Mark Gurman, yesterday at noon ET:

It’s not an “Air” — but the new Mac Studio, codenamed J575, appears to be imminent. It could be announced as early as this week along with the new MacBook Airs. There are signs these will come with an M4 Max but that its new Ultra chip will actually be an M3 Ultra.

Quite the scoop breaking this news after Apple started briefing media about it under NDA yesterday.

He’s not fooling anyone by dropping the J575 codename (which Apple would never include in a media briefing). That’s a bit of ham-fisted misdirection to make it seem like his source for this came from a product-aware source inside Apple, when in fact he almost certainly got it from someone in the media yesterday. (Codenames in and of themselves aren’t much of a secret inside Apple. That’s one reason they keep them so boring: letter-digit-digit-digit, usually.)

Apple conducted virtual media briefings yesterday for the iPad (M3 iPad Airs and A16 regular iPads) and Mac (M4 MacBook Airs and M4 Max/M3 Ultra Mac Studios). Apple announced the new iPads on Apple Newsroom yesterday morning at 9:00am ET, before those media briefings took place — the briefings were a recap of the announced news. Apple announced the new Macs today at 9:00am ET, after yesterday’s media briefings, which were under embargo until this morning. If you think it’s a coincidence that Gurman dropped zero last-minute tidbits about the new iPads (which were not briefed to the press ahead of time), but did drop the surprise M3 Ultra Mac Studio news (which was briefed, under embargo, ahead of time), I have a bridge to sell you.

He did the same thing with the VisionOS 2.4 news (Apple Intelligence, the new Spatial Gallery app, guest mode improvements). Apple held media briefings to share this news on Friday 14 February, under the condition that it was embargoed until the VisionOS 2.4 beta dropped the next week. But Gurman ran a report at Bloomberg with the embargoed info on Saturday 15 February. The only stuff he’s right about lately is what he gets from someone (or someones?) in the media leaking him embargoed info. It’s not going to take Sherlock Holmes for Apple to figure this out, especially when most of the Mac briefings yesterday were later in the day, after Gurman’s tweets. I’d put even money on him burning his source yesterday.

Ron Filipkowski:

Trump’s Sec of Agriculture Brooke Rollins says the solution to high egg prices for Americans is to get some chickens and raise them in your backyard.

No exaggeration. She’s selling the idea of everyone raising chickens in their back yards as “awesome”, with a laugh and a smile. And then the Fox News host (Rachel Campos-Duffy — wife of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — this whole world is comprised of socially-inbred reality-TV has-beens), smiling and laughing, concludes with “I think everyone who isn’t a farmer right now wants to be, so you’re in the right department, Brooke!”

This is a cult. No sense of “Hey, maybe this egg situation wasn’t so simple. Maybe this blowhard president isn’t going to solve the bird flu and halt inflation on day one...” — as they check their calendar and see that we’re already up to day 43 and their supermarket hasn’t had any eggs, at any price, in a week. No, instead, they’ve decided the answer is that all good-thinking Americans now happily want to be chicken farmers.

Next month: the fun of home dentistry.

Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac:

Leitmotif, the team behind the awesome diff and merge Mac app Kaleidoscope, is expanding its portfolio of native Mac apps for developers. The company has acquired Taska, a native Mac app that serves as a frontend for web services like GitHub and GitLab. [...] To celebrate its release of Taska 1.3, Leitmotif is discounting its apps by 50% for a limited time.

When Taska debuted last year, its original developers (Made by Windmill) sponsored DF for the week to promote it (the app was briefly named Sonar, before some sort of legal contretemps prompted a change), and thanking them, I wrote:

Taska combines the lightweight UI of a to-do app with the power of enterprise-level issue tracking, all in a native app built by long-time Mac nerds. The interface is deceptively simple, and very intuitive. Fast and fluid too. Everything that’s great about native Mac apps is exemplified by Taska. If you’ve ever thought, “Man, if only Apple made a native GitHub client...”, you should run, not walk, to download it.

Taska saves all your changes directly to GitHub/GitLab using their official APIs, so your data remains secure on GitHub’s servers — not Taska’s. Do you have team members not using Taska? No problem. Changes you make in Taska are 100% compatible with the web UI.

Leitmotif’s Kaleidoscope is a longtime stalwart in any Mac nerd’s toolbox. I can’t think of a better sibling to an app like Taska. (A few weeks ago I ran into a gnarly syncing glitch with a long log file, where there wasn’t just an old version and new one, but two different “new” versions from two different machines. Kaleidoscope got me out of that jam, no sweat.)

Funny piece — if your surname isn’t “Null” — by Oyin Adedoyin for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it, he joked to himself.

In 2018 he paid a $35 parking ticket. Soon afterward, he said, his mailbox was flooded with hundreds of traffic tickets for incidents he hadn’t been involved in. Tickets were from other counties and cities for vehicles of different colors, makes and models. A database had associated the word “null” with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles.

Brings to mind the classic “Little Bobby Tables” from XKCD.

Ben Stiller, in a delightful piece for The New York Times on working up the gumption to tell Gene Hackman — with whom he was working in Wes Anderson’s excellent The Royal Tenenbaums, his favorite Hackman movie:

“ … but I have to say for me, there is one movie you made that means so much to me. It might sound crazy, but I think it’s the reason I wanted to make movies. It’s ‘The Poseidon Adventure.’ It literally was my favorite movie when it came out. I think I was 7 or something and I went to see it in the theater about 10 times, then watched it repeatedly whenever it was on TV. It was so formative, and you were so good in it, and it just for me was my favorite movie for so long because of the excitement of that incredible score and those actors and the action and just all of it. It really changed my life and just … made me want to make movies.”

He smiled a little. He looked forward, thinking, perhaps about the movie, as if it hadn’t crossed his mind for a long time. Then he grinned and said:

“Money job.”

I can hear those words in Hackman’s voice. And I can see the grin.