This week on the world’s greatest podcast, Myke and I cover a new wave of Apple hardware leaks, then share our feelings on iPhones.
Nick Heer, on Liquid Glass ⇢
Nick’s long column on Apple’s new design language is probably the best thing I’ve read on the subject. This line about the glass material switching from light to dark as content scrolls behind it really jumped out at me:
It is Apple’s clever solution to a problem Apple created.
I like a lot about Liquid Glass, but there’s no arguing that there are issues that still need work, and I think Nick is pretty fair about what those are.
Relay for St. Jude 2025: The Final Week ⇢
September is winding down in a couple days, and with it, Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. This year marks our 7th annual fundraiser for St. Jude, and as of this writing, we’re sitting just shy of $640,000 raised this year, which is incredible. I know it’s rough out there right now, which makes this number all the more meaningful to me this year.
But there’s still time to give! We’re going to shut down the campaign a week from today, on October 6th. We’ve learned that some employee-matching gifts take a little extra time to clear, so if you’re working with your employer on having them match a gift, now’s the time to follow up! This is a great way to see your money do even more good in the world.
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When you walk into the ALSAC building on St. Jude’s campus, the wall you see behind the check-in desk always catches my attention:
That quote is from St. Jude founder Danny Thomas, and perfectly encapsulates how I think about Relay’s fundraising efforts for the hospital.
I’m not a scientist, nurse, researcher, child psychologist, doctor, or social worker. I don’t know how chemo interacts with cancer cells, or how to build a microscope to do things no microscope has ever done. I can’t sequence DNA, read an MRI, or work in a pharmacy.
What I can do is tell my story and use my platform to share the wonderful news of a place where kids with cancer and other catastrophic diseases receive the best care in the world.
At St. Jude, no child is denied treatment based on race, religion or a family’s ability to pay. From the moment in 2009 when Josiah was diagnosed with a brain tumor to a checkup he had two weeks ago, I have never been billed by St. Jude.
That is a true kindness, made possible by donors around the world.
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St. Jude is expanding its mission worldwide, so kids who never step foot on St. Jude’s campus benefit from the research done there. St. Jude is shipping medication and providing training to doctors around the world, and shares it research freely.
Through fundraisers like this, we become part of that work. We work for the good, and by doing so, do the good. Please join us in our final push for this year’s campaign, in doing the most good we possibly can.
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Mac Power Users 816: iOS & iPadOS 26 ⇢
iOS and iPadOS 26 bring many changes, including Liquid Glass, updated first-party apps, and new multitasking features for iPad users. This week, the guys talk through these changes and share impressions of Apple’s latest iPhones, AirPods, and Watches.
Mr. Liss Goes to Memphis ⇢
For the second year in a row, Casey Liss joined us for the Podcastathon. He just published an amazing piece about the show and his time at St. Jude:
This was my fourth time in Memphis; it’s staring to feel — to a degree — like a home away from home. Having been on campus several times now, not a ton about St. Jude surprises me. I’ve known for many years that St. Jude is dedicated wholly and completely to curing childhood cancer. ALSAC — St. Jude’s fundraising arm — is dedicated wholly and completely to funding that mission.
What struck me this year — as I toured the Domino’s Village, as I worked with the incredible team at ALSAC, as I spoke with people on the far periphery of the Podcastathon — is that everyone gives a crap. Top-to-bottom. Inside-and-out. They really give a crap. About everything they touch.
This really crystallized in me as I toured Domino’s Village. Domino’s Village is longer-term housing right on campus at St. Jude. It gives patients and their families a home base for their time in Memphis. And it isn’t just one-bedroom apartments. Cancer affects an entire family, not just the patient. Often, that means patients, caregivers, and even siblings are making Memphis their home, for months at a time. Domino’s Village has two- and three-bedroom apartments for exactly this reason. They’re beautiful, and nicely furnished.
But it doesn’t end there.
My Interview with Coding in Public ⇢
Chris Pennington over at Coding in Public has been running a community fundraiser with Relay for St. Jude for a few years, and yesterday, we sat down to talk about my St. Jude story, and how the hospital is serving sick kids — and their families — around the world.
Speaking for our St. Jude fundraiser, we have passed $540,000 raised this year, and there are several days to go! I would love to have you join us in giving families facing childhood cancer more tomorrows.
Connected 571: Touch Bar It Out of Existence ⇢
The guys reunite to share their impressions of the iPhone 17 Pros, iPhone Air, AirPods Pro 3, and Imran Chaudhri’s current position at HP.
Federal Goverment Partners with xAI
Amrith Ramkumar at The Wall Street Journal (Apple News), writing about a new partnership between the Trump administration and his on-again, off-again bestie Elon Musk:
Under the agreement with the General Services Administration, which oversees technology procurement for the federal government, agencies will get access to models such as Grok 4 and a new fast version called Grok 4 Fast for a nominal fee of 42 cents, the GSA said in a news release Thursday.
The deal follows similar arrangements with Alphabet’s Google; the ChatGPT maker, OpenAI; and Anthropic, a model developer that has clashed with the White House. The arrangement means the government is now working with the four U.S. companies making the most-advanced AI systems. OpenAI and Anthropic agreed to provide their models for $1, while Google is charging 47 cents. Musk likes the number 42 because it is a reference to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the sci-fi novel.
Hayden Field reported on this for The Verge a couple of weeks ago, recapping just some of the controversies around xAI:
The height of Grok’s power, up to now, has been posting answers to users’ queries on X. But even in this relatively limited capacity, it’s racked up a remarkable number of controversies, often resulting from patchwork tweaks and fixed with patchwork solutions. In February, the chatbot temporarily blocked results that mention Musk or President Trump spreading misinformation. In May, it briefly went viral for constant tirades about “white genocide” in South Africa. In July, it developed a habit of searching for Musk’s opinion on hot-button topics like Israel and Palestine, immigration, and abortion before responding to questions about them. And most infamously, last month it went on an antisemitic bender — spreading stereotypes about Jewish people, praising Adolf Hitler and even going so far as to call itself “MechaHitler.”
Musk responded publicly to say the company was addressing the issue and that it happened because Grok was “too compliant to user prompts. Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially.” But the incident happened a few weeks after Musk expressed frustration that Grok was “parroting legacy media” and asked X users to contribute “divisive facts for Grok training” that were “politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true,” and a few days after a new system prompt gave Grok instructions to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased” and “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect.” Following the debacle, the prompts were tweaked to scale back Grok’s aggressive endorsement of fringe viewpoints.
The whack-a-mole approach to Grok’s guardrails concerns experts in the field, who say it’s hard enough to keep an AI system from veering into harmful behavior even when it’s designed intentionally, with some measure of safety in mind from the beginning. And if you don’t do that… then all bets are off.
The A19 Pro ⇢
Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:
One of the first things I did when I got the new iPhones into Six Colors global HQ was to get the iPhone 17 Pro Max up and running and run Geekbench 6. (I know there are a lot of Geekbench scores out there, but I like to run my own, just because.) Because I’m curious about the pace of Apple silicon innovation.
The A19 Pro chip in the iPhone 17 Pro is presumably using the next generation of CPU and GPU cores that will also appear later this year or early next year in the M5 processor, as well. So it’s not just a view into how the chips have progressed for the iPhone, but also an indication about where gains will be made in the next generation of Macs.
According to his charts, the future looks very exciting.
‘Benjamin Button Reviews macOS’ ⇢
Rakhim Davletkali has written a delightful blog post, reviewing macOS releases in reverse:
Apple’s first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface — was jarringly bad. Without much experience in desktop UX, Apple’s first OS looked like a Fisher-Price toy: heavily rounded corners, mismatched colors, inconsistent details and very low information density. Obviously, the tool was designed mostly for kids or perhaps light users or elderly people.
Credit where credit is due: Apple had listened to their users and the next version – macOS Sequoia — shipped with lots of fixes. Border radius was heavily reduced, transparent glass-like panels replaced by less transparent ones, buttons made more serious and less toyish. Most system icons made more serious, too, with focus on more detail. Overall, it seemed like the 2nd version was a giant leap from infancy to teenage years.
You have to read the whole thing.
A Transparent Tale as Old as Time
512 Pixels reader Brian sent me a screenshot they took way back on Mac OS X 10.0, showing that Apple’s current struggle with transparent user interface elements isn’t anything new:
