More on Apple Product Drawings:

Dr. Drang, bouncing off my recent post on Apple’s dimensional drawings:

When I zoomed in on Stephen’s page, I was initially confused, but then I realized what seemed odd to me. You see, I’ve spent an awful lot of the past 40 years looking at engineering drawings, and I can’t think of any that looked like this. That’s because the drawings I’m used to are for making the depicted product, but the drawings Apple’s offering up here aren’t for that. These are for others—not Apple and not its suppliers—to use for making cases and other accessories. I figured it was worth a quick post on what makes a drawing like the one above so different from what I’m used to.

Source: 512 Pixels

Apple’s Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows – MacRumors:

In the demonstration video, the user asks the ChatGPT model (within the Siri app) to find emails about a specific topic, summarize their contents and action points, then send a message to a person in the user’s contacts via the Messages app. The response is then shown as logged in OpenAI’s platform web interface.
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act may have helped shape Apple’s approach here, as it requires Apple to give third parties effective access to iOS hardware and software features available to Apple’s own services, and the European Commission has specifically said this principle extends to Siri.

The “Ask…” implementation is currently limited to the ChatGPT extension in the macOS 27 Golden Gate Release Candidate (which is effectively the final version of the software set to be released later today), so Claude is not yet available. Meanwhile, Apple has not yet opened up the model delegation entitlement to third parties and it isn’t front-facing to users, but it at least shows how extensively Apple has engineered Siri for future model interoperability.

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All Hail the Genius Bar:

Mark Gurman has good news for Apple Store visitors:

In many stores, Apple will replace the video walls with dedicated Genius Bars, marking a return to a familiar element from an earlier era. The design resembles the Genius Bars of the past but with an all-wood look. There will be two counter heights for accessibility, while the wall behind the bar will include storage drawers and large posters highlighting new products.

The new Genius Bars and Avenue bays will be designed to mesh with existing stores and look fully integrated — as if they had been part of the original design.

Apple has been tinkering with this for a little while in select stores, and it is good to see that the company is considering rolling it out more broadly.

For a decade, Apple’s changes to its stores have made them more confusing and chaotic. This is a step in the right direction.

Source: 512 Pixels

I can draw now!:

I’ve confirmed this while working on user interfaces for personal tools I’ve built, illustrations for blog posts, and, more recently, my upcoming Rails World presentation. For example, even as a child, I was decent at drawing but terrible at coloring. Guess who can pick a terrific-looking color palette if you ask it?

As a programmer, I’m used to AI writing code better and faster than me by now, but this is different. I can now do things I couldn’t dream of doing before. That’s why I find it incredibly appealing to iterate on visual things using natural language. I feel in control, I enjoy the process tremendously, and I don’t see any blockers.

Source: Jorge Manrubia

A Dogcow Appears in iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate’s Liquid Glass Settings:

Well, this little Easter Egg in Apple’s 27 OSes is fun. If you go into Settings → Appearance → Liquid Glass and scroll down far enough in the example content, an old friend appears:

Download the video

This 3D version of Clarus can also be found within macOS 27 Golden Gate:

My thanks to Federico Viticci for sending this my way!

Source: 512 Pixels

John Ternus enters, with folding phones and AI watches:

In his first event video since taking over as Apple CEO, John Ternus got a cheeky introduction from his predecessor Tim Cook before boldly referencing some classic Steve Jobs moments and setting the company’s most important product on a new course.

I can’t wait to try out the iPhone Duo. As someone who spends a lot of time using an iPad, I’m seriously intrigued if it might fit in my life as a primary device. But for most people, it will be not just too expensive, but too weird. That’s fine. Apple strikes me as a company that’s willing to be patient—while making a lot of money from people who want to be out there on the cutting edge.

For everyone else, there’s the iPhone 18 Pro. And that’s as it should be.

Source: Six Colors

Frustrated By Legalities, Interior Plans Re-Org To Eliminate More Employees:

Why attempt to pivot away from the regional management model? Management in the national park service is made up of career park service professionals, not political appointees. This makes them somewhat immune to the machinations of any individual administration since they follow larger management directives approved by Congress, and enjoy the career protections typical across the civil service. Changing the structure within which those managers work is one of the only ways to eliminate their jobs, although it remains legally dubious.

Parks PAC, the first ever political action committee created to defend national parks, explains to me that this is a deliberate effort to break the park service, and then use the fact that it’s broken to attempt selling off some national parks.

“The Trump Administration wants to double down on its historically unpopular attacks on our National Park system, called ‘America’s Best Idea,’ by closing regional offices, laying off even more staff and shuttering facilities,” Parks PAC explains. “This is the plunder of our history, our culture, and our landscapes, done quietly because it could not survive being done in the open.”

The unstated goal here is to degrade management in the National Park Service to the point where its disarray can be held up as evidence that the parks no longer financially justify their existence.

And that’s part of the administration’s stated goal of privatizing operations in the big “crown jewel” parks, while selling off smaller, lesser visited units. Nationwide, the park service manages 433 individual sites, ranging from the big parks like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, on down to historic battlefields or National Historic Sites as small as individual homes.

The National Park Conservation Association warned that the $1.2 billion cut to the park service’s budget that the White House proposed last year could have forced the sale of up to 350 of those smaller sites.

Right now, the NPS operates on an appropriated annual budget of only $3.2 billion. Less than the cost of two days of Trump’s illegal war on Iran.

Selling off national parks has been an explicit and stated goal of Burgum’s tenure at DOI. Last June, he testified to Congress that selling national parks was, “on the table.”

Source: Wes Siler

Writing With Unnatural Constraints:

So too, goes my thinking, regarding the “watermarking” of AI-generated text through word choices alone. Fitting words into the watermarking pattern surely results in prose far less stilted than omitting the letter e, and surely also less stilted than rs1n’s hard-wrapped-at-75-characters-per-line Super Metroid FAQ, but it’s necessarily stilted to some degree. It’s sophistry to argue that one can write within a constraint without the constraint affecting the quality of the writing.

Source: Daring Fireball

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses:

Krebs seemingly tracked down the source: IDScan.net, an outfit that is used by car rental agencies like Hertz (seemingly where they got Krebs’s own drivers license) and marijuana dispensaries. They kept over 150 million ID card scans and lost them all in a data breach. Unreal.

Source: Daring Fireball