My final episode of Mac Power Users was released over the weekend:
David and Stephen celebrate the last seven years of Mac Power Users, reflecting on the topics, episodes, and community that make MPU so special. Then, Stephen Robles joins to accept the baton before his first episode as David’s new cohost.
I couldn’t have asked for a better way to say goodbye to my role on the show.
You know how people say there is an XKCD for everything? Number 281 has always been funny to me, given FedEx’s huge presence here:
Now the joke is on me, thanks to an ice storm that rolled through two weeks ago:
On this week’s episode of the podcast:
The guys discuss emo AI chatbots and Xcode 26.3, and Stephen tests Myke and Federico to determine which one is a true man of the people.
On Wednesday night, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman revealed that the Crew-12 and Artemis II astronauts will be allowed to bring iPhones and other modern smartphones into orbit and beyond.
“NASA astronauts will soon fly with the latest smartphones, beginning with Crew-12 and Artemis II,” Isaacman wrote on X. “We are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments for their families and share inspiring images and video with the world.”
Artemis II is going to be on the ground a little longer. After a two-day “wet dress rehearsal” test in which cryogenic propellant was loaded into the rocket, a liquid hydrogen leak and an issue with a valve crew module hatch led to the launch being scrubbed for now.
“NASA now will target March as the earliest possible launch opportunity for the flight test,” wrote Rachel H. Kraft.
Stephen Clark at Ars Technica reminds us that such issues are exactly why these tests exist:
In late 2018, David Sparks and I announced that I was joining Mac Power Users as a host. Here’s what I wrote at the time:
On this week’s episode, Katie announced that she is stepping away from the podcast almost ten years after the first episode. I will genuinely miss hearing her back and forth with David, her passion for technology and her uncanny ability to explain complex topics with ease.
Clawdbot has a new (worse) name, AirTags got an update, Camo served Apple with a lawsuit, and Sebastiaan de With has a new job. This week on the podcas t, we talk about all of these stories and more.
Michael Kranish, writing at The Washington Post ( Apple News), reflecting on the life and impact of Christa McAuliffe:
On that day four decades ago, I was standing alongside McAuliffe’s parents and friends. I was a reporter in the Boston Globe’s bureau in Concord, New Hampshire, and I was assigned to follow McAuliffe’s journey from Concord to Cape Canaveral. I visited McAuliffe in her home, flew with her son’s class to Florida and witnessed the disaster.
Bob Ebeling was anxious and angry as he drove to work on the morning of Jan. 28, 1986. He kept thinking about the space shuttle Challenger, cradled on a Florida launchpad 2,000 miles away. Ebeling knew that ice had formed there overnight and that freezing temperatures that morning made it too risky for liftoff.
“He said we are going to have a catastrophic event today,” recalled his daughter Leslie Ebeling, who, like her father, worked at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol and who was in the car in 1986 on that 30-mile drive to the company’s booster rocket complex outside Brigham City, Utah.
John Gruber is still using macOS Sequoia, but he recently came across one feature of Tahoe worth upgrading for:
But now that we’ve been poking around at column view in the Tahoe Finder, Jeff Johnson has discovered another enticing new feature. On Mac OS 26, the Finder has a new view option (accessed via View → Show View Options) to automatically resize columns to fit the longest visible filename. See Johnson’s post for screenshots of the new option in practice.
Kate Conger, Dylan Freedman, and Stuart A. Thompson at The New York Times:
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, created and then publicly shared at least 1.8 million sexualized images of women, according to separate estimates of X data by The New York Times and the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Starting in late December, users on the social media platform inundated the chatbot’s X account with requests to alter real photos of women and children to remove their clothes, put them in bikinis and pose them in sexual positions, prompting a global outcry from victims and regulators.
If everything goes to plan, NASA’s giant Space Launch System rocket will launch in early February with four astronauts strapped into the Orion capsule:
This will be the SLS’ second time to launch, after a successful test flight back in 2022. That test included an uncrewed Orion that showed unexpected damage to the capsule’s heat shield. In December 2024, NASA released a report outlining what caused the damage. The good news was that the program was ready to move forward: