Scharon Harding, Ars Technica:

Unlike with previous versions of macOS, macOS 27 Golden Gate doesn’t have a toggle for turning off Apple Intelligence. That makes disabling AI features that you may not want more difficult. It also means that the AI models necessary for running Apple Intelligence will take up space on your disk, even if you don’t use them or if you go through your settings to individually find and disable AI capabilities.

In response, a developer known as Om Lahore on GitHub last week created RemoveMacAI, a command-line tool that allows macOS 27 users to “turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27” in a way that is “fully reversible,” per the GitHub page. They said that Apple’s Intelligence models take up “about 12GB,” but the models can actually take up over 30GB, The Verge noted.

RemoveMacAI “turns off Siri, Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground, the ChatGPT extension, and all the summaries, then it deletes the models and stops macOS from downloading them again. Dictation still works because it’s a separate setting,” the developer said in a Reddit post first spotted by MacRumors.

Sounds crazy but it’s not rming files in the /System/ folder — it uses techniques that work with System Integrity Protection remaining enabled. I mean, I wouldn’t do it on a production machine, but, I don’t want to disable Apple Intelligence.

I can see the reasons why some people are frustrated that MacOS 27 Golden Gate doesn’t have built-in support for disabling this and removing the local models, though. If your Mac only has 256 or even 512 GB of storage, a dozen GB (or more) is meaningful. And there are institutional groups that have rules against AI — these places aren’t allowing Golden Gate at all until and unless Apple Intelligence can be removed. And that means not buying new Mac hardware that only runs Golden Gate.

What an apt photo, today of all days. What a gift Make Something Wonderful is.

How can B2B software be so friggin’ delicious? Early access drops 10/19. Spread the love.

OpenAI, today:

The EU AI Act requires generative AI providers to make generated text identifiable in a machine-readable way. Text watermarking and detection remain early technologies with significant limitations, and views about their benefits and responsible uses are still developing. Our phased approach reflects both the EU AI Act requirements as well as the technology’s limitations, with an emphasis on transparency about what a text watermark can and cannot tell people:

• Starting today, API customers globally will be able to opt in to text watermarking for select models. Text watermarking will remain off by default in the API.
• Over the coming weeks, we will add an invisible watermark to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text output in the European Union.
• We’re opening applications to access our text watermark detector. Access will initially be limited to approved researchers and expert organizations that can help us evaluate and improve the technology.

First, unlike Anthropic, OpenAI is only forcing this upon users in the EU, where it’s mandated by their ill-considered 2024 regulation. Second, also unlike Anthropic, OpenAI has made this available via an API so developers should be able to actually see if this adulterates text output with real-world usage.

Third, none of these companies have yet made their watermark detectors publicly accessible. I remain highly skeptical that they will work as advertised in the real world. I think this is all somewhat of a sham to claim compliance with the EU AI Act without actually providing anything that anyone can actually use in a practical way.

Our text watermarking technology, textGrain, adds an invisible statistical signal to the model’s word choices. Our detector looks for that signal to assess whether a passage contains an OpenAI watermark. More details about how textGrain works can be found in our technical report, which will be updated with additional details in the coming weeks. We also plan to make the technology available in open source so that others can build on it.

In our evaluations, textGrain matched or exceeded the performance of other approaches we tested, including SynthID for text. Even so, strong performance under ideal conditions does not guarantee reliable detection in everyday use.

SynthID-Text is the Google algorithm that Anthropic says they’re using too.

Maybe I’m all wet, but I think what they mean in that last sentence quoted above is that it only performs usefully in ideal conditions, with simplistic prompts, and will prove to be unusable in practical everyday use, especially if the user’s prompt contains instructions designed to circumvent it.

John Ternus, posting on X:

The way Steve taught us to care about every detail, every experience, every person, still guides our work today. Forever grateful.

Tim Cook, also on X (with a photo I don’t recall seeing before):

There are people who leave a mark on the world, and then there are people who change it entirely. Steve changed the world and so many lives in the process. He certainly changed my life forever. His spirit lives on in everything he created and everyone he inspired.

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring this last week, once again, at DF.

SSO is table stakes for enterprise deals, but building it into your app yourself means writing SAML controllers, parsing XML assertions, and handling IdP-specific quirks for each provider. Learn how SAML flows work, the tradeoffs between building or buying, and best practices for security, routing, and UX.

Or, skip the hassle and add SSO with WorkOS. Read their developer’s guide to learn more — everything from how SSO works to why WorkOS is the fastest way to add it.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple said:

We have identified an issue affecting a small number of iPhone 18 Pro Max users on the AT&T network that may cause a device to lose service and be unable to make calls. We released iOS 27.0.1 earlier this week and strongly encourage all iPhone 18 Pro Max users to update now, and are also issuing a carrier settings update today. These updates together are meant to help prevent this issue from occurring.

The carrier settings update for the iPhone 18 Pro Max will download automatically over the next 14 days. However, users can manually trigger the download by going to Settings, choosing General, then About.

Apple explains that the software updates will help prevent future issues for iPhone 18 Pro Max users on AT&T. The software updates will not restore service on devices that have already lost it.

Apple says that iPhone 18 Pro Max users who have already lost service will need a hardware replacement. Those users should contact Apple Support or AT&T, or visit an Apple Store or AT&T location.

As we reported this morning, iPhone 18 Pro Max users affected by this problem can’t connect to AT&T’s network for calls, texts, and data. Instead, those users see “SOS” in their iPhone’s status bar. The connectivity issues aren’t impacting every iPhone 18 Pro Max user on AT&T.

I’ve heard from a handful of DF readers about this, and the readers experiencing the problem have all found each other in various forums over the last two weeks. The following all seem to be true:

• It’s only a problem for AT&T customers. No such problems on Verizon or T-Mobile.

• It’s only the 18 Pro Max, not the regular 18 Pro. The salient fact here is that the only iPhone 18 Pro models that use Qualcomm cellular modems, rather than Apple’s own C2 modem, are 18 Pro Max devices in the U.S.. So the problem seems to be something related to the Qualcomm modem and AT&T’s network.

• It is not a problem for all 18 Pro Max devices on AT&T’s network. “A small number” is all Apple will say, but anecdotally it seems clear that it’s not most 18 Pro Max devices on AT&T. But it still seems like many. It’s not exceedingly rare.

Pretty unusual that once a device is affected and loses service, the device must be replaced. Yet, the 27.0.1 iOS update contains a fix (or fixes) that should help devices that haven’t yet lost service from losing service. I’d love to understand how a software update can prevent existing devices from being affected, but a software update cannot restore service to existing devices that have already been affected.

Something else I’m curious about is whether it’s related to AT&T customers, or AT&T’s network — are iPhone 18 Pro Maxes that are connected to MVNO carriers whose backend is provided by AT&T similarly affected? E.g. US Mobile customers on US Mobile’s “Dark Star” service? I’d love to hear from anyone who knows.

Apple Developer News, in a post titled “Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS”:

We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities into their apps for Apple products, backed by a set of controls designed to protect users’ private data. Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function properly on the Mac. Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems — including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history — without users’ full knowledge and understanding. For communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating with.

Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action. Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.

They don’t name names, but clearly this is in response to Meta Muse (cf. Jason Aten’s misadventure with Muse accessing Aten’s iMessages), Grok Bot, Claude, Dots, and the rest. This is why we can’t have nice things.

I really worry about just how much Apple is going to lock Full Disk Access down. I use it with several apps that couldn’t function properly without it, and would be severely hampered if I needed to authorize it manually every time they do something.

But before we Mac power users riot in Cupertino, we should note that we have no idea how many unsophisticated Mac users are calling Apple and queuing up at the retail store Genius Bars to complain about Muse and these other agents having run amok on their Macs, against their desires, after convincing these users to grant them access. It is a legitimate frustration for the highest-functioning users among us that the Mac has, for years, already seemed “too locked down”. But there are now around 150 million Mac users worldwide. Most of them are unsophisticated technically — a majority of them, profoundly so. Many of them have technical needs that cannot be met by the baby computer OS that is iPadOS. For a lot of them it might just be the ability to run the real version of Google’s Chrome web browser — or even the desktop version of Safari. So there are tens of millions of people who need to use a Mac to do things that cannot be done on an iPad, but who have zero understanding of what it means, say, to grant Muse permission for Full Disk Access. And then they think it is Apple’s fault that Muse is suddenly able to read their private iMessage conversations.

(Anyone out there who, say, works at an Apple retail store and can confirm whether this is an escalating support issue — one way or the other — I’d love to hear from you, confidentially.)

On iOS (and its tablet variant, iPadOS), you can say OK to every single thing an app like Muse asks for and Muse still won’t be able to read your email or end-to-end encrypted messages from iMessage or WhatsApp. There is no level of permission that grants third-party apps permission for such things. (The EU wants to force Apple to allow that under the DMA.) MacOS isn’t like that. You still need to grant apps permission for such things, but if you say OK to everything an app like Muse asks for on the Mac, you’re granting that app access to, effectively, almost everything on your startup drive. There are still some things it can’t see, but not many. A lot of non-technical Mac users do not understand this and cannot be expected to understand this. They just think, wrongly, that Apple protects them from allowing anything truly dangerous, because that’s how their iPhone (and/or iPad) works. So they just click OK to every access request from Muse and presume they’re still largely protected.

Hopefully Apple has in mind a solution to this situation that will still enable knowledgeable power users to confirm agreement to a sufficiently scary warning and put their Macs in a state similar to what we have today. I worry. What alleviates my worst fears is the knowledge that every technical user at Apple itself needs to use their Mac as the powerful Unix workstation OS that it is. Some of us need dangerously powerful tools. Most Mac users, however, do not — and don’t realize they’re using a dangerously powerful Unix workstation with a very friendly (literal) face.

In the 6th inning last night the Yankees were only ahead 2-0, and Red Sox first baseman and all-around jackass Willson Contreras hit a home run, closing it to 2-1. Contreras decided to walk around the bases. The baseball gods do not look kindly upon that sort of ostentatiously belligerent showboatery. (Especially when your team is still losing.) Contreras circled the bags after his dinger like a rooster letting you know he just banged a few hens — but at a slower pace.

In the next inning, Contreras wasn’t paying attention and his laziness allowed a Yankee to reach base after striking out on a wild pitch. That started the rally that resulted in the blowout final score.

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Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (gift link):

Apple Inc. plans to make its long-delayed push into the smart-home market on Oct. 13, marking a critical product expansion for the company under new Chief Executive Officer John Ternus. At the center of the strategy is a smart-home hub code-named J490, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple also plans to announce the first update to the HomePod mini since that device’s 2020 debut and its first new TV set-top box since 2022. [...]

The home hub will take the form of a roughly 6-inch square display, with versions that can be mounted on a wall or placed on a countertop, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the products haven’t been announced. [...]

Because the device is intended to remain stationary, it has a single FaceTime camera on the front and no rear camera. The product has microphones and speakers in its connected base. The hub is about as thick as an iPhone, and its display is surrounded by a quarter-inch, black bezel reminiscent of older iPads. It has rounded corners and no sharp edges. The device lacks a battery, so it has to be plugged in at all times, and there are no volume or power buttons.

The product comes in Apple’s standard gray aluminum finish and includes a USB-C port for power. The screen sits above a metal, round base with multiple rings of perforated speaker holes and connects to it through a polished metal arm. Users can manually tilt the display forward or backward. And the base has a rubberized bottom to help it stay on a table.

If you think that sounds like the beloved but short-lived “sunflower” iMac G4 from 2002, that’s exactly what Gurman says it resembles. As is so often the case, Gurman seems to know many details about the device, but yet doesn’t know its name or price. Presumably the speakers are good enough to serve by themselves, but how good are they? Can they be paired with HomePods to create stereo pairs?

The hub’s defining feature will be its ability to serve multiple members of a household. It is designed to recognize who is speaking to it or approaching it, and then display personalized content and provide answers based on that person’s data and accounts. When a user walks up, for example, the device will show that person’s contacts, messages, calendar appointments, notes and preferred app layout. The interface can then change automatically when another recognized household member approaches. It will also have a mode for visitors that hides personal information.

The device identifies users by their voices or through a facial-recognition system, though the latter is less reliable than Face ID on the iPhone. Users can require secondary authentication through an iPhone if they don’t want to rely solely on voice or facial recognition. The iPhone also serves as a fallback when the hub cannot identify someone correctly.

Given that Apple Watch is used as an identifier to unlock your Mac (and, says Apple, iPhone Duo), it would make sense if that worked with this device too.

Echo Wang, reporting for Reuters yesterday:

Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than ​industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.

This is a strong clear lede, but even so it falls short of expressing the true magnitude of what Anthropic represents. To wit, not that “AI” as a field will prove more profoundly transformational than industrialization, electricity, and the Internet, but that Anthropic alone will. This is not an IPO that makes sense if you consider Anthropic one among peers, even a short list placing them alongside just (say) OpenAI, Google, and Meta. It only makes sense if you believe Anthropic is on the cusp of winning a race to create a godlike super intelligence, and that first godlike super intelligence will take over the world.

You know, something exactly akin to the “rapture” events that religious cultists believe are coming.

But the cost to get there will be staggering. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years, according to the prospectus.

If you believe that they’re profitable now you’re as crazy as they are. They’ll seed stories to the press that they’re now profitable, using accounting methods they won’t define (and wouldn’t pass muster for a public company) but won’t make such claims in writing.

The prospectus details how the company has grown sharply in the last year — while also posting wider losses. Revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, even as the company lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding writedowns of various liabilities mostly tied to previous fundraising, according to the documents, reported here for the first time. [...]

Anthropic said nearly a quarter of its revenue came from two customers last year, and as part of its risk factors, warned that many of its largest clients were not locked into long-term contracts and could cut or stop spending.

I don’t think this is complicated. Their revenue is accelerating rapidly because they’re selling compute at a loss. They spent $13 billion to make $5 billion last year. Their revenue is growing rapidly, yes, but their costs are growing even faster. They’re already on the hook for half a trillion dollars on cloud computing expansion but their revenue is precariously reliant on a few big-spending whales who aren’t under contract, and commodity open source models are rapidly closing the gap. If Anthropic is losing a fortune now with $13 billion in costs how are they going to break even spending $100+ billion per year? Don’t worry, their godlike AI will figure that out?

Gary Marcus:

Anthropic’s proposed valuation is easily calculated, as -50 times 2025 losses.

The more they lose, the more they win!

Regarding my post yesterday speculating on how Apple’s October — seemingly set to be a big one — might play out, a friend asked if any or all of the new stuff might be released through Apple Newsroom announcements only. Good question. Let’s run through the rumored new hardware products:

• Apple TV hardware: I’d love to say no, but the answer is yes. I could see this coming out as a simple announcement with new specs. I really want to see Apple double-down in this space, reinvigorate it. I think watching TV on Apple TV hardware is by far the best experience out there. Yet its market share is very low. Apple TV is to the living room today what the Mac was to desktop computing in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Everyone sees it as too expensive and they have no idea why they’d actually be happier if they had one. So I hope Apple makes it a big part of a keynote/event, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
• iPad Mini: Yes, could be just a press release.
• HomePod Mini: Yes, could be just a press release.
• HomePod-type thing with a screen (maybe they will just call it “HomePad”?): No way — if this is coming, it has to be unveiled with a keynote video and some sort of media event with hands-on demos. And if they’re going to have some sort of event/show for this, they might as well unveil the above things there too.
• MacBooks with OLED touchscreens: No way could this be released only with a press release.
• M6 iMacs: Could be just a press release, but if they’re going to have some sort of event/show for the touchscreen MacBooks, why not include these at the start of that?

Desktop only, and you definitely want sound on. (Update: Now works great on mobile devices, too!)

With things like this I always start with Kottke.org. No idea why, because it’s quite possibly the last site on the entire web I’d want to see actually destroyed. (Well, second-to-last.)

“A foundry for bastard web fonts.” The default is a version of Times New Roman but every 7th glyph is replaced with one from Arial, but you can dial up whatever bastardization you want.

This is why I’m not at all worried about AI destroying the world. Look at the horrible things human beings have made.

Sancho Panza:

I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks.

Kagi, the search engine I’ve been using for a few years now, gave me the exact sort of results to Panza’s query that he was looking for.

If anyone could devise a funny way to measure battery life, it’s her.

Apple executives seemingly did very few interviews after the iPhone event three weeks ago. The best, perhaps by far, is this 11-minute video with Craig Federighi by “Donald Decodes”, a Chinese language creator. His YouTube account only has 1,100 followers (and only had 500 at the time of the video) and only one other video — presumably he’s got a big following in China. Very insightful questions about the Duo user interface — and Federighi gives very thoughtful answers. The question (and answer) about “back” swiping really gets to the heart of what makes iOS so much more cohesively designed than Android, spatially.

Glenn Fleishman:

Leaving Stolen Device Protection enabled does mean that you may have to wait an hour in some scenarios to manage aspects of your Apple Account, make changes to Face ID or Touch ID, change your device passcode, and a few other actions. But this minor inconvenience might assuage the kinds of concerns that Scott wrote in about, and make you more comfortable that your big basket of secret eggs won’t scramble.

I put off enabling Stolen Device Protection for a while after it came out, because I’m stubborn and trust myself to a degree that’s probably irrational. But when it became the default I enabled it, and haven’t once regretted it.

Jeremy Stern, in a massive and massively good profile of Mark Zuckerberg for Colossus:

Unsure of my own ability to evaluate such things, I leave Meta HQ and spend another few days in Palo Alto and San Francisco ahead of my interview with Zuckerberg, seeking out a number of MSL’s competitors and investors who agree to speak to me on background. Many of them take pleasure in what they describe as the organizational “mess” of MSL, in the people there allegedly being motivated more by money than by true belief, and in Zuckerberg as a maker of boredom-relief apps and targeted advertising, not of godlike intelligence or the singularity.

I’m inclined toward sympathy with much of what they say, though I am also irritated and want to shove them in a locker. While I am not the first to chafe at their combination of messianism, contempt for ordinary consumers, and denial that they, too, are rapacious capitalists, I am apparently the first to ask them to steelman the outcome in which Zuckerberg, in light of his long history, survives and expands. Which turns out to be simple:

AI is not, in fact, God. Instead, it does math and solves a limited set of problems humans face, and is otherwise simply useful and cool. Anthropic, and to a lesser extent OpenAI, have trouble ever accepting this fact. Zuckerberg does not. He has not spent a decade comparing his company to the Manhattan Project, and thus he is not above pushing the frontier of AI to help people book airline tickets, make dinner reservations, and edit photos. He will use it to drive down the cost of serving his users to zero, and to drive up his revenue by improving ads. He will use cash from the ad business — and his ownership of data centers, chips, and other infrastructure that Anthropic and OpenAI have to pay to rent — to undercut them on price. The potential install base for his AI is 3.6 billion people, who don’t care whether a given model is six months behind the frontier.

If AI commoditizes, then Anthropic and OpenAI go to zero, and value accrues instead at the complements Meta already dominates, like distribution, attention, personalization, and commerce. If it doesn’t commoditize, then at least he is not his competitors’ prisoner the way he’s been with Apple, and all he has to do is remain within six months of the frontier, which he’s already close to. Heads, he wins; tails, he wins.

Until last week I’d somehow never heard of Stern and never heard of Colossus (of which Stern is editor-in-chief). But on Thursday Ben Thompson published an interview with Stern at Stratechery — in the wake of this astonishingly well-written, insightful, and dare I say fair 15,000-word profile of Zuckerberg. It’s incomprehensible to me that heretofore I was unaware of Stern’s work or Colossus’s existence.

There is so much of the piece that I do not want to spoil, but I very much want to talk about. (Tummy drums!) I quoted the bit above simply because that third paragraph summarizes my own take on AI so well — along with my take on what is profoundly wrong with Anthropic in particular, and OpenAI to some degree.

Whatever your expectations are for a “long profile of Mark Zuckerberg”, Stern’s piece will surprise and delight you.