Juli Clover: Apple today provided developers with the seventh betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for testing purposes, with the updates coming a week after Apple seeded the sixth betas. The release notes are still titled “beta 6” and don’t call out any changes since beta 5. Joe Rossignol: The seventh developer betas of […]

Bitrig (tweet): Turn your ideas into apps in seconds, just by chatting with AI. No programming languages to learn, no complex tools to set up.[…]Bitrig speaks Swift and SwiftUI. Your apps are built with the same technologies Apple uses, and can tap into powerful features like your health data, notifications, and Home Screen widgets.[…]It’s always […]

My thanks to Dekáf Coffee Roasters for sponsoring last week at DF. Dekáf believes that people who drink coffee for its flavor are the true connoisseurs. While other roasters treat decaf as a side project, they’ve made it their entire mission. They’re dedicated to creating exceptional decaffeinated coffee that stands toe-to-toe with the world’s finest caffeinated beans.

I drink coffee every single day. I literally can’t remember the last day I didn’t have coffee in the morning. A few years ago, though, age started catching up to me and I stopped drinking coffee after lunch or so, lest it screw with my sleep. I really missed my afternoon coffee though. Why I didn’t think to try decaf I don’t know, but Dekáf sent me a few samples when they first sponsored DF back in April, and it’s been a revelation. In addition to fully decaffeinated roasts, they also have some half-decaffeinated roasts, and they’re absolutely delicious — my style of roast, for sure — and they don’t leave me jolted into the evening. Maybe you like tea, but I don’t. I like coffee, and I love being able to have a cup or two late in the afternoon again. It’s so good.

Also, I’m a big believer that you can judge a book by its cover. Just look at the Dekáf brand. It’s perfect. Color, typography, artwork — so cool, so spot-on for what they do.

Dekáf offers 9 single origins, 6 signature blends, and 4 Mizudashi cold brews (perfect for summer). All shipped to you within 24 hours of roasting. No shortcuts. You won’t believe it’s decaf. That’s the point. Even better, get 20% off with code: DF.

Steve Wozniak turned 75 (!) and was profiled by John Blackstone for CBS News (also posted to YouTube). Slashdot linked to it, and in the comments, someone gently jabbed at Woz for having sold, rather than hoarded, his stock in Apple. Woz himself chimed in, with this comment for the ages:

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

Apple never would have existed without Woz, and Woz personified “insanely great” engineering. He never contributed anything technical to Apple after the Apple II in the early 1980s, but, man, so much of his spirit and personality is infused in Apple’s DNA. He’s a hero to so many people who went on to work at Apple, and to so many of us on the outside too. The two Steves were so very different in so many ways, yet at heart, both exemplified that intersection between technology and the liberal arts.

His little comment above describing his philosophy on life brought to mind one of my favorite Woz stories, from Michael Moritz’s long-out-of-print 1984 book The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer, pp. 281–282:

Wozniak, who seemed determined to follow Samuel Johnson’s advice that it was better to live rich than to die rich, was always louder, splashier, and more cavalier about his fortune. As a student and an engineer he had always managed his financial affairs haphazardly and nothing changed as he grew wealthy. He could never keep track of receipts, for months didn’t bother to seek financial advice, and made a habit of filing his tax returns late. Wozniak turned into an approachable teddy bear and a soft touch. When friends, acquaintances, or strangers asked him for a loan he often wrote out a check on the spot.

Unlike Jobs, who guarded his founder’s stock carefully, Wozniak distributed some of his. He gave stock worth $4 million to his parents, sister, and brother and $2 million to friends. He made some investments in start-up companies. He bought a Porsche and fastened the license plates APPLE II to the car. His father found $250,000 worth of uncashed checks strewn about the car and said of his son, “A person like him shouldn’t have that much money.” After Wozniak finally did arrange for some financial advice, he arrived at Apple one day to announce, “My lawyer said to diversify so I just bought a movie theater.” Even that turned into a complicated venture. The theater, located among the barrios on the east side of San Jose, provoked angry community protests after it screened a gang movie, The Warriors. Wozniak attended a few community meetings, listened to the concerns of the local leaders, promised that his theater wouldn’t show violent or pornographic movies, and accompanied by Wigginton, spent a few afternoons in the empty, darkened theater screening movies and playing censor.

Jason Lalljee, reporting for Axios Tuesday:

President Trump’s nomination of Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday drew criticism from economists across the political spectrum. Why it matters: The growing negative consensus among conservative economists is unusual given Antoni’s own conservative pedigree.

Here we go with “unusual” as a euphemism for “unprecedented” — or perhaps, most accurately, “crazy” — again. The dichotomy here is that Trump and MAGA have flipped what “conservative” means in US politics. Some legitimate economists are left-leaning, some are right-leaning. It’s a field of study, like the law, that attracts from across the political spectrum. But all legitimate economists believe in trying to objectively measure the economy. MAGA kooks have overrun Republican elected politics, but not so with economics. So of course legitimate conservative economists are objecting to Trump’s nomination of this guy Antoni, who both is a crackpot kook of the paranoid style and looks like one, with crazy eyes and, of all things, a devil beard.

To the commentary:

Antoni’s “work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction,” Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Axios’ Courtenay Brown and Emily Peck.

Dave Hebert, an economist at the conservative American Institute for Economic Research, wrote in a post on X that he’s worked with Antoni before and implored the Senate to block the nomination. “I’ve been on several programs with him at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he’s gone MAGA,” Hebert said. [...]

Jessica Riedl, a senior Manhattan Institute fellow, shared another example from X, in which Antoni appeared not to know that the BLS’ measure of import prices did not account for the impact of tariffs. “The articles and tweets I’ve seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now,” she wrote. “I hope we see better at BLS.”

That’s the take on Antoni from conservative economists.