Author: Matthew Cassinelli

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News

New ‘HomePad’ launch in spring corroborated by The Information »

From Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu’s report at The Information, quoted by Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac:

Apple is also working on a home product featuring a small display, speakers and a robotic swiveling base, designed with a heavy emphasis on AI features. That device could be released as soon as this spring, according to two of the people.

At this point, I am convinced this device will run on App Intents using Interactive Snippets.

View the linked story on 9to5Mac and view the original report on The Information (paywalled).

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Links News

Inside Enchanté, Apple’s AI chatbot for employee productivity »

From Filipe Esposito for Macworld:

Macworld has learned that the company has begun rolling out two new AI-powered apps more broadly to employees in its offices. Both tools are designed for employees to not only test AI capabilities in real-world scenarios, a source said, but also integrate them into their workflow and even help improve Apple Intelligence.

[…]

The first app, called Enchanté, functions as an internal ChatGPT-like assistant for employees. The app can be used to assist employees with ideas, development, proofreading, and even general knowledge answers. The interface looks quite similar to what you see in the ChatGPT app for macOS.

And:

The second internal app, known as Enterprise Assistant, is far more specialized. Built entirely around Apple’s internal large language models (LLMs), Enterprise Assistant acts as a centralized knowledge hub for corporate employees.

View the original.

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Links News

Apple reportedly replacing Siri interface with actual chatbot experience for iOS 27 »

Mark Gurman, quoted by Zac Hall on 9to5Mac:

Apple Inc. plans to revamp Siri later this year by turning the digital assistant into the company’s first artificial intelligence chatbot, thrusting the iPhone maker into a generative AI race dominated by OpenAI and Google.

The chatbot — code-named Campos — will be embedded deeply into the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems and replace the current Siri interface, according to people familiar with the plan. Users will be able to summon the new service the same way they open Siri now, by speaking the “Siri” command or holding down the side button on their iPhone or iPad.

More details on the upcoming chatbot version of Siri.

View the quoted story on 9to5Mac and view the original on Bloomberg (paywalled).

 

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Links News

Apple’s Two-Phase AI Rollout – New Siri Soon, Chatbot Later »

From Mark Gurman, quoted by Jason Snell on Six Colors:

The previously promised, non-chatbot update to Siri — retaining the current interface — is planned for iOS 26.4, due in the coming months. The idea behind that upgrade is to add features unveiled in 2024, including the ability to analyze on-screen content and tap into personal data. It also will be better at searching the web.

And:

The chatbot capabilities will come later in the year, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. The company aims to unveil that technology in June at its Worldwide Developers Conference and release it in September.


Jason speculates on the policy shift from Apple that would need to occur for these to run on Google’s servers too.

View the quote on Six Colors and view the original on Bloomberg (paywalled).

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Gear Links

Master Trainer Stars in New Powerbeats Fit Campaign »

From Marcus Mendes at 9to5Mac:

The YouTube description reads:

“Put in the work. Staying strong this year with Kirsty Godso, whose training philosophy is all about showing up, staying consistent, and moving with purpose.”

Kirsty Godso is a health and workout influencer, who’s known for being a Nike Master Trainer, as well as for training celebrities.

I’ve been using my PowerBeats Pro as my daily drivers and love them (ever since my AirPods Pro 2 randomly stopped charging a few months ago 😕).

View the original.

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Announcements Developer

Drafts 50 released! Shortcuts Revisited, AppleScript Improved (Client Work)

From Greg Pierce, developer behind Agile Tortoise who makes Drafts and Tally:

Enhanced Shortcuts Support

Drafts has always had good Shortcuts support, but we wanted it to be great! This build delivers on that with dozens of new actions (over 50 now!). We also did a complete review of existing actions and improved them with more flexible parameters, better descriptions, and more. A few highlights of the changes:

  • More extensive options in “Find Drafts” allow you to query by date ranges, location information and more.
  • Many more convenience actions to work with Drafts, making it less finicky to configure common actions, like “Append to Draft”, “Archive Draft”, etc.
  • Access draft version histories and action logs from Shortcuts.
  • Control of the Drafts interface – like hiding and showing side panels, toggling pinning and link more.
  • Easier to configure, granular commands for actions like appending, prepending to drafts, archiving, and editing individual draft properties.

This work was done with the help of Matthew Cassinelli, recognized Shortcuts expert, and we really appreciate his expertise and attention to detail bringing together these updates. We tried not to break any existing shortcuts in the process of making these updates, but it’s possible some minor behavior changes were made. Please get it touch if you have any issues and we can help direct you to solutions.

Open up Shortcuts to get started! Orstart with example Shortcuts

It was a very full-circle moment helping Greg with his App Intents/Shortcuts over 15 years after he invented the x-callback-url spec that enabled Workflow in the first place. Only makes sense that Drafts has the best implementation possible.

If you want to add Shortcuts and App Intents support to your app, contact me for a free 1-hour consultationand we can discuss your project.

View the original on the Drafts forum.

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Developer News

OpenClaw Showed Me What the Future of Personal AI Assistants Looks Like »

From Federico Viticci for MacStories:

For the past week or so, I’ve been working with a digital assistant that knows my name, my preferences for my morning routine, how I like to use Notion and Todoist, but which also knows how to control Spotify and my Sonos speaker, my Philips Hue lights, as well as my Gmail. It runs on Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 model, but I chat with it using Telegram. I called the assistant Navi (inspired by the fairy companion of Ocarina of Time, not the besieged alien race in James Cameron’s sci-fi film saga), and Navi can even receive audio messages from me and respond with other audio messages generated with the latest ElevenLabs text-to-speech model. Oh, and did I mention that Navi can improve itself with new features and that it’s running on my own M4 Mac mini server?

If this intro just gave you whiplash, imagine my reaction when I first started playing around with Clawdbot, the incredible open-source project by Peter Steinberger (a name that should be familiar to longtime MacStories readers) that’s become very popular in certain AI communities over the past few weeks.

If he Claude Code craze over winter break wasn’t enough, the project-formerly-known-as-Clawdbot has taken over timelines as the next level of AI interaction on our personal machines – Federico has a great rundown.

View the original.

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Links News

Apple Intelligence Siri is over a year late, but that might be a good thing »

From Michael Burkhardt at 9to5Mac:

All of this time passing means one thing: a lot more people have an Apple Intelligence-capable device.

Everyone who bought any iPhone 16 or iPhone 17 model at all in the past two years (plus anyone who already had an iPhone 15 Pro), will be able to use Apple Intelligence.

*Apple engineer taking this to their boss*: “You see? It’s actually a good thing we were so late.”1

View the original.

  1. Burkhardt is still correct here, and Apple also shouldn’t have been so late with it. ↩
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Links

Gemini Personal Intelligence show what we can expect from Siri »

From Ben Lovejoy at 9to5Mac:

We already knew some of the features we could expect from AI Siri thanks to the announcements at WWDC 2024 and a now-deleted iPhone 16 ad – and the launch of Gemini Personal Intelligence has now effectively provided a working preview […]

Google yesterday launched a beta version of what it calls Personal Intelligence. The headline feature here is Gemini’s ability to use a complex mix of sources to generate responses, including personalized information pulled from a number of the Google apps and services people use.

“Personal Intelligence can retrieve specific details from text, photos, or videos in your Google apps to customize Gemini responses. This includes Google Workspace (Gmail, Calendar, Drive, etc), Google Photos, your YouTube watch history, and of all of the various Google search services you’ve used (Search, Shopping, News, Maps, Google Flights, and Hotels).”

View the original.

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Links

Apple model combines vision understanding and image generation »

From Marcus Mendes on 9to5Mac:

In the study titled MANZANO: A Simple and Scalable Unified Multimodal Model with a Hybrid Vision Tokenizer, a team of nearly 30 Apple researchers details a novel unified approach that enables both image understanding and text-to-image generation in a single multimodal model.

Mendes gives a detailed explanation of the paper’s results – Apple’s image generation is “comparable” to GPT-4o in some tests, for example:

As a result of this approach, “Manzano handles counterintuitive, physics-defying prompts (e.g., ‘The bird is flying below the elephant’) comparably to GPT-4o and Nano Banana,” the researchers say.

We can basically see here that Apple’s models are a year behind where they want to be – but potentially catching up thanks to new research.

View the original.

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Links

Apple introduces Creator Studio, an inspiring collection of creative apps »

From Apple Newsroom (line breaks added):

Apple today unveiled Apple Creator Studio, a groundbreaking collection of powerful creative apps designed to put studio-grade power into the hands of everyone, building on the essential role Mac, iPad, and iPhone play in the lives of millions of creators around the world.

The apps included with Apple Creator Studio for video editing, music making, creative imaging, and visual productivity give modern creators the features and capabilities they need to experience the joy of editing and tailoring their content while realizing their artistic vision.

Exciting new intelligent features and premium content build on familiar experiences of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform to make Apple Creator Studio an exciting subscription suite to empower creators of all disciplines while protecting their privacy.

View the press release.

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News

Apple partners with Gemini to power the new Siri »

On Monday, January 12, Google published ajoint statement from Google and Apple:

Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.

After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.

View the statement and the post on X.

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Custom Shortcuts

New in the Shortcuts Library: Action Shortcuts for the Action Button

I’ve just added a new shortcut to the Shortcuts Library — my Action Button shortcut:

  • Action Shortcuts: Designed for running your shortcuts from the Action Button, this shows shortcuts from the visible app or by Focus Mode if not in an app. When in Work mode, also presents option to edit the shortcut. Also, using Orientation, sets DND if face-down and if upside down in pocket, opens Maps directions home.

Check out Action Shortcuts in the Controls folder on the Shortcuts Library.

Categories
Guest appearances Podcasts

Guest spot — Clockwise: I Love Latin, OK?

On Wednesday, December 3, I had the pleasure of joining Dan Moren and Mikah Sargent as a guest along with Chris Lawley on Clockwise to talk about:

Gadgets we wish we owned, our favorite tech or software of the year, our best tips for helping aging relatives with tech, and our thoughts on John Giannandrea’s retirement from Apple.

Check out Clockwise in Apple Podcasts or listen to the show below:

Categories
Custom Shortcuts Shortcuts

Updated in the Shortcuts Library: Apple Music Replay shortcuts

I’ve just updated a folder in the Shortcuts Library — my set of Apple Music Replay shortcuts, adding the Replay 2025 playlist and the Replay All Time playlist added in June 2025:

  • Play my Replay All Time playlist: Plays the preselected Replay All Time playlist on Shuffle, which curates your top tracks across the years into a single playlist.
  • Play my Replay 2025: Plays the preselected Replay 2025 playlist on Shuffle. This time? Even more dance, plus more hip-hop.

Check out the folder of Apple Music Replay shortcuts on the Shortcuts Library.

Categories
Links News

John Giannandrea to retire from Apple »

From Apple Newsroom – quoted in full:

Apple today announced John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down from his position and will serve as an advisor to the company before retiring in the spring of 2026. Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramanya has joined Apple as vice president of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi. Subramanya will be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation. The balance of Giannandrea’s organization will shift to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue to align closer with similar organizations.

Since joining Apple in 2018, Giannandrea has played a key role in the company’s AI and machine learning strategy, building a world-class team and leading them to develop and deploy critical AI technologies. This team is currently responsible for Apple Foundation Models, Search and Knowledge, Machine Learning Research, and AI Infrastructure.

Subramanya brings a wealth of experience to Apple, having most recently served as corporate vice president of AI at Microsoft, and previously spent 16 years at Google, where he was head of engineering for Google’s Gemini Assistant prior to his departure. His deep expertise in both AI and ML research and in integrating that research into products and features will be important to Apple’s ongoing innovation and future Apple Intelligence features.

“We are thankful for the role John played in building and advancing our AI work, helping Apple continue to innovate and enrich the lives of our users,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “AI has long been central to Apple’s strategy, and we are pleased to welcome Amar to Craig’s leadership team and to bring his extraordinary AI expertise to Apple. In addition to growing his leadership team and AI responsibilities with Amar’s joining, Craig has been instrumental in driving our AI efforts, including overseeing our work to bring a more personalized Siri to users next year.”

These leadership moves will help Apple continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible. With Giannandrea’s contributions as a foundation, Federighi’s expanded oversight and Subramanya’s deep expertise guiding the next generation of AI technologies, Apple is poised to accelerate its work in delivering intelligent, trusted, and profoundly personal experiences. This moment marks an exciting new chapter as Apple strengthens its commitment to shaping the future of AI for users everywhere.

Huge transition for Apple, which has been bleeding AI researchers for months.

View the original.

Categories
Gear

Block Annoying LEDs with these LightDims Black Out Stickers

Everyone knows electronics manufacturers love their LEDs – why not slap a blue or red LED on the front so you know it’s turned on? The worst part is that they are often incredibly bright, casting light across the room, especially at night – and some can’t be turned off at all. Thankfully, my former cohost Mikah Sargent mentioned a solution1 I’ve been using for years – these LightsOut light blocking LED covers—stickers, basically—that come in a large sheet in different sizes:

The sheet is under $5, which both feels dumb to order online and also absolutely worth the peace of mind you get from the stickers – a single hour of lost sleep in a hotel room is worth the tradeoff. Plus, I ordered mine five years ago and have yet to use half, so $1/year so far is good enough for me.

I’ve primarily used mine on the Belkin MagSafe Stand that I use on my bedside table, plus on hotel TVs – I keep half the sheet in my travel bag, then just peel them off and put them back on when I leave.

Get the LightsOut LED covers on Amazon and check out the Belkin stand.

  1. Good god, that’s the kind of thumbnail you make as a joke one month into COVID and they actually use. ↩
Categories
Gear

Elgato’s Early Black Friday Deals Are Live; I Recommend the Stream Deck+

Elgato’s early Black Friday deals are live now, a week ahead of additional sales on Black Friday itself on November 28. Deals vary by region, so check out the dropdown on their site to see for your location (shown below):

As of writing, both the Stream Deck Mk. 2 and Stream Deck + are on sale for me for 20% off – I personally love both models, but I do think the Stream Deck + is more versatile because of its dials, display, and accessories like the XLR Dock, USB Dock, or Network Dock.

Most importantly – you can run shortcuts from a Stream Deck.

Check out Elgato for deals and check out Elgato posts on my site.

Plus, learn more about my partnership with Elgato.

Categories
Announcements

Follow @CassinelliMedia on X for a Full Feed of My Posts

If you’re using X for social media and want to see all the posts from my blog, I have a secondary account you can follow at @CassinelliMedia.

With the increase in links, custom shortcuts for my Shortcuts Library, and my offsite content among my normal blog posts—something that is reflected in the sections of my updated homepage design—I wanted a place where I could link to each post after they’re published, without flooding my own timeline and messing with the algorithm.

Check out @CassinelliMedia on X – or, alternatively, subscribe to the RSS feed for my site.

Categories
Links

Apple is Hiring a Home Screen UI Engineer

From Careers at Apple (line breaks added for clarity):

“The Home Screen team is responsible for many of the iconic system experiences on Apple devices.

The Team is responsible for the Home Screen, Control Center, Status Bar, Volume HUD and various other components on iOS and iPadOS.

As an engineer on the Home Screen team, your responsibilities will range from prototyping new user interface paradigms and implementing new features to defining API, fixing bugs, and improving performance.

You should have an excellent understanding of software design, good debugging skills and an eagerness to work hard and learn a lot.

You should have an eye for detail and a feel for making user interactions feel fluid and fun.

As our team works cross-functionally with many other groups across Software Engineering, Hardware Engineering and Design, you should have a good understanding of systems and excellent communication and collaboration skills!”

Very intriguing – I’d love to see things evolve for the future.

If this sounds like you and you’re qualified, please join Apple and set us up for the next generation of the Home Screen experience 🙏.

Check out the full job listing from Apple.