2026-06-25 23:06:33
Stephen Nellis and Aditya Soni quoting a statement they got from Apple: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads as memory costs skyrocket
"We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly," Apple said in a statement. "We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today's increases for iPad and Mac."
9to5Mac has a good summery of the price changes, and they’re not pretty. The notables to me are:
I also can’t help but see that “we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today's increases for iPad and Mac,” statement as implying more increases are coming. The iPhone price increase seems inevitable, and my money is on it starting with the new models in September. We’ll see what they manage there, but if prices go up $200 or so on those models, I’d expect this past year’s boom cycle in iPhone sales will come to an end.
2026-06-25 05:00:52
User cantrip in a comment on The Verge:
The Steam Machine is both fairly-priced and too expensive. It's priced at cost, it's just that not many people are going to be willing to pay it.
This is such a simple way to put it, and it's true. Looking back on my post from a couple days ago when the Steam Machine was released, my tone is pretty negative.
But it wasn't negative because I thought the product was bad. I think I was reacting to how I felt knowing that even though the product looks really good, it's priced so high that the people I think would really enjoy this won't be able to get it. And it's not because Valve is being greedy here, it's because the nature of component pricing makes it so that the only way they can make this product is to make it enormously expensive.
The harsh truth is that the free market has decided that the components that go into consumer tech are so valuable, that making those consumer tech products is way too expensive for consumers. I'm hoping we get a correction in the market soon, because in a way I've never really felt in my adult life, it feels like we are doing the paperclip optimizer thing, where everything else be damned, we're optimizing for one thing and one thing only, and everything else must suffer for it.
I write this as someone who thinks that AI is a very useful tool for a good number of things, but that it is not the be-all, end-all of everything.
2026-06-25 04:04:20
Earlier today, I released Tangerine Neue, my fork of the beloved Tangerine UI Mastodon theme originally created by Niléane. I initially put it together just for myself, but I figured I might as well share it with the world in case anyone else wanted to use this version. To say the response has been overwhelming would be an understatement. It is already getting a ton of traction on Mastodon, hitting the trending tab on mastodon.social, and so many people seem genuinely happy that someone plans to maintain a version of it, at least for a while.
If I'm being completely honest, it is actually a bit of a strange feeling. All of the other projects I have released so far have been built from scratch, but this is different. This is me taking over, to some extent, a brilliant, well known project created by someone else. I have done comparatively very little work on it so far, yet I have received an incredible outpouring of appreciation and excitement.
In a way, this situation is simply the nature of open source software, and it happens all the time. Most of these projects are completely unfunded, and they require a massive amount of effort to maintain. In most cases, they do not offer much of a financial return for your time, so it is common for another developer to eventually pick up a project and keep working on it when the original creator no longer has the time or interest to keep at it. A great example of this is the app Thaw, which is a fork of the app Ice. It was a very similar situation where the original creator made something incredibly cool, stopped maintaining it, and someone else stepped in to create their own version to keep it alive. Side note, I use Thaw on my Mac to tame my menu bar and it's great.
Still, it is hard to shake a certain sense of imposter syndrome. I don't feel like I deserve any credit here. I am effectively serving up what is mostly the same beautiful theme that Niléane made, just under my own name. That is something I am going to have to work through, and I want to be incredibly clear from the start that this is not my baby, I'm just doing what I can with it.
At the same time, there is a clear hunger among people using Tangerine UI today to have a reliable place they can go to keep getting the same great experience they have enjoyed for years. With that in mind, I want to clarify one thing from my announcement earlier today, and it's based on the feedback I've received so far. I intend to maintain this fork of the project for a good amount of time, and I want it to be a stable, trustworthy place for people who want to use it on their own instances. I was worried about looking like I was stepping on toes or taking something that wasn't mine and presenting it as my own. That does not seem to have been the response, which is a relief. The response has actually been, "please keep doing this."
I plan to keep the documentation very clear about its origins because Niléane deserves all the credit here. However, I will also begin updating some of the documentation and branding to make it clear that this is an active, reliable project that people can trust (the current README, for example, is almost apologetic for existing 😅).
That is what I will be working toward next. If you have any suggestions or run into any bugs, please feel free to let me know on Mastodon. Since this is open source, you are also more than welcome to submit a pull request. I will happily review it and add it to the official project.
Oh, and Younis wins the day on reactions to this:
> New Granite theme
Babe wake up, they made Tangerine UI for men
2026-06-24 23:00:00
Ben Thompson: My Vibe Coding Adventure, The App and the Experience, Ten Takeaways
There are, to be clear, a ton of home inventory apps. A lot of them, however, are made for a single person or are way too complicated or don’t use obvious AI affordances; the new breed of AI-centric apps, meanwhile, trust AI too much, promising to identify objects from a picture of a room and getting half of them wrong (if lucky!). In truth, however, I didn’t really do a deep dive on what was out there: I knew that AI afforded the opportunity to build exactly what I wanted — and no more!
This hits on a couple things I think are very relevant. First is the fundamental draw of developing your own software, which is to create exactly what you need and nothing more. Second, and related, is the fundamental fact that as software gets popular and more people want to use it, the more features it's going to accumulate.
1Password recently updated their pricing, and to justify the increase, they listed out all the things they've added recently that they think brings more value. A common retort to that announcement was that none of those features were used personally by a lot of individuals who got that email. Yes, it's great that they added functionality, but if the product was literally the same as what it was two years ago, a lot of people would be just as happy. Of course, 1Password didn't add these features for nothing. There were customers who wanted that, and even if they are an extreme minority, as you try to solve for everybody, you inevitably have feature bloat as you try to solve every use case. Take AI out of the picture entirely, and software development has always had the appeal of allowing people who are able to do it to create exactly the software that works for them.
I’m extremely excited about an entirely new avenue for hackers and makers. I remember being in high school and college and spinning quaint business plans about building websites for small businesses and whatnot; after all, I knew my way around GeoCities! I can imagine an entirely new generation of mini-entrepreneurs building little custom apps for friends and family, and that delights me. I also love the fact that owning your own hardware and controlling your own networking is clearly the best way to benefit from this stuff: so much tech stuff was becoming appliance-like that it felt like my generation was going to be the only one that actually understood how stuff worked; we’re back in a world where the greatest benefit will accrue to those who like to tinker.
Maybe I'm being too Pollyanna-ish here, but this concept really resonates with me. I'm an elder millennial, which means I was introduced to the internet as a child, and I really got going on it when I was a young teenager. There was no App Store back then. There was no concept that there's an app for that. A lot of stuff you had to do on your own, and a lot of that early internet world was about customization and personalization. There were millions of people who would not at all call themselves developers or even nerds necessarily who learned HTML on websites such as GeoCities. They did it to create fan sites for whatever bands they liked or to customize their MySpace homepage.
The App Store era has really pushed us into a world where learning these basic skills are not required. "There's an app for that." There's a centralized service that just does this for you and probably has a better user experience than what you could create yourself. Everything's closed source. Everything's configured how someone else wants it to be configured.
However, AI coding agents have made it far easier for more people to start building, and it's creating very satisfying experiences for millions of people who had never done this before. Some will mock these new developers for not understanding authentication or security or data handling and all the many things that come along with developing software. But you know what? These people may not be experts yet, but they're learning things they literally never would have thought about otherwise.
I think there's something to be said for the fact that a lot of amateurish and insecure software is being deployed today, and that's definitely a problem that needs to be mitigated. But I don't necessarily think it's just the way this technology has come up. We have an enormous number of new developers entering the space at the same time, and companies have made it trivially easy for these people to deploy code that is immediately available to the whole world.
But that said, it's been heartening seeing people reverse engineer things and build weird little things that they never would have done before. I guess they'd be scrolling TikTok instead.
2026-06-24 20:37:06
In 2023, Niléane created Tangerine UI, and it is 100% the best UI for Mastodon out there, and honestly, I think it should have been made the default theme by now.
That's why I was sad to hear that she was no longer maintaining the project last week. It can be a lot of time and effort to maintain something like this, so I definitely appreciate the desire to remove the burden of maintaining it from her life.
However, I still use Mastodon on the web, and I didn't want to have the theme start to break in new and interesting ways as new versions of Mastodon came out. I'm on mastodon.social, which is running Mastodon 4.6, which this theme does not support. While it mostly works fine, there are a few little bugs here and there.
I have no idea how much I'm going to do here long term, but Tangerine Neue is my fork of Tangerine UI. Here's what you need to know.
Mastodon 4.6 is the minimum supported Mastodon version. If your instance has not updated to 4.6 yet, you shouldn't adopt this fork yet. Mastodon 4.7 is currently in alpha and everything works so far there as well, and I anticipated working whenever that officially releases.
I've added a new granite theme on top of the four color themes that were there previously. I know this won't beat everyone's taste, but I think it's a slick new option.
Tangerine UI already did a pretty good job with accessibility standards. However, I did make a couple of tweaks to make the default contrast a little stronger. There is also some custom styling for users who have high contrast mode enabled. These high contrast options engage whether you have high contrast set on your device settings or via Mastodon's account settings.
Tangerine UI also did this cool thing where specific keywords in trending hashtags would get custom icons next to them (music note, film, Pride, etc), and I've added a few more keywords to the mix, which should let you see these custom icons a bit more often.
On the development front, which is mostly interesting just to me, I made some changes to the build process in an attempt to reduce duplicated code and avoid any errors across the five different color themes. Instead of maintaining each theme individually, there's now a template file that I can edit and a build process that generates the five variants for each color scheme. The project itself has more code than before, but the code that I actually work on in the project has been reduced by about 80%.
As I stated at the top of this blog post, and I try to make clear in the README on GitHub, this project is very modest in nature, and I don't necessarily anticipate being the torchbearer for Tangerine UI going forward. It's a very popular project, so I suspect others will have forks they share as well, and they may do a better job than I can long-term maintaining them.
However, I was making this for myself and figured why not share it with everyone, and if people like it, wonderful!
Again, shout out to Niléane for creating this amazing theme and maintaining it for three years. She's truly one of the GOATs of Mastodon.
2026-06-24 05:48:13
Jason Schreier: Studios in Microsoft’s Xbox Division Brace for Closures
Several studios in Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox gaming division, including Montreal-based Compulsion Games and San Francisco-based Double Fine, are in active negotiations to spin off as they try to thwart closure, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.
Cambridge, England-based Ninja Theory, the maker of Hellblade, is also in conversations with Xbox, as are several other studios across the portfolio that are at risk of being shuttered.
8 years ago, Microsoft announced their 5 new new Xbox Game Studios (Playground Games, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, Compulsion Games, The Initiative), and it was a big deal. It showed that the company was listening to its fans and was acquiring enormous amounts of talented game developers, which they promised to help flourish under their leadership. Some studios were meant to make huge blockbusters, while others were expected to make smaller games that would fill out the Game Pass library as well as bring them accolades. It's literally the movie studio model where some movies are meant to make a billion dollars, while others won't make a ton of money, but will help with their reputation. And if you have enough of those, they can make a lot of money together.
Sadly, things have not gone great. I'll let the Xbox Game Studios Wikipedia page do most of the talking, but as of today, there are 14 active studios, 5 that have been sold off, and 17 of them have been closed or consolidated into other studios. And as Jason Schreier reports, at least 4 of those 14 active studios are currently figuring out if they're going to get sold or shut down entirely. And we haven't even gotten into the studios under Bethesda, such as Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, which had stories histories and recent successes, only to be shut down unceremoniously.
I'm not saying we need to bar Microsoft from acquiring any more studios, but every time they announce they've acquired one, I get very nervous for them.