Apple Newsroom’s “Pro and Tell” announcement week continues:

Apple today announced the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, delivering even more performance, powerful on-device AI capabilities, and faster connectivity for college students, business users, creators, and more. M6 features an advanced 12-core CPU with the world’s fastest CPU core, so everything from productivity tasks to more demanding pro workflows feels incredibly fast and responsive. The 12-core GPU delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics and up to 25 percent faster AI workloads when compared to M5, making the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 a compelling value for users who need serious power. For those upgrading from M1, the performance gains are even more significant, with up to 11× faster graphics and up to 13× faster AI performance. With additional Neural Accelerators in the GPU and a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, M6 turns MacBook Pro into an even more powerful platform for AI — from taking advantage of Siri AI and Apple Intelligence features across apps and macOS to running LLMs locally, all while preserving user privacy. In addition, the 14-inch MacBook Pro features Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, while superfast storage makes working with large files, exporting projects, and running demanding AI workflows fly.

I questioned Apple’s decision to close up “superfast” there, but I stand corrected — it is, in fact, a perfectly cromulent adjective. I learn something every day.

Anyway, this is just the base MacBook Pro, the one that’s more like a MacBook Air Plus than a true professional laptop with an M-series Pro or Max chip. This tier of MacBook Pro has only ever been offered in the smaller 14-inch size. Prices seem unchanged from the post-June-price-hike M5 models:

Base price:     $2000

  RAM:  16 GB      +0
        24 GB    +200
        32 GB    +400

  SSD:   1 TB      +0
         2 TB    +500
         4 TB   +1500

Space black and silver colors, and nano-texture is available for $150 extra.

Link: apple.com/newsroom/2026/10/apple-introduces-the-new-14-inch…

From Charles Mann, a quick history of porcelain, which is basically what his pricey induction stovetop is made from. (Fun fact: I went to grad school for ceramic engineering before dropping out after a semester to teach myself web design.)

Alexandra Alter, in the lede for her profile of Marissa Mayer’s new AI startup Dazzle for The New York Times (gift link):

Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task.

Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.

So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle. Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer.

“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She thought it was perfect.

That anecdote is brutal. It makes it seem like Mayer has lost her mind. She’s getting roasted for it on social media. I suspected (and hoped) there was more to the story. There was. Here’s Mayer herself on X:

To be clear, I didn’t use Dazzle because I was overwhelmed by making a slide. I used it because summing up your child in a few bullets feels laughably limiting. And, since our team had just gotten an early prototype running, I wanted to see what deeper threads it might find.

She might just be hyping her startup. But she definitely didn’t tell The Times that she needed help from AI to remember that her own daughter is “empathetic, creative, and an animal lover”. She seemingly got done dirty by Alter and the Times on that use-case anecdote.

Link: nytimes.com/2026/10/25/style/marissa-mayer-ai-assistants…

Barack Obama, in a 430-word essay:

It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. [...]

The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views. Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.

Thoughtful, sharp, and eloquent as ever.

But Obama posted this essay on X, which, I have been told in the past week, shows that he in fact is a Nazi sympathizer, a fascist, a pedophile, and unconcerned about racism. As surprised as I was to learn those things about myself, I’m equally surprised to learn them about President Obama, whom I heretofore considered a thoughtful statesman and moral compass.

Either that, or, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon have relegated themselves into irrelevance by allowing their discourse to be dominated by a fringe of unhinged kooks who want to be angry and want everyone else to be angry.

Link: x.com/BarackObama/status/2111819687524774170

Apple Developer News, in a post titled “Updates to Full Disk Access in macoS”:

We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities into their apps for Apple products, backed by a set of controls designed to protect users’ private data. Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function properly on the Mac. Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems — including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history — without users’ full knowledge and understanding. For communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating with.

Going forward, we will introduce additional 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. Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.

They don’t name names or even mention “agentic AI”, but clearly this is in response to Meta Muse (cf. Jason Aten’s misadventure with Muse accessing Aten’s iMessages), Grok Bot, Claude, Dots, and the rest.

I really worry about just how much Apple is going to lock Full Disk Access down. I use it with several apps that couldn’t function properly without it, and would be severely hampered if I needed to authorize it manually every time they do something.

But before we Mac power users riot in Cupertino, we should note that we have no idea how many non-sophisticated Mac users are calling Apple and queuing up at the retail store Genius Bars to complain about Muse and these other agents having run amok on the Macs, against their desires, after convincing these users to grant them access. It is a legitimate frustration for the highest-functioning users among us that the Mac has, for years, already seemed “too locked down”. But there are now around 150 million Mac users worldwide. Most of them are unsophisticated technically — a majority of them, profoundly so. Many of them have technical needs that cannot be met by the baby computer OS that is iPadOS. So there are tens of millions of people who need to use a Mac to do things that cannot be done on an iPad, but who have zero understanding of what it means, say, to grant Muse permission for Full Disk Access. And then they think it is Apple’s fault that Muse is suddenly able to read their private iMessage conversations.

On iOS (and its tablet variant, iPadOS), you can say OK to every single thing an app like Muse asks for and Muse still won’t be able to read your email or end-to-end encrypted messages from iMessage or WhatsApp. There is no level of permission that grants third-party apps permission for such things. (The EU wants to force Apple to allow that under the DMA.) MacOS isn’t like that. You still need to grant apps permission for such things, but if you say OK to everything an app like Muse asks for on the Mac, you’re granting that app access to, effectively, almost everything on your startup drive. There are still some things it can’t see, but not many. A lot of non-technical Mac users do not understand this and cannot be expected to understand this. They just think, wrongly, that Apple protects them from allowing anything truly dangerous, because that’s how their iPhone (and/or iPad) works. So they just click OK to every access request from Muse and presume they’re still largely protected.

Hopefully Apple has in mind a solution to this situation that will still enable knowledgeable power users to confirm agreement to a sufficiently scary warning and put their Macs in a state similar to what we have today. I worry. What alleviates my worst fears is the knowledge that every technical user at Apple itself needs to use their Mac as the powerful Unix workstation OS that it is. Some of us need dangerously powerful tools. Most Mac users, however, do not — and don’t realize they’re using a dangerously powerful Unix workstation with a very friendly (literal) face.

Link: developer.apple.com/news/?id=p6zjojqw

In late 2025 Hilton launched a new invite only tier above Diamond Reserve called ‘The Honors Society’. Less than a year later it seems they are launching a new tier above The Honors Society called Black Diamond according to Loyalty Lobby. 

Not sure I really understand the strategy here from Hilton, I guess they have been getting push back from elites that status has become meaningless and this is the solution but adding a new tier after less than 12 months doesn’t seem sustainable.