Apple has done semi transparent menu bars before and I could not have hated them more, so fully transparent just seems like an awful idea. The whole liquid glass things worries me a bit, sure it looks snazzy in a demo or for a casual user, but a pro user needs consistency, not transparency that will make things always look different. I hope this can be turned off, or someone figures out a fix, because I like to read my menus!
https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/19/firewire-400-800-macos-26-support/ It is a good thing I have been trying to capture all of my old DV tapes before they become unusable. And now I am fighting not just the tapes deteriorating (thankfully I have been able to buy 3 new DV cleaning tapes to keep my old Sony DSR 20 running) but the OS support of FireWire! Surprisingly I have been unable to pull the 24pa out of most of the DV footage which was shot that way, so I have had to use Twixtor to retime the footage from 29.97 to 23.976. I tried using After Effects to guess pulldown, but it always ended up wrong. And I am using Topaz Video AI to convert from SD to HD. This is all a very time intensive process, but if I don’t do it now the footage will just all be done. I have old footage from Mr T’s Bowl and Footage from Birds in Hollywood. The Mr T’s will hopefully end up in a documentary that Mile TV and I will be working on.
From William Gallagher at AppleInsider, “Apple's Sherlocking hall of shame has more adds than ever before in 2025.” Apple has a thing for stealing Mac developers ideas and putting them in their OS, made famous by the old search engine Sherlock, and this year was a doozy. This year search has added both launching support and clipboard multi items, which you can get from a variety of launchers. For me it is OBDEV Launchbar, a program i use every day and still only skim the surface of what it can do. Being able to launch apps with a few keystrokes in incredible, and many people will love it, but I hope it doesn’t kill off all the great launchers out there.
I have previously written about the problems with People and Pets and my dogs. It keeps tagging Indiana Bones photos (who is dead) to pictures of Pepper Pawtts over and over again. Super frustrating. It really needs the ability to add deceased and born tags. Or take into account keywords? Well now I have a new problem that is seriously frustrating. I have been going through People and Pets and getting it all setup with contact info for my closets family and friends. Well as of yesterday it combined my wife and my father. Now my wife is Kelly Lynn Pancho Walker and my dad is Kelly Deanne Walker. And I had them setup correctly and attached to their individual contacts. And they seriously look nothing alike! And the best part is going through and telling it that my dad is not my wife doesn’t seem to transfer between devices. Over the past 2 days I have had to do the same thing on my computer, iPad and iPhone, and multiple times on some of the devices. And I keep going back and finding more photos of my dad tagged to my wife! And unlike old versions of photos where I could tag people myself, now you have to let Photos do it, so I have no way to retag photos of my father as himself! And he doesn’t show up as his own person. WTf! Apple makes things simpler which is fine until they don’t work! And this new feature is not ready for prime time!
Appleinsider has a great article on Apple and its production pipelines in China., and why Apple will likely never build iPhones in the US. And automation just isn’t there yet. Tesla tried the whole automation route and it really didn’t work. So making automation to make factories would cost a huge amount and likely take a lot of skill the US doesn’t really have. And all the estimations of Apple iPhones costing so much if made here, what about Teslas which are completely assembled here, but almost 100% manufactured in China. How much would that cost to make here? A lot more than an iPhone, but presumably Elon Musk will be given an exemption that Apple will not. And with Trump’s insane 125% on goods coming from China, which is and will harm American companies and boost foreign companies! With iPhones made in China costing as much as $3000 or more and only 10% tariffs on Korean products like Samsung. Meaning Trumps anti China policies will hurt American companies and boost foreign companies. How is that America First? Of course the Tariff’s were meant to bring manufacturing back to the US but have been used instead to make new trade deals, so it was never about bringing manufacturing back here.
So Apple updated the Mac Studio for the first time since the M2 version, but they certainly made a strange choice with the base model being an M4 Max, but the high end being an M3 Ultra. Making the lower end model actually faster than the high end model for single core operations. And the M3 Ultra is upgraded from the M3 Max with Thunderbolt 5, and GPU numbers that match the m4 max at least in core count. It seems that Apple is going to skip the Ultra connector in some series, but then maybe they should think about skipping every other generation so they can match Max and Ultra to the same generation so the higher end chip isn’t slower in single processor operations. Nor have less possible memory or memory bandwidth. I run video and with memory and videos sharing RAM I need as much as I can get, and $1600 for 256 GB is about all I could swing, as $4000 for 512 GB is insane. Damn Apple charges allot for RAM. And $4600 for 16 TB’s of hard drive space, OMG! My last Mac Studio was over 7K and the next one will likely be more, just hope it lasts over 7 years!
From Mark Surman at the Mozilla blog: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/ I know that losing Google’s paid search money is basically all of Mozilla’s income, but ads and AI aren’t the answer. I would guess that anyone using Mozilla is blocking ads, and AI in a browser is just not worth paying for? I mean Mozilla’s current AI summarizes web pages, but is that a money maker? I mean really? AI costs money to run so you have to pay for it, and I just haven’t seen where AI in a web browser is going to make Mozilla enough money to survive. And Mozilla needs to survive as there is Chrome/Chromium which you can’t trust cause it is Google, Safari, which is Apple so they will never allow Mozilla’s level of customization, and Mozilla, which makes no money.
https://www.provideocoalition.com/lumafusion-v5-2-doubles-video-audio-track-support/ Awesome, great news. LumaFusion is a real editor for iPad that works with a timeline like Premiere or Avid and not Final Cut. And it gets better all the time. Still it also makes me wish that BlackMagic would just release all the DaVinci Resolve pages on the iPad app, instead of having to use keyboard shortcuts to launch them, because then the iPad would have a real editor.
https://www.provideocoalition.com/avid-media-composer-is-now-apple-silicon-native/ OMG, 3 years to get an Apple Silicon native version, wow! Of course I have never worked on an AVID job that was on a current version of AVID, always an old OS and old version, but this news is huge! And adding easy source side waveforms is also huge! I always use the waveforms to edit in Premiere and love the ability to see them and video in DaVinci Resolve so this could not be a more welcome addition!
From Hartley Charlton at MacRumors, Apple's Macintosh Turns 41 Today. Holy Cow, does this make me feel old. I has an Apple IIc with Green only monitor before I had a Macintosh (in fact I didn't have a Mac until the Mac Classic, which I still have), but I do remember using the Mac + in School. OMG it was so amazing. It just changed everything. And of course I still use one today (with a little use of a Microsoft surface, though I still had a Mac too).