posts

Tim Cook on X (gross), about iPhones being used on the Artemis II mission:

Congratulations to Artemis II on a successful mission! You captured the wonders of space and our planet beautifully, taking iPhone photography to new heights, and we’re grateful you shared it with the world. Your work continues to inspire us all to think different. Welcome home!

Joz chimed in on X (gross) as well:

Welcome home to the Artemis II crew! Honored that NASA astronauts brought iPhone to space with them. One small step for iPhone. One giant leap for space selfies.

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Stephen Clark at Ars:

Slamming into the atmosphere at more than 30 times the speed of sound, NASA’s Orion spacecraft blazed a trail over the Pacific Ocean on Friday, returning home with four astronauts and safely capping humanity’s first voyage to the Moon in nearly 54 years.

Temperatures outside the capsule built up to some 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as a sheath of plasma enveloped the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity, and its four long-distance travelers, temporarily blocking radio signals the Moon ship and Mission Control in Houston. Flying southwest to northeast, the spacecraft steered toward a splashdown zone southwest of San Diego, where a US Navy recovery ship held position to await the crew’s homecoming. Ground teams regained communications with Orion commander Reid Wiseman after a six-minute blackout.

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I like to think I’m pretty knowledgeable when it comes to the weirdest corners of Apple history, but Cody Bromley’s recent blog post on a Final Cut Pro taught me I still have plenty to learn:

On the Macintosh episode of Version History, David Pierce and Nilay Patel had a lot of fun riffing about Mr. Macintosh, Steve Jobs’s obscure concept for a digital cryptid who lives in your computer.

About 15 years later, Apple actually shipped something very similar, except instead of a mysterious little man it was a yak named Bruce.

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This week on the show, Myke and I take on Nilay Patel and David Pierce about the top 50 Apple products and then dream of going to the moon.

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xAI, on X:

xAI is committed to building a state-of-the-art water recycling plant in Memphis. This plant will protect billions of gallons of water each year.

The team is currently prioritizing other more immediate projects at the site but our plans to build the water plant have not changed.

I certainly hope so.

Folks in Memphis responded strongly to yesterday’s news that the water treatment plant was on hold. xAI has very little credibility in the eyes of a lot of Memphians. The company not explaining what “other more immediate projects” have taken priority hasn’t helped.

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Part of xAI’s deal with the city of Memphis included an $80 million greywater facility designed to reduce the amount of water the company needs for cooling its data centers. The Mid-South sits atop the Memphis Sand Aquifer that provides us with some of the very best water in the country. It is our best natural resource by far, and one that many people have worked hard to protect.

Ground was broken on the plant in October, but as of today, work has stopped. Samuel Hardiman at The Daily Memphian broke the news:

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Tim Hardwick:

Apple’s first foldable iPhone may not carry the speculative media-derived “Fold” branding after all, according to Chinese leaker Digital Chat Station.

In a new post on Weibo, the oft-accurate leaker claimed that Apple’s book-style foldable could launch as the “iPhone Ultra.” Meanwhile, domestic Chinese manufacturers are allegedly deciding whether to follow Apple’s lead by tentatively branding their own upcoming foldables as “Ultra” models, but likely with a lighter price tag – Apple’s version is expected to cost between $2,000 and $2,500.

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NASA is uploading a bunch of Artemis II photos to Flickr. This one, named Earthset, is a throwback to Apollo 8 in the best possible way:

Don’t miss this image of the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun. We live in an amazing universe.

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Eric Lagatta, USA TODAY:

Before etching their names in spaceflight history, the four Artemis II astronauts received some posthumous words of encouragement from one of NASA’s greats.

Jim Lovell, who flew on two Apollo-era missions in 1968 and 1970, recorded a message for the astronauts before his death in 2025. They heard it before they became the first humans to fly near the moon in more than 50 years.

On Monday, April 6, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover of NASA, as well as Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, flew by the moon in a mission similar to the Apollo 8 flyby, of which Lovell was a part. And in a bit of serendipity, it wasn’t long before a nearly seven-hour period of lunar observations began that the Artemis II crew broke one of Lovell’s own records: surpassing the distance from Earth that the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission reached under Lovell’s command.

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For the last couple of years, I have used Apple’s Reminders app, but over the last few months, it has become clear I needed something with planned dates to better map out future work. Last fall, OmniFocus 4.7 shipped with just that feature, so after years away, I have returned to the venerable application.

When using Reminders, I was also using InstaRemind to add tasks quickly using natural language processing. OmniFocus’ Quick Entry tool is pretty great, but I have found it to be error-prone as you have to tab between multiple fields to enter a task with metadata such as a project, due date, etc:

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What a contrast to what someone else said.

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Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac about the on-going challenges of buying a Mac Studio:

If you order an M3 Ultra Mac Studio with the only remaining RAM upgrade today,¹ Apple says it will arrive in four to five months.

That means the 256GB RAM option ordered in April arrives in August or September if the shipping estimate tracks.

It’s not just the Mac Studio; it’s easy to build a Mac mini that won’t ship until August. That is bad news if you need a new Mac desktop on short notice. These long delays are not impacting all Macs, though, as the iMac and notebooks seem to all have much better shipping dates.

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