2025-12-18 08:31:06
Tim Goodman pops down the chimney again to reunite with Jason and discuss the Oscars on YouTube, finding balance in the TV review game, the rise of international content, episode deconstructions, “Pluribus,” and his top shows of the year.
2025-12-18 04:29:23
iPhone rumors — under-glass Face ID and a foldable, the iMac Pro’s possible return and our ideal pro Mac lineup, automations that solve problems, and what we do when the power goes out.
2025-12-18 03:04:57
Harry McCracken of Fast Company has a great, in-depth story about how Apple is working with filmmakers and other creators to help them build more immersive content for the Vision Pro:
…much of the progress the Vision Pro has made hasn’t stemmed from the routine tick-tock of software and hardware updates. Apple has also been throwing itself into the equally vital work of getting third-party developers and creators to build experiences that will help the rest of us understand what, exactly, its headset is good for. That was the goal of a Vision Pro developer event the company held at its Cupertino campus in late October.
I wrote a little about this event at the time, and met some of the creators Harry interviewed for his story, which really captures the current state of Apple’s immersive content evangelism.
2025-12-17 06:42:48
Last week Apple released 26.2 updates to its operating systems, and if you’re on the 26 train, you should install .2 because it includes a bunch of security updates including some zero-days.
In its list of security update details, Apple credits a bunch of security researchers for discovering the issues. Among them is Rosyna Keller of Totally Not Malicious software—fantastic name—who found bugs in MediaExperience, Messages, and Telephony. Keller says that the Messages fix alone is worth updating to iOS 26.2, or if you’re still on iOS 18, updating to iOS 18.7.3.
Related: Due to health and other reasons, Keller has fallen on hard times and apparently hasn’t been compensated by Apple for the security reports. There’s a GoFundMe campaign to help the long-time Mac developer.
2025-12-17 01:32:59
I didn’t have this on my bingo card, but here’s Hartley Charlton at MacRumors with a report about Apple testing a high-end iMac configuration:
Apple is developing a high-end iMac featuring the M5 Max chip, according to information from leaked internal software… The software contains references to an iMac with the identifier J833c running platform H17C. H17C is associated with the codename “Sotra C,” which relates to the expected marketing name “M5 Max.” This suggests that an iMac with the M5 Max chip is in active testing.
As Charlton notes, this isn’t the first we’ve heard about Apple potentially doing a high-end iMac. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported back in 2023 that Apple had initially planned an M2-based iMac Pro, but tabled it “due to cost concerns.” However, Gurman emphasized that a pro iMac was still on Apple’s agenda:
It’s worth noting that the pro version was tabled but never canceled. This larger model is still poised to follow the 24-inch one, coming in either late 2024 or 2025. It will have a 32-inch display, making it the biggest iMac in Apple’s history.
Well, it’s very late 2025 and it’s not here, but sometimes these things slip. Perhaps 2026 will be the year of a true large-screen iMac Pro. I have to admit I’m a bit surprised—I was a very happy iMac Pro owner, but I thought the model (introduced eight years ago this month) was just too niche and that Apple would prefer to refer pro users to a MacBook Pro or Mac Studio attached to an external display. Maybe the iMac Pro might once again be used to soften the blow of the possible discontinuation of the Mac Pro?
2025-12-17 01:13:19
The Computer History Museum is doing an amazing job trying not just to preserve the history of the computer revolution, but to keep it alive by getting permission to release source code for classic software. The latest is the crowning achievement of the Knoll brothers, Photoshop:
With the permission of Adobe Systems Inc., the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1990 version 1.0.1 of Photoshop. All the code is here with the exception of the MacApp applications library that was licensed from Apple. There are 179 files in the zipped folder, comprising about 128,000 lines of mostly uncommented but well-structured code. By line count, about 75% of the code is in Pascal, about 15% is in 68000 assembler language, and the rest is data of various sorts.
CHM had trustee Grady Booch of IBM comment on the (ironically not very commented) code, and he called it “well-structured”, “mature”, and “so easy to read, that comments might even have gotten in the way.”
As the post by Leonard J. Shustek continues:
…this is the kind of code we all can learn from. Software source code is the literature of computer scientists, and it deserves to be studied and appreciated. Enjoy a view of Photoshop from the inside.
I really like the phrase “the literature of computer scientists.” The only shame is that this release doesn’t include the code from the MacApp applications library, which Photoshop used and is owned by Apple. It would sure be nice if Apple made that code available as well.
