512 Pixels

Mark Gurman has good news for Apple Store visitors:

In many stores, Apple will replace the video walls with dedicated Genius Bars, marking a return to a familiar element from an earlier era. The design resembles the Genius Bars of the past but with an all-wood look. There will be two counter heights for accessibility, while the wall behind the bar will include storage drawers and large posters highlighting new products.

The new Genius Bars and Avenue bays will be designed to mesh with existing stores and look fully integrated — as if they had been part of the original design.

Apple has been tinkering with this for a little while in select stores, and it is good to see that the company is considering rolling it out more broadly.

For a decade, Apple’s changes to its stores have made them more confusing and chaotic. This is a step in the right direction.

Something remarkable happened over at Relay’s campaign for St. Jude.

We have now raised more than $5 million for St. Jude since we started this project in 2019.

If you had told me back then that this would be possible, I would not have believed you. The Relay community has proven me wrong, and I’m so thankful for it. Let’s keep the party going.

This is Relay’s dent in the universe.

David Smith:

The eve of iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders seems like a good time to look back at the iPhone 17 family’s adoption. Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith.

Generally, they followed the usual adoption pattern and overall did very well, ending at around 20% of total usage.

With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison, the 16 Plus ended its first year at around 1.4% (vs. the Air’s 0.3%).

The graph is pretty pretty pretty pretty rough for those of us who love the iPhone Air:

Widgetsmith is huge and is much more representative of real-world performance than apps written for a nerdier audience. I suspect the overall sales of these phones look a lot like this chart.

I believe we’ll see an update to the Air in the spring, with the same rear camera system as found on the iPhone Duo. Past that? I think Apple may pull the plug.

This is one of my favorite pages across Apple’s various websites. I mean, just look at this drawing of the iPhone 17 Pro:

In the shadow of Apple’s Surprise and Shine event, we grade our predictions and talk through the news.

Many picks were made. One Chairman will be named.

Who will win? Who will fold?

Ahhh, the Duo-ality of the Rickies!

Kate Matthews has an on-going project that I just love:

I’ve been sketching size comparisons for the new iPhone models since 2017, so in 2026 I’m celebrating ten years of iPhone size sketches!

This is just a sample of what awaits you:

Well, this little Easter Egg in Apple’s 27 OSes is fun. If you go into Settings → Appearance → Liquid Glass and scroll down far enough in the example content, an old friend appears:

This 3D version of Clarus can also be found within macOS 27 Golden Gate:

My thanks to Federico Viticci for sending this my way!

If you have an iPhone, you’ll want to check these out.

Thankfully, there’s some time between now and when the iPhone Duo ships next month.

Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

The new starting prices for the three models now look like this:

• iPhone 16: $799 (+$100)
• iPhone 17e: $699 (+$100)
• iPhone 17: $899 (+$100)
• iPhone Air: $1099 (+$100)

So that’s a $100 price hike on all four existing models in Apple’s iPhone lineup. With the debut of the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, Apple has discontinued the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max.

I was surprised that the new 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max saw only a $100 increase.

If you have tried moving entries from Day One to Apple’s Journal app en masse, you have no doubt hit a wall. Journal has no AppleScript support, no public API, and very limited Shortcuts support.

I assumed this would remain unsolved until Apple created an importer for Journal, but then I saw Brian Stucki link to this project on GitHub.

I made an extra backup of my Day One data and then threw nearly 3,000 Day One posts at it, and the CLI just worked.

I don’t know if everything moved perfectly, and Journal is a very simple application when compared to Day One, but this is by far the best tool I have seen for this job yet.

Sam Gold on Mastodon, writing about the one version of OS X that allowed a user to put something to the left of the Finder icon in the Dock:

[In] Lion DP1, you could set defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-left-of-finder -bool YES and get this.

that first Lion beta build is absolutely chock full of experimental UI behind flags.

This makes me feel weird inside.

Usually, there isn’t much news in August, but this year we got new desktop Macs and Tim Cook’s last day as CEO. I’ve added both to the Apple History Calendar.