2025-08-14 22:15:35
Apple will introduce a redesigned Blood Oxygen feature for some Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 users through an iPhone and Apple Watch software update coming later today.
Users with these models in the U.S. who currently do not have the Blood Oxygen feature will have access to the redesigned Blood Oxygen feature by updating their paired iPhone to iOS 18.6.1 and their Apple Watch to watchOS 11.6.1. Following this update, sensor data from the Blood Oxygen app on Apple Watch will be measured and calculated on the paired iPhone, and results can be viewed in the Respiratory section of the Health app. This update was enabled by a recent U.S. Customs ruling.
This seems like a workaround to let Apple Watches released after Masimo successfully brought a patent case against Apple and forced the company to deactivate the blood oxygen sensor on new U.S. Apple Watch models. The main difference seems to be that data will be recorded on the watch, but only displayed on the iPhone.
I’m still surprised that it’s gone this long and this far, but Apple seems to be a company that will leave no legal stone unturned and will fight to the end when it feels it’s in the right.
2025-08-14 05:14:06
Our display setup and window management; which legacy online component should be sunset after AOL dial-up; whether new Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence automation appeals; and views on YouTube’s AI age verification and the best and worst ways to do it.
2025-08-13 23:00:49
Apple’s product lines follow a very specific pattern: start small, and then grow into something bigger and more complex. There was originally one Mac, one iPhone, one iPad, one Apple Watch.
Over time, the product lines got more complicated. Sometimes too complicated, as anyone who remembers Steve Jobs returning to Apple with a four-quadrant grid in his back pocket, driving out an ocean of Performas and reducing the Mac to four simple products.
Too often, people take Jobs’s move to simplify an overcomplicated product line a bit more literally than they should. The Mac product line Jobs found on his return was too complex, yes, but as he rebuilt Apple he knew he would have to simplify and focus things to get started. After the Power Mac, PowerBook, iMac, and iBook all shipped, Jobs was happy to toss in all sorts of Macs that didn’t fit into the grid, including the G4 Cube and Xserve.
Similarly, as modern Apple has grown in the years since Jobs, it has done so in part by dropping the simplicity and offering many different variations of its products. It just makes sense. And over the next few years, we may find new versions of familiar products that go far beyond what we’ve come to expect from Apple.
2025-08-13 22:00:00
We talk presidential participation awards, Perplexity’s bid for attention and removing the notch.
2025-08-13 12:27:08
I do love it when I reference Dr. Drang on Upgrade and he responds with an entire blog post:
As Jason said on the show, he’d probably need a kayak that’s a bit bigger and more stable than mine because of the choppier water he’d encounter in his bay. While I’ve been out on windy spring days when the waves were a foot high and had whitecaps—yes, even on the relatively small lakes around here—it’s unusual for me to see much chop.
It’s about a mile (less if I walk) from my house to a boat dock I could use to kayak on the bay. So tempting, and I’ve loved it every time I’ve done it, but the logistics always get in the way. I love that Dr. Drang has found a fold-up kayak he can put in his Toyota, but I’m not sure if I can do the same for the rougher water in the bay.
Paddling regularly on the bay remains an ambition of mine. It seems wasteful to be so close and not to take advantage.
2025-08-13 00:43:39
At the MIT Technology Review, my old colleague Mat Honan has a great piece about the simultaneous promise and overpromise of AI:
In some ways, the AI hype cycle has to be out of hand. It has to justify the ferocious level of investment, the uncountable billions of dollars in sunk costs. The massive data center buildouts with their massive environmental consequences created at massive expense that are seemingly keeping the economy afloat and threatening to crash it. There is so, so, so much money at stake.
Which is not to say there aren’t really cool things happening in AI. And certainly there have been a number of moments when I have been floored by AI releases.
Come for the trenchant tech analysis, stay for the surprise marine biology.
