2025-07-19 05:00:00
Joe Rossignol for MacRumors: Apple Sues Jon Prosser Over iOS 26 Leaks
Apple's complaint outlines what it claims is the series of events that led to the leaks, which centered around a development iPhone in the possession of Ramacciotti's friend and Apple employee Ethan Lipnik. According to Apple, Prosser and Ramacciotti plotted to access Lipnik's phone, acquiring his passcode and then using location-tracking to determine when he "would be gone for an extended period." Prosser reportedly offered financial compensation to Ramacciotti in return for assisting with accessing the development iPhone.Apple says Ramacciotti accessed Lipnik's development iPhone and made a FaceTime call to Prosser, showing off iOS 26 running on the development iPhone, and that Prosser recorded the call with screen capture tools. Prosser then shared those videos with others and used them to make re-created renders of iOS 26 for his videos.
This sounds like a big mess, and if what Apple alleges is true, amounts to much more than simply leaking information. Prosser denies this is what happened, so we'll see what happens next. I certainly don't know anything about this personally, and maybe this is my bias showing, but this sounds like a crazy story to make up and it sounds exactly like the sort of thing I could see Prosser doing. Time will tell.
2025-07-19 04:20:34
This Week in Videogames is a new video game publication spearheaded by YouTube's Ralph Panebianco (aka SkillUp). From their about us page:
We believe in a no-nonsense approach to videogame coverage that respects your time and intelligence. News and announcements should be curated and concise. Reviews and long-form writing should be insightful and a pleasure to read.
I hope the site is successful, and my initial impressions are that the content lives up to these standards. Like, here's a news story about layoffs at a studio that just released a very successful game (what else is new in the video games industry?):
Clean, quick, and to the point! It's a helpful reminder that news stories don't have to be 1,000 words just to take up space and appease the SEO gods.
The site is free for most content, but there is a $10/month subscription (with a 7 day free trial) if you're so inclined.
2025-07-19 03:59:34
Brian Steinberg: CBS to Cancel ‘Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ Citing ‘Financial Decision’
“We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable and will retire ‘The Late Show’ franchise” in May of 2026, CBS executives said in a statement. “We are proud that Stephen called CBS home. He and the broadcast will be remembered in the pantheon of greats that graced late night television. This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
My first reaction to hearing this news was surprise, but it started to make a little more sense when I head it was the show ending, not that Colbert (who is routinely the most-viewed late night host) was getting the boot to make room for someone else. Obviously late night shows aren't what they used to be, and I would put money on their audience getting older on average every year.
But just because I wasn't surprised to see CBS potentially giving up on the format, that doesn't mean I think it's the right decision. Colbert is a big name and a great comedic talent, so it's a shame to just give up. Obviously YouTube channels and podcasts have taken over some of the jobs that late night shows had done for years, but Colbert's YouTube game is pretty strong. The show has 10 million subscribers and his monologues average about 2 million views within a day or two of premiering on YouTube (just a couple hours after airing on CBS).
Anyway, the Variety article also mentions this:
Colbert will next year wind up a colorful run. When he took over “Late Show” in 2015, he had to navigate a new role. He was no longer the bloviating conservative character he portrayed on Comedy Central. He had to instead find ways to be his authentic self, even though he had not revealed such a persona to the public in the past.
It's hard to remember, but back in 2015 when he was announced as the new host, basically no one had seen him be anything besides his character on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
2025-07-18 08:00:40
So I installed Cyberpunk 2077 on my 2024 M4 Pro MacBook Pro (at no extra cost, since I've owned the Steam version forever), and gave it a go. I expressed a little disappointment on social media about the expected performance, and today I'm here to say that actually, it's decent performance, but at the cost of one major element.
I just used the "for this Mac" settings that are set by default, which are detailed in screenshots below, but let me summarize the headline things:
First, I ran the in-game benchmark (which is a quite good representation of what you'll get in the actual game, in my experience) on the completely default settings.
This is solid! 48fps isn't the best in the world, but that is what the game sets vsync to by default, so the fact it held almost perfectly there the whole time is good, and with a variable refresh rate display like mine, it felt perfectly smooth enough to play. Good news!
I was curious, so I enabled frame generation and ran the benchmark again. This is AMD's frame gen, so it's not as good as NVIDIA's, but it was worth a shot.
Now that's what I'm talking about! An average of 119fps is very good.
Finally, how about ray tracing (with frame generation enabled)? I've got the highest end M4 Pro variant, so it's not the top of the line, and I didn't bother trying path tracing.
68fps average is still quite good, although for reasons I'll get into in a second, I would not play this way.
Here's a 12-minute clip of me playing the very early part of the game using the default "for my Mac" settings, frame generation on, and ray tracing off.
The game runs nicely and I'd actually be happy to play the game on my Mac, but there is one major limitation on the default M4 Pro settings, and that's resolution. As I mentioned in the settings overview, the output resolution is 1080p with upscaling enabled. The MetalFX upscaling lets the game "actually" run at down to 50% resolution, which is 540p.
Now, I recently wrote about how I'm a big fan of tech like upscaling and frame generation when they're done well, but one thing that's important to note about these technologies is that they perform better the higher the base render is able to achieve. In the case of Doom The Dark Ages, like I was talking about in that piece, that was upscaling about 1800p up to 4k. While MetalFX actually does a pretty decent job with upscaling, Cyberpunk is rendering a 540-900p image, upscaling it to 1080p, and presenting on a 4k. This means I get a better image than native 540p, but it's certainly not what anyone would consider "crisp".
Obviously, higher end Macs will perform better, and this is a laptop this is running on, so don't take this as a scathing review, it's just a matter of keeping expectations in check. My impression is that the Apple silicon CPU is humming along great, and likely isn't even being pushed too hard, but the GPU power is not able to render this world at a high resolution.
But all is not lost, the beauty of PC gaming is you can tweak things to your liking! 1080p just won't fly for me, so I boosted the resolution just just under 4K, dropped the visual settings to medium across the board, and was able to get a bit over 70fps in the benchmark.
For fun, I boosted the game up on my PC as well to see what I got there. For fun, I started with a similar 1080p (with upscaling) benchmark, matching the Mac runs above. This included path tracing and all settings to ultra rather than high, and I was getting 153fps.
To better match what I'd actually play at, I bumped the resolution to 4K, turned path tracking off (but left ray tracing), and in this case turned off frame generation.
55fps is perfectly playable on a variable refresh rate display, but I do actually play for frame generation and it hovers around 100fps in-game.
You can see the specs in the screenshots, but this is a decidedly good, but not cutting edge PC. The NVIDIA GPU is the last generation, mid-range card and while it's pretty amazing, it's certainly not the best that money can buy. I don't bring this up to flex, but to provide context for the gaming market Apple is trying to get its foot into.
All that said, it's cool that this game is on the Mac and I hope it lets more people give it a shot. It's not going to be the full, high-end PC experience, but it seems like a perfectly decent way to play.
2025-07-16 20:49:32
I was watching this video about a developer who was skeptical about LLM-assisted coding, but gave it a real shot over a month. He doesn’t plan on completely giving into the “vibes” or anything, but his opinion of how this sort of development works and what it can and can’t do have evolved quite a bit from his first impressions.
For the record, I think LLMs are pretty good for a bunch of things, but it wasn’t until I started using them for code in December of last year when I truly had my mind blown. The tools have only gotten better since then.
I wanted to reference this video because a lot of the developers I've seen on social media who complain about LLM coding being terrible tend to imply they've spent 10 minutes using something like Cursor or Claude Code, it didn't do exactly what they wanted, and they took to social media to complain. Imagine if I opened up VS Code, used it for 10 minutes to try and write a Python script, and declared it useless because I couldn't get a working script going in that time. No, I haven't taken any time to learn Python or macOS automation, why do you ask?
I bring this up because I genuinely think there's something meaningful here with LLM-powered engineering, and I think that just like add engineering tools, you need to learn how to use it before you can effectively use it or provide insightful commentary on its merits.
2025-07-16 09:16:28
Jordan Moreau: Emmy Nominations 2025: ‘Severance’ Leads All Shows With 27 Nods, ‘The Penguin,’ ‘The Studio’ and ‘White Lotus’ Close Behind
“Severance,” which scored 27 noms, and “The Studio,” which landed 23 noms, were undeniable. In particular, “The Studio” has now earned the most comedy nominations in a single year, ever — tying Season 3 of “The Bear,” which earned 23 nods in 2024 (winning 11, which also was a record for most Primetime Emmys won by a comedy series in a single year).
Listen, I was a pretty harsh critic of Apple TV+ shows when it launch a few years ago, but they've gotten much better since then and the lineup is pretty solid these days. I still think there's a weird cohort who loves anything and everything on Apple TV+ as if it were the greatest art ever made, but listen, Severance and The Studio are positively great and they deserve to be recognized.