Neo doesn’t have a hardware indicator light for the camera. The indication for “camera in use” is only in the menu bar. There’s a privacy/security implication for this omission. According to Apple, the hardware indicator light for camera-in-use on other MacBook models, and the on-screen (e.g. in the Dynamic Island) indicator on iPhones and iPads, cannot be circumvented by software. If the camera is on, that light comes on, and no third-party software can disable it. Because the Neo’s only camera-in-use indicator is in the menu bar, that seems obviously possible to circumvent via software. Not a big deal, but worth being aware of. [Update: In a brief note added to Apple’s Platform Security Guide, Apple claims that the green indicator dot in the corner of the Neo’s display is guaranteed to be visible if the camera is in use.]

The Neo’s webcam doesn’t offer Center Stage or Desk View. But personally, I never take advantage of Center Stage or Desk View, so I don’t miss their absence. Your mileage may vary. But the camera is 1080p and to my eyes looks pretty good. And I’d say it looks damn good for a $600 laptop.

The Neo has no notch. Instead, it has a larger black bezel surrounding the entire display than do the MacBook Airs and Pros. I consider this an advantage for the Neo, not a disadvantage. The MacBook notch has not grown on me, and the Neo’s display bezel doesn’t bother me at all.

And there’s the whole thing with the second USB-C port only supporting USB 2 speeds. That stinks. But if Apple could sell a one-port MacBook a decade ago, they can sell one with a shitty second port today. I’ll bet this is one of the things that will be improved in the second generation Neo, but it’s not something that would keep me from recommending this one — or even buying one myself — today. If you know you need multiple higher-speed USB ports (or Thunderbolt), you need a MacBook Air or Pro.

The Neo ships with a measly 20-watt charger in the box — the same rinky-dink charger that comes with iPad Airs. I wish it were 30 watts (which is what came with the M1 MacBook Air), but maybe we’re lucky it comes with a charger at all. The Neo charges faster if you plug it into a more powerful power adapter, in either USB-C port.⁴ The USB-C cable in the box is white, not color-matched to the Neo, and it’s only 1.5 meters long. MacBook Airs and Pros ship with 2-meter MagSafe cables. Again, though: $600!

The Weighty Issue on My Mind

The Neo is not a svelte ultralight. It weights 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg) — exactly the same as the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air. The Neo, with a 13.0-inch display, has a smaller footprint than the 13.6-inch Air, but the Air is thinner. I don’t know if this is a catch though. It’s just the normal weight for a smaller-display Mac laptop. The decade-ago MacBook “One”, on the other hand, was a design statement. It weighed just a hair over 2 pounds (0.92 kg), and tapered from 1.35 cm to just 0.35 cm in thickness. The Neo is 1.27 cm thick, and the M5 Air is 1.13 cm. In fact, the extraordinary thinness of the 2015 MacBook might have necessitated the invention of the haptics-only Magic Trackpad. The Magic Trackpad first appeared on that MacBook and the early 2015 MacBook Pros — it was nice-to-have for the MacBook Pros, but might have been the only trackpad that would fit in the front of the MacBook One’s tapered case.

If I had my druthers, Apple would make a new svelte ultralight MacBook. Not instead of the Neo, but in addition to the Neo. Apple’s inconsistent use of the name “Air” makes this complicated, but the MacBook Neo is obviously akin to the iPhone 17e; the MacBook Air is akin to the iPhone 17 (the default model for most people); the MacBook Pros are akin to the iPhone 17 Pros. I wish Apple would make a MacBook that’s akin to the iPhone Air — crazy thin and surprisingly performant.

The biggest shortcoming of the decade-ago MacBook “One”, aside from the baffling decision to include just one USB-C port that was also its only means of charging, was the shitty performance of Intel’s Core M chips. Those chips were small enough and low-power enough to fit in the MacBook’s thin and fan-less enclosure, but they were slow as balls. It was a huge compromise for a laptop that carried a somewhat premium price. Today, performance, performance-per-watt, and physical chip size are all solved problems with Apple Silicon. I’d consider paying double the price of the Neo for a MacBook with similar specs (but more RAM and better I/O) that weighed 2.0 pounds or less. I’d buy such a MacBook not to replace my 14-inch MacBook Pro, but to replace my 2018 11-inch iPad Pro as my “carry around the house” secondary computer.⁵

As it stands, I might buy a Neo for that same purpose, 2.7-pound weight be damned. iPad Pros, encased in Magic Keyboards, are expensive and heavy. So are iPad Airs. My 2018 iPad Pro, in its Magic Keyboard case, weighs 2.36 pounds (1.07 kg). That’s the 11-inch model, with a cramped less-than-standard-size keyboard. I’m much happier with this MacBook Neo than I am doing anything on that iPad. Yes, my iPad is old at this point. But replacing it with a new iPad Pro would require a new Magic Keyboard too. For an iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard, that combination starts at $1,300 for 11-inch, $1,650 for 13-inch. If I switched to iPad Air, the cost would be $870 for 11-inch, $1,120 for 13-inch. The 13-inch iPads, when attached to Magic Keyboards, weigh slightly more than a 2.7-pound 13-inch MacBook Neo. The 11-inch iPads, with keyboards, weigh about 2.3 pounds. Why bother when I find MacOS way more enjoyable and productive? My three-device lifestyle for the last decade has been a MacBook Pro (anchored to a Studio Display at my desk at home, and in my briefcase when travelling); my iPhone; and an iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard for use around the rest of the house. This last week testing the MacBook Neo, I haven’t touched my iPad once, and I haven’t once wished this Neo were an iPad. And there were many times when I was very happy that it was a Mac.

And I can buy one, just like this one, for $700. That’s $170 less than an 11-inch iPad Air and Magic Keyboard. And the Neo comes with a full-size keyboard and runs MacOS, not a version of iOS with a limited imitation of MacOS’s windowing UI. I am in no way arguing that the MacBook Neo is an iPad killer, but it’s a splendid iPad alternative for people like me, who don’t draw with a Pencil, do type with a keyboard, and just want a small, simple, highly portable and highly capable computer to use around the house. The MacBook Neo is going to be a great first Macintosh for a lot of people switching from PCs. But it’s also going to be a great secondary Mac for a lot of longtime Mac users with expensive desktop setups for their main workstations — like me.

The Neo crystallizes the post-Jony Ive Apple. The MacBook “One” was a design statement, and a much-beloved semi-premium product for a relatively small audience. The Neo is a mass-market device that was conceived of, designed, and engineered to expand the Mac user base to a larger audience. It’s a design statement too, but of a different sort — emphasizing practicality above all else. It’s just a goddamn lovely tool, and fun too.

I’ll just say it: I think I’m done with iPads. Why bother when Apple is now making a crackerjack Mac laptop that starts at just $600? May the MacBook Neo live so long that its name becomes inapt.

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.