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Special guest Dan Frommer returns to the show. Topics include the indie media business, the iPhone Pocket, the iPhone Air (including rumors about the second generation model), AI “personalities”, and five years of Apple Silicon Macs. Also, six years of Dan’s site, The New Consumer.

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Jonathan V. Last, writing for The Bulwark:

The president of the United States gave a speech yesterday before a group of McDonald’s corporate workers and franchise owners. I’m going to quote a few sections of his remarks at great length, because if you have not listened to Trump speaking recently, the decline in his cognitive abilities is a bit shocking.

The point of this exercise is not to clown on Trump, but to give everyone a baseline understanding of where he is, with the mentals, as we try to understand how he will respond to increasing pressures in the coming months.

The video of his remarks is here and I’ll include timestamps for each section, in case you want to see what he looks and sounds like.

Bottom line: This is a man in noticeable mental decline.

The whole world is inured to listening to Trump speak like this — it sounds normal even to those of us who see that Trump is spiraling into dementia. Ah, that’s just Trump being Trump. But it’s not normal. Reading the transcript is jarring. Also jarring: listening to Juliet Jeske’s performative reading of a particularly nonsensical portion of Trump’s McDonald’s speech. It’s just gibberish.

President Donald Trump, today in the Oval Office alongside his “very good friend” Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, after ABC News reporter Mary Bruce had the temerity to pose a question regarding Mohammed having ordered the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018:

People are wise to your hoax. ABC, your company, your crappy company, is one of the perpetrators. And I’ll tell you something, I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake, and it’s so wrong. And we have a great commissioner, a chairman, who should look at that.

Also from Trump, regarding Khashoggi’s murder:

A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.

Things happen, indeed.

Disney (ABC’s owner), a year ago settled a lawsuit Trump filed against ABC News — a lawsuit most experts agreed ABC would have won — for $16 million, in what clearly amounted to a bribe.

Yours truly, last month, in a post on Apple’s capitulation to Trump regarding the ICEBlock app for iOS:

When you give a bully your lunch money, they always come back for more.

I think Bob Iger gets that now. “Fuck you, make me” remains the correct response to these threats.

Mark Gurman, in his (paywalled, alas) Power On column for Bloomberg over the weekend:

The next major update didn’t arrive until 2023, when Apple finally transitioned the desktop to in-house chips with the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. Two years later, that model remains largely unchanged. And it’s been overshadowed by the Mac Studio, which received the M3 Ultra chip earlier this year while the Mac Pro stayed put.

Now here’s the bad news: That doesn’t look set to change anytime soon. There’s no longer an M4 Ultra in the works (a Mac Pro to support it was also nixed), and the next high-end desktop chip will be the M5 Ultra. So far, Apple is only focused on a new Mac Studio for the processor. That suggests the Mac Pro won’t be updated in 2026 in a significant way.

From what I’ve heard inside the company, Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro. The sentiment internally is that the Mac Studio now represents both the present and future of Apple’s professional desktop strategy.

Here’s a comparison of the now-two-year-old M2 Ultra Mac Pro with the M3 Ultra and M4 Max Mac Studios. I’d love to see Apple pursue some sort of M# Extreme chip that goes above and beyond the M# Ultra variants, but unless they do, there’s not much point to a 32-pound suitcase-sized enclosure that offers little more than the Studio’s small 8-pound enclosure. The difference mostly comes down to the Pro’s internal PCI Express expansion slots, but those slots don’t support third-party GPUs from Nvidia or AMD — and likely never will.

See also: Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica.