Steven Levy (MacRumors): We are here to discuss Cook’s big move in this high-stakes environment: the impending release of Apple Intelligence, the company’s first significant offering in the white-hot field of generative AI. Some consider it belated. All year, Apple’s competitors have been gaining buzz, dazzling investors, and dominating the news cycle with their chatbots, […]

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg:

Apple is now working on a major effort to support third-party hand controllers in the device’s visionOS software and has teamed up with Sony Group Corp. to make it happen. Apple approached Sony earlier this year, and the duo agreed to work together on launching support for the PlayStation VR2’s hand controllers on the Vision Pro. Inside Sony, the work has been a monthslong undertaking, I’m told. And Apple has discussed the plan with third-party developers, asking them if they’d integrate support into their games. [...]

One hiccup is that Sony doesn’t currently sell its VR hand controllers as a standalone accessory. The company would need to decouple the equipment from its own headset and kick off operations to produce and ship the accessory on its own. As part of the arrangement, Sony would sell the controllers at Apple’s online and retail stores, which already offer PS5 versions.

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired frequent DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8,000 for popcorn. Or, imagine you got on a plane and they told you that seatbelts were only available in first class. Your sense of outraged injustice would probably be something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with the dreaded SSO tax — the practice of charging an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On, often by making it part of a product’s “enterprise tier”. The jump in price can be astonishing — one CRM charges over 5000% more for the tier with SSO. At those prices, only very large companies can afford to pay for SSO. But the problem is that companies of all sizes need it.

Until outraged customers can shame vendors into getting rid of the tax, many businesses have to figure out how to live without SSO. For them, the best route is likely to be a password manager, which also reduces weak and re-used credentials, and enables secure sharing across teams. And a password manager is likely a good investment anyway, for apps that aren’t integrated with SSO. To learn more about the past, present, and future of the SSO tax, read 1Password’s full blog post.

While there is no subscription offering for Daring Fireball (never say never again), I am reminded this week to remind you that, if you enjoy podcasts, you should subscribe to Dithering, the twice-weekly 15-minutes-on-the-button podcast I do with Ben Thompson. Dithering as a standalone subscription costs just $7/month or $70/year. People who try Dithering seem to love it, too — we have remarkably little churn.

Recording the show often helps me coagulate loose ideas into fully-formed thoughts. Both my Tuesday column on Intel’s decline and today’s on using generative AI for research were inspired by our discussion on the show the night before. I toss a lot of takes out on Dithering that never make it here, though. If you’re on the fence, subscribe for a month and you’re only out $7 — but I bet you’ll stick around. Trust me. And thanks to everyone who’s already subscribed.

Late-breaking candidate for best new font of 2024.