Bernie Sanders: Ideologue and Economic Ignoramus

Saturday, 27 June 2026

Bernie Sanders, posting on Twitter/X Thursday (don’t complain to me that he doesn’t use his Bluesky account):

Corporate greed is Tim Cook, the billionaire Apple CEO, claiming that hiking prices on Apple products by over $200 is “unavoidable” after it made $112 billion in profits last year & spent $310 billion on stock buybacks.

These price hikes aren’t unavoidable. They’re unacceptable.

It boggles the mind how anyone could post this and not question the common sense napkin math of a company spending 3× its annual profit on stock buybacks. That’s theoretically possible, I suppose, but obviously unsustainable. A company would have to burn through a cash hoard or incur massive amounts of debt to spend 3× its profit on anything. It makes no sense. Someone who doesn’t consider the common sense of those numbers probably shouldn’t be spouting off on anything related to economics. And of course Apple files an annual report with the SEC, easily searchable via the web, which plainly shows that the company spent $89 billion on stock repurchases last year, and paid shareholders $15 billion in dividends. Those numbers make sense for a company that earned $112 billion in profit.

I suspect Sanders is so ignorant of basic economics that he sees the ampersand in his tweet as additive — that Apple made $112 billion in profit and spent $310 billion in buybacks and thus had something like $420 billion of money “in the black” with which they could eat the cost of rising RAM and SSD components. But they’re not additive. Stock repurchases are purchases. If Apple actually had spent $310 billion on stock buybacks last year — which, to repeat, they most certainly did not — even Karl Marx might excuse them for raising prices on their products this year, because they’d be in a $200 billion hole they needed to dig out of.

But such concerns, obvious to anyone who’s taken an Econ 101 course in college, seldom stop ideologues.

Putting aside Sanders’s factually incorrect and nonsensical $310 billion figure, let’s just consider this general scenario: A company makes a product that consists of essential components they must purchase from suppliers. Something happens — outside the company’s control — that causes those essential components to rise in price significantly. Therefore the cost of goods for the company’s product increases significantly. What should the company do? Raise prices and pass those increased costs on to their customers, maintaining the same level of profit for themselves? Or hold prices steady and eat those costs, accepting lower profits or even negative margins, so that customers remain unaffected?

One can hold logically consistent views at both extremes. At one end, the belief that business is business and higher costs naturally result in higher prices passed along to customers. At the other end, the belief that companies should put the welfare of their customers ahead of their own profit seeking. Perhaps you think the answer is somewhere in-between: somewhat higher prices and somewhat lower profit margins. What you cannot do is hold a philosophically consistent logically coherent view where your answer to how a company should respond in such a scenario is contingent on what the “something happens” is that caused component prices to rise.

When the “something happens” is a global RAM and SSD shortage resulting from the AI datacenter capex spending spree, Sanders’s tweet makes clear that he’s of the opinion that Apple should eat these costs.

But when the “something happens” was Trump’s tariffs, Sanders argued that (emphasis added) “Trump’s across-the-board tariffs are not the way to do it. We do not need a blanket and arbitrary sales tax on imported goods which will raise prices on products that the American people desperately need.” And again: “Trump’s blanket tariffs will just raise prices for American consumers and hurt our relationships with allies, undermining our global position.” Not “might” raise prices. “Will” raise prices.

Sanders arguing today that Apple should eat the entire cost of rising RAM and SSD components makes no more sense than this tweet from Donald Trump a year ago:

Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT THE TARIFFS,” and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!

Sanders’s tweet is better punctuated and capitalized, but it’s the same illogic. Zero economic sense, 100 percent ideological wishful thinking. Yelling angrily doesn’t make your argument any more compelling or coherent. ★

Saturday, 27 June 2026

Micron Executive Sumit Sadana Tells Tim Cook to Stop Hitting Himself ★

From the bottom of Rolfe Winkler’s report for The Wall Street Journal Thursday, on Apple’s unprecedented price increases (gift link):

Apple’s price hikes arrived the day after Micron Technology, the big American maker of memory and storage, reported blowout quarterly earnings, touting gross profit margins that topped 80%. Shares jumped 16% after the close and appeared likely to power a Thursday rally among semiconductor stocks. [...]

In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn’t make investments during the memory market’s last downturn, when Micron’s gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock-bottom prices.

“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”

I overlooked this segment when I read (and linked to) Winkler’s report Thursday. It really does seem clear that Sadana is blaming Apple for not cutting Micron any slack when the supply/demand curve for RAM had a different look in 2023. I’m sure Micron’s current 80 percent margins are here to stay this time, so getting a few jabs in at Apple will never come back to bite Micron and Sadana.

Apple Faced Bipartisan Opposition When It Last Lobbied to Buy Chinese RAM in 2022 ★

From a September 2022 letter to then-Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, co-signed by Marco Rubio (then a Republican senator from Florida, currently secretary of state) and Mark Warner (Democratic senator from Virginia):

We write to convey our extreme concern about the possibility that Apple Inc. will soon procure 3D NAND memory chips from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-owned manufacturer Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC). Such a decision would introduce significant privacy and security vulnerabilities to the global digital supply chain that Apple helps shape given YMTC’s extensive, but often opaque, ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and concerning PRC-backed entities. In addition, we write to convey that any decision to partner with YMTC, no matter the intended market of the product offerings developed by such a partnership, would affirm and reward the PRC’s distortive and unfair trade practices, which undermine U.S. companies globally by creating significant advantages to Chinese firms at the expense of foreign competitors. Last year, the Biden Administration described YMTC as China’s “national champion memory chip producer,” which supports the CCP’s efforts to counter U.S. innovation and leadership in this space.

The “no matter the intended market of the product offerings” bit was a reference to Apple’s plan only to use Chinese RAM chips for iPhones sold in the Chinese market. I wouldn’t want Chinese RAM in my iPhone any more than I’d want to buy a “Chinese DSLR” as my camera.

Anyway, Apple’s 2022 attempt to get an OK for this went over like a lead balloon, meeting sharp bipartisan opposition. Rubio is today the most influential man in the Trump administration in foreign affairs.

Microsoft Raises Xbox Prices, Drops High-End Storage Model From Lineup ★

Microsoft’s Xbox blog:

Effective August 1, 2026, we will be updating prices worldwide. The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our 2 TB model.

Last October, we increased XBOX console price by $20-$70 in the U.S. We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers on options. Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5× and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027. The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles. Unlike phones, computers, speakers, and other consumer devices, consoles are typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make.

I’m not offended they’re increasing prices. I’m offended only that they want people to style “Xbox” in all caps. And cry me a river regarding that “typically not sold at a profit” line they love to pull out.

What’s most telling is that Microsoft is sunsetting the high-end Xbox model with 2 TB of storage, not the low-end 512 GB one. High-end configurations typically have the highest profit margins. Not in this crisis, however. That’s similar to the way that Mac Studios with the M3 Ultra are now only available with the base RAM configuration: 96 GB. When the M3 Ultra chip debuted in March 2025, Apple offered upgrades to 256 and 512 GB of RAM for $1,600 and $4,000 respectively. Now they don’t offer those tiers of RAM at any price. The only way to buy a Mac Studio with more than 96 GB of RAM is to buy a used one — which eBay sellers are offering for $25,000 to $30,000.

FT Reports That Apple Is Lobbying to Buy Memory Chips From Blacklisted Chinese Company CXMT ★

Demetri Sevastopulo and Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times (paywalled, alas):

Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to buy memory chips from CXMT, a Chinese company that the Pentagon has put on a blacklist because of alleged connections to the People’s Liberation Army, according to six people familiar with the matter. [...]

Apple is not barred from buying chips from CXMT, or YMTC, another Chinese memory chipmaker. But the Pentagon has put both companies on its Chinese Military Company blacklist. The so-called 1260H list contains dozens of Chinese groups with alleged ties to the PLA that undermine US national security. [...]

Congress would probably object strongly if the administration blessed Apple purchases from CXMT, which is the Chinese national champion. “Apple choosing to partner with a Chinese military company would be a grave mistake,” John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House China committee, told the FT. “Helping the [Chinese Communist Party] succeed in its plans to dominate critical supply chains will make our country’s tech industry and economy more dependent on China at a time when we must build secure tech supply chains with our allies,” Moolenaar said. [...]

One former official warned the US risked losing another industry by letting Apple buy memory from a group that receives Chinese subsidies.

“Trump can show the courage to keep American memory alive for our security and our competitiveness or pour it down the drain so [Apple chief executive] Tim Cook can squeeze out a few more points of margin.”

In Apple’s announcement of the company’s imminent leadership transition, they said that in his new role as executive chairman, “Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.” It occurs to me, more and more, that Cook might be no less busy than he was as CEO.

Grok Is a Generative Porno App ★

Grace Kay and Theo Wayt, writing for the paywalled-with-no-gift-links The Information:

xAI launched an upgraded video model last week, highlighting how it’s pushing ahead with its own visual efforts even as it brings in outside help to compete with rivals in areas like coding. SpaceX also touted the popularity of its AI video tools ahead of its blockbuster IPO. What SpaceX didn’t mention, however, is that much of the consumer demand stems from Grok’s looser content rules, which have made it a major destination for generating pornography and other racy content.

Indeed, two recent xAI employees estimated that well over half of Grok’s overall traffic was driven by pornographic images and videos, adult role-play chats or other NSFW activity. On forums for Grok users, many of the most popular posts are porn. Users can generate visuals in several ways, including picking the video models through the consumer app or tapping them through other Grok products.

Maybe that’s a sustainable business model. But I don’t think it’s what SpaceX hype investors think they’re putting their money into. If they renamed the companies to SpaceXXX and xxxAI it might dampen enthusiasm for the stock, but make more clear what they’re selling.

OpenAI Announces, But Is Blocked From Releasing, New GPT-5.6 Models ★

OpenAI yesterday:

We’re beginning a limited preview of the GPT‑5.6 series: Sol, our flagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and Luna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive performance to GPT‑5.5 while being 2× cheaper and Luna brings strong capability at our lowest cost.

GPT‑5.6 Sol launches with our most robust safety stack to date. We strengthened protections for higher-risk activity, sensitive cyber requests, and repeated misuse, and spent multiple weeks finding weaknesses, pressure-testing our system, and hardening it against real-world attacks.

We believe in broad access, and we plan to make GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna generally available in the coming weeks. As part of our ongoing engagement with the U.S. government, we previewed our plans and the models’ capabilities ahead of today’s launch. At their request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with the government, before releasing more broadly.

Stephanie Palazzolo, reporting for The Information (and posted to X) regarding an internal Q&A hosted by CEO Sam Altman:

The reason for the staggered release, Altman explained: The federal government asked it to do so. Altman said that this was the best path for widely releasing the model as soon as possible, said one of the people. In a Thursday memo, Altman told staff that the government would be “approving access customer by customer during this preview period” for GPT 5.6. He added that he hoped there would be a more general release a “couple of weeks later” if all went well. [...]

Even so, after OpenAI had shared its plans for the limited release with top government officials earlier this week, Altman still received a call from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick cautioning the company against launching without receiving approvals from other agencies, according to a person familiar with the call.

It is perfectly reasonable to believe that the U.S. government should have regulatory approval over frontier AI models. It’s absurd to think this should be run by an apparatchik with zero AI expertise like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

AI regulation should be thoughtful, measured, consistent, objective, and deeply informed. It should not be impulsive, impetuous, petty, uninformed, subjective, inconsistent, and transactional. The latter, however, is what we’re getting.

White House Grants Access to Anthropic’s Mythos Model to 100+ U.S. Institutions; Fable Still Shut Down ★

Reed Albergotti and Ben Smith, reporting last night for Semaphor:

The decision, in a letter sent Friday afternoon to Anthropic, is a major de-escalation in the confrontation between the Trump Administration and one of the world’s most valuable private companies. Two weeks ago the administration imposed export controls on Mythos, leading to a shut down of the model and its cousin Fable 5 after warnings from Amazon and other companies that they could be “jailbroken” for malicious purposes.

The letter is silent on Fable 5, a weaker version of Mythos that was briefly the most powerful AI model widely available to consumers. People close to the talks said they are moving toward releasing Fable as well, though that timeline is unclear. [...]

Lutnick’s letter marks the beginnings of a new regulatory regime that gives the US government control over the release of frontier AI models.

A completely ad hoc policy of “Whatever the White House says, goes” is the makings of a terrible regulatory framework for AI. This would be true no matter who was president at the moment. But it’s particularly disastrous for this administration, which is both utterly transactional and staffed from top to bottom with anti-science know-nothings confident that their “ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.

Howard Lutnick is making these determinations? I mean come on.

The Steam Machine ★

Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge (gift link):

Since the Magnavox Odyssey came out in 1972, game consoles have been built with the same basic goal: to effortlessly play proprietary games on a TV screen. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have spent decades essentially selling the same product. A few consoles could do more, but the formula you know and love remains buy box, plug into TV, insert game, play.

The Steam Machine aims to be something bigger. It’s a vision of a box with fewer restrictions and an almost endless catalog of games — for those willing to spend nearly twice the price of a PlayStation 5.

That’s right. Today, Valve has announced the Steam Machine will start at $1,049 without a gamepad or $1,128 bundled with one, but you aren’t getting a significant boost in performance over the 5.5-year-old Sony PS5 you can still buy today. Even after three price hikes, a vanilla $650 PS5 offers sharper images in Cyberpunk 2077 and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered in my tests. So how can Valve possibly charge over a grand, you might ask?

It’s because the Steam Machine is, let’s say, a PC-plus. It’s a PC that acts more like a console than any you’ve used before. It’s incredibly cool and quiet, so much smaller than a PS5, surprisingly smooth, and completely navigable with any modern gamepad you own. You don’t need a mouse, keyboard, or even Valve’s own touchpad-equipped Steam Controller to download, launch, or play games. Joysticks do the job.

The price is eye-opening, but that’s the theme across all consumer hardware this year. It’s hard not to root for Steam with its expanding hardware ambitions, but Hollister’s review shows just how far they have to go to achieve “plug it in, insert game, play” simplicity.

Om

Friday, 26 June 2026

Om died two days ago, after a long battle against a bum heart.

Om and I often sat next to each other at Apple keynotes. This was not at all surprising or odd, insofar as we’d been friends for 20 years. Folks at Apple PR knew that we were close, and would often pair us together in post-keynote media briefings. I always enjoyed being paired with him. He asked keen questions. He saw through bullshit. He found holes in arguments. He took everything in. When I felt overwhelmed, he seemed serene. Om always seemed serene, period. His own photography reflects his presence.

Also, he was funny and fun. Profoundly generous. A good person to be around. A great person to know and be known by. He knew everyone and everyone knew Om. A lot of the people I know in this racket, I know through Om. Every time he’d introduce me to someone, he’d embarrass me with praise for my work. He greeted everyone with a compliment and whatever he said, he meant it. He had kind words to offer everyone because he had a gift for recognizing good things about everyone. He didn’t have an insincere bone in his body, which made him intensely lovable as a friend, and fiercely acerbic and accurate as a critic of technology. “He did not mince words” and “Everyone loved him” do not usually apply to the same person. They did with Om.

He was, of course, a Yankees fan.

So, no, it was not odd that he and I gravitated toward each other at Apple events. But the fact that Om continued to be invited to these events, with a media badge, was in fact unusual. He had stepped away from day-to-day journalism and became an investor back in 2014. A decade later, he was still on the short list of top invitees to events at Apple. His reputation warranted that respect. His ongoing writing and analysis — right up until the very end — continued to earn it. So of course Om continued to be invited to, and attend, these events. He was Om Fucking Malik. His presence improved any room, and lifted everyone’s mood. He made grumps smile. You couldn’t help it.

When he stepped aside from his namesake website GigaOm in 2014, Om wrote:

“Now it is time for the next chapter,” wrote Derek Jeter, the New York Yankees shortstop and my 2nd favorite Yankee (behind Bernie Williams), sharing his intention to retire at the end of 2014. “I have new dreams and aspirations and new challenges. And I want the ability to move at my own pace, see the world and finally have a summer vacation.”

I relate to Jeter’s desire to find life outside of work. Living a 24-hour news life has come at a personal cost. I still wake in middle of the night to check the stream to see if something is breaking, worrying whether I missed some news.

It is a unique type of addiction that only a few can understand, and it is time for me to opt out of this non-stop news life. After five years as a “venture partner,” I am joining True Ventures as a partner, and thus bringing an end to my life as a professional journalist.

Om, somehow, went straight from new-media wunderkind to éminence grise of tech journalism. Back when he was blogging, he blogged hard — multiple breaking-news posts per day, every day, while he was working as an acclaimed reporter for Business 2.0, Forbes, and Red Herring. That’s not what he did for the latter half of his career at all. He began changing his pace and perspective after suffering a heart attack in 2008, at the age of 42. He knew what he wanted to change, he told us he was going to change it, and then he did it. Thinking about his career transformation brings to mind the great Donald Knuth’s remarks regarding email:

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.

What email is to Knuth, the 24-hour news cycle was to Om. He’d had enough, and recognized it. He no longer wanted to be on top of things. He wanted to be on the bottom of things. He transformed himself from the bloggiest of quick-trigger bloggers into the most thoughtful of essayists. He went from documenting what was happening, as it happened, to explaining why. He was very, very good at that — he saw things through a singular perspective and expressed his thoughts with a singular voice.

Om was never impressed by who someone was, what they’d previously accomplished, what grand wealth they’d garnered, or stature they’d achieved. It’s human nature to be overwhelmed by awe in the presence of great people. Om was not. To impress Om, you needed to deliver impressive new work. He was impervious to riptides of hype. Those are superpowers in this racket.

I texted him on June 1 to coordinate meeting up at WWDC the next week. That’s when he filled me in that he’d been hospitalized in the ICU at Stanford since mid-April, and the situation was dire. He needed a heart transplant or he wouldn’t live. I knew he’d been dealing with health issues in recent years, but I had no idea it had become so acute. We’d been chatting regularly for weeks — largely because he’d been so prolific of late, on topics exactly aligned with my own recent attention. He’d been doing some of the best writing and analysis of his career this year — but for the last few weeks, unbeknownst to me, and most of the world, that writing was from a bed in the ICU.¹ This is going to sound cornier than a bucket of Jiffy-Pop, but it is a profound irony that a man with such a big and beautiful figurative heart could have such a lousy literal one.

I apologized for calling out his website in my “What Is a Dickover?” interactive essay, which I hadn’t warned him about, and had posted just three days before he told me of his medical plight. He told me not to worry, I was right, it was annoying, and he’d fix it. I didn’t think he’d get to that. But I checked today, and it’s gone.

Om didn’t keep his health crisis secret, per se. He kept it private. That was very Om. He was generous and effusive, often ebullient, always intense. But he was, in many ways, inscrutable. Private. Contemplative. Comfortable with himself, and by himself. I’ve never met anyone like Om Malik. They broke that mold after minting one.

I seldom ask anyone for professional advice, but when I did, I often asked Om. We did not do exactly the same thing, he and I, but we did close to the same thing. He understood what I do — or at least, what I try to do here — in a way that few others could. Among those of us who came of age in the first decade of blogging, who aspired to make it a career, the common route was to go from independent blogging to a salaried byline at an established big-name publication with roots in print as a magazine or newspaper. Om went the other way — from acclaimed reporter in top-shelf print magazines to turning GigaOm into a phenomenon. I never saw Daring Fireball as a stepping stone to greater things. I wanted only to make Daring Fireball a great thing. Om recognized that. In one of my earliest memories of meeting him — I think when I was working at Joyent, circa 2006 — we discussed publishing and new media and my own ambitions. He told me I should just keep doing what I was doing. Establishment media was a bloated slow-moving mess, he said. The future, he was absolutely certain, would be controlled by creators building their own brands and reputations, not subserving a legacy media publication. I told him I had no such plan. He said, “Good. You don’t need them. They need you.”

Om loved good coffee, nice watches, exotic pens, Apple products, the media industry, photography (both the art and the gadgetry), and the New York Yankees. So, yeah — he and I always had more to talk about than time to talk when we were together. Always. But it was the Yankees we talked about most. He loved about the Yankees what I love about the Yankees — that they embody the pursuit of excellence. Not just winning, but winning the right way. The Yankees play in Yankee Stadium, not Shitco Cellular Service & Financial Bank Park. He got angry about the Yankees by what gets me angry about them. Not when they merely lose. That’s baseball. But when they get cheap, or stupid, or both. (You did not want to get Om started on Hal Steinbrenner, who is definitely cheap and possibly stupid.)

We attended a handful of games together at the Stadium. One time, he told me the most amazing story. When he first immigrated to New York in 1993, and was hustling to make a career in journalism in the U.S., he supported himself with a job selling luggage across the street from (old) Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. If you’ve ever been to New York, you know those stores. He worked at one. He didn’t know anyone in New York, let alone anyone in the U.S. business or technology news media. And he didn’t know a damn thing about baseball. So, on many days, he’d work all day and into the early evening, and then go across the street and buy a cheap seat in the upper deck and watch the Yankees. You’re never alone in a stadium. He learned baseball, and he fell in love with the Yankees on the cusp of the remarkable Jeter-Rivera-Pettitte-Posada dynasty. Om’s favorite player of that era was the serene Bernie Williams, of course. (Mine was Paul O’Neill, the hothead. Of course.)

I said, “I’ve always wondered about those stores. There’s so many of them. Does anyone actually buy luggage at those places?”

“John, you would be surprised. But they do not sell themselves. You have to sell them. It is hard work. The people who buy suitcases in those stores buy them there because they want to argue about prices. It is a fight every day.”

In Om’s telling, the threads were all infused. His lonesome isolation as a young immigrant, 7,000 miles from his birthplace. Falling in love with baseball (in general) and the Yankees (in particular) at just the right time — a crash course in American culture and an antidote to loneliness, rolled into one pinstriped package. His burning ambition to break into major U.S. journalism. And the daily humbling grind of selling suitcases on the hot summer sidewalks of the Bronx.

Om didn’t sell suitcases for long. But I’ll bet while he did, he was pretty fucking good at it. He didn’t wait for his future to arrive. He made it happen. Careers — hell, our entire lives — are like those suitcases. They don’t sell themselves.

He not busy being born is busy dying, wrote Dylan. Om Malik wasn’t busy dying even when he was dying. ★

I will forever be thankful that, somehow, I had the inkling to tell Om how good his recent writing was, before he told me his health was in such dire straits. Don’t hold back on telling people they made something you love or admire. Om himself was remarkably generous in that regard. ↩︎

Friday, 26 June 2026

Apple’s Full Statement on Yesterday’s Price Increases ★

Apple, in a statement issues to the press yesterday, quoted fully by MacRumors:

The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.

I saw a few other publications quote a sentence or two from the statement, but I like to see the whole thing. It’s not long.

The Price-Hiked Apple TV 4K Is 4 Years Old ★

Via MacRumors’s Buyer Guide, the current third-gen Apple TV 4K models were introduced in October 2022, and sport the A15 Bionic chip that debuted with the iPhones 13 in 2021. It’s widely believed that new hardware models are coming this fall. I mentioned yesterday that the steep price increases ($130 → $200 for the 64 GB base model; $150 → $250 for the 128 GB model with Ethernet and Thread networking) move Apple TV further out of line compared to the discount set-top boxes and sticks from companies like Roku and Amazon. But even setting aside the prices of competing devices, it just feels wrong to hike prices this much for four-year-old hardware running five-year-old pre-AI silicon. The higher-end model’s price went up 67 percent!

The only way this makes sense is if these prices are really meant for the upcoming new hardware, and those new models are more ambitious home hubs that warrant $200–250 prices. This makes the current models a really bad deal for the next few months, but come September or October, Apple can introduce next-gen Apple Intelligence-ready Apple TV hardware and the prices can remain $200/250. It’s Apple, so maybe the new hardware will have prices that are even higher, and these increases are just stop-gaps to ease the eventual sticker shock upon the new hardware’s reveal.

But as things stand today, no platform in Apple’s portfolio came out of these price increases looking worse than Apple TV. It’s especially painful to think about people buying one now, at these prices, only to have their purchase obsoleted in September or October.

Thursday, 25 June 2026

Apple Journal’s Atrocious Undo Bug Has Been Fixed (and SwiftUI, Per Se, Is Not to Blame) ★

On the eve of WWDC, in a post arguing that “SwiftUI Only Makes It Easy to Develop Bad Apps”, I wrote about an atrocious bug in Apple’s Journal app:

If you’re running MacOS 26 Tahoe, open Journal and make a new dummy entry. Type something like “The quick brown fox.” Then double-click on the word “brown” and delete it. Now invoke Undo.

What you expect is for the word “brown” to reappear. What happens is ... the whole sentence disappears. Gone. Invoke Redo and you only get back to “The quick fox.” The word “brown” is just gone forever. It’s nowhere in the Undo stack. That’s just profoundly fucked up. I’ve never seen anything like this with an AppKit app, ever. (I’ve never seen it with a UIKit app either — and the same thing happens on iOS with Journal. It’s just that you notice it less often because we don’t invoke Undo and Redo nearly as often there.)

Marcin Wichary, linking to my post from his remarkably good, remarkably prolific blog Unsung, wrote:

Software engineering typically has some categories of bugs and failures that result in immediate action — a night shift, a war room, “sevs,” and so on. Those are, in my experience, things like:

the app crashes,

the site doesn’t load,

there is data loss.

Depending on what you work on, this list will also likely include security problems, regulatory considerations, privacy-leaking bugs, and so on. In a more mature organization, these are all well documented, but even in early startups there is some shared understanding that some bugs are bigger than life and they take immense priority over pretty much anything else.

At any company, a version of this list needs to exist for front-end and user-experience problems, and undo should be on top of that list. If you break undo, you drop what you’re doing to fix it.

This seems to be what exactly happened. I don’t understand how Journal’s data-destroying Undo bug persisted as long as it did, but after I wrote about it two weeks ago, I heard from Apple PR that:

The text editing component in Journal is in fact UIKit, not SwiftUI, so I was wrong to blame SwiftUI just because Journal is largely SwiftUI-based.
The bug had been identified and fixed for a future update.

Well, the future is already here, because the buggy Undo behavior in Journal is fixed in developer beta 2 on both MacOS and iOS 27. Nice. I hope it gets fixed for the 26.6 releases too, but at the moment it’s still broken in the current developer beta of 26.6 (and, of course, still broken in all the v26.5 OSes). So be careful while writing in Journal.

Spensive Thoughts

Thursday, 25 June 2026

Some quick thoughts on the hardware prices Apple increased — and didn’t increase — today. Here’s a table with most of the base models whose prices increased:

	Original	New	Change
Vision Pro	$3500	$3700	6%
HomePod	$300	$350	17%
HomePod Mini	$100	$130	30%
Apple TV 64 GB	$130	$200	54%
Apple TV 128 GB	$150	$250	67%

iPad	$350	$450	29%
iPad Mini	$500	$600	20%
iPad Air	$600	$750	25%
iPad Pro	$1000	$1200	20%

MacBook Neo	$600	$700	17%
MacBook Air	$1100	$1300	18%
MacBook Pro	$1700	$2000	18%
iMac	$1300	$1500	15%

Mac Mini	$600	$800	33%
Mac Studio M4 Max	$2000	$2500	25%
Mac Studio M3 Ultra	$4000	$5300	33%

Apple TV 4K was hit particularly hard on a percentage basis, with the 64 GB base model going up 54% and the 128 GB model (which also includes a Thread radio and Ethernet) rising 67%. These increases especially hurt for a product that was already perceived — fairly or unfairly — as being too expensive compared to its competition. A Roku Ultra costs $100 and Roku Streaming Sticks start at $30, as do Amazon’s Fire TV Sticks. A replacement Siri Remote for Apple TV alone costs $60. It’s clearly the SSD storage in the Apple TV 4K that prompted this, but because people use them to “stream”, consumers don’t even think of Apple TV as having “storage”.

Poor Vision Pro’s meager 6% price increase feels more like a pep talk than a meaningful change. A signifier that Apple has not forgotten it exists. “Don’t worry, buddy, you’re getting a price increase too, just like everyone else. We’ll bump you up ... I don’t know ... how about $200? There you go. Here’s a pat on the head too. Keep your chin up, kid.”

iPad prices mostly went up 20–25%, but the hardest hit was the no-adjective base model, which rose almost 30%, from $350 to $450. That’s a big increase for a product meant to appeal to buyers for whom price is obviously their biggest concern.

MacBook and iMac prices went up 15–20%, but Mac Minis and Mac Studios went up almost twice as much on a percentage basis.

Apple did not raise prices on three of its most popular product lines: iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods. With iPhone and Apple Watch, I guess they think they can hold the line until September, when new models will be announced. But the rumor mill strongly suggests that the only new iPhones coming in September are the iPhone 18 Pro and the new foldable “Ultra”.¹ I can’t help but wonder whether, alongside the introduction of new iPhones, the existing ones slated to be updated in early 2027 (iPhone Air, iPhone 17, iPhone 17e) will go up in price. In normal years, those of us in the know generally discourage friends and family from buying new iPhones or Apple Watches in the summer, encouraging them to wait until September. This year, it might make sense to encourage people to buy now, if they’re price conscious. Based on these other products, surely iPhones and Apple Watches will soon rise in price 15–25 percent. Whether “soon” means “next week” or “September”, I don’t know. But at this moment, iPhones and Apple Watches are selling for bargain prices relative to iPads and Macs, and the iPhone 18 Pro is going to cost a lot more than the 17 Pros. Plus, orange?

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that AirPods did not go up in price. They don’t use SSD storage and they don’t use RAM like other products do.

Because these price increases were driven entirely by RAM and SSD component pricing, the hardest-hit products are the professional tier models, with the most RAM and largest SSDs. Here’s a table I put together in Apple Notes, which (forgive me) I’m going to paste as a screenshot.

M5 Pro / Max 14″ MacBook Pro Configurations

Notes:

The nano-texture display upgrade remains +$150, for both 14-inch and 16-inch models.
16-inch models remains +$300 vs. same-spec 14-inch models.
The binned M5 Pro chip with 15-core CPU/16-core GPU remains exclusively available in 14-inch models, at -$200 compared to the 18/20-core chip. I didn’t bother to include it in the table, nor the plain M5 chip MacBook Pro, which is also only available in 14-inch models.

The base model prices for these M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros only went up 13–15%. But RAM and SSD upgrades increased, in most configurations, by a whopping 50–67%. The 64 and 128 GB RAM upgrades for the M5 Max doubled in price.

Example configurations:

14-inch M5 Pro 18/20 cores, 64 GB RAM, 4 TB SSD:
- Was: $4,000
- Now: $5,200 (+30%)
14-inch M5 Max, 18/40 cores, 128 GB RAM, 8 TB SSD, nano-texture display:
- Was: $7,050
- Now: $9,850 (+40%)

Add $300 to those prices if you prefer 16-inch — which brings the maxed-out configuration to $10,150, and still hits an even $10K if you omit the nano-texture option.

That second one is the configuration I personally would want to buy to replace my beloved but aging M1 Max MacBook Pro (64 GB RAM, 4 TB SSD) from 2021. I knew prices would go up if I waited another year, but I hadn’t really considered that they’d go up by 40%. For that $2,800 price increase, one used to be able to purchase 16 spare wheels for the late great Mac Pro. ★

I’m still holding out hope they call it “iPhone Duo”. ↩︎

Thursday, 25 June 2026

Om Malik, 1966-2026 ★

Heartbreaking news, shared by Om’s family:

Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends.

We invite you to share your remembrances of Om in the comments below or by posting and tagging his accounts on X/Twitter, Instagram, Threads, or LinkedIn.

Om kept this battle very private, so this news comes as a terrible surprise for many, and an incomprehensible gut punch for everyone who knew and loved him. Rest in peace, my friend.

So it goes.

Apple Raises Prices on Most Products by 15–25 Percent, but Not iPhones, Watches, or AirPods ★

Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

The company briefly took down its Apple Online Store early this morning as it typically does when announcing new products. When it came back online, the price tags for Mac computers rose roughly 15% to 20% and iPad prices rose 15% to 25%.

Among the price increases, the base MacBook Air rose $200 to $1,299; the base MacBook Pro increased $300 to $1,999; the entry-level MacBook Neo increased $100 to $699. The iPad Air increased $150 to $749 and the iPad Pro increased $200 to $1,199.

iPhone prices were unchanged, though the company hinted at more increases in a statement.

“We have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices,” it said in the statement. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”

MacRumors has a list of before/after prices. Christ, they even raised the price of the poor Vision Pro by 6 percent, from $3,500 to $3,700.

Anyone who purchased a MacBook Neo for $600 (or $500 with education discount) between March and this morning purchased the lowest-price MacBook Apple has ever sold — and perhaps the lowest-price MacBook they ever will sell.

Wednesday, 24 June 2026

WebKit Always Enables the Copy Menu Item in Every App ★

Jeff Johnson:

Several weeks ago, John Gruber of Daring Fireball asked me whether I could reproduce an issue he was seeing in Safari: when a web page is focused, the Copy menu item in the main menu is always enabled, regardless of whether there’s anything selected in the web page. I could indeed reproduce that issue, and it turns out to be the fault of WebKit. The issue also occurs in Mail app, when an email message is focused.

On Apple platforms, WebKit is a public API, used by third-party apps in addition to Apple’s first-party apps. RSS readers such as NetNewsWire and Vienna, preferred by Gruber and myself, respectively, use WebKit to display articles from RSS feeds. And sure enough, both apps exhibit the same issue: the Copy menu item is always enabled when an article is focused.

What happens if you copy and paste from a WebKit WebView with no selection? Nothing happens, nothing is pasted. However, technically speaking, the clipboard is not empty.

In most Mac apps, since the dawn of time, if there is nothing selected to be copied, the Edit → Copy (and Cut) commands are disabled. If you invoke the ⌘C shortcut while the Copy command is disabled, you hear an alert sound, letting you know that whatever you thought you were copying could not be copied because it wasn’t selected. That beep is useful context. This is proper behavior for all menu items — if they’re not available to do something, they should be disabled, and invoking a disabled menu item keyboard shortcut should beep. In any app that uses WebKit, since early in 2025, the Copy command is always enabled when a WebKit view has focus — but if nothing is selected, you get useless clipboard data that can’t actually be pasted anywhere. (And whatever was on your clipboard is now gone, or pushed back if you use a clipboard history utility.)

This is clearly a bug. It cannot be acceptable that you can copy nothing, wiping out whatever was previously on the clipboard. (Or to be pedantic, to copy a useless inscrutable plist blob that can’t be pasted anywhere.)

Johnson reported this bug in WebKit’s Bugzilla system, but it was erroneously closed as “Won’t Fix”. There’s a conflation in the WebKit team’s closing of Johnson’s bug report between how the Edit → Copy command behaves in any WebKit-using app, and how JavaScript’s document.execCommand("copy") needs to be available even when there’s no selection in the WebKit view. WebKit engineers introduced the bug in application behavior when they attempted to fix the decade-old bug in the JavaScript behavior last year.

I was very glad to read on the WebKit blog, just this morning, that the WebKit team is encouraging the submission of bug reports. Here’s a bug that has already been reported, with copious details, that they merely need to look at again.

WebKit in Safari 27 Beta ★

The WebKit blog (back during WWDC):

If you look through the lists of features and fixes in Safari 27, you’ll notice that, although there are 58 brand-new features and 525 fixes — the largest pile of fixes in any Safari release in recent memory — most of what is released is not about new things.

Most of this work has been about existing features behaving more correctly, handling more edge cases, and fitting together with other features the way you’d expect. We committed our time to increasing quality — that’s the story of this release and the year that led to it. [...]

If something has been bothering you, test it in Safari 27 beta. You might be pleasantly surprised. And if it hasn’t been fixed yet, file a bug report, or add a comment to an existing issue with a concrete scenario, a link to a real site, or a reduced test case. The more concrete the problem, the more helpful it is.

Sounds like it’s a bit of a Snow Leopard year for WebKit, too, not just the OSes.

Designed in California: An Apple History Podcast ★

Kickstarter campaign from Jason Snell and Myke Hurley to fund a 50-episode narrative podcast on Apple’s 50-year history. (Actually, with stretch goals, more than 50 episodes.) The campaign has already hit its primary funding goal but there’s a week left in the campaign and more stretch goals to hit. Jason and I spoke at length about Designed in California on the latest episode of my podcast, and like I said there — if you enjoy podcasts like The Talk Show and Upgrade and aren’t backing this campaign, you’re not hooked up right. Really looking forward to this when episodes start dropping.

Tuesday, 23 June 2026

The Talk Show: ‘Perp Walk for Selfies’ ★

Jason Snell returns to the show for a look back at WWDC 2026, and a look ahead to Designed in California, his and Myke Hurley’s upcoming 50-episode Apple history podcast.

Sponsored by:

Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free daily greens, with code talkshow50off.
Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code TALKSHOW.
Finalist — A daily planner for iPhone, iPad and Mac, built on proven paper-based planning methods. DF readers get six months free; see details at the link.

Monday, 22 June 2026

Ultra-Wide 0.5× Lenses Have Utility Beyond ‘Photography’ ★

Some follow-up thoughts on my earlier piece, regarding the second-gen iPhone Air’s additional camera lens being a 0.5× ultra-wide, not a 3× or 4× telephoto:

Ultimately, it’s the fact that I use my 0.5× lens not so much for photography but for scanning documents and notes, and taking “What is this?” images of things in my hand, that explains its utility compared to a telephoto. I think of photography as meaning, roughly, “I’m trying to capture an aesthetically pleasing image that I intend to keep in perpetuity, to enjoy and remember for years to come.”

A telephoto is only good for photography, in that sense. The ultra-wide lens is a tool with additional utility beyond capturing photos you want to keep in any artistic or emotional sense. You can always grit your teeth and use digital zoom if you don’t have a telephoto, but you can’t fake going wider or, importantly, closer. The minimum focal distance of the iPhone 17 Pro 1× lens is 20 cm. The minimum focal distance of the iPhone Air 1× lens is 15 cm. Those extra 5 cm make a difference, but the iPhone Pro’s 0.5× lens has a minimum focal distance of just 2 cm. It can focus on pretty much anything you put in front of it. The iPhone Air’s 1× lens can’t do that. With Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, taking macro photos of objects and text, simply to ask Siri or another chatbot about them, is increasingly important.

One reader, who previously owned iPhone Pro models, but bought an Air last year, emailed to say: “It would be nice to have the telephoto; it’s annoying not having the ultra wide. When I was buying it I thought I’d miss the telephoto but actually it’s the other way around. If they add ultra wide it will be an instant upgrade for me.”

I think that sentiment sums it up.

Apple Is Going to Raise Device Prices — but When? ★

Speaking of Mark Gurman, in the wake of Tim Cook’s unprecedented interview with the WSJ to warn that Apple is going to raise prices in response to the steep rise in RAM and SSD prices, he tweeted (XCancel link):

Regarding Apple price hikes, have to imagine these are fairly imminent. No other reason to flag them now. I’d also note that Apple back to school sale is very imminent, and it could make sense to tie these together as a buffer. Either way this is happening soon. Not a fall thing.

I won a steak dinner from my Dithering cohost Ben Thompson, betting that Apple would not raise the prices on RAM when they introduced the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros in March, largely on the basis that Apple considers the pricing part of the product’s brand. For the same reason, I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle. I think Cook’s warning is about the fall, starting with the iPhones 18 Pro and the folding “Ultra” in September, and he issued the warning months early just to make the bad news “old news” by the time September gets here.

But unlike with the MacBook Pros in March, I wouldn’t bet more than a beverage on my hunch here. However out of character it would be for Apple to raise prices midway through product cycles, the global RAM shortage is unprecedented. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple pushes price increases moments after I hit “Publish” on this post. (I’m checking right now, before I hit the button, in fact.)

But Cook gave that interview on Wednesday. Now it’s Monday and Apple still hasn’t changed any pricing. If they were going to push out price increases soon, why not last Friday? Why wait at all unless they’re waiting for new hardware? I wouldn’t want to bet on this, but if I had to, I think price increases will roll out with new and refreshed hardware products and they’ll ride the storm in the meantime. I also wonder whether Apple hasn’t yet decided when to increase pricing. Maybe they’re bracing right now for the RAM shortage (and thus RAM pricing) to get even worse, soon, but hoping to hold out until September. And that’s why Cook didn’t offer any hints about when?

Gurman Says Second-Gen iPhone Air, Coming in Early 2027, Will Sport a 0.5× Ultra-Wide Second Camera ★

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is preparing a second-generation iPhone Air for spring 2027, aiming to boost the appeal of the slimmed-down device, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Current prototypes of the new model, code-named V62, add a second rear camera for ultrawide-angle photography, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the product hasn’t been announced. It’s now in advanced testing within Apple, they said.

When Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu of The Information broke the story on the second-gen iPhone Air getting a second camera system back in November, they didn’t say what kind of lens it would be — ultra-wide or telephoto. I speculated that it could go either way. The no-adjective iPhones 11–17 have all sported two lenses: 1× and 0.5×. Pro-tier iPhones have shipped with three lenses (1×, 0.5×, and a telephoto that has varied in length from 2× to 5×) ever since the iPhone 11 Pro introduced the “Pro” adjective in the name. But prior to the iPhone 11 model year, top-tier iPhones with two lenses (7 Plus, 8 Plus, X, XS) shipped with a telephoto 2× lens, not a 0.5× ultra wide, as the second lens.

If Gurman is correct that the additional lens on the second-gen iPhone Air is going to be an ultra-wide 0.5×, I wonder if that is motivated by which type of lens is more popular, or which one fits the Air’s thin form factor better. Could be both — that ultra-wide photography and video is more popular than telephoto, and it fits the constraints of the form factor better. (When I wrote about this in November, a bunch of readers emailed to say that their teenage kids shoot a ton of ultra-wide photos.)

I just ran the numbers on my personal photography with the iPhone 17 Pro over the last nine months. I’ve shot just a hair under 4,000 stills and 90 videos. Still photos by lens:

 0.5x:   6%
   1x:  86%
   4x:   5%
Front:   3%

Videos by lens:

 0.5x:  18%
   1x:  80%
   4x:   2%
Front:   0

By the numbers, I use the ultra-wide 0.5× lens about the same amount as the telephoto 4× for stills, but much more frequently for video — because video is captured with a sensor crop. But flipping through the stills shot with each, an awful lot of my 0.5× photos are macro close-ups of things like receipts and products on store shelves. If I could only have one of the two additional lenses, it’d be a close call, but I’d choose the telephoto 4× — which has become more useful than any previous telephoto lens this year with the sensor crop to get an optical 8× zoom.

Update: “Ultra-Wide 0.5× Lenses Have Utility Beyond ‘Photography’”.

Criterion Collection: The Complete Kubrick ★

30-disc set includes:

4K restorations of Kubrick’s thirteen features and three shorts, with their original soundtracks alongside the 5.1 mixes, restored and remastered

Over twenty-five hours of interviews, documentaries, and behind-the-scenes materials
Kubrick’s international version of The Shining

A new 4K restoration of Vivian Kubrick’s behind-the-scenes documentary Making “The Shining”

Newly recorded commentary tracks featuring filmmaker Lee Unkrich (editor of the book Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”) and author Michael Benson (Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece)

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Dickover of the Week: The Observer ★

Bharat Iyer:

Let’s be real … if The Observer actually cared at all about your privacy, they wouldn’t share your personal data with ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY ONE FUCKING PARTNERS. [...]

Imagine if, upon purchasing a copy of the Sunday newspaper in 1791, you were followed around town by 161 men, taking note of everything you do throughout the day. Makes you wonder who’s really doing the observing.

It’s bad enough to include 161 third-party trackers on a website. But it’s downright dystopic to declare your 161 third-party “partners” under the heading “We Care About Your Privacy”. That’s like beating someone in the head with a baseball bat while telling them “We care about your skull”, literally adding insult to injury.

Yours truly back in 2020, “Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy”:

Imagine if you were out shopping, went into a drug store, examined a few bottles of sunscreen, but left the store without purchasing anything. And then immediately a stranger approached you with an offer for sunscreen. Such an encounter would trigger a fight or flight reaction — the needle on your innate creepometer would shoot right into the red. (Not to mention that if real-world tracking were like online tracking, you’d get the same creepy offer to buy sunscreen even if you just bought some. Tracking-based offers are both creepy, and, at times, annoyingly stupid.)

Sunday, 21 June 2026

Before and After: MacOS 27 Golden Gate Beta 1’s App Icons ★

Basic Apple Guy, back during WWDC:

WWDC always brings a torrent of new content, details, and platform-wide changes. One of the first things I noticed after installing the macOS Golden Gate beta was the updated icon design. The colours are much bolder, several icons have been adjusted, and the refraction in the Liquid Glass effect has changed significantly, especially in icons like Journal.

There’s also a noticeable sharpness to the icons, along with a flattening of the Liquid Glass effect. I’m not sure yet whether this is simply an early-beta artifact or the intended final look.

I think it’s definitely the intended look, and I like it. The changes in these app icons are all subtle, but they’re all changes for the better. I still don’t like the primitive flat shapes and mandated squircle, but at least the trend is finally moving in the right direction again.

Mux — Video for Developers ★

My thanks to Mux for sponsoring Daring Fireball last week. Video is a boatload of data. Every video file in your product contains audio, objects, and scenes that most stacks can’t read or access.

Mux Robots turns that data into video intelligence. Configure your video workflows once, and they run automatically on every new upload: ask questions, summarize, find key moments, and more. No asset webhooks or self-hosted glue code needed.

Mux is video infrastructure for developers, trusted by Synthesia, Shopify, and the U.S. Soccer Federation. Start building for free. Use code FIREBALL at signup for an extra $50 credit.

Friday, 19 June 2026

Another One for the ‘Sorry, We Used to Be Crap’ Truth-in-Advertising File: Carlsberg Beer ★

Ben Chapman, reporting for The Independent in 2019:

After 40 years of advertising its lager as “Probably the best beer in the world”, Danish brewer Carlsberg has confessed that the famous slogan may not be true. Reacting to falling sales and increasingly harsh comments from drinkers about the taste of its beer, Carlsberg has launched a new recipe along with a more honest approach to marketing.

The campaign declares: “Probably not the best beer in the world. So we’ve changed it. Somewhere along the line, we lost our way. We focused on brewing quantity, not quality. We became one of the cheapest, not the best.”

As part of the new ad campaign Carlsberg is sharing negative comments about the old beer including, “Carlsberg tastes like stale breadsticks” and another comparing it to “drinking the bathwater your nan died in”.

I drank a Carlsberg once. Once.

‘What’s the Deal With Old Guys and Giant Glasses?’ ★

Early adoption of new technology is generally considered a young-person thing, but maybe Snap Specs will turn that notion on its head. Direct sales in retirement homes?

Trump Mobile T1 Phone Is a Gold-Painted Two-Year-Old HTC U24 Pro ★

NBC News:

The Trump Mobile T1 phone, originally marketed as “Made in the USA,” is nearly identical to the two-year-old HTC U24 Pro, a phone made by the Taiwanese company HTC using Chinese parts, according to a technical analysis the repair-guide and parts company iFixit conducted in partnership with NBC News.

That report is paywalled, but NBC News’s five-minute video is on YouTube, and iFixit has a full teardown report of their own. The only thing that’s surprising is that the Trump T1 doesn’t cost much more than the HTC-branded one ($500 vs. $470).

Fox to Buy Roku Streaming Service in $25 Billion Deal ★

The Wall Street Journal on Monday:

Fox Corp. said it is acquiring Roku in a deal valued at around $25 billion, making a major bet on the future of ad-supported streaming. The deal — Fox’s largest to date — brings together a media company known for its live news and sports programming with the biggest provider of streaming platforms for connected TVs.

It will add scale to Fox’s streaming business, currently home to free, ad-supported streaming service Tubi, which the company bought for $400 million in 2020, and subscription-based Fox One and Fox Nation.

In addition to distributing other streaming services through connected TVs and devices, Roku has its own ad-supported Roku Channel. The combined company will better compete with the likes of Amazon.com and Netflix for ad dollars.

I’m late to comment on this, but this seems stupid. Roku sucks. I know they’ve got a 25 percent or so share of the smart TV interface market, but no one is attached to Roku. The entirety of their market share is people who don’t care. That’s not worth $25 billion. Shit platforms seldom last, and the ones that do last achieve monopolies. I think Roku’s share is going to slip, not grow.

Snap Launches Ad Campaign for Specs Starring Michael Caine ★

“They’re about power, aren’t they, and the bloody powerful blokes who wear them.”

Maybe I’m all wet and these things are stylish, no matter what they do to your ears.

Jerry Seinfeld Tries Out Snap’s Specs ★

“Hey buddy, nice frames.”

Seinfeld’s father tried them out too.

Domino’s Admitted Their Pizza Tasted Like Cardboard ★

Re: my post on Verizon flat-out admitting their business practices have resembled a scheme from Dr. Evil, Domino’s did something similar regarding their pizza a while back. This 2021 story for Inc. by Jeff Haden describes the turnaround.

Thursday, 18 June 2026

Verizon, Formerly Menace Mobile ★

Verizon has sprung for a new ad campaign set in the Austin Powers world, with four stars from the cast — Mike Myers, of course, as Dr. Evil; Rob Lowe as Number Two (Robert Wagner is alive but is 96); Seth Green as Evil’s son Scott, and Mindy Sterling as Frau Farbissina — and director Jay Roach. The premise of the two-minute spot is that Dr. Evil is proposing “Menace Mobile”, a wireless carrier with confusing pricing and plans. Scott pooh-poohs the idea on the grounds that “This isn’t evil. This is just typical phone company stuff.” Then, after some back-and-forth, comes this exchange:

Scott: Diabolical phone companies are why we’re all switching to Verizon.

Dr. Evil: I thought Verizon was just like the rest of the wireless organizations.

Scott: Well, they were, but not anymore. They just got rid of activation and upgrade fees. They’re changing everything.

I don’t think the commercial is particularly funny, alas, but I do find it extraordinary, because of the exchange quoted above. “Well, they were, but not anymore” is one the most extraordinary lines I’ve heard in a commercial. They’re just flat out admitting that, until recently, they ran their business like a scheme from Dr. Evil.

I’ve been on Verizon for a long time. It’s expensive, but so was AT&T, and I’ve always felt like I got better service and better coverage from Verizon (which is why I switched in the first place). But just last year I did the wrong thing when I bought my iPhone 17 Pro. I should have bought it unlocked, but instead I bought it as a device upgrade tied to my Verizon account, and the bastards nicked me for a $30 upgrade fee. I’d like to think that will never happen again because they’re actually dropping all of their bullshit fees, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Austin Powers, by the way, came out in 1997. In the film, Powers was frozen since 1967. That means next year, we’ll be as far removed from the debut of the movie as unfrozen Austin Powers was from the groovy 60s in the film.

Cotypist – Smart Autocomplete Utility for Mac ★

Usually when I link to a new app, it’s something that I find useful personally. Cotypist is something else. It’s an AI-powered autocomplete utility for the Mac, using on-device models and processing, by developer Daniel Gräfe of Accelerated Thought. It is very well-designed, and remarkably Mac-assed (right down to where it stores its local data and AI models). It respects your privacy and all the best conventions of MacOS. Cotypist suggests a few words ahead of your insertion point at a time, and you can accept them by hitting Tab; if you want to ignore them, you just keep typing. The autocomplete suggestions appear inline, in whatever app you’re typing in, using your current font. I wasn’t even aware that was possible, but it is via MacOS’s rich accessibility APIs. Cotypist’s suggestions are eerily good. It’s even got a great name.

Personally, I can’t stand using it.

For me, it’s actually worse that the suggestions are so good, and so often on-point for what I intend to write. That’s why I can’t stand it. It’s like having a voice in my ear whispering my own thoughts before I think them. But are they my thoughts, or are they just close to my thoughts? They’re so close I can’t tell. And thus the experience of seeing these words appear before I’ve typed them feels more like a curse than a blessing, and a never-ending distraction. I’d find Cotypist far less distracting if its suggestions weren’t as good — but in that case it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting or useful, and I wouldn’t be writing about it at all.

But I’m a writer. I enjoy writing. Writing is probably the most satisfying and fulfilling thing I do in life. I enjoy picking every word as I get to it. I find a blinking insertion point in the middle of a good but half-written sentence to be thrilling. But you might feel otherwise. Perhaps you find all writing to be a laborious chore, like washing dishes. Or you might have a job that requires answering a lot of repetitive emails. I’ve done email technical support in the past, and I would have killed for Cotypist then. I would imagine Cotypist is simply marvelous for someone who writes English as a second language.

It’s absolutely worth trying if you think you might want to use it, and probably worth trying just to see it in action even if, like me, you don’t want something like this. Trying it out might change your mind. There’s a free tier for casual use (100 completed words per day), and Plus and Pro paid tiers for $6 and $9 per month. New installations get a 30-day free trial of the Pro tier.

New Domain for Sign In With Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email ★

Apple Developer:

Later this summer, Apple will unify the email domains used by Sign in with Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email under a single, shared domain: private.icloud.com.

New addresses generated for both features will be issued on the new domain. For example:

Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com.

iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses, previously issued on icloud.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com.

Existing addresses on the legacy domains will continue to work and forward mail to users without interruption.

Initial reaction to this change is that it might render “Hide My Email” ineffective, because shitbird services will simply ban the domain, trying to force you to use your primary email address. It seems inevitable that some number of services will do this. But my retort is that a service that won’t accept these email addresses is one that I probably don’t want to have anything to do with. The only reason not to accept private.icloud.com email addresses is if you want to do something invasive with users’ actual email addresses.

NetNewsWire Status ★

Brent Simmons, writing at Inessential:

My hope for retirement was to get a lot of work done on NetNewsWire.

A year ago it was in sore need of modernization, tech debt pay-off, and bug fixes. People were asking for features, but the foundation needed a ton of work before I could get on to adding new rooms.

Here are some highlights of what we’ve done with 2,188 commits in the past year.

NetNewsWire was already one of my favorite, most-used, most indispensable apps. Now it’s much better and improving steadily at a rapid clip. You love to see it.

SpaceX, Newly Public, to Acquire Cursor for $60 Billion in SpaceX Funny-Money Stock ★

CNBC, two days ago:

In November, Cursor said it crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue, according to a release at the time. Cursor was also ranked at No. 37 on the annual CNBC Disruptor 50 list in 2026. The $60 billion in class A common stock that SpaceX has agreed to pay to acquire Cursor represented a 3.4% dilution at the aerospace and tech conglomerate’s IPO valuation.

Shares of SpaceX gained roughly 16% on Tuesday, topping Amazon and Microsoft by market cap and making it the fourth most valuable company in the U.S.

SpaceX is an amazing company but this valuation is insane. The idea that it’s even close to as valuable as Microsoft or Amazon is bananas. SpaceX still isn’t even profitable, so its price-to-earnings ratio is literally infinity. It’s halfway through Thursday as I post this and SpaceX is down ~10 percent on the day, so a touch of sanity is being restored, at least at the moment.

Cursor, with $1 billion in sales, certainly isn’t worth 60× revenue — especially in a business where it too isn’t profitable. But who cares when you’re paying with funny-money stock?

Tim Cook, in Interview With WSJ: ‘Unfortunately, Price Increases Are Unavoidable’ ★

Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”

Cook declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products would be affected. Apple’s next major product launch is likely to be in September when it releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone. [...]

Cook said Apple wouldn’t use its cash and silicon expertise to build its own memory and storage factories. “We can’t do everything,” said Cook. “We know what we’re good at.” [...] Cook said during his time working in the electronics supply chain, from IBM to Compaq to Apple, he had never seen a commodity price swing like the one from the past six months. “This is a hundred-year flood,” said Cook. “I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”

Apple, to my recollection, has never before issued a warning about price increases. Keep in mind that Apple deals with prices in a very different way from its competitors. For Apple, prices are part of a product’s brand, so they don’t fluctuate with component costs. The trash can Mac Pro held its $3000 starting price for six years, despite its specs remaining effectively unchanged in that span.

So when Apple raises prices on the iPhone 18 Pro models this September (and, presumably, launches the folding iPhone “Ultra” with an eye-watering price), expect those prices to stick. And if Apple expects RAM and SSD component pricing to continue rising through 2027 — which is what many anticipate — they might build that into the pricing now. Raise prices by (say) $200 now rather than $100 this year and another $100 next year.

Also, credit to Tim Cook for taking this one personally, months ahead of the iPhone 18 launch, rather than leaving it to John Ternus to serve up a surprise shit sandwich in his first keynote as CEO.

Wednesday, 17 June 2026

Snap Unveils Specs, Its $2,200 AR Glasses, and They’re Fugly ★

Jay Peters, The Verge (gift link):

Snap is finally launching augmented glasses for the public. Specs, which Snap describes as “a wearable computer built into see-through augmented reality glasses,” will cost $2,195. You can preorder a pair of Specs now at specs.com with a $200 refundable deposit, and Snap says they’re expected to ship “this fall” in the US, UK, and France. [...]

The company says that Specs are “fully standalone, with no puck and no tether.” (Which is perhaps a jab at Apple’s Vision Pro, which is tethered to a separate battery pack.) They’ll be offered in two sizes, a 47mm model weighing 132g and a 52mm model weighing 136g, and will have removable inserts that Snap says will support “a wide range of prescriptions.”

Unlike Vision Pro, Snap is presenting Specs as eyeglasses that users will wear out and about in their daily lives. Viewed perfectly straight-on and photographed by a professional fashion photographer — as presented on the Specs website — they’re a bold look. Viewed from any other angle and captured normally, they look like goggles, not glasses. The frames look orthopedic and the lenses are not even close to clear. They make you look like you forgot to take off your goggles leaving the theater after a 3D movie — goggles that are big enough to wear over regular glasses.

Maybe Specs are useful enough to justify looking so orthopedic, but I doubt it.

Vehicle Motion Cues — a.k.a. Apple’s Weird Anti-Nausea Dots ★

Thomas Ricker, writing for The Verge:

I’ll just work from the car, I thought. But after a few minutes of staring at my screen on quick mountain switchbacks I could feel the first signs of cold, coagulated nausea bubbling up from that sweaty place in my gut. I looked to the horizon for relief, but nothing helped... until I remembered Apple’s magic dots.

Introduced in 2024, Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues promise to tap into your device’s accelerometer and gyroscope to reduce or, in my case, even eliminate the motion sickness felt when trying to use an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook inside a moving vehicle.

My son has suffered from motion sickness in cars his whole life, and Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues work like a charm for him too. What a great feature.

Yours Truly on MacBreak Weekly: Is the New Siri AI Good? ★

MacBreak Weekly:

John Gruber of Daring Fireball joins the MacBreak Weekly panel this week! A deep dive into Apple’s new Siri following WWDC. Why Apple Intelligence & the new Siri are not coming to the EU initially later this year. And could the iPhone Ultra’s launch be delayed this year?

It’s fun to be the guest, not the host, of a podcast. I took Jason Snell’s usual panelist spot this week, alongside Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, and Christina Warren. Lots to cover, including a week of real-life experience using the new Siri AI. (It’s really good!)

Also, sometimes you just know what the episode title of a podcast is going to be, the moment a phrase is uttered. This was one of those episodes, with “Intimate Functionalities”.