MacStories Weekly: Issue 534

Apple Investigating Options for Extending Web Content Under iPhone Duo’s Safari Controls

Jen Simmons, writing at the official WebKit blog: Safari 27.1 does bring one change to users. Now, when someone holds iPhone Duo partially folded like a book while looking at a PDF on the web, Safari...

A Day with the iPhone Duo: First Impressions

I spent Wednesday in New York, interviewing developers about their iPhone Duo apps. It was like a little slice of WWDC dropped among Manhattan's skyscrapers, which was wonderful. There's nothing I...

Building for iPhone Duo, in App Developers’ Own Words

I spent yesterday in New York City interviewing developers about their iPhone Duo apps and the experience of building for such a new and different device. The depth and breadth of developers Apple...

iPhone Duo Review Roundup: Great Hinge, Messy Apps, and Everybody Misses Face ID

iPhone Duo reviews are out today, and while I was hoping that this year I’d get to review this hybrid device under embargo, it hasn’t happened (I hope it will, someday!). I’ve spent the past few...

Perplexity Computer’s Local-First Approach to Agents

Today, Perplexity announced a local-first mode for Computer where the model and agent work entirely on your Mac whether you're online or not, sending data to the cloud only with the user's approval....

Apple Announces October 28 “Pro and Tell” Event

In a post by Greg Joswiak on X, Apple has said it will hold an ‘Pro and Tell’ in Los Angeles, California on Wednesday, October 28 at 10:00 am Pacific. Judging from the 'Pro' in the tagline, I...

ChatGPT Dots Gain Widget and New Shortcuts Actions

Late Friday, OpenAI updated the ChatGPT app on iOS and iPadOS with a new widget for your Dot and Shortcuts actions that let you control it three ways. The implementation is really well done and adds...

MacStories Weekly: Issue 533

Meta Releases Muse Spark Open, an Over 800 Billion Parameter Model That Can Run Locally on Multiple...

Meta just released the weights for Muse Spark Open, a multimodal large language model with a mixture-of-experts architecture. It has over 800 billion parameters in total, with 40 billion active per...

Why Aren’t AI Labs’ Apps Better?

Ben Davis (co-host of one of my favorite new podcasts this year, Nerd Snipe) has a fascinating take on a question I’ve seen many in the Apple community ponder as well: if these frontier models are so...

HomeView Points to Siri AI as the Next Developer Platform

Yesterday, Wired reported that third-party apps with CarPlay functionality would be available on Apple's new HomeView device. That struck me as odd. I was expecting, and I think many others were at...

Apple Teams Up with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric to Offer the Apple Home Collection

Apple revealed today that it has partnered with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric on the Apple Home Collection, a range of smart home products including sensors, thermostats, cameras, and a smart...