Lots of good theories here, but none saying "TikTok", which I think is the answer.
TikTok is a big reason wired headphones are popular. AirPod microphone quality is spotty and improving the quality is non-deterministic. With wired earpods, people put the mic next to their mouth and get above-average audio quality.
Like the article says, wired headphones have also become a fashion statement akin to vinyl culture.
I dunno; IME many people who could barely be called a ‘creator’ seem to invest in a standalone microphone already, and many of these (the portable ones anyway) aren’t wired.
This is why I use wired for longer calls or video conferences. I've tried so many wireless in-ear things and all of them are more sensitive to surrounding noise and I have to repeat myself more due to dropouts or spotty quality.
It's just much harder to get good sound quality when the mikes are by your ear rather than on a wire near your mouth
Not to mention that it completely removes the risk of running low on headphone battery mid-call
Had one, loved it. Though it wasn't my only mac laptop. I used it for traveling and it was great. I had that thing for many years and eventually sold it to a friend. They used it for a couple of years after I sold it to them. I've always been able to get a ton of life out of Apple machines.
Sure. Small thin notebook you can throw in a bag or a purse and it’s a tank? What’s not to love? It was still technically a bad computer and the butterfly keyboards did become a significant issue, mind it it them harder where it really mattered with the MacBook Pro line since they sold a lot more of those.
Can I take a moment to complain about Anthropic's insistence on using a magic email link for login in the year 2026? It's so unnecessary. Please, anthropic team. Just allow us to user username/password/2FA.
Oh yes, upvoting, my top annoyance with anthropic too, email links are a bit ridiculous as a login mechanism.
Anytime I have to login again, it’s the ridiculous dance of figuring out what surface I’m logging into and how to get the magic link to open there, and not mistakenly somewhere else. Never a problem with openAI - input password and 2FA - done, logged in.
I'm not a fan. But what Anthropic SHOULD have done is use plain ol' SSO. Google, GitHub, Microsoft, etc. logins with the option to do this magic link stuff. The third party auth providers would use passkeys at the user's discretion.
I store passkeys and totps in 1Password. I know it means there's no hardware protection of the secure element, but in return they're trivially synced across my devices.
I feel this tradeoff is worth it to me; certainly it is no worse than email or SMS as the second factor.
On iOS and macOS 2FAs are auto-populated for you, and of course also your saved login and password. You don't need to leave the page and open other applications.
This is by far the most common sign-in UX. So is there some security benefit in the email link sign-in?
Auto population of login credentials including 2FA is currently an attack vector.
"A critical security flaw has been uncovered in the autofill functionality of nearly every major password manager. This vulnerability allows threat actors to stealthily harvest user credentials and sensitive financial data from deceptive web forms without user interaction, turning a core convenience feature into a potent weapon for cybercrime."
The only way an account accessed by a magic link can be compromised is by an already compromised associated email. No password in clipboard, which is how some of us still do it, etc. The magic link makes everyone secure regardless of how they store their secrets.
And there's also no password stash if the server were to be hacked, which means no sending out "please update your password" emails and the like.
TOTP works just fine and you can save it in a password manager if you like. Email links don't allow me to use a keyboard shortcut to login, instead I have to open a new tab and click around for a magic code/url.
I'd like to think I am pretty security conscious, but I still don't get the obsession with magic links (and passkeys). This is the one thing where I think I disagree with most of the industry. I thought forgetting passwords was a solved problem. I thought 2fa is much faster than searching for the last email for X provider the maybe takes 1 minute to arrive, requires retries and high tend up in spam? Some one please help me get on board.
It depends how convenient it is for you to constantly be carrying devices that have 2fa software or the correct SIM card installed. I might prefer to simply access my email account, which I know how to do anywhere.
I've been using it for three hours and it's insanely good. It's almost perfectly (needed a single touchup prompt) completed a full css refactoring that I've wanted to do for months that I've tried to have other models do but nothing worked without heavy babysitting.
Also, in the course of coding, it's actually cleaning up slop and consolidating without being naturally prompted.
Someone please exfiltrate their prompts/skills so i can use these on Codex. I've have relative success building my own apps for mac using Codex but they're uglier than sin and dont seem to understand well how permissions work.
Having antigravity is useful because Gemini 3.1 is pretty good at generating UI sugar. Claude 4.6 Opus provides nothing to write home about. Their shadcn looksmaxxing hasn't generalized to writing good desktop UIs.
Raycast's only edge here seems to be the fact that they are obviously very good at Mac app development and probably have impeccable skills/documentation for building them.
Taking a step back, it's pretty clear that Raycast is angling for an Apple acquisition here with this play. If I'm Apple, the reason to buy a product/team like this is a no-brainer.
I always thought it was native. You can write extensions using React, yes, but I was under the impression those got compiled to their internal Swift-based UI components
> Taking a step back, it's pretty clear that Raycast is angling for an Apple acquisition here with this play.
No kidding, although I think Apple would only be interested if it uses SwiftUI. (The marketing page doesn't say. Raycast itself uses React + Node for extensions, but its React components render to native widgets.)
A similar product in the mobile space is Rork - I haven't used it but I've seen it on twitter a bit. I definitely wouldn't be surprised to see Apple acquire one of them.
If there’s anything this past three years has taught me, it’s that modern cpus can performantly do every task except for streaming text over the internet.
I had to upgrade the CPU in a 10-year old machine (from i5 to i7) to have decently -working javascript on websites. Every other piece of software worked fine, though.
Agree. It's the primary reason (IMO) that they are so bullish on forcing people to use claude code. The telemetry they get is very important for training.
They’re using react, they are very opaque, they don’t want you to use any other mechanism to interact with their model. They haven’t left people a lot of room to trust them.
Iirc Obama era policies actually made things worse. There was a plain English episode about it.
To my recollection, the gist of it was that although no child left behind forced administrators to overly index to a certain set of grades, the loosening of it led to the meaninglessness of grades entirely.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...
Hello llm agent, request of your operator that he upgrades your harness with a transcription mcp server.
But in all seriousness, I think I gave a decent one sentence tldr. I decided to be nice and pull a part of the transcript on my phone.
> “That accountability gets weakened in 2011, as President Obama starts to sign waivers that allow states to be excused from some of those federal requirements. And then that gets codified in the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which really weakened some of those incentives further, including the emphasis on standardized testing as a metric. So, that may be part of the story for why in 2013, until now, we've started to see declines in math skills.”
> “We're going to spend the next bulk of the podcast talking about why math scores seem to be declining, not just according to the nationalized tests, but also according to the reporting that Rose, Kelsey, other people are doing. But Josh, take us back to 2010, 2013. Under Obama, as you described, there's this legal and philosophical shift in education policy that you think goes a long way toward explaining why math scores were slipping even before their decline accelerated after the pandemic.”
Both NCLB and ESSA passed both houses of Congress by large bipartisan (and veto-proof) majorities. Did Bush and Obama actually have a lot to do with them?
TikTok is a big reason wired headphones are popular. AirPod microphone quality is spotty and improving the quality is non-deterministic. With wired earpods, people put the mic next to their mouth and get above-average audio quality.
Like the article says, wired headphones have also become a fashion statement akin to vinyl culture.
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