2026-04-20 02:51:43
Marc Malkin, Variety:
Jessica Chastain says Apple TV is finally going to release her political thriller series “The Savant.” [...]
“Before it was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to see it,’ but now I can say, ‘We’re going to see it,’” Chastain told me exclusively on Saturday at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in Santa Monica.
As for when, sources tell me that Apple is planning for a July release.
Previously, re: The Savant’s limbo release date.
2026-04-20 01:37:01
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius.
The winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features. They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions, and read their deep dive for more.
2026-04-19 01:52:56
Vittoria Benzine, at Artnet (via Oliver Thomas):
The singular American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick saw the little details. He even saw the future. But, most of all, he saw people, with all their quirks. Kubrick’s films, from Dr. Strangelove (1964) to The Shining (1980), offer proof of this — as do his earliest photos, produced during the 1940s. One new trove of 18 such images will get its first-ever outing next week, when Los Angeles-based Duncan Miller Gallery presents the find alongside works by contemporary photographer Jacqueline Woods at the Photography Show in New York. [...]
The photos are some of the earliest images that the director made for Look. “New York’s subway trains are a reading room on wheels, a lover’s lane and, after 11 p.m., a flophouse,” Kubrick’s subsequent photo essay accompanying his subway visions opined.
I’ve seen some of these before, but not all. (Which makes sense, if some of them have only now been discovered.)
Mia Moffet, writing for Museum of the City of New York back in 2012 (where you can see more of these photos):
As you can see below, with the exception of iPods and smart phones, activities on the train haven’t changed much in the last 66 years, including shoving one’s newspaper in everyone else’s faces.
My favorite:
(Here’s another from the same scene, moments apart.)
Moffet then quotes from this 1948 interview with young “Stan” Kubrick, regarding how he captured them:
Indoors he prefers natural light, but switches to flash when the dim light would restrict the natural movement of the subject. In a subway series he used natural light, with the exception of a picture showing a flight of stairs. “I wanted to retain the mood of the subway, so I used natural light,” he said. People who ride the subway late at night are less inhibited than those who ride by day. Couples make love openly, drunks sleep on the floor and other unusual activities take place late at night. To make pictures in the off-guard manner he wanted to, Kubrick rode the subway for two weeks. Half of his riding was done between midnight and six a.m. Regardless of what he saw he couldn’t shoot until the car stopped in a station because of the motion and vibration of the moving train. Often, just as he was ready to shoot, someone walked in front of the camera, or his subject left the train.
Kubrick finally did get his pictures, and no one but a subway guard seemed to mind. The guard demanded to know what was going on. Kubrick told him.
“Have you got permission?” the guard asked.
“I’m from LOOK,” Kubrick answered.
“Yeah, sonny,” was the guard’s reply, “and I’m the society editor of the Daily Worker.”
For this series Kubrick used a Contax and took the pictures at 1/8 second. The lack of light tripled the time necessary for development.
2026-04-19 00:48:37
Nicole Nguyen, writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
Mac Minis with larger-capacity RAM chips — a base M4 model with 32GB of RAM, starting at $999, and the M4 Pro models with 64GB of RAM, starting at $1,999 — are “currently unavailable” on Apple.com. And estimated shipping wait times for any other Mini model start at about a month, and in some cases is up to 12 weeks. (This Mini scarcity extends to other retailers as well.)
The more powerful Mac Studio makes up an even smaller share of sales than the Mini — less than 1%, according to CIRP. But its high-memory configurations ($3,499 and up) are also unavailable, and more affordable variations show wait times of up to 12 weeks. Last month, Apple removed the Mac Studio’s mega upgrade — 512GB of RAM — which it had touted as “the most ever in a personal computer.”
Meanwhile, Apple can ship its most popular computer, the MacBook Pro, with 128GB of RAM ($5,099 and up) to your door in early May. MacBook Pro models with less RAM ship sooner, and almost all other Mac models we reviewed on Apple.com will arrive just days after they’re ordered.
Apple declined to comment on what’s happening with these AI-friendly systems, but analysts have three theories.
This situation is rather unusual, and I suspect Nguyen is correct that it’s the result of a combination of factors, including a surge in demand from new “desktop AI” systems like OpenClaw. It’s rather remarkable that pretty much all of these desktop AI systems are Mac-exclusive, including the new Codex app from OpenAI (that’s based on Sky, the never-released AI automation app from the team behind Workflow, which Apple acquired and renamed Shortcuts). Some of these systems will surely arrive on other platforms eventually, but at the moment, they’re only on the Mac. They’re not on Windows, not on Linux, not on Android, and not on iOS. Just the Mac. That’s because the Mac is, and always has been, the best computer platform in the world. It just is. These systems can’t run on iPhones or iPads because those are baby computers. They just are. So if you want to jump in as an early adopter on desktop AI, it needs to be on a Mac. And if you want a headless always-on Mac to do it, the only options are a Mac Mini or Mac Studio.
Obviously Apple is nearing the release of M5-generation models for both the Mini and Studio. Perhaps those models are behind schedule, and Apple already tapered production of the old models. I think it’s just a question of whether we need to wait for WWDC in June, or if they’re going to drop in May.
2026-04-18 08:43:35
Apple Design:
Avoid pestering people. Repeated rating requests can be irritating, and may even negatively influence people’s opinion of your app. Consider allowing at least a week or two between requests, prompting again after people demonstrate additional engagement with your experience.
Prefer the system-provided prompt. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS offer a consistent, nonintrusive way for apps and games to request ratings and reviews. When you identify places in your experience where it makes sense to ask for feedback, the system checks for previous feedback and — if there isn’t any — displays an in-app prompt that asks for a rating and an optional written review. People can supply feedback or dismiss the prompt with a single tap or click; they can also opt out of receiving these prompts for all apps they have installed. The system automatically limits the display of the prompt to three occurrences per app within a 365-day period. For developer guidance, see
RequestReviewAction.
There are a lot of apps that eschew a lot of these guidelines. I mean, how do you avoid pestering people when the entire idea of an alert asking for a rating/review is, by nature, pestering? It’s an oxymoron, like saying “Don’t pester people when you pester them.”
I actually knew about the system setting to opt out of these prompts. On iOS it’s in Settings → Apps → App Store: In-App Ratings & Reviews. On MacOS, it’s in the App Store app’s Settings window. On both platforms, it’s on by default. This is one of several settings that I would change, personally, but choose not to, as a critic / pundit / know-it-all, so as to have more of the standard experience that most users get. If you’re annoyed by these prompts though, you should feel free to turn them off.
2026-04-18 08:31:16
I wrote yesterday:
And the apps that do the right thing — like Godier’s Current — and never solicit a review like a needy hustler are penalized.
On Mastodon, Steven Troughton-Smith responded:
Review prompts are the difference between a great app getting five positive reviews, and thousands of positive reviews. I would never recommend to a developer to not implement the APIs. It’s App Store Editorial suicide for most apps, since Apple tends to only pick things up when they have that body of review data.
I can see how my describing not prompting for reviews as “the right thing” looks like I’m suggesting developers should not prompt for reviews. That wasn’t my intention.
You have to play the game as the game stands, and Apple controls the game. And in the game as it stands, apps need 5-star reviews to gain traction in the App Store, perhaps especially so for apps in crowded categories. And for most apps, the only way to achieve that is through prompting. But the right thing to do, for the user experience in the app, is never to prompt for reviews.
That’s the problem with how Apple has set this up — to be competitive, apps need to do the wrong thing. I’m a competitive bastard. If I had an app in the App Store today, I’d probably prompt for reviews. I don’t begrudge developers who do it today. That’s the game. I admire developers who refuse to play this part of the game. It’s noble. But it’s not a winning strategy. I want Apple to fix the game — that’s the only real solution.
The system is so twisted that even Apple itself begs for these reviews from its own apps, even the system apps built into iOS. When else does Apple ever ask for anything? It looks needy and pathetic. Real Gil Gunderson vibes.
The funny thing is, this morning while I was reading the Mastodon thread with Troughton-Smith’s post, Ivory prompted me for a rating. Which I dutifully submitted. 5 stars, of course. Which brings me to another follow-up point. A few readers have emailed to object to the argument that it hurts developers to give apps anything short of a 5-star rating. (A few of these readers are from Germany, no surprise.) It’s logical, I agree, that a 4-star rating ought to be considered fair and just for a good app with obvious room for improvement. But anything short of 5 stars pulls down any good app’s average, because the overwhelming majority of users who rate apps only ever assign 5 stars for apps they like, or 1 star for apps they’re angry about. In a system where the overwhelming majority of users only ever assigns 1 or 5 stars, assigning 4 stars is effectively a mildly negative review. That sucks. Apple should fix it. But until they do (which, let’s face it, they probably won’t), obstinately ignoring that this is how App Store ratings work does not help good apps get the attention you think you’re helping them get with a 4-star rating.
