Holly Bailey, writing for The Washington Post about xAI in Memphis:
In late April, hundreds of people gathered at a South Memphis high school to speak out about xAI’s turbines. Dozens of Shelby County sheriff’s deputies along with Tennessee National Guard members were there to provide security, a surprising show of force for a public health hearing.
“What do they think we are going to do?” a woman asked in the parking lot, eyeing the massive security presence.
Jason Snell has been covering Apple since all the Macs it shipped were beige boxes. This week on MPU, he joins David and me to discuss the company’s range of legal and technological issues that seem to be adding up rapidly.
This video is a great look at the xAI pollution issues here in Memphis:
Cameron Kaiser writing at Old VCR:
Of course you can run Doom on a $10,000+ Apple server running IBM AIX. Of course you can. Well, you can now.
Now, let’s go ahead and get the grumbling out of the way. No, the ANS is not running Linux or NetBSD. No, this is not a backport of NCommander’s AIX Doom, because that runs on AIX 4.3. The Apple Network Server could run no version of AIX later than 4.1.5 and there are substantial technical differences. (As it happens, the very fact it won’t run on an ANS was what prompted me to embark on this port in the first place.) And no, this is not merely an exercise in flogging a geriatric compiler into building Doom Generic, though we’ll necessarily do that as part of the conversion. There’s no AIX sound driver for ANS audio, so this port is mute, but at the end we’ll have a Doom executable that runs well on the ANS console under CDE and has no other system prerequisites. We’ll even test it on one of IBM’s PowerPC AIX laptops as well. Because we should.
Jason Snell has written a great piece on the Mac clone program:
The mid-’90s were a weird time for Apple. Microsoft and Intel dominated the computer industry so much that Apple’s tiny market share just kept shrinking, and Apple struggled to make money. You might think that allowing other companies to compete with Apple would just make things worse, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and Apple CEO Michael Spindler (who had taken over for the deposed longtime CEO John Sculley) decided to take those measures.
The Onion has nailed it when it comes to a “Made in America” iPhone:
Amidst the strain of tariffs, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced Thursday the launch of a new 7,083-piece iPhone kit. “Apple customers will have a blast soldering, polishing, and drilling as they build their very own iPhone,” Cook said in a Keynote presentation at Apple headquarters, touting the new product as an innovative, first-of-its-kind achievement and noting that the tech giant’s competitors were already scrambling to offer similar build-your-own products of their own.
This week on a very full episode of Connected:
The folks originally behind Shortcuts are back with a new app called Sky. Federico has written a preview of the new AI-powered assistant, which understands the content of your applications and windows, unlocking new types of interactions and automations.
Apple will announce its biggest ever software rebrand at WWDC, tied to operating system redesigns. Apple is moving from version numbers to years (like Windows in the 90s). The new OSs: iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, visionOS 26, tvOS 26, watchOS 26.
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Ari Weinstein and Conrad Kramer were two of the folks behind Workflow, which Apple bought in 2017 and turned into Shortcuts. The pair left Apple a couple of years ago and launched a startup named Software Applications Incorporated. Today, thanks to an exclusive story over at MacStories, we know what they’re up to. Here’s Federico:
What sets Sky apart from anything I’ve tried or seen on macOS to date is that it uses LLMs to understand which windows are open on your Mac, what’s inside them, and what actions you can perform based on those apps’ contents. It’s a lofty goal and, at a high level, it’s predicated upon two core concepts. First, Sky comes with a collection of built-in “tools” 1 for Calendar, Messages, Notes, web browsing, Finder, email, and screenshots, which allow anyone to get started and ask questions that perform actions with those apps. If you want to turn a webpage shown in Safari into an event in your calendar, or perhaps a document in Apple Notes, you can just ask in natural language out of the box.
Apple today announced the addition of iPad to Self Service Repair, providing iPad owners with access to repair manuals, genuine Apple parts, Apple Diagnostics troubleshooting sessions, tools, and rental toolkits. Beginning tomorrow, with support for iPad Air (M2 and later), iPad Pro (M4), iPad mini (A17 Pro), and iPad (A16), the launch features components including displays, batteries, cameras, and external charging ports. Today’s announcement joins the expansion of other Apple repair services that further enable customers and independent repair providers to complete out-of-warranty repairs, including new details about the Genuine Parts Distributor program.
Many classic Macs came with — or supported — displays running at 512x384 pixels, but many compact Macs, ranging from the original 1984 machine up through 1991’s Macintosh Classic II had built-in CRTs running at 512x342 pixels. That covers all black-and-white compact Macs with a 9-inch screen. The later Color Classic and Color Classic II used a 10-inch CRT at a full 512x384.
This came up when I joined John Gruber on The Talk Show. At one point in the show, I rattled off the original Mac’s resolution as being 512x384.
Stephen Hackett, proprietor of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay (purveyor of many fine podcasts), joins the show. Topics include: IO (or if you will, io), the new joint venture of OpenAI and Jony Ive’s LoveFrom; the sheer fantasy of “Made in America” iPhones; and Fortnite’s return to the US App Store.
Usually May is a pretty quiet time the world of Apple, but this year has proven to be an exception to the rule.