The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space:
1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement
2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it
3. Companies who write things because they sell things
A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels.
Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Arstechnica (specially John Siracusa's OS X reviews) are the rare category 2.
Category 3 are things like the Puget Systems blog where they benchmark hardware, but also sell it, and it functions more as a buyer information.
The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website. I'd imagine that when Anand joined Apple, this was likely the case, and if so that makes total sense.
When Andrei Frumusanu left Anandtech for Qualcomm, I'm sure he was paid much more for engineering chips than he was for writing about them, but his insight into the various core designs released for desktops and mobile was head and shoulders above anything I've seen since.
It's a shame that I can't even find a publication that runs and publishes the SPEC benchmarks on new core designs now that he is gone, despite SPEC having been the gold standard of performance comparison between dissimilar cores for decades.
There are still places that benchmark, but mostly for commercial apps like Puget Systems in the earlier post. Phoronix can also be useful as well for benching open source stuff.
I wouldn't put much trust in well-known benchmark suites as in many cases proprietary compilers, a huge amount of effort was put into Goodhart's law optimizing to the exact needs of the benchmark.
The new leadership team blogged last year that their priority would be on upstreaming their existing work.
> Our priority is kernel upstreaming. Our downstream Linux tree contains over 1000 patches required for Apple Silicon that are not yet in upstream Linux. The upstream kernel moves fast, requiring us to constantly rebase our changes on top of upstream while battling merge conflicts and regressions. Janne, Neal, and marcan have rebased our tree for years, but it is laborious with so many patches. Before adding more, we need to reduce our patch stack to remain sustainable long-term...
Where do the M3 and M4 fit in? Until upstreaming and CI progress, the core team cannot prioritize new hardware.
I think the majority of that upstreaming work (that isn't on hold until the kernal is ready for the Rust graphics driver to land) has happened and additional features like DP alt mode for USB C have been demoed.
The next update from the team should land on their blog after 6.19 ships
I'd say that after the Apple Maps launch, Tim Cook learned a lesson about allowing features that need additional work the time they need to fully bake.
Google just launched the Pixel 10 with several promised AI features broken, and could really stand to learn the same lesson.
Apple Maps is still such a sucky service, at least where I live and where I travel to.
It regularly directs me to incorrect addresses and businesses and labels places obviously incorrectly.
Every use of the search function promotes guide content for a single city I'm not currently in, with no way to configure or turn them off. Good products should go out of their way to annoy you IMHO.
They only managed to get their cycle routing for the UK and Ireland working in 2025 after years and years of complaints.
I'm not a fan of Google but I feel compelled to keep Google Maps because Apple Maps is still so unreliable.
I'd offer the balance here that I still don't enjoy using Android and generally prefer iOS to it, warts and all.
Google Maps regularly sends contractors, delivery drivers, etc to a blocked off utility "road" that has never allowed traffic. Apple Maps doesn't. I've given up reporting the problem to Google. (And besides, Google eventually took away the report feature from either desktop or mobile, I forget which, telling me their engineers don't care at all about quality.)
Google recently shipped Magic Cue as their tentpole new AI feature on the Pixel 10 despite it not working.
> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.
However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.
It's worth reminding people that Firefox extensions that are part of Mozilla's "recommended extensions" program have been manually vetted.
> Firefox is committed to helping protect you against third-party software that may inadvertently compromise your data – or worse – breach your privacy with malicious intent. Before an extension receives Recommended status, it undergoes rigorous technical review by staff security experts.
Endpoint security software on the Mac, if it's worth the hit to system resources that is, inspect every call to exec and fork that occur in the kernel and also inspect those for known attack vectors, malicious scripts, etc. The one I have installed on my work Mac will kill reverse shell attempts before they are run. Will stop keychain attacks. Infostealing (as they can also get every file system op as they are happening in the kernel).
Gatekeeper and Xprotect are good, but there's only so much they can do.
Antivirus programs will run on PowerShell scripts, VBScript files, JScript files, and all other kinds of automation on Windows.
The screenshots from the article clearly show a permission prompt for a program. Whether that's a binary or a shell script or something else doesn't matter, the infection stage should've been caught by anti malware rather than permission prompts.
Windows Defender does this already. If Apple's AV can't catch this, I think they may be relying on their DRM-as-a-security-measure (signatures, notarisation, etc.) a bit too much.
> With a previous case it seemed (to me) like Apple might have pushed an update to give access
You're going to have to provide a cite here, since Apple has publicity stated that they have not and will not ever do this on behalf of any nation state.
For instance, Apple's public statement when the FBI ordered them to do so:
Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government “prohibited” the company “from sharing any information,” but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will “detail these kinds of requests” in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.
Apple statements are quite distinct from what they do behind the scenes.
Sure, but every company doesn't make it as difficult as possible to set up a new encrypted computer without uploading a copy of your your encryption key to their servers.
> Apple-TSMC: The Partnership That Built Modern Semiconductors
In 2013, TSMC made a $10 billion bet on a single customer. Morris Chang committed to building 20nm capacity with uncertain economics on the promise that Apple would fill those fabs. “I bet the company, but I didn’t think I would lose,” Chang later said. He was right. Apple’s A8 chip launched in 2014, and TSMC never looked back.
Google certainly shipped Magic Cue as their tentpole new AI feature on the Pixel 10 despite it not working.
> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.
However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.
Unfortunately, this is my impression as well.
I really miss Anandtech's reporting, especially their deep dives and performance testing for new core designs.
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