The M5 has landed, and Federico has thoughts on the present and future workloads it can unlock. Also: Stephen isn’t alone, Myke’s new iPhone has an unexpected accent, and Liquid Glass continues to change.
I was robbed during this week’s edition of The Quizzies. #JusticeForStephen
Steven Aquino, writing at Curb Cuts, bouncing off my post about the new Clear/Tinted toggle that appeared in this week’s betas:
Hackett notes Apple’s placement of the Liquid Glass control is surprising as he believed “a control like this would land in Accessibility.” However a logical presumption, it’s not really a hardcore accessibility feature. Here’s the thing about accessibility features, on iOS or Android or anywhere else: they’re a discrete, specialized—and admittedly esoteric—suite of settings intended to meet highly specific needs. While it’s true “accessibility is for everyone” for the most part, the majority of the options under Accessibility are decidedly opinionated in their target demographic.
Take the AssistiveTouch pointer, for instance. AssistiveTouch is itself a subset of specialized features aimed at aiding those with motor disabilities; as such, the pointer has been expressly designed to serve that greater purpose. This focus is why, as one anecdote, the response to the AssistiveTouch pointer rankled me a few years ago. Apple added it for a reason. Indeed, the company’s senior director of global accessibility policy and initiatives Sarah Herrlinger told me in an interview at the time it “isn’t your traditional pointer,” yet the iPadOS power users were so desperate for proper pointer support, many in the community appropriated the AssistiveTouch pointer and lamented how it doesn’t work like your aforementioned traditional pointer. But it wasn’t conceived to be conventional… my understanding is Apple’s Accessibility group “handed off” the AssistiveTouch functionality to the wider OS team to be further massaged into the mainstream pointer feature that exists today. I got pushback from a lot of people for explaining all of this under the notion AssistiveTouch isn’t perfect and warrants criticism… to which I still say, sure, but it isn’t meant for you and your nerdy whims.
His point that this toggle is about personal presence, and not providing a one-switch-does-it-all Accessibility settings makes a lot of sense to me. As Aquino points out, features like Reduce Transparency do much more to change the UI to make it more readable for those who need it. He goes on:
As I wrote following the WWDC keynote, I sat with Herrlinger for a few minutes after the presentation, and while I didn’t conduct a full, on the record interview, I was able to attribute to her that the Accessibility team worked “closely” with the Design team to make Liquid Glass as visually accessible as possible. Reduce Transparency will always be there if you really and truly require the extra oomph it offers, she said to me.
A bunch of folks ran around this summer claiming that Liquid Glass flew in the face of Apple’s Accessibility work, but that take never sat well with me. Apple takes this stuff really seriously.
OpenAI reportedly asked the Raine family – whose 16-year-old son Adam Raine died by suicide after prolonged conversations with ChatGPT – for a full list of attendees from the teenager’s memorial, signaling that the AI firm may try to subpoena friends and family.
OpenAI also requested “all documents relating to memorial services or events in the honor of the decedent including but not limited to any videos or photographs taken, or eulogies given,” per a document obtained by the Financial Times.
Speaking to the FT, lawyers from the Raine family described the request as “intentional harassment.”
The new information comes as the Raine family updated its lawsuit against OpenAI on Wednesday. The family first filed a wrongful death suit against OpenAI in August after alleging their son had taken his own life following conversations with the chatbot about his mental health and suicidal ideation. The updated lawsuit claims that OpenAI rushed GPT-4o’s May 2024 release by cutting safety testing due to competitive pressure.
We are coming up on five years since the first M1 Macs shipped. It was an incredible time to be a Mac user. Those first Apple silicon Macs looked like the Intel machines they replaced, but they were better in every single way.
In December 2020, John Gruber wrote:
We knew this to be true: Computers could run fast and hot, or slow and cool. For laptops in particular, the best you could hope for is a middle ground: fast enough and cool enough. But if you wanted a machine that ran really fast, it wasn’t going to run cool (and wasn’t going to last long on battery), and if you wanted a computer that ran cool (and lasted long on battery), it wasn’t going to be fast.
We knew this to be true because that was the way things were. But now, with the M1 Macs, it’s not. M1 Macs run very fast and do so while remaining very cool and lasting mind-bogglingly long on battery. It was a fundamental trade-off inherent to PC computing, and now we don’t have to make it.
Despite its Touch Bar, I immediately bought that first M1 MacBook Pro, and when the 14-inch MacBook Pro came out a year later, I moved to it.1 I’m typing these very words on my 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 Max inside. Each of these machines was faster than the one before it, outperforming my old iMac Pro and Mac Pro in new ways with every upgrade.
Apple silicon has been nothing but upside for the Mac, and yet some seem bored already. In the days since Apple announced the M5, I’ve seen and heard this sentiment more than I expected:
This is just another boring incremental upgrade.
That 👏 is 👏 the 👏 point.
Back in the PowerPC and Intel days, Macs would sometimes go years between meaningful spec bumps, as Apple waited on its partners to deliver appropriate hardware for various machines. From failing NVIDIA cards in MacBook Pros to 27-inch Intel iMacs that ran so hot the fans were audible at all times, Mac hardware wasn’t always what Apple wanted.
Of course, some of the issues with previous generations of Mac were Apple’s fault — look no further than the butterfly keyboard or the years the Mac Pro spent in the wilderness. Apple will make questionable decisions in the future, just as it has in the past.
The difference is that with Apple silicon, Apple owns and controls the primary technologies behind the products it makes, as Tim Cook has always wanted. It means that it can ship updates to its SoCs on a regular cadence, making progress in terms of both power and efficiency each time.
A predictable update schedule means that incremental updates are inevitable. Revolution then evolution is not a bad thing; it’s okay that not every release is exciting or groundbreaking. It’s how technology has worked for decades.
…but some people have short memories. Before the Apple silicon introduction, we all wanted steady, predictable progress in Mac hardware development. We wanted each product in the lineup to be updated regularly and not wither on the vine for years. For the most part, Apple has delivered. Just look at this chart of the progress Apple has made since the M1:
I don’t see anything in those charts to complain about, especially given the frequency at which most people buy new computers. That’s one reason why Apple compared the M5 to the M1 in its press release announcing the new chip. Unless you buy a new computer every year, every update you experience will be meaningful.
That’s what we wanted when Apple announced the move away from Intel, and calling it boring five years in is missing the point and downplaying the success of Apple silicon thus far.
If you go to Settings > Display and Brightness on iOS, or System Settings > Appearance on the Mac, you’ll find a new toggle that lets you swap between two looks: Clear and Tinted. Clear is the look of Liquid Glass since iOS 26 launched, while Tinted adds opacity and contrast.
Here’s how the options look on the Lock Screen and in Photos:
This toggle being in the display settings with things like Dark Mode is interesting to me. I would have thought that a control like this would land in Accessibility…
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This week on a jam-packed feedback episode of MPU, David and I discuss a bunch of listener feedback, the return of Slide Over, the state of iCloud Family Sharing, and check in on his Rivian experience.
I used iWeb back in the day to make early versions of my personal website, as well as websites for friends, before I started learning more about web development and switched to Adobe Dreamweaver. Apple only released two major updates to iWeb, with the last one arriving in the iLife ’09 package. When the company migrated its cloud services from MobileMe to iCloud, the ability to publish personal websites was removed, and iWeb was finally discontinued in 2011.
Even though Apple’s web hosting services are long gone, you can still use iWeb and save your finished site to a local folder or FTP server. The last versions were Intel-native Mac applications, so iWeb should work all the way up to macOS 10.14 Mojave, released in 2018. It can’t run in newer macOS releases because Apple ripped out support for 32-bit applications.
The web has changed dramatically since 2011, so I thought it would be a fun experiment to revisit iWeb and see how its websites hold up to modern standards. I installed iWeb 3 on my old Mac Mini running Snow Leopard and got to work.
I have wanted to do this for years, and major props to Corbin for diving deep on this project.
Since the launch of Sora 2, the system has been willing to generate video of just about any famous person doing just about anything. Over the last couple of weeks, OpenAI has been clamping down on many examples of this, but this particular one caught my eye:
In an unsigned statement on X:
The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. (King, Inc.) and OpenAI have worked together to address how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s likeness is represented in Sora generations. Some users generated disrespectful depictions of Dr. King’s image. So at King, Inc.’s request, OpenAI has paused generations depicting Dr. King as it strengthens guardrails for historical figures.
While there are strong free speech interests in depicting historical figures, OpenAI believes public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used. Authorized representatives or estate owners can request that their likeness not be used in Sora cameos.
Sam Altman, writing two weeks ago:
We have been learning quickly from how people are using Sora and taking feedback from users, rightsholders, and other interested groups. We of course spent a lot of time discussing this before launch, but now that we have a product out we can do more than just theorize.
We are going to make two changes soon (and many more to come).
First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls.
He continues:
Second, we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences. We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users. The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon. Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we we [sic] want both to be valuable.
There’s nothing like a zillion dollar company flying by the seat of its pants.
Clips has joined Music Memos and Cards in the Great Beyond, just as the M5 was announced for the MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Vision Pro.
Apple today announced M5, delivering the next big leap in AI performance and advances to nearly every aspect of the chip. Built using third-generation 3-nanometer technology, M5 introduces a next-generation 10-core GPU architecture with a Neural Accelerator in each core, enabling GPU-based AI workloads to run dramatically faster, with over 4x the peak GPU compute performance compared to M4.1 The GPU also offers enhanced graphics capabilities and third-generation ray tracing that combined deliver a graphics performance that is up to 45 percent higher than M4.1 M5 features the world’s fastest performance core, with up to a 10-core CPU made up of six efficiency cores and up to four performance cores.2 Together, they deliver up to 15 percent faster multithreaded performance over M4.1 M5 also features an improved 16-core Neural Engine, a powerful media engine, and a nearly 30 percent increase in unified memory bandwidth to 153GB/s.1 M5 brings its industry-leading power-efficient performance to the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro, allowing each device to excel in its own way. All are available for pre-order today.
“M5 ushers in the next big leap in AI performance for Apple silicon,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. “With the introduction of Neural Accelerators in the GPU, M5 delivers a huge boost to AI workloads. Combined with a big increase in graphics performance, the world’s fastest CPU core, a faster Neural Engine, and even higher unified memory bandwidth, M5 brings far more performance and capabilities to MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro.”
(I think Apple really wants us all to know how great these chips are for AI, but it’s hard to tell.)
The MacStories crew has all the details:
One thing that caught my eye in Apple’s press releases was a comparison of the new MacBook Pro to both Intel and M1 models:
The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 is a big upgrade. When compared to Intel-based systems, it delivers up to 86x faster AI performance, up to 30x faster GPU performance with ray tracing, and up to 5.5x faster CPU performance.1 M1 upgraders will experience up to 6x faster AI performance, up to 6.8x faster GPU performance with ray tracing, and up to 2x faster CPU performance.
It’s wild to see how far Apple silicon has come since the M1 launched five years ago. I can’t wait to see what the M5 Pro, M5 Max, and (maybe) the M5 Ultra will deliver when we see them, assumedly next year.
After seeing my buddies at Studio Neat launch an amazing new patch, I fell down the rabbit hole that is the NeXT logo.
Dan and Tom linked to this video, which shows Paul Rand delivering his work to Steve Jobs and his team at NeXT. I hadn’t seen this before, and boy, I wish it were longer than a mere 80 seconds in length:
Rand did powerful and authoritative work when it came to corporate logos, as reflected upon by Jobs in a 1993 interview:
I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, “No, I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people.”