406: ‘Hock TUAW’, With Christina Warren

The Talk Show With John Gruber

Christina Warren (a.k.a. "Mary Brown") returns to the show. Topics include Apple's new iOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1 betas (featuring Apple Intelligence), a little reminiscing about Gil Amelio and Steve Jobs, and the bizarre saga of TUAW, resurrected as a zombie AI slopsite.

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Links:

• “On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple” by Gil Amelio.
• Steve Jobs introduces the Mac OS X Dock — and the purple “single window mode” button — at MWSF 2000.
• Coverage of zombie TUAW and Christina's AI-generated alter ego:
  • Christina, announcing the scam on Threads, and on Mastodon, both of which resulted in interesting threads.
  • Karissa Bell at Engadget: "[Apple Blog TUAW Returns as an AI Content Farm](Apple blog TUAW returns as an AI content farm)".
  • Jason Koebler at 404 Media: “Hocked TUAW”.
  • The Verge: “Early Apple Tech Bloggers Are Shocked to Find Their Name and Work Have Been AI-Zombified”.
  • Ernie Smith, deducing that the new owner of TUAW is Haider Ali Khan, and that he also bought the ilounge.com domain name.
• A very much NSFW tweet testing Apple Intelligence's familiarity with current slang.
• MTV News shut down and the jerks at Paramount pulled the plug on their decades-long archive.
• Brett Terpstra.
• Ernie Smith, author of Tedium and creator of udm14.com, a single-serving site that shows you how to make Google's "web" view your default for search.

This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.