2026-03-16 07:00:54
David Pogue absolutely killed it hosting this live event last week. Glad I saved it to watch on my TV. Special guests include Chris Espinosa, John Sculley, and Avie Tevanian. A legit treat.
2026-03-16 01:36:48
My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner — a digital take on traditional paper planners — that (with permission) pulls in your calendars, reminders, and health data. Its motto: “Most productivity apps help you organize tasks. Finalist helps you finish them.”
Finalist first sponsored DF back in December, and I wrote quite a bit about it then. You should read that post. I’ve continued using Finalist, day in, day out, since then. It’s open on my Mac and on my first iPhone home screen. I’m even on the TestFlight beta list, using new builds as Radic releases them. Finalist was good enough back in December that I started relying on it, and it’s gotten even better in the three months since. It’s a great app, period, but it’s really fun to use an app that is getting better so quickly. Radic is cooking with gas. It’s just so obvious, just using it, that Finalist is his own dream app for daily productivity. Here’s a fun one-minute video showing what’s new in version 3.6.
Recent features include subtasks, calendar bookmarks, HealthKit data in Finalist’s journal, and a spoken daily briefing you can trigger from your Lock Screen. You can (and I do) run Finalist alongside the apps you already use. E.g., Finalist hasn’t replaced Fantastical for me — they just work great together because they both show me the same calendar events. Same goes for Apple Reminders. If you took a look back in December, you should check out what’s new. If you haven’t tried Finalist yet, you definitely should. Free trial from the App Store, with both subscription pricing and a one-time lifetime purchase.
2026-03-16 01:30:00
Sam Henri Gold:
Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.
I know this because I was running Final Cut Pro X on a 2006 Core 2 Duo iMac with 3GB RAM and 120GB of spinning rust. I was nine. I had no business doing this. I did it every day after school until my parents made me go to bed.
What a lovely essay. The best piece anyone has written about the MacBook Neo — because it’s not really about the MacBook Neo.
2026-03-16 01:00:00
Resume.org, summarizing their survey of 1,000 U.S. hiring managers:
59% admit they emphasize AI when explaining hiring freezes or layoffs because it plays better with stakeholders than citing financial constraints.
Reminds me of the “Not Me” ghost in Bil Keane’s The Family Circus comic strip.
2026-03-15 23:51:56
Horace Dediu, under the headline “The Most Brilliant Move in Corporate History?”:
Apple used to be the biggest capex spender, mainly because it paid for most of the property plant and equipment in the factories that made its phones and computers. [...]
But that all changed with AI. Amazon is spending $200 billion this year on AI data centers. Google, $185 billion. Microsoft, $114 billion. Meta, $135 billion. Combined: $650 billion. (Not including OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX/XAI.) That is like buying the US Navy every year. And yet Apple’s capital budget is still a modest $14 billion, oscillating with new hardware tooling cycles.
Apple is refusing to transfer its cash flow to Nvidia. Curiously, it believes that its cash flow belongs to its shareholders, not to Nvidia’s.
The hyperscalers are now spending 94% of their operating cash flows on AI infrastructure. Amazon is projected to go negative free cash flow this year with as much as $28 billion in the red. Alphabet’s free cash flow is expected to collapse 90% from $73 billion to $8 billion. These companies used to be the greatest cash machines ever built. Now they’re borrowing money to keep the data center lights on.
It has served Apple very well to guard its free cash flow preciously ever since the company sprung back to growth under Steve Jobs. Are they stuck in the past by sitting this out, or wisely passing on a mania?
If they can make Apple Intelligence a first-class agentic AI by relying on Gemini, paying only $1 billion per year, it sure looks like genius. But given their track record with Apple Intelligence to date, that is an enormous “if”.
2026-03-15 23:41:58
Katie Paul, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, reporting for Reuters:
Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers.
No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said. Top executives have recently signaled the plans to other senior leaders at Meta and told them to begin planning how to pare back, two of the people said. The sources spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to disclose the cuts.
“This is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in response to questions about the plan.
This, hot on the heels of a New York Times report that Meta’s in-house AI models are lagging and they’re considering licensing Gemini from Google.
