The Archive

Stratechery weekly digest covering Apple, SpaceX, and sports; no AI-specific technical or research content.

Nvidia’s new SoC is available in Windows laptops from six different manufacturers. We’ve collectively tested four of them so far. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Nvidia's RTX Spark N1X processor is finally here, and we've been collectively testing a small fortune's worth of powerful laptops sporting this new "superchip." RTX Spark is designed to be a high-performing Arm-based SoC for laptops and small desktop computers, rivaling the best from Apple, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. It has loads of cores, Nvidia RTX Blackwell graphics, and enough power and unified memory to run sizable l...

The new Muse Spark Open AI model can work on M5 Ultra Mac Studios. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Meta announced the Muse Spark Open AI model today, claiming that it's the "most capable US open-weight model to date." But the company also says that it's the "the first model in its class" that can "run on your desktop using two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios with the latest MLX framework." Meta and Apple, typically rivals, worked together on the launch and are publicly supporting each other. "Muse Spark Open - weights releasing today - runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with ...

There's a growing trend in the consumer tech world: gadgets designed to spy on everything and everyone around you, regardless of whether or not anyone else actually consented to it. Now, with the advent of "AI personal assistants" like Meta's Muse, you're being cheerfully asked not just to give up your own data, but also the information of your friends, family, the person you went on a Hinge date with five years ago - and virtually anyone else you've ever come in contact with. Since Muse was released last month, the agent has already been downloaded millions of times and hit No. 1 on Apple's ...

Claude Opus 4.8 and Codex GPT Sol 5.6 fail at reverse-engineering iOS protobuf schemas with high error rates; LLMs unreliable for forensic analysis.

OpenAI claims a former employee took more than 100 files related to its product plans before joining Apple. In a document filed on Wednesday, OpenAI accuses the unnamed employee of sending this information to a personal account and then presenting it to Apple leadership, including the vice president of the company's operations in Asia. The filing, reported earlier by Reuters, is tied to a legal battle between Apple and OpenAI over trade secrets - but this time, OpenAI is doing the accusing. It alleges that the files in question contain images of at least one unreleased device, along with supp...

Stratechery analyzes Apple's HomeView hardware and questions the market viability of premium devices reliant on limited AI capabilities.

A federal judge ruled that Apple can access OpenAI's interview materials involving former Apple employees, as well as private messages and testimony from key figures in the case.

The other day I whizzed past several people while running in the park, my playlist blasting at full volume. The next morning, I smiled at a barista while ordering a caramel apple-flavored matcha latte. Afterward, I sat on a park bench reading a book, called up a pal to chat about her recent trip to Prague, and then asked my Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses what meetings were coming up on my calendar. The chipper AI voice said I hadn't connected my Google Calendar yet (I had) and asked if I would like help connecting. I sighed and then asked it to play an upbeat song. It picked Kendrick Lamar's "Not...

The HomeView is a smart speaker with a touchscreen display. It’s available in silver, starlight, rose pink, and space grey. | Image: Apple It's finally here: Apple's long-rumored smart display, the Apple HomeView, has arrived. I got a first look at the device in New York City this week, and it's gorgeous. The HomeView puts a small, vibrant screen atop a speaker base for taking video calls, beautifully displaying photos, and providing information at a glance with Apple's Siri AI voice assistant. The device's square shape makes it feel less imposing than larger smart displays like Google's Nest...

Ambi is releasing apps for iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch that enables ambient capture

Apple will announce a new smart home hub on Tuesday called the HomeView, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen There have been multiple reports that Apple was working on a new smart home product, but now it seems the product has a name and a launch date. Gurman […]

Is Apple hoping to get into the AI-generated podcast business?

Stratechery weekly digest covering Apple, Facebook, and US-China dynamics; no AI-specific content indicated.

After launching nearly a month ago and spending several weeks as the top free app in Apple's App Store, the latest update to Meta's Muse iOS app introduces native support for the iPad. A Mac version of Meta's agentic AI tool (designed to compete with OpenClaw, ChatGPT's Dots, and Grok Bot) was released about a week after the original mobile version debuted expanding its usefulness to desktop tasks like organizing files. The new iPad version should function similar to Muse on iPhones, but better take advantage of the extra screen real estate and iPadOS' better multitasking capabilities. The ne...

Stratechery analysis of Apple's smart home strategy via partner integration and speculation on Amazon's agent positioning.

The tool can free up over 12GB of storage.

Getting some extra storage space on your Mac could be as easy as deleting Apple's AI features with a new open-source command line tool called RemoveMacAI. There used to be a single Settings toggle for disabling Apple Intelligence, but that was removed in macOS 27. Now, the models stay on your disk, and the features are split up across different settings panes. As spotted earlier by MacRumors, the RemoveMacAI developer said in a post on Reddit that the tool essentially does what the old settings toggle did, deleting the models and turning the features off: You have to find about a dozen settin...

Stratechery opinion: Apple's walled ecosystem, once protective, now constrains AI experimentation and developer freedom.

Meta says FDA isn't sufficient to Muse reading messages. Apple begs to differ.

Apple will add new limits for "full disk access" on Mac in response to risks posed by AI agents, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. In an update on Friday, Apple says it's rolling out new controls to "ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action." The change comes just weeks after Inc's Jason Aten found that Meta's Muse AI somehow knew the contents of his messages, despite not giving the chatbot explicit permission to access them on his iPhone or Mac. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone pushed back on this repor...

Apple says it will add new controls around macOS’s Full Disk Access permission, warning that increasingly capable AI agents make broad access to users’ files, messages, mail, and browsing history riskier.

Guided Vision is launching in Gemini Live on compatible Android devices today to use AI to give real-time audio descriptions of anything you point your phone's camera at. By sharing your camera in Gemini Live, you can have Google's AI help with things like reading small text, describing your surroundings, finding or identifying objects around you, and describing details on specific objects. Like the VoiceOver Live Recognition feature Apple has added to the iPhone and Vision Pro, it's designed for people who are blind, have low vision, or want assistance in specific situations. In addition to ...

I used Google’s Nest Doorbell (left), Aqara’s HomeKit-compatible G400 (center), and the Ring Pro 4K (right) to test the new AI features of Gemini for Home, Apple Intelligence for Home, and Amazon’s Ring. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge A few years back, I was at a beachside Easter egg hunt, watching my kids dash through sand dunes searching for sweet treats. My phone buzzed in my pocket; I ignored it. A moment later, it buzzed again. I pulled it out, glanced down, and saw a "motion detected" notification from my security camera. "Just my dog in the yard," I thought, dismissing ...

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., speaks during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2026. | Bloomberg via Getty Images Earlier this month, Apple announced that its new Apple Watches will have the ability to continuously listen to every spoken word they detect and create summaries of whatever's going on around you. The privacy blowback was immediate and inevitable: Experts warned of the legal risks of using the features, especially in nonpublic spaces and states where eavesdropping laws require both parties to consent to ...

Apple Store architect Ron Johnson says Apple's secret sauce has always been its people.

Today, I’m talking with Mark Gurman, who is the world’s best-sourced Apple reporter — both as Bloomberg’s chief Apple correspondent and the host of the upcoming podcast Power On. Earlier this month, Apple hosted its annual iPhone hardware event, virtually every detail of which was reported ahead of time by Mark. But this event was special, for a number of reasons. It was new Apple CEO John Ternus’ first major product launch since he took over for former CEO Tim Cook less than two weeks prior. It was also the debut of the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable smartphone. The timing of those two t...

Apple is paying $250 million to settle claims that it failed to deliver an AI-upgraded Siri - and now, eligible iPhone owners can submit a claim for a payout. If you live in the US and purchased an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or any iPhone 16 model between June 10th, 2024, and March 29th, 2025, you can file a claim on the settlement's website, as reported earlier by MacRumors. You can receive an estimated $25 per eligible device, but the settlement's website notes that this can increase to $95 depending on how many people file claims. To file a claim, you'll need to enter your name, con...

Planned 2029 debut could make this Apple’s first enterprise server in decades.

According to The Information, Apple is planning to get back into the server game and might just pair up with NVIDIA to make it happen. Apple retired its Xserve line in 2011 and has largely left enterprise machines to other manufacturers since. But the growing demand for compute power as the AI industry continues to expand has apparently led the company to believe there is an opening for its powerful but efficient ARM-based M processors. Its Mac Mini and Mac Studio have proven popular with AI developers, which has led to shortages. The server product, whether it's called Xserve or something el...