Trump’s Dogshit White House Signage Typography 

Before anyone starts patting the Trump administration on its back for one good typographic decision, take a gander at the hard-to-believe-this-is-real new signage at (and alas, on) the White House. This is the sort of signage that typically spells “Business Center” across from the check-in desk at a Courtyard Marriott. The Biden State Department replacing Times New Roman with Cabrini was a typographic misdemeanor. Festooning the White House with signage set in gold-plated Shelley Script ought to land Trump in the Hague.

(The idea that the Oval Office ought to be explicitly labeled “The Oval Office” — whatever the typeface or signage style — brings to mind this classic Far Side cartoon, which I think aptly illustrates the president’s mental faculties.)

‘Those Fonts Are Favored Only by the Apathetic and Sloppy’ 

The fifth of five rules in Matthew Butterick’s “Typography in Ten Minutes”:

And finally, font choice. The fastest, easiest, and most visible improvement you can make to your typography is to ignore the fonts already loaded on your computer (known as system fonts) and the free fonts that inundate the internet. Instead, buy a professional font (like those found in font recommendations). A professional font gives you the benefit of a professional designer’s skills without having to hire one.

If that’s impossible, you can still make good typography with system fonts. But choose wisely. And never choose Times New Roman or Arial, as those fonts are favored only by the apathetic and sloppy. Not by typographers. Not by you.

(Via Antonio Cavedoni.)

The Full Text of Marco Rubio’s Directive on State Department Typography, Re-Establishing Times New Roman

Wednesday, 10 December 2025

I’m a big believer in reading original source material. For example, when Apple provided me, alongside only a handful of other outlets, with a statement regarding their decision to delay the “more personalized Siri” back in March, I ran the full statement, verbatim. I added my own commentary, but I wanted to let Apple’s own statement speak for itself first. It drives me nuts when news sites in possession of a statement or original document do not make the full original text available, even if only in a link at the bottom, and choose only to quote short excerpts.

With regard to today’s news regarding Marco Rubio’s directive re-establishing Times New Roman as the default font for U.S. State Department documents (rescinding the Biden administration’s 2023 change to Calibri), I very much wanted to read the original. The New York Times broke the news, stated that they had obtained the memo, and quoted phrases and words from it, but they did not provide a copy of the original.

The State Department has not made this document publicly available, and to my knowledge, no one else has published it. I have obtained a copy from a source, and have made it available here in plain text format. The only change I’ve made is to replace non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) with regular spaces.1

Please do read it yourself, and do so with an open mind.

It seems clear to me that The New York Times did Rubio dirty in their characterization of the directive. The Times story, credited to reporters Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz, ran under the headline “At State Dept., a Typeface Falls Victim in the War Against Woke”, and opens thus:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio waded into the surprisingly fraught politics of typefaces on Tuesday with an order halting the State Department’s official use of Calibri, reversing a 2023 Biden-era directive that Mr. Rubio called a “wasteful” sop to diversity.

While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.

Rubio’s memo ran about 950 words. Here are the full quotes the Times pulled from it, consisting of just 56 words, aside from the memo’s subject line (“Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper”):

“wasteful”

“radical”

“restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.”

“informal”

“clashes”

“was not among the department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of D.E.I.A.”

“accessibility-based document remediation cases”

“Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence.”

“generally perceived to connote tradition, formality and ceremony”

Rubio’s memo wasn’t merely “mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation”. That’s entirely what the memo is about. Serif typefaces like Times New Roman are more formal. It was the Biden administration and then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken who categorized the 2023 change to Calibri as driven by accessibility. I do not have access to Blinken’s memo making that change (under the cringe-inducing subject line “The Times (New Roman) are a-Changin”), but it was first reported by John Hudson and Annabelle Timsit at The Washington Post, where they wrote:

The secretary’s decision was motivated by accessibility issues and not aesthetics, said a senior State Department official familiar with the change.

Rubio’s memo makes the argument — correctly — that aesthetics matter, and that the argument that Calibri was in any way more accessible than Times New Roman was bogus. Rubio’s memo does not lash out against accessibility as a concern or goal. He simply makes the argument that Blinken’s order mandating Calibri in the name of accessibility was an empty gesture. Purely performative, at the cost of aesthetics. Going back to that 2023 story at the Post, they quote from Blinken’s memo thus:

In its cable, the State Department said it was choosing to shift to 14-point Calibri font because serif fonts like Times New Roman “can introduce accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities who use Optical Character Recognition technology or screen readers. It can also cause visual recognition issues for individuals with learning disabilities,” it said.

The bit here about OCR is utter nonsense, a voodoo belief. No OCR or screen-reader software in use today has any problem whatsoever with Times New Roman. That’s just made-up nonsense, and I’d like to see sources for the claim about “visual recognition issues for individuals with learning disabilities”. I don’t think it’s true, and citing it alongside a provably wrong claim about OCR software makes me even more skeptical.

Rubio brings actual numbers to make his case, which is more than can be said for anyone I’ve found arguing that Calibri is somehow more accessible than Times New Roman. Rubio’s argument is alluded to in the Times’s article thus:

But Mr. Rubio called it a failure by its own standards, saying that “accessibility-based document remediation cases” at the department had not declined.

Here’s the full passage from Rubio’s memo:

And although switching to Calibri was not among the Department’s most illegal, immoral, radical, or wasteful instances of DEIA (see, e.g., Executive Orders 14151, 14173, 14281, and Memorandum on Removing Discrimination and Discriminatory Equity Ideology From the Foreign Service (DCPD202500375)) it was nonetheless cosmetic: the switch was promised to mitigate “accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities,” and employees were promised, “Your adoption supports the Department’s commitment to create a more accessible workplace,” but these promises were false. In fact, the number of accessibility-based document remediation cases at the Department of State was the same in the year after adopting Calibri as in the year before (1,192 cases in FY2024 versus 1,193 cases in FY2022). And the costs of remediation actually increased by $145,000 in that period — nearly a 20% jump. Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the Department’s official correspondence.

2024 was a Biden year, not a Trump year, so there’s no reason to think the remediation numbers were counted differently. The change to Calibri was the worst kind of accessibility effort: one that was founded on nothing more than feel-good performance. It was a change everyone could see and notice, but one that had no practical benefit whatsoever. Good on Rubio for rescinding a bad decision, and even better for doing so with a fair and informative explanation.2 (His memo even explains, “Fonts are specific variations of a typeface.... Through common use, the word font has come to mean both typeface and font.”) 

  1. The memo, per State Department standards perhaps, uses two spaces after sentences and colons. In the original copy I received, those double-spaces were sometimes in the sequence NON-BREAK-SPACE + SPACE, and other times the other way around: SPACE + NON-BREAK-SPACE. There were also a handful of seemingly random non-breaking space characters between words, mid-sentence. All of them, I suspect, just invisible-to-the-eye detritus from Microsoft Word. I replaced all of them with regular spaces, preserving, in plain text, two spaces wherever two spaces were intended. ↩︎

  2. Do I think it was “fair and informative” to describe all of the Biden State Department’s DEIA initiatives as “illegal, immoral, radical, or wasteful”? No. Did I bother reading any of the documents Rubio referenced as proving such? No. Do I think this particular memorandum, specific to changing State’s font back to Times New Roman, would have been stronger without that line, leaving his defenestration of the Calibri font change to speak for itself? Yes. But that line was just one aside in an otherwise focused, sober, and, yes, fair and informative memo. ↩︎︎

Wednesday, 10 December 2025

U.S. State Department Changes Back to Times New Roman From Calibri 

Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz, reporting for The New York Times:

While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.

In an “Action Request” memo obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Rubio said that switching back to the use of Times New Roman would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” Calibri is “informal” when compared to serif typefaces like Times New Roman, the order said, and “clashes” with the department’s official letterhead. [...]

Then-Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken ordered the 2023 typeface shift on the recommendation of the State Department’s office of diversity and inclusion, which Mr. Rubio has since abolished. The change was meant to improve accessibility for readers with disabilities, such as low vision and dyslexia, and people who use assistive technologies, such as screen readers. [...]

But Mr. Rubio’s order rejected the grounds for the switch. The change, he allowed, “was not among the department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of D.E.I.A.,” the acronym for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. But Mr. Rubio called it a failure by its own standards, saying that “accessibility-based document remediation cases” at the department had not declined.

“Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence,” Mr. Rubio said. He noted that Times New Roman had been the department’s official typeface for nearly 20 years until the 2023 change. (Before 2004, the State Department used Courier New.)

When Blinken ordered the change to Calibri in 2023, I wrote:

It is correct for the State Department to have a house style for documents. I’m not sure what font they should use, but it wasn’t Times, and it shouldn’t be Calibri. Off the top of my head, I’d suggest Caslon — a sturdy, serious typeface that looked good 250 years ago, looks good now, and should look good 250 years from now.

While neither is a good choice, between the two, Times New Roman is clearly better. Unstated in my post from 2023 is acknowledgement that the choice might be limited to the default fonts in Microsoft Office. Limited to those fonts, Times New Roman might be the best choice. I just think it’s stupid for an institution with the resources of the U.S. State Department to shrug its shoulders at the notion that they should license and install whatever fonts they want on all of their computers. Anyone making excuses that they “can’t” do that should be fired. It’s the job of IT to serve the needs of the organization, not the organization’s job to limit itself to what makes IT easiest.

Calibri does convey a sense of casualness — and more so, modernity — that is not appropriate for the U.S. State Department. And I do not buy the argument that Calibri is somehow more accessible for those with low vision or reading disabilities. People with actual accessibility needs should be catered to, but they need more than a sans serif typeface, and their needs should not primarily motivate the choice for the default typeface. Dyslexics need typefaces like OpenDyslexic; people with low vision need font sizes much larger than 14-point. Those would make for terrible defaults for everyone.

iMessage’s Delivery Architecture Makes It Hard to Block Without Blocking All iOS Push Notifications

Tuesday, 9 December 2025

From Apple’s iMessage Security Overview:

Apple iMessage is a messaging service for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. Relying on the Apple Push Notification service (APNs), iMessage lets users send texts and attachments like photos, contacts, locations, links, and emoji. Messages sync across all devices, enabling seamless conversations. Apple doesn’t store message content or attachments, which are all secured with end-to-end encryption so that no one but the sender and receiver can access them. Apple canʼt decrypt the data.

This thread on Mastodon, prompted by my wondering why Russia is blocking FaceTime but not iMessage, suggests that because iMessage messages are sent via APNs, a network (or entire nation) seeking to block iMessage can only do so by blocking all push notifications for iOS. That’s why on airplanes with “free messaging” on in-flight Wi-Fi, you usually also get all incoming push notifications, even for services that aren’t available on the free Wi-Fi.

Here’s a support document from GFI Software, which makes network appliances for enterprises and schools:

The Exinda appliance gives administrators multiple options to stop or throttle applications that can use a lot of bandwidth in the network. An application that many would consider discardable or able to be easily limited in bandwidth is iMessage. When blocking or discarding iMessage traffic, users may experience an issue where all push notifications on iOS devices that have traffic going through the Exinda, i.e., on WiFi, will stop displaying.

Root Cause: Apple uses the Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) to allow application creators to push out information to iOS devices. This includes mail servers being able to push out notifications of calendar and email, or app creators to be able to push text-based messages straight to the device.

Apple might have architected iMessage this way to make iMessage veto-proof with cellular carriers, who, at the time of iMessage’s announcement in June 2011, were already promoting iPhone push notifications as a reason to upgrade from a dumb phone to an iPhone with a more expensive plan. The carriers might have been tempted to block iMessage over cell networks to keep people using SMS, but they couldn’t without blocking all push notifications, which wouldn’t be tenable. But this architecture also makes iMessage hard to block in authoritarian countries where iPhones are even vaguely popular. (Maybe this helps explain why iMessage isn’t blocked in China, too?)

Draw your own conclusions about cellular carriers and enterprise network administrators being similar to authoritarian governments. 

Tuesday, 9 December 2025

The Real Problem of Humanity 

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, back in 2009:

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.

A related adage I heard, and internalized, recently: “We’re not thinking creatures who feel; we’re feeling creatures who think.” (Via Jason Kottke.)

ProPublica: ‘Trump’s Own Mortgages Match His Description of Mortgage Fraud, Records Reveal’ 

Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi, and Alex Mierjeski, reporting for ProPublica:

For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence. President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “CROOKED” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action.

But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show.

In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.

In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence.

Frank Wilhoit’s axiom comes to mind: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

The difference between traditional conservatism — which hadn’t yet been washed away in 2018, when Wilhoit wrote it — and today’s MAGA Republican cult is that in Trumpism, the in-group is just Trump, and whoever he sees as serving allegiance to him personally. It’s not men, not white people, not rich people, and not even rich white men, as a class. It’s just Donald Trump and those who pay personal fealty to him. Especially rich white men who pay subservient fealty to him.

The Wall Street Journal: ‘Behind Paramount’s Relentless Campaign to Woo Warner Discovery and President Trump’ 

Joe Flint, Brian Schwartz, and Natalie Andrews, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link, also in News+):

“Just tried calling you about new bid we have submitted,” Ellison texted Zaslav. “I heard you on all your concerns and believe we have addressed them in our new proposal. Please give me a call back when you can to discuss in detail.”

He didn’t hear back.

Sensing trouble, Ellison followed up, saying Paramount had offered a package that covered all the issues Warner had raised, including the need for “strong cash value” and “speed to close.”

“It would be the honor of a lifetime to be your partner and to be the owner of these iconic assets,” he texted, according to a regulatory filing.

Desperation is never a good look.

During a visit to Washington in recent days, David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN, a common target of President Trump’s ire, people familiar with the matter said. Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.

Lickspittling is never a good look, either. David Ellison cuts the figure of a pathetic little man, a mere shadow of his father. (I’ll bet he gets along well with Don Jr. and Eric.) And Trump is now already pissed that Ellison hasn’t turned 60 Minutes into Fox and Friends.

You’ll Never Guess Who Won the Newly Created ‘Peace Prize’ From FIFA, the World’s Most Corrupt Sports Body 

The Guardian:

There on a plinth, with “Donald J Trump” emblazoned on it in capital letters, was the uncoveted trophy: a golden globe resting on five golden hands big enough to compensate any tiny-handed recipient feeling sore about the Nobel peace prize.

But wait, there was more. “There is also a beautiful medal for you that you can wear everywhere you want to go,” added Infantino, knowing that with Trump there is no such thing as too much.

Glowing oranger than usual under the stage lights, Trump eagerly put the medal around his neck without waiting for Infantino to do the honours. He told the audience of 2,000 people: “This is truly one of the great honours of my life.”

It’s just perfect that Trump put the medal around his own neck.

The jokes practically wrote themselves.

You Can’t Please a Madman 

Donald Trump, on his blog:

The only reason Marjorie “Traitor” Brown (Green turns Brown under stress!) went BAD is that she was JILTED by the President of the United States (Certainly not the first time she has been jilted!). Too much work, not enough time, and her ideas are, NOW, really BAD — She sort of reminds me of a Rotten Apple! Marjorie is not AMERICA FIRST or MAGA, because nobody could have changed her views so fast, and her new views are those of a very dumb person. That was proven last night when washed up, Trump hating, 60 Minutes “correspondent,” Lesley Stahl, who still owes me an apology from when she attacked me on the show (with serious conviction!), that Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP FROM HELL was produced by Russia, not Hunter himself (TOTALLY PROVEN WRONG!), interviewed a very poorly prepared Traitor, who in her confusion made many really stupid statements. My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME! Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE! Oh well, far worse things can happen. P.S. I hereby demand a complete and total APOLOGY, though far too late to be meaningful, from Lesley Stahl and 60 Minutes for her incorrect and Libelous statements about Hunter’s Laptop!!! President DJT

Trump’s expectation isn’t that 60 Minutes, along with the entirety of CBS News, along with the entirety of CBS TV programming, would tilt in Trump’s direction after its acquisition (as part of Paramount) by David Ellison’s Skydance. Trump’s expectation is that all of CBS, every minute of the broadcast day, should appeal to and appease him.

‘Netflix and the Hollywood End Game’ 

Ben Thompson at Stratechery yesterday:

It’s important to note that the President does not have final say in the matter: President Trump directed the DOJ to oppose AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, but the DOJ lost in federal court, much to AT&T’s detriment. Indeed, the irony of mergers and regulatory review is that the success of the latter is often inversely correlated to the wisdom of the former: the AT&T deal for Time Warner never made much sense, which is directly related to why it (correctly) was approved. It would have been economically destructive for AT&T to, say, limit Time Warner content to its networks, so suing over that theoretical possibility was ultimately unsuccessful.

Thompson also makes clear that Paramount itself couldn’t possibly launch a credible bid for Warner Bros.:

Paramount’s bid, it should be noted, was for the entire Warner Bros. Discovery business, including the TV and cable networks that will be split off next year; Netflix is only buying the Warner Bros. part. Puck reported that the stub Netflix is leaving behind is being valued at $5/share, which would mean that Netflix outbid Paramount.

And, it should be noted, that Paramount money wouldn’t be from the actual business, which is valued at a mere $14 billion; new owner David Ellison is the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who is worth $275 billion. Netflix, meanwhile, is worth $425 billion and generated $9 billion in cash flow over the last year. Absent family money this wouldn’t be anywhere close to a fair fight.

It’s not illegal or even sketchy for an acquisition to be backed by family money from an entirely separate source (in the Ellisons’ case, Oracle), but it certainly makes more business sense for Netflix to make this acquisition than Paramount. There’s a strong argument that David Ellison doesn’t really know what the fuck he’s doing in the media racket; no one would argue that Netflix doesn’t know exactly what they’re doing.

Paramount Skydance Makes Hostile Takeover Bid for Warner Bros. Discovery 

The Wall Street Journal yesterday:

Paramount launched a $77.9 billion hostile takeover offer for Warner Bros. Discovery Monday, taking its case for acquiring the storied entertainment company directly to shareholders just days after Warner agreed to a deal with Netflix.

Paramount, run by David Ellison, is arguing that its all-cash $30-a-share offer for all of Warner, owner of networks such as CNN, TBS and HGTV as well as the HBO Max streaming service, is a better deal for shareholders and more likely to pass regulatory muster.

“We’re really here to finish what we started,” Ellison said on CNBC Monday morning.

The “more likely to pass regulatory muster” bit is a euphemism for the Ellisons (David, and the real player here, his $250+-billion-dollar-net-worth father Larry) being on the inside of the Trump administration oligarchy. It’s so transparent that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is part of the hostile bid, along with sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar.

That said, while the Executive Branch is influential in such regulatory approvals, it’s not completely under their control. The U.S. court system, while under duress from this administration, remains independent, and with admittedly notable exceptions, remains largely on the up-and-up.

And CNN’s Brian Stelter reports that Netflix was prepared for this:

“Today’s move was entirely expected,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on stage at a UBS conference just now, waving off Paramount’s hostile play for WBD. “We have a deal done, and we are incredibly happy with the deal... We’re super confident we’re going to get it across.”

Monday, 8 December 2025

Johny Srouji, in Memo Responding to Gurman Report: ‘I Love My Team, and I Love My Job at Apple, and I Don’t Plan on Leaving Anytime Soon’ 

CNBC:

Apple chip leader Johny Srouji addressed rumors of his impending exit in a memo to staff on Monday, saying he doesn’t plan on leaving the company anytime soon. “I love my team, and I love my job at Apple, and I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon,” he wrote.

Bloomberg reported on Saturday that Srouji had told CEO Tim Cook that he was considering leaving, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

It wasn’t rumors, plural. It was one report, on Saturday, from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, and Srouji just called bullshit on it.

What a colossal fuck-up for Gurman and Bloomberg. There’s no possible scenario where Srouji was threatening to leave Apple for a competitor on Saturday and telling his staff (in a memo meant to leak to the press) “I love my job at Apple, and I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon” Monday morning.

The most gracious interpretation for Gurman and Bloomberg is that Srouji had expressed this to Cook, at some point in the recent past, and Cook addressed whatever it took to keep Srouji on board. But even in that scenario, they ran a story Saturday that was wrong at the time it was published.

The more likely scenario is the one suggested by Neil Cybart:

If someone wanted to sow seeds of doubt among Apple employees in an effort to help their own poaching efforts, there are at least three publications who would have no problem offering an anonymous microphone to that person.

I.e., the source for this story about Srouji being unhappy at Apple and considering leaving for a competitor was aligned with one of those competitors, and Gurman and his editors at Bloomberg said “Sure, we’ll print that.” Meta, of course, is the competitor that comes to mind.

It speaks to Gurman’s personal and Bloomberg’s institutional influence that Srouji and Apple saw the need to shoot the bogus narrative down in public like this. I can’t remember the last time an Apple executive saw the need to send an intended-to-leak memo like this to shoot down one bogus story. After last week, though, this one couldn’t be ignored.

EU Court Rules That Apple Must Face Dutch Antitrust Lawsuit Regarding App Store Commission Rates 

Juli Clover, writing at MacRumors (regarding a report at Reuters):

Apple could ultimately have to pay up to an estimated 637 million euros to address the damage suffered by 14 million iPhone and iPad users in the Netherlands.

That’s about €45/user.

The lawsuit dates back to 2022, when two Dutch consumer foundations (Right to Consumer Justice and App Store Claims) accused Apple of abusing its dominant market position and charging developers excessive fees. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Dutch iPhone and iPad users, and it claimed that Apple’s 30 percent commission inflated prices for apps and in-app purchases.

I’m curious what these consumer foundations would consider a “fair” (and thus legal) commission rate.

This all comes back to the argument that Apple’s App Store commission inflates prices. A recent Apple-funded (and Apple-promoted) study suggests this is not true — that with lower commissions mandated by the DMA, prices paid by consumers stayed the same and the difference went to the developers. That’s good if you’re a developer, but it’s not the argument being made by these consumer advocate groups.

That said, I pointed out just the other day that Tiimo, a to-do app that Apple just named as the iPhone app of the year in the 2025 App Awards, charges about 20 percent less for subscriptions on its website compared to its in-app subscriptions. An Apple-funded, Apple-promoted study showing that the App Store’s commissions don’t raise prices ought to be taken with a few grains of salt.

Apple argued that the Dutch court did not have jurisdiction to hear the case because the EU App Store is run from Ireland, and therefore the claims should be litigated in Ireland. Apple said that if the Dutch court was able to hear the case, it could lead to fragmentation with multiple similar cases across the EU, plus it argued that customers in the Netherlands could have downloaded apps while in other EU member states.

I know Apple wants this litigated in Ireland because the Irish government sees Apple as an ally, not an adversary, but it does seem contrary to the idea of a single market if a company doing business in the EU is subject to different antitrust laws from each of the EU’s 27 member states.

Sunday, 7 December 2025

WorkOS Radar 

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bot attacks and brute force attempts?

WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. A simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior. Your users trust you. WorkOS Radar lets you keep it that way.

Russia Blocks FaceTime and Snapchat 

Dasha Litvinova, reporting for the AP:

Russian authorities said Thursday they have imposed restrictions on Apple’s video calling service FaceTime, the latest step in an effort to tighten control over the internet and communications online. State internet regulator Roskomnadzor alleged in a statement that the service is being “used to organize and conduct terrorist activities on the territory of the country, to recruit perpetrators (and) commit fraud and other crimes against our citizens.” Apple did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

The Russian regulator also announced that it has blocked Snapchat, a messaging app for sharing photos, videos and text messages, citing the same grounds it gave for restricting FaceTime. It said that it took the action Oct. 10 even though it only reported the move on Thursday.

I’m sure the crime rate in Russia will soon plummet. (I’m curious why iMessage isn’t blocked too.)

Update: A DF reader in Russia, who has sent me feedback before, told me that iMessage still works (and in fact told me via iMessage), but that it likely hasn’t been blocked because it isn’t widely used there. (He said that his chat with me is his one and only iMessage thread.) FaceTime, on the other hand, is quite popular in Russia. Or at least it was.

Meta Says Fuck That Metaverse Shit

Sunday, 7 December 2025

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times, “Meta Weighs Cuts to Its Metaverse Unit” (gift link):

Meta is considering making cuts to a division in its Reality Labs unit that works on the so-called metaverse, said three employees with knowledge of the matter.

The cuts could come as soon as next month and amount to 10 to 30 percent of employees in the Metaverse unit, which works on virtual reality headsets and a V.R.-based social network, the people said. The numbers of potential layoffs are still in flux, they said. Other parts of the Reality Labs division develop smart glasses, wristbands and other wearable devices. The total number of employees in Reality Labs could not be learned.

Meta does not plan to abandon building the metaverse, the people said. Instead, executives expect to shift the savings from the cuts into investments in its augmented reality glasses, the people said.

Meta confirmed the cuts to the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg’s Kurt Wagner broke the news Thursday.

I’m so old that I remember ... checks notes ... four years ago, when Facebook renamed itself Meta in late 2021 with this statement: “Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.” And Mark Zuckerberg, announcing the change, wrote:

But all of our products, including our apps, now share a new vision: to help bring the metaverse to life. And now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do.

From now on, we will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first. That means that over time you won’t need a Facebook account to use our other services. As our new brand starts showing up in our products, I hope people around the world come to know the Meta brand and the future we stand for.

Many of us never fell for this metaverse nonsense. For example, I’m also old enough to remember just one year later, near the end of Joanna Stern’s on-stage interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak at a 2022 WSJ event, seven months before Vision Pro was announced (at the 29:30 mark):

Stern: You have to finish this sentence, both of you. The metaverse is...

Joz: A word I’ll never use.

He might want to use the word now, just to make jokes.

Om Malik, writing in April this year:

Some of us are old enough to remember that the reason Mark renamed the company is because the Facebook brand was becoming toxic, and associated with misinformation and global-scale crap. It was viewed as a tired, last-generation company. Meta allowed the company to rebrand itself as something amazing and fresh.

Lastly, yours truly, linking to Malik’s post:

And so while “Meta” will never be remembered as the company that spearheaded the metaverse — because the metaverse never was or will be an actual thing — it’s in truth the perfect name for a company that believes in nothing other than its own success. 

Sunday, 7 December 2025

One Last Note on Tiimo: What’s the Deal With That Icon? 

One small update I just appended to my piece Friday taking a look at the winning apps from this year’s App Store Awards:

Lastly, I have questions — some really hard questions — regarding Tiimo’s app icon. Such as, “What is that?”

Perhaps it got picked because it makes Apple’s new OS 26 icons look good by comparison?

Friday, 5 December 2025

Dithering: ‘Alan Dye Leaves Apple’ 

The December 2025 cover art for Dithering, showing a man dressed as Santa Claus getting a kiss on the cheek under some mistletoe.

Dithering is my and Ben Thompson’s twice-a-week podcast — 15 minutes per episode, not a minute less, not a minute more. It’s a $7/month or $70/year subscription, and included in the Stratechery Plus bundle (a bargain). This year our CMS (Passport — check it out) gained a feature that lets us make some episodes free for everyone to listen to on the website. Today’s episode, regarding Alan Dye leaving Apple for Meta, seems like a good one to do that with. (And, once again, this month’s album art serendipitously captures my mood.)

Give it a listen. Subscribe if you enjoy it.

Apple’s Succession Intrigue Isn’t Strange at All 

Aaron Tilley and Wayne Ma, in a piece headlined “Why Silicon Valley is Buzzing About Apple CEO Succession” at the paywalled-up-the-wazoo The Information:

Prediction site Polymarket places Ternus’ odds of getting the job at nearly 55%, ahead of other current Apple executives such as software head Craig Federighi, Chief Operating Officer Sabih Khan and marketing head Greg Joswiak. But some people close to Apple don’t believe Ternus is ready to take on such a high-profile role, and that could make a succession announcement unlikely anytime soon, said people familiar with the company.

Nothing in the rest of the article backs up that “some people close to Apple don’t believe Ternus is ready” claim, other than this, several paragraphs later:

And while his fans believe Ternus has the temperament to be CEO, many of them say he isn’t a charismatic leader in the mold of a Jobs. He has also had little involvement in the geopolitical and government affairs issues that dominate most of Cook’s time these days. On a recent trip to China, for example, Apple’s new COO, Sabih Khan, accompanied Cook to some of his meetings.

No one else in the history of the industry, let alone the company, has the charisma of Steve Jobs. And while I think Polymarket has the shortlist of candidates right, I also think they have them listed in the right order. Sabih Khan probably should be considered an outside-chance maybe, but the fact that he accompanied Cook to China doesn’t make me think, for a second, that it’s in preparation to name him CEO. If Khan were being groomed to become CEO, he’d have started appearing in keynotes already. It’s silly to slag Ternus for not having the charisma of Steve Jobs, when Ternus has been a strong presence in keynotes since 2018, and in the same paragraph suggest Khan as a better option, when Khan has never once appeared in a keynote or public appearance representing Apple.

Some former Apple executives hope a dark-horse candidate emerges. For example, Tony Fadell, a former Apple hardware executive who coinvented [sic] the iPod, has told associates recently that he would be open to replacing Cook as CEO, according to people who have heard his remarks. (Other people close to Apple consider Fadell an unlikely candidate, in part because he was a polarizing figure when he worked at the company. Fadell left Apple in 2010.)

The parenthetical undersells the unlikelihood of Fadell returning to Apple, ever, in any role, let alone the borderline insanity of suggesting he’d come back as Cook’s successor.

It has become one of the strangest succession spectacles in tech. Typically, the kind of buzz that is swirling around Cook occurs when companies are performing badly or a CEO has dropped hints that they’re getting ready to hang up their spurs. Neither applies in Cook’s case, though.

There’s nothing strange about it. Apple has a unique company culture, but so too do its peers, like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. And just like at those companies, it’s therefore a certainty that Cook’s replacement will come from within the company’s current ranks. Polymarket doesn’t even list anyone other than Ternus, Federighi, Joswiak, and Khan.

As for hints, there is not much need for any hint beyond the fact that Cook is now 65 years old and has been in the job since 2011. But the high-profile multi-source leak to the Financial Times is a pretty obvious fucking additional hint.

Lisa Jackson on The Talk Show Back in 2017 

This interview was both interesting and a lot of fun. Worth a listen or re-listen.

Apple Announces a Few Other Executive Transitions 

Apple Newsroom, yesterday:

Apple today announced that Jennifer Newstead will become Apple’s general counsel on March 1, 2026, following a transition of duties from Kate Adams, who has served as Apple’s general counsel since 2017. She will join Apple as senior vice president in January, reporting to CEO Tim Cook and serving on Apple’s executive team.

In addition, Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, will retire in late January 2026. The Government Affairs organization will transition to Adams, who will oversee the team until her retirement late next year, after which it will be led by Newstead. Newstead’s title will become senior vice president, General Counsel and Government Affairs, reflecting the combining of the two organizations. The Environment and Social Initiatives teams will report to Apple chief operating officer Sabih Khan. [...]

Newstead was most recently chief legal officer at Meta and previously served as the legal adviser of the U.S. Department of State, where she led the legal team responsible for advising the Secretary of State on legal issues affecting the conduct of U.S. foreign relations.

Monday’s announcement that AI head John Giannandrea is retiring and the hierarchy for AI related projects being further reshuffled under software head Craig Federighi was significant, but not surprising, given how things went this year for Apple with AI.

Wednesday’s announcement that VP of design and Liquid Glass frontman Alan Dye is leaving Apple for Meta was a shock, both inside and outside the company. As I wrote this week, I think it’s great news for Apple, but not by plan.

This news yesterday is just typical planned retirements. The timing is slightly unfortunate though. In the eyes of observers unfamiliar with the company, they might be misconstrued as signs of executive upheaval, occurring on the heels of the minor and major dramas of Giannandrea’s and Dye’s departures. The Jackson / Adams / Newstead transitions announced yesterday are nothing of the sort.

Jackson had a very nice run at Apple and carved out a rather unique position within the company. Apple’s environmental efforts expanded tremendously under her leadership. I’ve never met anyone with a bad word to say about her, and in my own interactions, found her downright delightful.

As for Adams, the responsibilities of Apple’s general counsel are generally far afield from my interests. The only two times I’ve mentioned her at DF were when she got the job in 2017, and a passing reference when the FBI sent a letter to Apple, addressed to Adams, in 2020 regarding the locked phone of a mass shooter in Pensacola, Florida. That’s a sign of a good run for a general counsel — it’s a job where no news is good news.

Lastly, I wouldn’t read anything into Newstead coming to Apple by way of Meta. But it is a bit funny that it was announced the day after Dye left Apple for Meta. She seems to have an excellent wide-ranging background to spearhead Apple’s government affairs. Her stint in the State Department was during the first (now seemingly sane) Trump administration, but she clerked for liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

2025 App Store Award Winners: Tiimo, Essayist, and Detail

Friday, 5 December 2025

Apple, today: “Announcing the 2025 App Store Awards”:

This year’s winners represent the best-in-class apps and games we returned to again and again. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

I did not enjoy all of them as much as Apple did.

Tiimo

iPhone app of the year Tiimo bills itself as an “AI Planner & To-do” app that is designed with accommodations for people with ADHD and other neurodivergences. Subscription plans cost $12/month ($144/year) or $54/year ($4.50/month). It does not offer a native Mac app, and at the end of onboarding/account setup, it suggests their web app for use on desktop computers. When I went to the web app, after signing in with the “Sign in With Apple” account I created on the iPhone app, Tiimo prompted me to sign up for an annual subscription for $42/year ($3.50/month), or monthly for $10 ($120/year). The in-app subscriptions offer a 30-day free trial; the less expensive pay-on-the-web subscriptions only offer a 7-day free trial. The web app doesn’t let you do anything without a paid account (or at least starting a trial); the iOS app offers quite a bit of basic functionality free of charge.

From Apple’s own description for why it gave Tiimo the award:

Built to support people who are neurodivergent (and anyone distracted by the hum of modern life), Tiimo brought clarity to our busy schedules using color-coded, emoji-accented blocks. The calming visual approach made even the most hectic days feel manageable.

It starts by syncing everything in Calendar and Reminders, pulling in doctor’s appointments, team meetings, and crucial prompts to walk the dog or stand up and stretch. Instead of dumping it all into a jumbled list, the app gives each item meaning by automatically assigning it a color and an emoji. (Tiimo gave us the option to change the weightlifter emoji it added to our workout reminders, but its pick was spot on.)

While on the move with coffee in one hand and keys in the other, we sometimes talked to Tiimo with the Al chatbot feature to add new tasks or shift appointments. When we felt overwhelmed by our to-do list, Tiimo kept us laser-focused by bubbling up just high-priority tasks, while its built-in Focus timer (accessible from any to-do with a tap) saved us from the pitfalls of multitasking.

But Tiimo really stood out when we faced a big personal project, like getting our Halloween decorations up before Thanksgiving. With the help of Al, the app suggested all the smaller tasks that would get us there: gathering the decorations from the garage, planning the layout, securing the cobwebs, and doing a safety check.

Aside from the web app, Tiimo is iOS exclusive, with apps only for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. No Android version. It seems to do a good job with native platform integration (Calendar integration is free; Reminders integration requires a subscription). Animations in the app feel slow to me, which makes the app itself feel slow. And, personally, I find Tiimo’s emphasis on decorating everything with emoji distracting and childish, not clarifying.

The app seems OK, but not award-worthy to me. But, admittedly, I’m not in the target audience for Tiimo’s ADHD/neurodivergent focus. I don’t need reminders to have coffee in the morning, start work, have dinner, or to watch TV at night, which are all things Tiimo prefilled on my Today schedule after I went through onboarding. As I write this sentence, I’ve been using Tiimo for five minutes, and it’s already prompted me twice to rate it on the App Store. Nope, wait, I just got a third prompt. That’s thirsty, and a little gross. (And, although I’m not an ADHD expert, three prompts to rate and review the app in the first 10 minutes of use strikes me as contrary to the needs of the easily distracted.)

Lastly, I have questions — some really hard questions — regarding Tiimo’s app icon. Such as, “What is that?”

Essayist

Mac app of the year Essayist bills itself as “The Word Processor designed for Academic Writing” (capitalization verbatim). Subscriptions cost $80/year ($6.67/month) or $10/month ($120/year). Its raison d’être is managing citations and references, and automatically formatting the entire document, including citations, according to a variety of standards (MLA, Chicago, etc.). Quoting from Apple’s own description of Essayist:

Essayist gives you an easy way to organize a dizzying array of primary sources. Ebooks, podcasts, presentations, and even direct messages and emails can be cataloged with academic rigor. Using macOS Foundation Models, Essayist extracts all the key info needed to use it as a source.

For example, paste a YouTube URL into an entry and Essayist automatically fills in the name of the video, its publication date, and the date you accessed it. Drag in an article as a PDF to have Essayist fill in the title, author, and more — and store the PDF for easy access. You can also search for the books and journal articles you’re citing right in the app.

Essayist is a document-based (as opposed to library-based) app, and its custom file format is a package with the adorable file extension “.essay”. The default font for documents is Times New Roman, and the only other option is, of all fonts, Arial — and you need an active subscription to switch the font to Arial. (Paying money for the privilege to use Arial... Jiminy fucking christ. I might need a drink.) I appreciate the simplicity of severely limiting font choices to focus the user’s attention on the writing, but offering Times New Roman and Arial as the only options means you’re left with the choice between “the default font’s default font” and “font crime”. The Essayist app itself has no Settings; instead, it offers only per-document settings.

The app carries a few whiffs of non-Mac-likeness (e.g. the aforementioned lack of Settings, and some lame-looking custom alerts). The document settings window refers to a new document, even after it has been saved with a name, as “Untitled” until you close and reopen the document. Reopened documents do not remember their window size and position. But poking around with otool, it appears to be written using AppKit, not Catalyst. I suspected the app might be Catalyst because there are companion iOS apps for iPhone and iPad, which seem to offer identical feature sets as the Mac app. Essayist uses a clever system where, unless you have a subscription, documents can only be edited on the device on which they were created, but you can open them read-only on other devices. That feels like a good way to encourage paying while giving you a generous way to evaluate Essayist free of charge. There is no Android, Windows, or web app version — it’s exclusive to Mac and iOS.

I’ve never needed to worry about adhering to a specific format for academic papers, and that’s the one and only reason I can see to use Essayist. In all other aspects, it seems a serviceable but very basic, almost primitive, word processor. There’s no support for embedding images or figures of any kind in a document, for example. [Correction: Essayist does support figures, but I missed the UI for how to insert them.]

Detail

iPad app of the year Detail bills itself, simply and to the point, as an “AI Video Editor”. The default subscription is $70/year ($5.83/month) with a 3-day free trial; the other option is to pay $12/month ($144/year) with no free trial. After a quick test drive, Detail seems like an excellent video editing app, optimized for creating formats common on social media, like reel-style vertical videos where you, the creator, appear as a cutout in the corner, in front of the video or images that you’re talking about. The iPhone version seems equally good. The iPad version of Detail will install and run on MacOS, but it’s one of those “Designed for iPad / Not verified for macOS” direct conversions. But they do offer a standalone Mac app, Detail Studio, which is a real Mac app, written using AppKit, which requires a separate subscription to unlock pro features ($150/year or $22/month). Detail only offers apps for iOS and MacOS — no Windows, Android, or web.

From Apple’s own acclaim for Detail:

When we used Detail to record a conversation of two people sitting side by side, the app automatically created a cut that looked like it was captured with two cameras. It zoomed in on one speaker, then cut away to the other person’s reaction. The app also made it easy to unleash our inner influencer. We typed a few key points, and the app’s AI wrote a playful script that it loaded into its teleprompter so we could read straight to the camera.

Most importantly, Detail helped us memorialize significant life moments all while staying present. At a birthday party, we propped an iPad on a table and used Detail to record with the front and back cameras simultaneously. The result was a split-screen video with everyone singing “Happy Birthday” on the left and the guest of honor blowing out the candles on the right. (No designated cameraperson needed.)

Detail has a bunch of seemingly genuinely useful AI-based features. But putting all AI features aside, it feels like a thoughtful, richly featured manual video editor. I suspect that’s why the AI features might work well — they’re an ease-of-use / automation layer atop a professional-quality non-AI foundation. Basically, Detail seems like what Apple’s own Clips — recently end-of-life’d — should have been. It turns your iPad (or iPhone) into a self-contained video studio. Cool.

Of these three apps — Tiimo on iPhone, Essayist on Mac, and Detail on iPad — Detail appeals to me the most, and strikes me as the most deserving of this award. If I were to start making videos for modern social media, I’d strongly evaluate Detail as my primary tool.

Apple still has no standalone category for AI apps, but all three of these apps emphasize AI features, and Apple itself calls out those AI features in its praise for them. It’s an obvious recurring theme shared by all three, along with their shared monetization strategies of being free to download with in-app subscriptions to unlock all features, and the fact that all three winners are exclusive to iOS and Mac (and, in Tiimo’s case, the web). 

Friday, 5 December 2025

Netflix Agrees to Buy Warner Bros., Including HBO, for $83 Billion 

Meg James, reporting for The Los Angeles Times (News+ link):

The two companies announced the blockbuster deal early Friday morning. The takeover would give Netflix such beloved characters as Batman, Harry Potter and Fred Flintstone.

Fred Flintstone?

“Our mission has always been to entertain the world,” Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, said in a statement. “By combining Warner Bros.’ incredible library of shows and movies — from timeless classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane to modern favorites like Harry Potter and Friends — with our culture-defining titles like Stranger Things, KPop Demon Hunters and Squid Game, we’ll be able to do that even better.”

Not sure Squid Game belongs in the same comparison as Citizen Kane, but the Warners library is incredibly deep. Stanley Kubrick’s post-2001: A Space Odyssey films were all for Warner Bros.

Netflix’s cash and stock transaction is valued at about $27.75 per Warner Bros. Discovery share. Netflix also agreed to take on more than $10 billion in Warner Bros. debt, pushing the deal’s value to $82.7 billion. [...] Warner’s cable channels, including CNN, TNT and HGTV, are not included in the deal. They will form a new publicly traded company, Discovery Global, in mid-2026.

I don’t know if this deal makes sense for Netflix, but Netflix has earned my trust. Netflix is a product-first company. They care about the quality of their content, their software, their service, and their brand. If you care about the Warner/HBO legacy, an acquisition by Netflix is a much, much better outcome than if David Ellison had bought it to merge with Paramount.

The LA Times article goes on to cite concerns from the movie theater industry, based on Netflix’s historic antipathy toward theatrical releases for its films. Netflix is promising to keep Warner Bros.’s film studio a separate operation, maintaining the studio’s current support for theatrical releases. I hope they do. I grew up loving going to the movies. I still enjoy it, but the truth is I go far less often as the years go on. Movie theaters shouldn’t be a protected class of business just because there’s so much affection and nostalgia for them. If they continue sliding into irrelevance, so be it. That’s how disruption, progress, and competition work.

Alan Dye Was in Tim Cook’s Blind Spot

Thursday, 4 December 2025

NBC News, back in March 2018:

Speaking at a town hall event hosted by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Recode’s Kara Swisher, Cook said Facebook put profits above all else when it allegedly allowed user data to be taken through connected apps. [...]

When asked what he would do if he were in Zuckerberg’s position, Cook replied: “What would I do? I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“The truth is we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer, if our customer was our product,” Cook said. “We’ve elected not to do that.”

“Privacy to us is a human right. It’s a civil liberty, and something that is unique to America. This is like freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” Cook said. “Privacy is right up there with that for us.”

Perhaps Cook now needs to define “us”.

This was a rather memorable interview. Cook’s “What would I do? I wouldn’t be in this situation” is one of the stone-coldest lines he’s ever zinged at a rival company. (In public, that is.) That was just ice cold. Cook is a consummate diplomat. Most non-founder big company CEOs are. Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Andy Jassy — none of them are known for throwing shade, let alone sharp elbows, at competitors. Cook has made an exception, multiple times, when it comes to Facebook/Meta (and to a lesser degree, Google).

So it’s not just that Alan Dye jumped ship from Apple for the chief designer officer role at another company.1 It’s not just that he left for a rival company. It’s that he left Apple for Meta, of all companies. Given what Cook has said about Meta publicly, one can only imagine what he thinks about them privately. Apple executives tend to stay at Apple. The stability of its executive team is unparalleled. But Dye is a senior leader who not only left for a rival, but the one rival that Cook and the rest of Apple’s senior leadership team consider the most antithetical to Apple’s ideals.

It would have been surprising if Dye had jumped ship to Google or Microsoft. It would have been a little more surprising if he’d left for Amazon, if only because Amazon seemingly places no cultural value whatsoever on design, as Apple practices it. But maybe with Amazon it would have been seen as Andy Jassy deciding to get serious about design, and thus, in a way, less surprising after the fact. But leaving Apple for Meta, of all companies, feels shocking. How could someone who would even consider leaving Apple for Meta rise to a level of such prominence at Apple, including as one of the few public faces of the company?

So it’s not just that Alan Dye is a fraud of a UI designer and leader, and that Apple’s senior leadership had a blind spot to the ways Dye’s leadership was steering Apple’s interface design deeply astray. That’s problem enough, as I emphasized in my piece yesterday. It’s also that it’s now clear that Dye’s moral compass was not aligned with Apple’s either. Tim Cook and the rest — or at least most? — of Apple’s senior leadership apparently couldn’t see that, either. 

  1. I’d have thrown OpenAI in that list of companies where it would have been surprising, but not shocking, for Dye to leave Apple for. But that simply wasn’t possible given Jony Ive’s relationship with Sam Altman, LoveFrom’s collaboration with OpenAI with the io project, and Ive’s utter disdain for Dye’s talent, leadership, and personality. ↩︎

Thursday, 4 December 2025

Alan Dye Comments on His Career Move in an Instagram Story 

Straight/dumb quotation marks. Some default Instagram typeface. That period just hanging there, outside the closing quote. This is the post from the man who led Apple’s software design for a decade.

Not to mention the gall to use any quote from Steve Jobs, let alone this particular one, which is enshrined by Apple on the wall outside Town Hall at the old Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino, and provides the title for the splendid book published (in a delightful interactive version on the web, and in gorgeous limited print editions) by the Steve Jobs Archive and LoveFrom.

“Just figure out what’s next” for Alan Dye, after his supposedly wonderful accomplishments at Apple, is ... going to work for Meta? Jiminy H. Christ, that takes stones.

Bad Dye Job

Wednesday, 3 December 2025

In my post earlier today on the then-breaking news that Alan Dye has left Apple to join Meta as chief design officer (a new title at the company1), I wrote:

It sounds like Dye chose to jump ship, and wasn’t squeezed out (as it seems with former AI chief John Giannandrea earlier this week). Gurman/Bloomberg are spinning this like a coup for Meta (headline: “Apple Design Executive Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup”), but I think this is the best personnel news at Apple in decades. Dye’s decade-long stint running Apple’s software design team has been, on the whole, terrible — and rather than getting better, the problems have been getting worse.

Dye’s replacement at Apple is longtime Apple designer Stephen Lemay. I’ve never met Lemay (or at least can’t recall meeting him), and prior to today never heard much about him. But that’s typical for Apple employees. Part of the job working for Apple is remaining under the radar and out of the public eye. What I’ve learned today is that Lemay, very much unlike Dye, is a career interface/interaction designer. Sources I’ve spoken to who’ve worked with Lemay at Apple speak highly of him, particularly his attention to detail and craftsmanship. Those things have been sorely lacking in the Dye era. Not everyone loves everything Lemay has worked on, but nobody bats 1.000 and designers love to critique each other’s work. I’ve chatted with people with criticisms of specific things Lemay has worked on or led at Apple (e.g. aspects of iPadOS multitasking that struck many of us as deliberately limiting, rather than empowering), but everyone I’ve spoken to is happy — if not downright giddy — at the news that Lemay is replacing Dye. Lemay is well-liked personally and deeply respected talent-wise. Said one source, in a position to know the choices, “I don’t think there was a better choice than Lemay.”

The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. (If you care about design, there’s nowhere to go but down after leaving Apple. What people overlooked is the obvious: Alan Dye doesn’t actually care about design.)

What I struggled with in the wake of today’s news is how to square the following contradiction:

  • Dye apparently left for Meta on his own; he wasn’t squeezed out.

  • Apple replacing Dye with Lemay seemingly signals a significant shift in direction, replacing a guy whose approach was almost entirely superficial/visual with a guy who’s spent his entire career sweating actual interaction details.

If Apple’s senior leadership would have been happy to have Dye remain as leader of Apple’s software design teams, why didn’t they replace him with a Dye acolyte? Conversely, if the decision makers at Apple saw the need for a directional change, why wasn’t Dye pushed out?2

The answer, I think, is that the decision to elevate Lemay wasn’t about direction, but loyalty. Why risk putting in a Dye-aligned replacement when that person might immediately get poached too? We know, from this year’s AI recruitment battles, that Zuckerberg is willing to throw almost unfathomable sums of money to poach talent he wants to hire from competitors. Gurman reported that Billy Sorrentino, a Dye deputy who has served as a senior director of design at Apple since 2016, is leaving for Meta with Dye.3 I don’t have any other names, but word on the street is that other members of Dye’s inner circle are leaving Apple for Meta with him. But those who remain — or who might remain, if they’d have been offered the promotion to replace Dye — simply can’t be trusted from the perspective of senior leadership, who were apparently blindsided by Dye’s departure for Meta. They wouldn’t have given Dye a prime spot in the WWDC keynote if they thought he might be leaving within months.

So the change in direction we may see — that many of us desperately hope to see — under Lemay’s leadership might be happenstance. More a factor of Lemay being politically safe, as someone predating Dye and outside Dye’s inner circle at Apple, than from Tim Cook or anyone else in senior leadership seeing a need for a directional change in UI design. But happenstance or not, it could be the best thing to happen to Apple’s HI design in the entire stretch since Steve Jobs’s passing and Scott Forstall’s ouster.

Putting Alan Dye in charge of user interface design was the one big mistake Jony Ive made as Apple’s Chief Design Officer.4 Dye had no background in user interface design — he came from a brand and print advertising background. Before joining Apple, he was design director for the fashion brand Kate Spade, and before that worked on branding for the ad agency Ogilvy. His promotion to lead Apple’s software interface design team under Ive happened in 2015, when Apple was launching Apple Watch, their closest foray into the world of fashion. It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.

The most galling moment in Dye’s entire tenure was the opening of this year’s iPhone event keynote in September, which began with a title card showing the oft-cited Jobs quote “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” The whole problem with the Dye era of HI design at Apple is that it has so largely — not entirely, but largely — been driven purely by how things look. There are a lot of things in Apple’s software — like app icons — that don’t even look good any more. But it’s the “how it works” part that has gone so horribly off the rails. Alan Dye seems like exactly the sort of person Jobs was describing in the first part of that quote: “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’”

I am not a Liquid Glass hater. I actually think, on the whole, iOS 26 is a better and more usable UI than iOS 18. But MacOS 26 Tahoe is a mess, visually, and I’m not sure there’s a single thing about its UI that is better than MacOS 15 Sequoia. There are new software features in Tahoe that are excellent and serve as legitimate enticements to upgrade. But I’m talking about the user interface — the work from Alan Dye’s HI team, not Craig Federighi’s teams. I think the fact that Liquid Glass is worse on MacOS than it is on iOS is not just a factor of iOS being Apple’s most popular, most profitable, most important platform — and thus garnering more of Apple’s internal attention. I think it’s also about the fact that the Mac interface, with multiple windows, bigger displays, and more complexity, demands more nuanced, more expert, interaction design skills. Things like depth, layering, and unambiguous indications of input focus are important aspects of any platform. But they’re more important on the platform which, by design, shoulders more complexity. Back in 2010, predicting a bright future for the Mac at a time when many pundits were thinking Apple would soon put the entire platform out to pasture, I wrote, “It’s the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light.” That remains as true today as it was 15 years ago. But Liquid Glass, especially as expressed on MacOS, is a lightweight poorly considered design system as a whole, and its conceptual thinness is not sufficient to properly allow the Mac to carry the weight it needs to bear.

Perhaps more tellingly, there should have been no need for the “clear/tinted” Liquid Glass preference setting that Apple added in the 26.1 OS releases. Alan Dye wasn’t fired, by all accounts, but that preference setting was as good a sign as any that he should have been. And it’s very much a sign that inside Apple, there’s a strong enough contingent of people who prioritize how things work — like, you know, whether you can read text against the background of an alert — to get a setting like this shipped, outside the Accessibility section of Settings.

It remains worrisome that Apple needed to luck into Dye leaving the company. But fortune favors the prepared, and Apple remains prepared by having an inordinate number of longtime talented HI designers at the company. The oddest thing about Alan Dye’s stint leading software design is that there are, effectively, zero design critics who’ve been on his side. The debate regarding Apple’s software design over the last decade isn’t between those on Dye’s side and those against. It’s only a matter of debating how bad it’s been, and how far it’s fallen from its previous remarkable heights. It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray. It was a big problem inside the company too. I’m aware of dozens of designers who’ve left Apple, out of frustration over the company’s direction, to work at places like LoveFrom, OpenAI, and their secretive joint venture io. I’m not sure there are any interaction designers at io who aren’t ex-Apple, and if there are, it’s only a handful. From the stories I’m aware of, the theme is identical: these are designers driven to do great work, and under Alan Dye, “doing great work” was no longer the guiding principle at Apple. If reaching the most users is your goal, go work on design at Google, or Microsoft, or Meta. (Design, of course, isn’t even a thing at Amazon.) Designers choose to work at Apple to do the best work in the industry. That has stopped being true under Alan Dye. The most talented designers I know are the harshest critics of Dye’s body of work, and the direction in which it’s been heading.

Back in June, after WWDC, I quoted from Alan Dye’s introduction of Liquid Glass during the keynote, and then quoted from Steve Jobs’s introduction of Aqua when he unveiled the Mac OS X Public Beta in January 2000. I wrote:

Re-watching Jobs’s introduction of Aqua for the umpteenth time, I still find it enthralling. I found Alan Dye’s introduction of Liquid Glass to be soporific, if not downright horseshitty.

One of the bits from Jobs’s Aqua introduction I quoted was this:

This is what the top of windows look like. These three buttons look like a traffic signal, don’t they? Red means close the window. Yellow means minimize the window. And green means maximize the window. Pretty simple. And tremendous fit and finish in this operating system. When you roll over these things, you get those. You see them? And when you are no longer the key window, they go transparent. So a lot of fit and finish in this.

After I published that post, I got a note from a designer friend who left Apple, in frustration, a few years ago. After watching Jobs’s Aqua introduction for the first time in years, he told me, “I’m really struck by Steve directly speaking to ‘radio buttons’ and ‘the key window’.” He had the feeling that Dye and his team looked down on interface designers who used terms like Jobs himself once used — in a public keynote, no less. That to Dye’s circle, such terms felt too much like “programmer talk”. But the history of Apple (and NeXT) user interface design is the opposite. Designers and programmers used to — and still should — speak the exact same language about such concepts. Steve Jobs certainly did, and something feels profoundly broken about that disconnect under Alan Dye’s leadership. It’s like the head of cinematography for a movie telling the camera team to stop talking about nerdy shit like “f-stops”. The head of cinematography shouldn’t just abide talking about f-stops and focal lengths, but love it. Said my friend to me, regarding his interactions with Dye and his team at Apple, “I swear I had conversations in which I mentioned ‘key window’ and no one knew what I meant.”

That won’t be a problem with Stephen Lemay. Understanding of fundamental principles will no longer be lacking. Lemay has been at Apple spanning the gamut between the Greg Christie/Bas Ording glory days and the current era. At the very least, Lemay running HI should stop the bleeding — both in terms of work quality and talent retention. I sincerely believe things might measurably improve, but I’m more sure that things will stop getting worse. That alone will be a win for everyone — even though the change was seemingly driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to poach Dye, not Tim Cook and Apple’s senior leadership realizing they should have shitcanned him long ago.

Alan Dye is not untalented. But his talents at Apple were in politics. His political skill was so profound that it was his decision to leave, despite the fact that his tenure is considered a disaster by actual designers inside and outside the company. He obviously figured out how to please Apple’s senior leadership. His departure today landed as a total surprise because his stature within the company seemed so secure. And so I think he might do very well at Meta. Not because he can bring world-class interaction design expertise — because he obviously can’t — but because the path to success at Meta has never been driven by design. It’s about getting done what Zuck wants done. Dye might excel at that. Dye was an anchor holding Apple back, but might elevate design at Meta.5

My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.” 

  1. Titles are just titles, and title inflation is a real problem at all big companies. But I always thought C-level executives by definition report directly to the CEO. That that was the whole point of a “chief whatever officer” title versus “senior vice president of whatever”. But according to Mark Gurman’s exclusive report at Bloomberg breaking this whole story (emphasis added):

    With the Dye hire, Meta is creating a new design studio and putting him in charge of design for hardware, software and AI integration for its interfaces. He will be reporting to Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who oversees Reality Labs. That group is tasked with developing wearable devices, such as smart glasses and virtual reality headsets. Dye’s major focus will be revamping Meta’s consumer devices with artificial intelligence features.

    If true, Dye doesn’t even report directly to Mark Zuckerberg. Oddly enough, after the retirement of COO Jeff Williams this year, Apple claimed the company’s design teams transitioned to reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook. ↩︎

  2. And man oh man am I curious who was involved with this decision, who had Tim Cook’s ear, and just how quickly they were forced to make it. Part of what made Stephen Lemay a popular choice within Apple’s ranks is that Lemay, by all accounts I’ve heard, isn’t a political operator and never angled for a promotion to a level of this prominence. His focus has always singularly been on the work. ↩︎︎

  3. Sorrentino was featured in a two-minute-plus segment in this year’s WWDC keynote, starting at the 38:25 mark, introducing the new iOS Visual Intelligence features. His star was rising at Apple. And Dye himself, of course, was given the spotlight to introduce and effectively take credit for Liquid Glass itself. At least until recently, no one at Apple saw this coming. ↩︎︎

  4. I have good reason to believe that Ive, in private, would be the first person to admit that. A fan of Liquid Glass Jony Ive is not. I believe he sees Dye as a graphic designer, not a user interface designer — and not a good graphic designer at that. I don’t think Alan Dye could get a job as a barista at LoveFrom. ↩︎︎

  5. It’s worth recalling that Zuckerberg sorta kinda tried this poach-design-talent-from-Apple thing before. Mike Matas, the wunderkind designer who became a sensation with Delicious Library in 2005, soon thereafter moved on to work at Apple, where he designed such things as the “slide to unlock” interface on the original iPhone. Matas was a key designer on that glorious first version of the iPhone’s OS. He then left Apple and formed Push Pop Press, and wound up at Facebook in 2011 after Facebook acquired Push Pop — before it had even shipped its core product. (I saw a still-in-development version of Push Pop’s publishing system in 2011, before Facebook bought them and shut down the product, and it remains to this day one of the most impressive, exciting, “this is the future” demos I’ve ever seen. It’s not merely a shame but a goddamn tragedy that it never even shipped.) Zuckerberg wound up assembling around Matas an entire little superteam of “Delicious” era designers and design-focused developers. That team wound up shipping Facebook Paper in 2014 — an iOS-exclusive alternative client for Facebook that espoused the same principles of elegance, exquisite attention to detail, and, especially, direct manipulation of content in lieu of user interface chrome, that infused Push Pop Press’s publishing system. Facebook Paper was so good it almost — almost — made me sign up for a Facebook account just so I could use it. But Facebook Paper went nowhere, fast. Zuckerberg lost his boner for “design”, Facebook Paper was pulled from the App Store in 2016, and the team behind Paper disbanded.

    Matas today works at LoveFrom, and remains, to my mind, one of the most singularly talented and interesting people in the field of interaction design. In some closer-to-ideal alternate universe, Matas would be running HI design at Apple today. ↩︎︎

Wednesday, 3 December 2025

Louie Mantia on The Talk Show in July, Talking About Alan Dye and Liquid Glass 

Back in July, I was lucky enough to have my friend Louie Mantia on The Talk Show to talk about Liquid Glass and (as I wrote in the show notes) “the worrisome state of Apple’s UI design overall”. This was probably my favorite episode of the show all year, and I think it holds up extremely well now that we’re all using Liquid Glass, across Apple’s platforms, in release versions.

Included in the show notes was a link to Mantia’s essay making his case against Dye’s decade-long stint leading Apple’s UI design teams, “A Responsibility to the Industry”, which began thus:

Firstly, I maintain that it makes absolutely no sense that Alan Dye has the power he has, because he simply has no taste. But what’s worse is that he wields that power so clumsily, so carelessly. And because it goes unchallenged, unchecked by someone higher than him, the entire industry suffers the consequences.

Here’s Mantia today, regarding the news of Dye leaving Apple for Meta:

And good riddance!!

Alan.app 

Tyler Hall, just one week ago:

Maybe it’s because my eyes are getting old or maybe it’s because the contrast between windows on macOS keeps getting worse. Either way, I built a tiny Mac app last night that draws a border around the active window. I named it “Alan”.

In Alan’s preferences, you can choose a preferred border width and colors for both light and dark mode.

That’s it. That’s the app.

The timing of this is remarkably serendipitous — releasing an app named “Alan” to fix an obvious glaring design shortcoming in recent versions of MacOS just one week before Alan Dye left Apple. (See Michael Tsai for more on the app’s name, including a callback to Greg Landweber’s classic Mac OS extension Aaron.)

It’s worth following Hall’s “the contrast between windows” link, which points to his own post from five years ago lamenting the decline in contrast between active and inactive windows in MacOS. That 2020 post of Hall’s refers back to Steve Jobs’s introduction of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in 2007:

As I was preparing the above video for this post, I completely forgot there was a final feature about the new Leopard Desktop that was highlighted in that keynote.

Jobs took time out of a keynote to callout that it was now easier to tell which window is focused. At 1:29 in that clip, you’ll hear an outsized “Wooo!” from some of the audience just for this one improvement.

Jobs even prepared a slide, highlighting “Prominent active window” as a noteworthy new feature. In 2007, the increase of visual prominence for the active window, going from 10.4 Tiger to 10.5 Leopard, drew applause from the audience. But the level of visual prominence indicating active/inactive windows was much higher in 10.4 Tiger than in any version of MacOS in the last decade under Alan Dye’s leadership.

Nick Heer on Alan (the app, and, indirectly, the man):

I wish it did not feel understandable for there to be an app that draws a big border around the currently active window. That should be something made sufficiently obvious by the system. Unfortunately, this is a problem plaguing the latest versions of MacOS and Windows alike, which is baffling to me. The bar for what constitutes acceptable user interface design seems to have fallen low enough that it is tripping everyone at the two major desktop operating system vendors.

Nick Heer Obtained Video of Alan Dye’s Exit From Apple 

That doesn’t look like one of the fancy Mitsubishi traction elevators at Apple Park, but otherwise, this jibes.

Alan Dye Leaves Apple for Meta, Replaced by Longtime Designer Stephen Lemay 

Mark Gurman, with blockbuster news at Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc. has poached Apple Inc.’s most prominent design executive in a major coup that underscores a push by the social networking giant into AI-equipped consumer devices.

The company is hiring Alan Dye, who has served as the head of Apple’s user interface design team since 2015, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Apple is replacing Dye with longtime designer Stephen Lemay, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the personnel changes haven’t been announced.

Apple confirmed the move in a statement provided to Bloomberg News.

“Steve Lemay has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999,” Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said in the statement. “He has always set an extraordinarily high bar for excellence and embodies Apple’s culture of collaboration and creativity.”

It sounds like Dye chose to jump ship, and wasn’t squeezed out (as it seems with former AI chief John Giannandrea earlier this week). Gurman/Bloomberg are spinning this like a coup for Meta (headline: “Apple Design Executive Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup”), but I think this is the best personnel news at Apple in decades. Dye’s decade-long stint running Apple’s software design team has been, on the whole, terrible — and rather than getting better, the problems have been getting worse.

Tuesday, 2 December 2025

Look How They Massacred My Boy 

Todd Vaziri, on the HBO Max Mad Men fiasco:

It appears as though this represents the original photography, unaltered before digital visual effects got involved. Somehow, this episode (along with many others) do not include all the digital visual effects that were in the original broadcasts and home video releases. It’s a bizarro mistake for Lionsgate and HBO Max to make and not discover until after the show was streaming to customers.

I decided to help illustrate the changes by diving in and creating images that might do better than words. The first thing I noticed is that, at least for season one, the episode titles and order were totally jumbled. The puke episode is “Red in the Face”, not “Babylon”.

So HBO Max not only ruined several episodes by “remastering” the wrong footage, but they both mis-numbered and mis-titled the episodes. Breathtaking ineptitude. Think about it. This is the entire raison d’être — streaming high quality movies and episodic series. That’s the one and only thing HBO Max does. And they have zero care or craft for what they do. They didn’t just do this to any show. They did it to one of the most cinematically beautiful and carefully crafted shows ever made.

Vaziri’s post, as is his wont, is replete with illustrated and animated examples of the mistakes in HBO’s versions compared to the correct originals available from AMC and iTunes. Vaziri notes:

The fun thing about this restoration mistake is that now we, the audience, get to see exactly how many digital visual effects were actually used in a show like “Mad Men”, which most would assume did not have any digital effects component. In this shot, not only were the techs and hose removed, but the spot where the pretend puke meets Slattery’s face has some clever digital warping to make it seem like the flow is truly coming from his mouth (as opposed to it appearing through a tube inches from his mouth, on the other side of his face).

HBO Max Butchers ‘Mad Men’ in Botched ‘Remastering’ 

Alan Sepinwall, writing for Wired (News+ link in case Wired’s paywall busts your balls):

Last month, HBO Max announced a major new addition to its library. Not only would the streamer be adding Mad Men — a show that HBO execs infamously passed on back when Matthew Weiner was a writer on The Sopranos — but it would be presenting the period drama’s episodes in a new 4K remastering. This would, according to the press release, give “audiences and longtime Mad Men fans the opportunity to enjoy the series’ authentically crafted elements with crisp detail and enhanced visual clarity.”

As it turned out, there was perhaps too much clarity. Not long after the series went live on HBO Max, a screencap began floating around social media from a scene in the Season One episode “Red in the Face,” where Roger Sterling is vomiting in front of a group of horrified Sterling Cooper clients. When it aired — and in the version still available on AMC+ — seven men are onscreen, all of them wearing period-appropriate suits and ties. The HBO Max version, on the other hand, features two men who appear very out of place in 1960: crew members lurking in the background, feeding a hose to create the illusion that actor John Slattery is puking.

It’s not like the crew members are only partially on-screen, or out of focus far in the background. They’re right there. It’s glaringly obvious that no one at HBO Max even watched this. That’s how rotten the culture at Warner Bros. Discovery is. They obtained the rights to one of the greatest TV shows ever made (one that I personally hold alongside The Sopranos as my favorite ever), processed the episodes in some sort of “remastering” that did not need to happen, and didn’t even bother to watch the fucking new versions they produced before putting them on their service for the world to stream.

AMC+ has the entire original series, as originally broadcast, and it looks gorgeous. I bought all seven seasons from iTunes back in the day, and they look as good, if not better, in those versions. David Zaslav — a well-known idiot — should go to prison for this.

Apple to Resist Order in India to Preload State-Run App on iPhones 

Aditya Kalra and Munsif Vengattil, reporting for Reuters:

Apple does not plan to comply with a mandate to preload its smartphones with a state-owned cyber safety app and will convey its concerns to New Delhi, three sources said, after the government’s move sparked surveillance concerns and a political uproar.

The Indian government has confidentially ordered companies including Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi to preload their phones with an app called Sanchar Saathi, or Communication Partner, within 90 days. The app is intended to track stolen phones, block them and prevent them from being misused.

The government also wants manufacturers to ensure that the app is not disabled. And for devices already in the supply chain, manufacturers should push the app to phones via software updates, Reuters was first to report on Monday. [...]

Apple however does not plan to comply with the directive and will tell the government it does not follow such mandates anywhere in the world as they raise a host of privacy and security issues for the company’s iOS ecosystem, said two of the industry sources who are familiar with Apple’s concerns. They declined to be named publicly as the company’s strategy is private.

The second source said Apple does not plan to go to court or take a public stand, but it will tell the government it cannot follow the order because of security vulnerabilities. Apple “can’t do this. Period,” the person said.

To my knowledge, there are no government-mandated apps pre-installed on iPhones anywhere in the world. I’m not even sure how that would work, technically, given that third-party apps have to come from the App Store and thus can’t be installed until after the iPhone is configured and the user signs into their App Store Apple Account.

The app order comes as Apple is locked in a court fight with an Indian watchdog over the nation’s antitrust penalty law. Apple has said it risks facing a fine of up to $38 billion in a case.

This is another one of those laws like the EU’s DMA, where maximum possible fines are based on a percentage of global revenue. No one in India seems to actually be threatening any such fine, but it’s ludicrous that it’s even possible.

Monday, 1 December 2025

Gurman Pooh-Poohs Financial Times Report That Tim Cook Is Retiring in First Half of 2026 

Speaking of Apple executive HR news, in his Power On Bloomberg column last weekend, Mark Gurman pooh-poohed the Financial Times’s recent report that Tim Cook was likely to retire early next year (paywalled, alas, but summarized by MacRumors):

In October, I wrote that the internal spotlight on Ternus was “intensifying,” and that barring unforeseen circumstances he would be the leading candidate. But I didn’t put a date on when a change might happen. Then, around midnight two Fridays ago, the Financial Times published a report with three central claims: Apple is “intensifying” succession planning; Ternus is likely the next CEO; and Cook is expected to step down between late January and June.

The first two points are anything but revelations if you’ve read Bloomberg coverage and Power On, or have simply been paying attention to the realities of Cook’s age and tenure. The timing, however, is another matter entirely. It’s a huge deal that the FT did this: A respected publication should only predict the CEO transition date for a company of Apple’s scale with a high level of confidence — based on people legitimately in the know.

This is where I have concerns. Based on everything I’ve learned in recent weeks, I don’t believe a departure by the middle of next year is likely. In fact, I would be shocked if Cook steps down in the time frame outlined by the FT. Some people have speculated that the story was a “test balloon” orchestrated by Apple or someone close to Cook to prepare Wall Street for a change, but that isn’t the case either. I believe the story was simply false.

They can’t both be right. Either the Financial Times or Bloomberg and Gurman will have a serving of claim chowder no later than June. But as Gurman points out, the only disagreement in their reporting is regarding timing: soon vs. soon-ish.

It could be that we see something like the following next year. Current board chairman Arthur Levinson turned 75 this year, the suggested age limit for Apple Board members. So maybe he rides off into the sunset and Apple names Cook, who already has a seat on the board, executive chairman. Maybe in February, ahead of Apple’s annual shareholder meeting. Then, in the second half of the year, Cook steps down as CEO, Ternus takes the CEO job, and Cook remains chairman of the board for the next decade or so. One change at a time, with a drip-drip series of leaks to trusted business news publications, like the one to the Financial Times last month — seemingly from the board itself — to make none of it come as a surprise.

I don’t think the leak — from multiple sources — to the FT was a “test balloon” (cue John Siracusa on ATP 666 regarding “trial balloon” being the correct idiom). It was more of a “heads up, this is what’s coming”.

John Giannandrea Is Out 

Apple Newsroom, “John Giannandrea to Retire From Apple”:

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.

After the fiasco around Apple Intelligence and the “more personalized Siri” features — which were announced at WWDC in June 2024, but postponed until 2026 in a tail-between-their-legs announcement in March 2025 — and the executive reshuffling immediately after that delay was announced that put Mike Rockwell in charge of Siri and moved all or most of Apple Intelligence and Siri under Craig Federighi, it would have been much more surprising if Giannandrea had stayed at Apple. In fact, I’m surprised he wasn’t out before WWDC this past June.

I don’t think we need to wait for additional details to know that he was squeezed out. If, as Mark Gurman reported back in March, “Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development”, why was he still there?

As for Subramanya, according to his LinkedIn profile, he was at Google for 16 years, and left to join Microsoft only five months ago. Either he didn’t like working at Microsoft, or Apple made him an offer he couldn’t refuse (or, perhaps, both).

Sunday, 30 November 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Financial Boner’ 

Special guest: Tyler Hayes. Topics include how to get a small phone today, which way foldables should fold, the state of Apple TV (including its new “sonic logo”), and some holiday gift gadget recommendations.

Sponsored by:

  • Clic for Sonos: No lag. No hassle. Just Clic.
  • Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.

Saturday, 29 November 2025

Dekáf Coffee Roasters 

My thanks to Dekáf for sponsoring Daring Fireball this week. They’ve just launched a nice lineup of holiday gift bundles — curated sets of their most-loved coffees that make gift-buying easy.

Nine single origins. Six signature blends. Four Mizudashi cold brews. All micro-lot and top-rated coffees are shipped within 24 hours of roasting. No shortcuts. No crash. Dekáf is coffee at its most refined, just without the caffeine. I’ve gone through a few bags, and each one tasted great — like high quality regular coffee.

And, there’s a special offer just for DF readers: get 20% off with code DF.

Festivitas — Now for iOS, Thanks to Widgets 

Last year developer Simon Støvring launched a fun new app for the Mac called Festivitas, which let you decorate your menu bar and Dock with animated holiday lights and falling snow. This year he’s added an iOS version for iPhone and iPad that lets you create widgets to decorate your home screens with holidays lights and festive photo frames. Pure fun.

See also: Jason Snell on using Festivitas’s Shortcuts support to create an automation that gives a 10 percent chance of snow every 20 minutes. Støvring’s own Shortcuts examples (available in the app’s Settings window) include things like turning on the lights when music starts playing. With support for Shortcuts, users can create their own fun.

‘A Critter Carol’ — Apple’s 2025 Holiday Short Film 

Delightful, and there’s an equally delightful behind-the-scenes video.

Thursday, 27 November 2025

‘Fifteen Years’ 

A masterpiece from Randall Munroe, perfect for Thanksgiving.

Wednesday, 26 November 2025

David Lerner, Co-Founder of Tekserve, Dies at 72 

Sam Roberts, reporting for The New York Times:

David Lerner, a high school dropout and self-taught computer geek whose funky foothold in New York’s Flatiron district, Tekserve, was for decades a beloved discount mecca for Apple customers desperate to retrieve lost data and repair frozen hard drives, died on Nov. 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 72. [...]

Tekserve specialized in finding the cures for sick computers — including insect infestations — and recovering first novels and other priceless data, which the company said it was able to do about 85 percent of the time.

“We only charged for success,” Mr. Lerner said.

There were many great independent Apple resellers from the pre-Apple-Store era. There was only one that was legendary: Tekserve.

Running to the Press 

Regarding my earlier post on similarities between the 2010 App Store Guidelines and today’s: Notably absent from the current guidelines (I think for a very long time) is the specious but very Jobsian claim that “If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.” Getting the press on your side is one of the best ways for a developer to get an unjust App Store review decision overturned. Apple loathes negative publicity.

November Update to the App Store Review Guidelines 

Here’s the updated full guideline for section 4.1:

4.1 Copycats

(a) Come up with your own ideas. We know you have them, so make yours come to life. Don’t simply copy the latest popular app on the App Store, or make some minor changes to another app’s name or UI and pass it off as your own. In addition to risking an intellectual property infringement claim, it makes the App Store harder to navigate and just isn’t fair to your fellow developers.

(b) Submitting apps which impersonate other apps or services is considered a violation of the Developer Code of Conduct and may result in removal from the Apple Developer Program.

(c) You cannot use another developer’s icon, brand, or product name in your app’s icon or name, without approval from the developer.

It’s guideline (c) that’s new, but I like guideline (a) here. Not just the intent of it, but the language. It’s clear, direct, and human. It reminds me of the tone of the very early guidelines, when it seemed like Steve Jobs’s voice was detectable in some of them. In a post back in 2010, I wrote:

This new document is written in remarkably casual language. For example, a few bullet items from the beginning:

  • We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps.

  • If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.

  • If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you’re trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.

  • We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.

  • If your app is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.

Some of that language remains today. Here’s the current guideline for section 4.3:

4.3 Spam [...]

(b) Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already. We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience. Spamming the store may lead to your removal from the Apple Developer Program.

I could be wrong, but my sense is that Apple has, without much fanfare, cracked down on scams and rip-offs in the App Store. That doesn’t mean there’s none. But it’s like crime in a city: a low amount of crime is the practical ideal, not zero crime. Maybe Apple has empowered something like the “bunco squad” I’ve wanted for years? If I’m just unaware of blatant rip-offs running wild in the App Store, send examples my way.

Monday, 24 November 2025

Simple Rule of Thumb: AI Systems Shouldn’t Pretend to Be Human 

Dave Winer:

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it’s human, with a level of intimacy that you really don’t want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there’s a pseudo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it’s just a computer. I think AI’s should give up the pretense that they’re human, and this one should be first.

Amen.

‘A Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors’ 

Charlie Warzel, writing for The Atlantic:

X’s decision to show where accounts are based is, theoretically, a positive step in the direction of transparency for the platform, which has let troll and spam accounts proliferate since Musk’s purchase, in late 2022. And yet the scale of the deception — as revealed by the “About” feature — suggests that in his haste to turn X into a political weapon for the far right, Musk may have revealed that the platform he’s long called “the number 1 source of news on Earth” is really just a worthless, poisoned hall of mirrors.

Max Berger, on Bluesky:

If I’m understanding this correctly, X is owned by a white nationalist who pays poor people of color in developing countries to pretend to be working class white Americans to scare other white Americans into being afraid poor people of color from developing countries are going to ruin America?

Pretty much.