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The oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet, TidBITS brings you the Apple Macintosh, iPhone, iPad, and iPod news, reviews, tips, and commentary that matters. Join us each week for audio versions of award-winning coverage from industry stalwarts Adam Engst, Glenn Fleishman, Julio Ojeda-Zapata, Michael Cohen, Rich Mogull, Jeff Carlson, Tonya Engst, and others.

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Inside Apple’s 3D‑Printed Titanium Apple Watch Cases

TidBITS ·

2025/11/21

Apple writes:This year, all Apple Watch Ultra 3 and titanium Apple Watch Series 11 cases are 3D-printed with 100 percent recycled aerospace-grade titanium powder, an achievement not previously considered possible at scale. Every team at Apple rallied behind a shared ambition. The polished mirror finish on Series 11 had to be pristine. Ultra 3 had to maintain its durability and lightweight form to meet the demands of everyday adventurers. They both also had to be better for the planet without

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TidBITS Memberships Now Support PayPal

TidBITS ·

2025/11/20

It never hurts to ask. TidBITS member Carl Pohle recently wrote to me because his TidBITS membership had expired. He wanted to renew but preferred to use PayPal to avoid having another place to update his credit card number whenever it changed. I started writing back to him to apologize and explain that our Paid Memberships Pro system supports only a single payment gateway at a time, which is Stripe for us. But then I wondered if that was actually true or if I was just speaking confidently from a

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BBEdit 15.5.4

TidBITS ·

2025/11/19

Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 15.5.4, improving the app icon appearance when running macOS 26 Tahoe. The venerable text editor corrects initial layout and column sizes in the “Find Symbol in Workspace” panel, fixes a bug in which the document count was incorrect in the alert when closing a window containing one or more non-text documents, makes a change to the order in which tick marks for Live Search matches are drawn in the scroll bar, improves performance in Balance Tags to

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Ulysses 39

TidBITS ·

2025/11/19

Ulysses has released version 39 of its eponymous writing app, a major upgrade that fully embraces Apple’s Liquid Glass design language and brings some handy new features. The app redesigns and reworks buttons and toolbars, both sidebars (library and dashboard), menus, and contextual menus. The advanced text check (previously known as Revision Mode) has been moved into the main dashboard, and checks are initiated by simply activating the tab. Ulysses 39 also reworks physical keyboard navigation

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SpamSieve 3.2.2

TidBITS ·

2025/11/19

C-Command Software has published SpamSieve 3.2.2, a maintenance update with bug fixes and improvements for the spam-filtering utility. The release no longer warns about the transition to New Outlook (as Microsoft has extended support for Legacy Outlook for another year), works around an issue with macOS 26 Tahoe that caused the SpamSieve icon to be re-added to the menu bar even if you’d turned the feature off, adds a the Slow Apple Mail Training section to the manual with an experimental workaround

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Apple’s N1 Chip Improves Wi-Fi Performance

TidBITS ·

2025/11/19

Reporting on data gleaned from Ookla’s Speedtest Intelligence, Luke Kehoe writes: Apple’s N1 chipset is a substantial upgrade. The iPhone 17 family delivers a clear step-change in Wi-Fi performance vs. the Broadcom-based iPhone 16 lineup, with faster download and upload speeds across every region. Globally, median download and upload speeds on the N1 were each up to 40% higher than on its predecessor. Introduced in the iPhone 17 lineup, Apple’s custom N1 wireless networking chip combines Wi-Fi,

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Apple Hit with $634 Million Verdict as Blood Oxygen...

TidBITS ·

2025/11/18

In the latest episode of the legal thriller involving the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor, Blake Brittain of Reuters reports: A federal jury in California said on Friday that Apple owes medical-monitoring technology company Masimo $634 million for infringing a patent covering blood-oxygen reading technology. Apple has already said it will appeal, which will further prolong the case. It first impacted consumers when Apple was compelled to disable the blood oxygen sensor in Apple Watch models sold

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Cloudflare Outage Takes Down Large Swaths of the...

TidBITS ·

2025/11/18

At 6:48 AM on 18 November 2025, Cloudflare posted: Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly. What’s not obvious from that dry language is that large parts of the Internet went down as a result, including TidBITS, as Jetpack—a WordPress plug-in that monitors uptime—informed me shortly after. The Cloudflare error page was

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ChronoSync 12 and ChronoAgent 12

TidBITS ·

2025/11/17

Econ Technologies has updated its ChronoSync and ChronoAgent synchronization and backup tools to version 12, bringing several new time- and event-based scheduling options and full compatibility with macOS 26 Tahoe. ChronoSync 12 adds support for remote triggering of synchronizer tasks via ChronoAgent, adds an option to run a two-pass synchronizer with optionally performing deletions, reworks how iCloud directory contents are asynchronously gathered, improves progress feedback for iCloud and File

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Firefox 145

TidBITS ·

2025/11/17

Mozilla has issued Firefox 145 with several handy improvements to the venerable Web browser. The release now enables you to add, edit, and delete comments on PDFs (with a new comment sidebar view, too), rolls out new privacy protections aimed at reducing browser fingerprinting (a tracking technique that allows websites to identify you even if you have cookies blocked or are using private browsing), enables you to hover over a tab group to get a preview of the tabs inside, adds support for accessing

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SoundSource 5.8.10

TidBITS ·

2025/11/17

Rogue Amoeba has published SoundSource 5.8.10 with full support for macOS 26 Tahoe. The audio control utility updates the ARK plugin to version 12.3.4 to address several Tahoe-related bugs, corrects a broken mute button on the System Output source, significantly improves the experience of changing devices while audio is actively playing (no more blips leaking through), ensures audio processing works on AirPods Max headphones connected via USB-C even when Head Tracking is enabled, and fixes a bug

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Benefits of the AI Bubble

TidBITS ·

2025/11/17

At Stratechery, Ben Thompson writes: What goes up must come down, which is to say bubbles that inflate eventually pop, with the end result being a recession and lots of bankrupt companies. And, not to spoil the story, that will almost certainly happen to the AI bubble as well. What is important to keep in mind, however, is that that is not the end of the story, at least in the best case. Bubbles have real benefits. We are, of course, in an AI bubble, and billions of dollars of investment will

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How to Set Contact Avatars and Posters on the iPhone

TidBITS ·

2025/11/17

While writing “Comparing the Classic and Unified Views in iOS 26’s Phone App” (10 November 2025), I commented that the Unified view’s Calls screen was more attractive if you had contact posters for your favorites. Contact posters have been available since iOS 17, but few of my contacts have set them. Or, rather, relatively few of the iPhone users with whom I communicate via Messages have set them—posters are only shared via iMessage (blue bubble conversations) and when you explicitly share your

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Bookends 15.2.2

TidBITS ·

2025/11/14

Sonny Software has released Bookends 15.2.2, featuring a new Apple-related AI feature for the reference management tool. If a unique identifier isn’t found when importing reference metadata from Bookends Browser, Bookends will use Apple Intelligence’s on-device model to extract metadata from the page. The release also enables you to create a separate bibliography for each chapter (section) when using the native Word scan, improves native Word unscanning, fully renders HTML attachments in

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Hazel 6.1

TidBITS ·

2025/11/14

Noodlesoft has released Hazel 6.1, with a new Liquid Glass look for the automation and cleanup utility in macOS 26 Tahoe. The update adds menu icons for Tahoe and new folder options to tell Hazel how to handle cloud-only files. It also works around an Apple bug that could cause Hazel’s icon to be shown for external drives in the Finder’s sidebar, ensures preview is done in the background to avoid locking up the user interface, addresses the lack of a scrollbar when bringing up the text

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Apple Introduces Digital ID, but It Doesn’t Replace...

TidBITS ·

2025/11/12

Apple continues to push forward with adding digital ID cards to Apple Wallet (see “Apple Announces Details of Storing State IDs in Wallet,” 2 September 2021). Currently, iPhone users can add a driver’s license or state ID to the Wallet app in 12 US states—Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia came online recently—and Puerto Rico. Those in Japan can add My Number Card.Apple has now launched the more general Digital ID, which will initially roll out in beta at TSA checkpoints at more than 250 US

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Apple’s iPhone Pocket Is a Rorschach Test, Not a...

TidBITS ·

2025/11/12

Apple writes: ISSEY MIYAKE and Apple today unveiled iPhone Pocket. Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth,” its singular 3D-knitted construction is designed to fit any iPhone as well as all pocketable items. Beginning Friday, November 14, it will be available at select Apple Store locations and on apple.com in France, Greater China, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UK, and the U.S. While it’s hard for Apple users not to think of the iPod Socks (see “Sockarooni!” 15 November 2004),

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Fission 2.9.2

TidBITS ·

2025/11/10

Rogue Amoeba has released Fission 2.9.2 with full support for macOS 26 Tahoe (with a strong recommendation for macOS 26.1), as well as further refinements to the app’s updated color scheme (blue is back!). The audio editor now confirms your intentions if you attempt to open more than 11 files by dropping them onto the app’s Start window, makes several improvements to VoiceOver compatibility, restores the zero dB center line to Fission’s waveforms, adds a new Automatically Show Start Window option in

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Acorn 8.3.2

TidBITS ·

2025/11/10

Flying Meat has released Acorn 8.3.2 with a few improvements and bug fixes for the image editor. The update changes how the Horizontal & Vertical Align Center commands are used for multiple selected layers, now using the optical bounds of selected layers instead of automatically centering in the canvas. Acorn also slightly changes its behavior when transforming selections—see the release notes for a complete explanation. Other changes include a resolution for an issue where new layers weren’t

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Affinity 3.0.1

TidBITS ·

2025/11/10

Canva has issued Affinity 3.0.1, a maintenance update for the recently announced single app that brings together the creative suite of Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher (see “Canva’s Affinity Combines Photo, Designer, and Publisher into One Free App,” 31 October 2025). The release improves stability for the Ask panel in macOS 26 Tahoe, ensures Save as Package works correctly with restricted fonts, improves the reliability of Export to Canva completions, and ensures controls in the Develop

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