406: ‘Hock TUAW’, With Christina Warren

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.