Better Siri is, yet again, a little farther off — BirchTree

Making a meaningfully better, LLM-enhanced Siri seems to be very tricky.

Well, probably but changing the software strategy over and over might prove to be the real culprit here.

“Today, Apple is proud to report a remarkable, record-breaking quarter, with revenue of $143.8 billion, up 16 percent from a year ago and well above our expectations,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “iPhone had its best-ever quarter driven by unprecedented demand, with all-time records across every geographic segment, and Services also achieved an all-time revenue record, up 14 percent from a year ago. We are also excited to announce that our installed base now has more than 2.5 billion active devices, which is a testament to incredible customer satisfaction for the very best products and services in the world.”

How can Apple think they are doing anything wrong with these numbers? You tell me.

Let’s Keep an Eye on Apple’s Own iOS Adoption Numbers — Daring Fireball

I presume, or at least hope, that they’ll update these numbers for iOS 26 any day now.

Apple will wait as long as the numbers look favorable. The longer it will take, the more we can assume that this year’s OSes adoption isn’t where it was in previous years.

Halide cofounder Sebastiaan de With joins Apple’s design team — 9to5Mac

Halide and Lux co-founder and designer Sebastiaan de With announced today that he is joining Apple’s human interface design team.

Woah! I’m happy for him, and I think it’s a big plus for Apple in general. I always admired his work, both in Halide and on his website.

I visited some friends this weekend and talked about Apple’s latest software updates. The general sentiment seems to be that they don’t like the updates (iOS 26 as well as the “new weird and fuzzy look”). Apple no longer delights users. 😔

iPhone 18 Pro: Leaker Reveals Alleged Size of Smaller Dynamic Island — MacRumors

The account “Ice Universe” today claimed the Dynamic Island cutout on the iPhone 18 Pro models will be approximately 35% narrower than it is on the iPhone 17 Pro models. Specifically, they said it will have a width of around 13.5mm, down from around 20.7mm, and they shared the mockup image above to show what it would look like.

When Apple eliminates the camera and sensor cutout from the display, maybe next year or the year after, what will happen with the dynamic island? My take is that the dynamic island continues to show content popping up from the top of the screen, just like before.

Intel puts consumer chip production on back burner as datacenters make a run on Xeons — The Register

If you notice PC prices creeping up over the next few months, the rising cost of memory won’t be the only reason, because on Thursday Intel said it is reallocating foundry capacity from client chips to meet surging demand for Xeon processors used in AI servers.

I wonder if Apple can manage to keep iPhone prices stable this fall with the release of the iPhone 18. They are certainly facing headwinds.

So far this year, AI and Claude Code have completely changed my plans to learn writing extensive Apple Shortcuts. In fact, I would even argue that Apple has to find a way to enable a Claude Code like experience to write Apple Shortcuts (and why not AppleScript while at it).

How long will it take Apple to fix the Apple Watch setup process involving restoring from previous backups? It’s been an issue for many people for years! My setup process when I upgraded from Series 6 to Series 8 was hindered by this issue. Same when I upgraded from Series 8 to Series 10. Either the backup found wasn’t recent, or there was no backup to restore from. Michael Tsai is one such person. Anyone at Apple is setting up a new watch? 🤔

First visit to the new Ste-Catherine Apple Store in downtown Montreal. It’s quite a different vibe than the previous store. More to come in a short article.