By John Gruber

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Rec League:
Share what you’re into
and find your people.

                BARTENDER
      We don't serve their kind here!

Luke, still recovering from the shock of
seeing so many outlandish creatures, doesn't
quite catch the bartender's drift.

                LUKE
      What?

                BARTENDER
      Your droids. They'll have to wait 
      outside. We don't want them here.

Luke looks at old Ben, who is busy talking
to one of the Galactic pirates. He notices
several of the gruesome creatures along the
bar are giving him a very unfriendly glare.

Luke pats Threepio on the shoulder.

                LUKE
      Listen, why don't you wait out by 
      the speeder. We don't want any 
      trouble.

                THREEPIO
      I heartily agree with you sir.

Friday, 24 April 2026

XOXO Explore ★

Andy McMillan and Andy Baio:

Today, over 10 years later, and almost two full years after we retired the festival for good, we’re finally launching that website. Named after what we thought would be a throwaway title for a short-lived GitHub repo, allow us to introduce XOXO Explore. [...]

And, for the first time ever (!) on an XOXO website, we now have an actual About page, where we’ve attempted to explain what XOXO actually was, documenting the 12-year history of the festival and its related projects, and featuring a bunch of our favorite quotes from press and attendees over the years.

You’ll also notice the entire site is littered with floating visual ephemera: design artifacts, illustrations, animations, photos, and videos, all pulled from our vast archive of commissions and collaborations.

Conferences come and conferences go. But when they go, they tend to disappear. What a remarkable library, a record, XOXO Explore is.

New Zealand Passed a Generational Smoking Ban in 2022, But Repealed It Before It Went Into Effect ★

Eva Corlett, reporting for The Guardian in 2023:

New Zealand’s new government will scrap the country’s world-leading law to ban smoking for future generations to help pay for tax cuts — a move that public health officials believe will cost thousands of lives and be “catastrophic” for Māori communities.

In 2022 the country passed pioneering legislation which introduced a steadily rising smoking age to stop those born after January 2009 from ever being able to legally buy cigarettes. The law was designed to prevent thousands of smoking-related deaths and save the health system billions of dollars. [...]

The laws were due to be implemented from July 2024. But as part of its coalition agreement with populist New Zealand First, National agreed to repeal the amendments, including “removing requirements for de-nicotisation, removing the reduction in retail outlets and the generation ban”.

It’s interesting that this law passed in the first place, but I would argue that there are no lessons to be learned from it given that it was repealed before it ever went into effect. And it seemingly was repealed solely along left/right political lines after a change in the country’s parliament, not because the public had turned against this specific not-yet-in-effect law.

Thursday, 23 April 2026

United Kingdom to Enact Smoking Ban Only for Those Who Are Not Yet Legal Adults ★

Ephrat Livni, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

Britain aims to raise a “smoke-free generation” by permanently banning the sale or supply of tobacco to anyone born in 2009 or after, with a bill that was approved by Parliament on Tuesday.

The bill applies to people currently 17 years old or younger and aims to keep them from ever picking up the habit in their lifetime. The proposal is expected to soon go into law after the final formality of approval by King Charles III.

Lawmakers say that in practice, the measure means the age of sale for tobacco products will rise over time as the targeted demographic group grows older and could lead to a smoke-free society. The law will apply in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

I’ve never smoked and I’m strongly in favor of most — maybe all? — of the smoking bans and tobacco-related public health measures that have been passed in my lifetime. I can’t imagine going back to when smoking was permitted in restaurants, bars, airplanes, and public spaces. I’m also strongly in favor of stiff taxes on tobacco products to discourage their use.

But this U.K. law seems bonkers to me. To me, something ought to be either legal for adults or not. The idea that if you’re already 18 years old you can buy tobacco products for the rest of your life, but if you were born in 2009 or later, you’ll never be permitted to, is so contrary to my sense of fairness that I’m finding it hard to put my objection into words. All adults should be equals under the law. That’s my take in a nut. If smoking should be illegal, it should be illegal for everyone. I’ve never heard of a law like this anywhere in the world. It’s like they’re enshrining in law that everyone in the U.K. who is today a child is forever a child when it comes to tobacco. If there are examples of similar laws I’m unaware of, I’d love to hear about them. [Update: Brookline Massachusetts passed a town ordinance like this in 2021, and after it was upheld by the state supreme court in 2024, a few other MA towns have too. My cynical guess is that the only effect of this law is to annoy young Brookline smokers by making them drive a few miles to buy smokes, but if the actual effect is that fewer young Brooklinites (sp?) smoke, that’s great. But I also doubt that anyone in Brookline’s municipal government is going to commission a study to see if the law had any practical effect on smoking rates.]

Maybe the British are different, but there’s no way this law would work in America. First, I don’t think such a law would ever gain popular traction. But even if it did, it would just create a black market. At least when we banned booze, we banned it for everyone.

Trump’s Blog Has Somehow Lost $1.1 Billion ★

Russ Choma, reporting for Mother Jones:

Devin Nunes was not an obvious choice to run a fledgling social media network, but after $1.1 billion in losses, the former dairy farmer and congressman is out as the head of Truth Social.

Donald Trump Jr., a board member at Trump Media + Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, said on Tuesday night that Nunes would be replaced by another executive who formerly worked at Hulu. Nunes confirmed the move in a Truth Social post of his own.

The company, which is majority owned by Donald Trump, has seen its stock plummet 84 percent under Nunes’ leadership, from its debut price of $58 back in 2024. The current share price of around $9.80 is arguably still optimistic for a company that has lost $1.1 billion since it went public, and recorded just over $10.6 million in revenue in the same time.

Like a well-oiled Atlantic City casino.

When Trump Media was first announced as a concept, the Trump family said it would include: Truth Social, streaming television services to rival Netflix and Amazon and web-hosting that would rival Amazon’s AWS business. And all of it would be devoted to fighting the “woke” media and corporate culture that Trump said had blacklisted him following Jan. 6. Truth Social would be a redoubt for freedom of speech, the streaming services would have wholesome non-“woke” content that America craved and the web-hosting would provide a home for any company that dared to challenge Amazon’s alleged anti-free speech motivations.

I’m sure the rest of that has merely been delayed, temporarily, while Trump Media’s best and brightest minds continue working on the cell phone they started selling last summer but still haven’t shipped.

Nilay Patel: ‘Beware Software Brain’ ★

Nilay Patel, in a terrific essay (and Decoder one-sider) at The Verge:

In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI, and that Gen Z in particular seems to hate AI more and more as they encounter it. There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and the Democrats generally. That’s with nearly two thirds of respondents saying they used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month. Quinnipiac just found that over half of Americans think AI will do more harm than good, while more than 80 percent of people were either very concerned or somewhat concerned about the technology. Only 35 percent of people were excited about it.

Poll after poll shows that Gen Z uses AI the most and has the most negative feelings about it. A recent Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an already-bad 27 percent last year. At the same time, anger is growing: 31 percent of those Gen Z respondents said they feel angry about AI, up from 22 percent last year.

A good friend texted me a few weeks ago that “the phrase ‘software is eating the world’ sure hits differently now” than when Marc Andreessen coined the term back in 2011. (Patel, in fact, references Andreessen’s seminal essay.) That same friend texted me a link to this piece by Patel this morning.

Something is profoundly off in the computer industry when it comes to software broadly and AI specifically. It’s up for debate what exactly is off and what should be done about it, but the undeniable proof that something is profoundly off is the deep unpopularity surrounding everything related to AI. You can’t argue that the public always turns against groundbreaking technology. The last two epoch-defining shifts in technology were the smartphone in the 2000s, and the Internet/web in the 1990s. Neither of those moments generated this sort of mainstream popular backlash. I’d say in both of those cases, regular people were optimistically curious. The single most distinctive thing about “AI” today is the vociferous public opposition to it and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do.

You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.

So what is software brain? The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code. Like I said, this is a powerful way of seeing things. So much of our lives run through databases, and a bunch of important companies have been built around maintaining those databases and providing access to them.

Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and riders. YouTube is a database of videos. The Verge’s website is a database of stories. You can go on and on and on. Once you start seeing the world as a bunch of databases, it’s a small jump to feeling like you can control everything if you can just control the data.

But that doesn’t always work.

“Software brain” is a good term — a tidy two-word encapsulation of a sprawling worldview that is currently very much in vogue. Take some time to read Patel’s whole piece carefully. It feels important, and it’s really well considered.

Eight for Eight ★

Speaking of Chris Espinosa, this is pretty neat:

On September 1 I’ll join the elite club (members Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Mike Markkula, and Bill Fernandez) who have worked under a number of Apple CEOs ≥ our employee number:

Woz: 1 (Scott)
Jobs: 2 (Scott, Markkula)
Markkula: 3 (Scott, Sculley, Spindler)
Fernandez: 4 (Scott, Markkula, Sculley, Spindler)
Espinosa: 8 (Scott, Markkula, Sculley, Spindler, Amelio, Jobs, Cook, Ternus)

Microsoft Offers Voluntary Retirement to Long-Serving Employees ★

Tom Warren, The Verge (gift link):

“Many of these employees have spent years, and in some cases, decades, shaping Microsoft into what it is today,” says Microsoft’s HR chief Amy Coleman in a memo seen by The Verge. “For those who may be considering their next chapter, we’re offering a one‑time Voluntary Retirement Program.” Microsoft says it applies to only a “small percentage of our US employees.”

US employees whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70 or more will be eligible for voluntary retirement, and Coleman says this will include “generous company support.” It’s not clear if this is a precursor to more layoffs at Microsoft, but it certainly looks like a method to avoid a bigger round of layoffs ahead of Microsoft’s new financial year in July.

70 combined years? My god, when did Microsoft get so, well, soft? I just read about a guy at Apple whose age plus years of employment will hit something like 114 later this year. If I weren’t so lazy I’d double check the exact number with a calculator, but whatever it’s up to today, he hit 70 combined years back around the time the first iMac came out.

Unauthorized Users in Discord Group Had Weekslong Access to Anthropic’s Supposedly-Super-Dangerous Claude Mythos Model ★

Rachel Metz, reporting for Bloomberg:

A small group of unauthorized users have accessed Anthropic PBC’s new Mythos AI model, a technology that the company says is so powerful it can enable dangerous cyberattacks, according to a person familiar with the matter and documentation viewed by Bloomberg News.

A handful of users in a private online forum gained access to Mythos on the same day that Anthropic first announced a plan to release the model to a limited number of companies for testing purposes, said the person, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal. The group has been using Mythos regularly since then, though not for cybersecurity purposes, said the person, who corroborated the account with screenshots and a live demonstration of the model.

Jess Weatherbed, at The Verge (gift link):

The model was reportedly accessed illicitly on April 7th, the same day that Anthropic announced it was releasing Mythos to a limited number of companies for testing. The group that gained the unauthorized access has not been publicly identified, though Bloomberg reports that its members are part of a Discord channel that seeks out information about unreleased AI models. [...] Other unreleased Anthropic AI models have also been accessed by the group, according to Bloomberg.

So on the one hand, Anthropic itself is the one describing Mythos as a dangerous national security threat. On the other hand, their own security is so sloppy that rando hooligans on Discord have had access to Mythos since the day it was announced, and regularly access other unreleased Claude models. This, just weeks after Anthropic screwed up and accidentally exposed the entire source code to Claude Code.

If Mythos is as dangerous as Anthropic (including CEO Dario Amodei) claims, this is a colossal screw up. If a Discord group of AI enthusiasts has unauthorized access, why should we not assume that Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and Iranian intelligence agencies do too? And if this is no big deal, then Anthropic (and Amodei) are full of shit about how dangerous Mythos is. One way or the other it looks like a total clown show over there.

Wednesday, 22 April 2026

DF T-Shirts and Hoodies: Get Them While the Getting Is Good ★

Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week and shipping them out next week. The hoodies are a new model from Bella Canvas, the manufacturer. Our previous hoodies were “heather gray” and the fabric was a blend of 50% polyester, 37.5% cotton, and 12.5% rayon. That model is being phased out. So we’ve switched to a new model that’s 85% cotton, 15% polyester, and a darker “heather black” color. The old ones were good, but the new ones feel even better.

There Are Corrections, and There Are Corrections ★

The New York Times (gift link):

A correction was made on April 21, 2026: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated which day the New York Mets suffered their 11th straight loss. It was on Sunday, not Monday. Even the Mets cannot lose on an off day.

This is to New York Times corrections what “Headless Body in Topless Bar” was to New York Post headlines — perfection.

Ben Thompson on Tim Cook’s Legacy ★

Ben Thompson at Stratechery, “Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing”:

Cook was, without question, an operational genius. Moreover, this was clearly the case even before he scaled the iPhone to unimaginable scale. When Cook joined Apple in 1998 the company’s operations — centered on Apple’s own factories and warehouses — were a massive drag on the company; Cook methodically shut them down and shifted Apple’s manufacturing base to China, creating a just-in-time supply chain that year-after-year coordinated a worldwide network of suppliers to deliver Apple’s ever-expanding product line to customers’ doorsteps and a fleet of beautiful and brand-expanding stores. There was not, under Cook’s leadership, a single significant product issue or recall.

That last sentence is something that Cook won’t get enough credit for. A major product defect or recall is just inherently more memorable than the lack of major defects or recalls. Compare and contrast to Samsung: 2016’s Note 7 was recalled for battery combustion; six other Samsung models caught fire in 2016 too; the early Galaxy Fold phones were an outright debacle. Nothing like that ever happened under Cook.

Cook also oversaw the introduction of major new products, most notably AirPods and Apple Watch; the “Wearables, Home, and Accessories” category delivered $35.4 billion in revenue last year, which would rank 128 on the Fortune 500. Still, both products are derivative of the iPhone; Cook’s signature 0 to 1 product, the Apple Vision Pro, is more of a 0.5.

I don’t think it’s worth discounting AirPods or Apple Watch as “derivative” of the iPhone. Yes, Apple Watch requires a paired iPhone, and while AirPods connect with Macs, iPads, and Apple TVs, they are of course primarily used paired with iPhones. But you can just as easily say that the iPhone was derivative of the iPod. And the iPod was derivative of iTunes. And iTunes was derivative of the Mac. And the iPhone was derivative of the Mac too, insofar as iOS and UIKit truly are stripped-down versions of MacOS and AppKit. Better, in my opinion, to simply give Tim Cook credit for overseeing the creation of two massively popular and successful new device platforms.

For Apple’s 2011 fiscal year, which covers the company’s last year under Steve Jobs, the company had $108 billion in total revenue. Inflation-adjusted that’s ~$159 billion in 2026 dollars. 2011 Mac revenue was $22 billion ($32 billion inflation-adjusted) and iPad revenue was $20 billion ($29 billion inflation-adjusted). iPhone revenue was $47 billion ($69 billion inflation-adjusted). So compared to where revenue was when Cook took the helm, the mostly-all-new-under-Cook Wearables category today is bigger than the Mac or iPad were under Jobs, and a very credible half the size of the iPhone.

Cook’s more momentous contribution to Apple’s top line was the elevation of Services. [...]

Last year Apple Services generated 26% of Apple’s revenue and 41% of the company’s profit; more importantly, Services continues to grow year-over-year, even as iPhone growth has slowed from the go-go years.

There was a legitimate widespread concern in the early years of the Cook era that the downside of the iPhone’s unprecedented success was that Apple’s financials were dangerously reliant on that single product. Even today the iPhone generates between 50–60 percent of Apple’s revenue each quarter, but it is quite obviously the growth of Services and Wearables that makes Apple’s overall revenue by product line look as balanced as it does. From Jason Snell’s report on Apple’s most recent quarter (the best in Apple’s entire history):

There’s a totally reasonable concern that the growth of Services will pervert Apple’s priorities away from hardware products. I think that’s why naming John Ternus, the head of hardware, as the new CEO is an important statement in and of itself regarding where Tim Cook sees Apple’s North Star: hardware products.

I believe that Cook’s focus on Services over the last decade was in no way about shifting the focus of the company away from its roots. Nor was it about growth for the sake of growth. I think it was about bringing balance to the balance sheet, to protect the company’s core mission of creating devices.

Tuesday, 21 April 2026

Trump on Tim Apple ★

The president of the United States, on his blog this morning (all capitalization, punctuation, and missing/wrong words verbatim):

I have always been a big fan of Tim Cook, and likewise, Steve Jobs, but if Steve was not taken from the Planet Earth so young, and ran the company instead of Tim, the company would have done well, but nowhere near as well as it has under Tim. For me it began with a phone call from Tim at the beginning of my First Term. He had a fairly large problem that only I, as President, could fix. Most people would have paid millions of dollars to a consultant, who I probably would not have known, but who would say that he knew me well. The fees would be paid but the job would not have gotten done. When I got the call I said, wow, it’s Tim Apple (Cook!) calling, how big is that? I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to “kiss my ass.” Anyway, he explained his problem, a tough one it was, I felt he was right and got it taken care of, quickly and effectively. That was the beginning of a long and very nice relationship. During my five years as President, Tim would call me, but never too much, and I would help him where I could. Years latter, after 3 or 4 BIG HELPS, I started to say to people, anyone who would listen, that this guy is an amazing manager and leader. He makes these calls to me, I help him out (but not always, because he will, on occasion, be too aggressive in his ask!), and he gets the job done, QUICKLY, without a dime being given to those very expensive (millions of dollars!) consultants around town who sometimes get it done, and sometimes don’t. Anyway, Tim Cook had an AMAZING career, almost incomparable, and will go on and continue to do great work for Apple, and whatever else he chooses to work on. Quite simply, Tim Cook is an incredible guy!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Matthew Yglesias, on Twitter/X, first:

You can see in Trump’s take on Tim Cook what he really likes about tariffs, which is nothing to do with economics and everything about how it makes business leaders dependent on his goodwill.

and second:

Also appreciate that Trump threw in a hot take about Apple being better off without Steve Jobs.

The man loves to post!

Yglesias is exactly right re: Trump’s obsession with tariffs. There is zero underlying economic philosophy behind them. He likes tariffs because he sees them as a way to exert political power. I’d add only that Yglesias is being a tad deferential/euphemistic when he says “makes business leaders dependent on his goodwill”. Trump himself used the right phrase to describe why he likes tariffs — they get business leaders to “kiss his ass”. Trump’s own words.

Yglesias’s second point is directly related to the first. There’s no evidence that Trump and Jobs ever met, personally, but Trump admired Jobs and has an intuitive understanding that Jobs would not have kissed his ass, and to Trump, that’s the most important thing about Cook. Rightly or wrongly, Cook took/takes that one for the team. Jobs wouldn’t have (and, if he had lived, would have probably sent COO Tim Cook to do it), and Trump knows it.

Lastly, hat tip to Trump for the self-deprecating reference to his having mistakenly addressed Cook as “Tim Apple” at a public meeting back in 2019. He’s still funny when he’s in the right mood.

Bonus: Mekka Okereke color-coded each sentence of Trump’s post in four categories: (1) praise for Cook; (2) belittling other people; (3) self glorification; and (4) putting his own name in all caps.

Monday, 20 April 2026

DF Paraphernalia: T-Shirts and Hoodies Are Back ★

Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week and shipping them out next week. Go ahead and place your order now, while I gather my thoughts about today’s Apple leadership news.

‘Community Letter From Tim’ ★

Tim Cook, in a letter addressed, simply, “To the Apple community”:

For the past 15 years I’ve started just about every morning the same way. I open my email and I read notes I received the day before from Apple’s users all over the world.

You share little pieces of your lives with me and tell me things you want me to know about how Apple has touched you. About the moment your mom was saved by her Apple Watch. About the perfect selfie you captured at the summit of a mountain that seemed impossible to climb. You thank me for the ways Mac has changed what you can do at work and sometimes give me a hard time because something you care about isn’t working like it should.

In every one of those emails I feel the beating heart of our shared humanity. I feel a sense of deepening obligation to work harder and push further. But most of all, I feel a gratitude that I cannot put into words, that I somehow got to be the person on the other end of those emails, the leader of a company that ignites imaginations and enriches lives in such profound ways it defies description. What an honor and a privilege it has been.

The language here feels looser, more casual, more real than anything Cook has said or written in public since his historic, seminal coming-out essay at Businessweek back in 2014.

Just a wonderful note. This feels like a very happy day for Tim Cook. Where has this guy been?

Apple: ‘Tim Cook to Become Apple Executive Chairman; John Ternus to Become Apple CEO’ ★

Apple Newsroom, with a veritable “boom”:

Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive officer effective on September 1, 2026. The transition, which was approved unanimously by the Board of Directors, follows a thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.

Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.

Ternus will become the 8th CEO in Apple’s 50-year history:

1. Mike Scott, 1977–1981
2. Mike Markkula, 1981–1983
3. John Sculley, 1983–1993
4. Michael Spindler, 1993–1996
5. Gil Amelio, 1996–1997
6. Steve Jobs, 1997–2011
7. Tim Cook, 2011–2026

At just over 50 years old — the same age Cook was when he took the job — Ternus is young enough for decade-plus run, joining only Sculley, Jobs, and Cook.

In a separate announcement: “Johny Srouji Named Apple’s Chief Hardware Officer”.

This is all very exciting, but also all very low on drama. It’s all very, very Cook-ian.

Apple’s Annual Environmental Progress Report ★

Apple Newsroom:

In its annual Environmental Progress Report released today, Apple marked progress toward Apple 2030, the company’s ambitious goal to be carbon neutral across its entire footprint by the end of this decade. Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2025 remain down over 60 percent compared to 2015 levels, holding constant from 2024 even in a year of significant business growth. The report highlights additional progress in renewable energy, materials innovation and recycling, water stewardship, and zero waste.

On the packaging front:

Apple completed the transition to 100 percent fiber-based packaging last year, fulfilling its pledge to remove plastic from packaging by 2025. Over the past 10 years, Apple engineers and designers have developed alternatives to common packaging components, replacing plastic screen protectors and trays with versions made with recycled or responsibly sourced paper. They also innovated to make packaging more recyclable, designing the largest boxes, like for the new Studio Display XDR, to collapse into smaller pieces that fit into a home recycling bin. Apple avoided more than 15,000 metric tons of plastic in the past five years alone — the equivalent of about 500 million plastic water bottles.

Apple made this shift while not compromising a whit on the design quality of its packaging. If anything, I’d say Apple products have better packaging than ever. How they look, how they feel, the experience of opening them. Some of the company’s most talented and most effective designers work on the packaging team.

Earlier in the announcement:

As Apple celebrates Earth Day with its teams, partners, and customers around the world — including with a special offer for users who bring in their Apple devices for recycling at participating Apple Store locations — here’s a look at the progress the company is making across its environmental initiatives.

That special offer, the 2026 Earth Day Promotion, is a PDF. That PDF file is not the work of Apple’s best designers. Jiminy.

Sunday, 19 April 2026

Jessica Chastain Says Apple TV Will Finally Release ‘The Savant’ ★

Marc Malkin, Variety:

Jessica Chastain says Apple TV is finally going to release her political thriller series “The Savant.” [...]

“Before it was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to see it,’ but now I can say, ‘We’re going to see it,’” Chastain told me exclusively on Saturday at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in Santa Monica.

As for when, sources tell me that Apple is planning for a July release.

Previously, re: The Savant’s limbo release date.

WorkOS FGA: The Authorization Layer for AI Agents ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius.

The winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features. They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions, and read their deep dive for more.

Saturday, 18 April 2026

Mac Mini and Mac Studio Supply Shortages ★

Nicole Nguyen, writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

Mac Minis with larger-capacity RAM chips — a base M4 model with 32GB of RAM, starting at $999, and the M4 Pro models with 64GB of RAM, starting at $1,999 — are “currently unavailable” on Apple.com. And estimated shipping wait times for any other Mini model start at about a month, and in some cases is up to 12 weeks. (This Mini scarcity extends to other retailers as well.)

The more powerful Mac Studio makes up an even smaller share of sales than the Mini — less than 1%, according to CIRP. But its high-memory configurations ($3,499 and up) are also unavailable, and more affordable variations show wait times of up to 12 weeks. Last month, Apple removed the Mac Studio’s mega upgrade — 512GB of RAM — which it had touted as “the most ever in a personal computer.”

Meanwhile, Apple can ship its most popular computer, the MacBook Pro, with 128GB of RAM ($5,099 and up) to your door in early May. MacBook Pro models with less RAM ship sooner, and almost all other Mac models we reviewed on Apple.com will arrive just days after they’re ordered.

Apple declined to comment on what’s happening with these AI-friendly systems, but analysts have three theories.

This situation is rather unusual, and I suspect Nguyen is correct that it’s the result of a combination of factors, including a surge in demand from new “desktop AI” systems like OpenClaw. It’s rather remarkable that pretty much all of these desktop AI systems are Mac-exclusive, including the new Codex app from OpenAI (that’s based on Sky, the never-released AI automation app from the team behind Workflow, which Apple acquired and renamed Shortcuts). Some of these systems will surely arrive on other platforms eventually, but at the moment, they’re only on the Mac. They’re not on Windows, not on Linux, not on Android, and not on iOS. Just the Mac. That’s because the Mac is, and always has been, the best computer platform in the world. It just is. These systems can’t run on iPhones or iPads because those are baby computers. They just are. So if you want to jump in as an early adopter on desktop AI, it needs to be on a Mac. And if you want a headless always-on Mac to do it, the only options are a Mac Mini or Mac Studio.

Obviously Apple is nearing the release of M5-generation models for both the Mini and Studio. Perhaps those models are behind schedule, and Apple already tapered production of the old models. I think it’s just a question of whether we need to wait for WWDC in June, or if they’re going to drop in May.

Friday, 17 April 2026

Apple’s Developer Guidelines for Ratings and Review Prompts ★

Apple Design:

Avoid pestering people. Repeated rating requests can be irritating, and may even negatively influence people’s opinion of your app. Consider allowing at least a week or two between requests, prompting again after people demonstrate additional engagement with your experience.

Prefer the system-provided prompt. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS offer a consistent, nonintrusive way for apps and games to request ratings and reviews. When you identify places in your experience where it makes sense to ask for feedback, the system checks for previous feedback and — if there isn’t any — displays an in-app prompt that asks for a rating and an optional written review. People can supply feedback or dismiss the prompt with a single tap or click; they can also opt out of receiving these prompts for all apps they have installed. The system automatically limits the display of the prompt to three occurrences per app within a 365-day period. For developer guidance, see RequestReviewAction.

There are a lot of apps that eschew a lot of these guidelines. I mean, how do you avoid pestering people when the entire idea of an alert asking for a rating/review is, by nature, pestering? It’s an oxymoron, like saying “Don’t pester people when you pester them.”

I actually knew about the system setting to opt out of these prompts. On iOS it’s in Settings → Apps → App Store: In-App Ratings & Reviews. On MacOS, it’s in the App Store app’s Settings window. On both platforms, it’s on by default. This is one of several settings that I would change, personally, but choose not to, as a critic / pundit / know-it-all, so as to have more of the standard experience that most users get. If you’re annoyed by these prompts though, you should feel free to turn them off.

Follow-Up Regarding App Store Reviews, Which Are Definitely Busted ★

I wrote yesterday:

And the apps that do the right thing — like Godier’s Current — and never solicit a review like a needy hustler are penalized.

On Mastodon, Steven Troughton-Smith responded:

Review prompts are the difference between a great app getting five positive reviews, and thousands of positive reviews. I would never recommend to a developer to not implement the APIs. It’s App Store Editorial suicide for most apps, since Apple tends to only pick things up when they have that body of review data.

I can see how my describing not prompting for reviews as “the right thing” looks like I’m suggesting developers should not prompt for reviews. That wasn’t my intention.

You have to play the game as the game stands, and Apple controls the game. And in the game as it stands, apps need 5-star reviews to gain traction in the App Store, perhaps especially so for apps in crowded categories. And for most apps, the only way to achieve that is through prompting. But the right thing to do, for the user experience in the app, is never to prompt for reviews.

That’s the problem with how Apple has set this up — to be competitive, apps need to do the wrong thing. I’m a competitive bastard. If I had an app in the App Store today, I’d probably prompt for reviews. I don’t begrudge developers who do it today. That’s the game. I admire developers who refuse to play this part of the game. It’s noble. But it’s not a winning strategy. I want Apple to fix the game — that’s the only real solution.

The system is so twisted that even Apple itself begs for these reviews from its own apps, even the system apps built into iOS. When else does Apple ever ask for anything? It looks needy and pathetic. Real Gil Gunderson vibes.

The funny thing is, this morning while I was reading the Mastodon thread with Troughton-Smith’s post, Ivory prompted me for a rating. Which I dutifully submitted. 5 stars, of course. Which brings me to another follow-up point. A few readers have emailed to object to the argument that it hurts developers to give apps anything short of a 5-star rating. (A few of these readers are from Germany, no surprise.) It’s logical, I agree, that a 4-star rating ought to be considered fair and just for a good app with obvious room for improvement. But anything short of 5 stars pulls down any good app’s average, because the overwhelming majority of users who rate apps only ever assign 5 stars for apps they like, or 1 star for apps they’re angry about. In a system where the overwhelming majority of users only ever assigns 1 or 5 stars, assigning 4 stars is effectively a mildly negative review. That sucks. Apple should fix it. But until they do (which, let’s face it, they probably won’t), obstinately ignoring that this is how App Store ratings work does not help good apps get the attention you think you’re helping them get with a 4-star rating.

Thursday, 16 April 2026

App Store Reviews Are Busted ★

Terry Godier:

For example, if you have a 4.1 star rating in the App Store, any 4 star review is going to decrease that average. In other words, leaving a 4 star review is essentially leaving a negative review. [...]

You will see a lot of 4 star reviews that say things like, “This is my favorite app!” or “Gamechanger!” The apps that tend to have these types of reviews are often over a 4.0 in the store and are being actively harmed average-wise by having them, even though the intent was clearly not to do so.

Problem #1 is that star-rating systems absolutely suck for aggregation. If you’re going to collect and average ratings from users, the system that works best is binary: thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Netflix switched from stars to thumbs in 2017, and YouTube switched all the way back in 2009. The App Store should switch to thumbs.

The logical endpoint of apps optimizing for a 5 star review invalidates the system as meaningful on the store. The system becomes a better representation of the sophistication at review prompt execution than it does an accurate reflection of app product quality. The incentive isn’t to create an actual 5 star app, but rather to create a robust system that transmits only 5 star reviews.

Problem #2 is that even if the App Store switched from stars to thumbs, the system would still be gamified by developers, rewarding, as Godier aptly puts it, not the best apps but instead the apps that are best at “review prompt execution”. Apple should remove the APIs that allow apps to prompt for reviews, and forbid the practice of prompting for them. Nothing good, and much bad, comes from these prompts. Imagine being in a restaurant, and in the middle of your entree, the server comes to your table and hands you an iPad and asks you to rate the joint on Yelp. That’s what using most apps is like. And the apps that do the right thing — like Godier’s Current — and never solicit a review like a needy hustler are penalized.

Every time I see one of these prompts it’s like getting hit up by a panhandler — and some of the prompts come from Apple’s own apps. It’s all so greasy. One of the advantages of a walled garden ought to be keeping panhandlers and solicitors out.

Freecash Was More Like Scamcash ★

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

If you’ve been on TikTok this year, you’ve more than likely encountered ads for Freecash. The app has been marketed as a way to make money just by scrolling TikTok — and jumped to the top of the app stores in recent months, peaking at the No. 2 position in the U.S. App Store.

In truth, Freecash pays users to play mobile games — all the while collecting a heaping amount of sensitive data, according to cybersecurity company Malwarebytes. [...]

On Monday, after being contacted by TechCrunch for comment, Apple pulled Freecash from its App Store. As of Monday afternoon, the app was still listed in the Google Play store. (It has since been removed).

As I have repeatedly written, it boggles my mind why Apple doesn’t have an App Store “bunco squad” that targets scam and fraud apps that are popular and/or high-grossing. It’s folly to think that the App Store could ever be completely free of scam apps. But it’s absurd that this app Freecash rose to #2 in the App Store, with millions of downloads, and Apple only took a look at and removed it after TechCrunch asked about the app.

Pieter Arntz, writing at Malwarebytes:

The landing pages featured TikTok and Freecash logos and invited users to “get paid to scroll” and “cash out instantly,” implying a simple exchange of time for money. Those claims were misleading enough that TikTok said the ads violated its rules on financial misrepresentation and removed some of them.

Once you install the app, the promised TikTok paycheck vanishes. Instead, Freecash routes you to a rotating roster of mobile games — titles like Monopoly Go and Disney Solitaire — and offers cash rewards for completing time‑limited in‑game challenges. Payouts range from a single cent for a few minutes of daily play up to triple‑digit amounts if you reach high levels within a fixed period.

The whole setup is designed not to reward scrolling, as it claims, but to funnel you into games where you are likely to spend money or watch paid advertisements.

Dystopian. And it’s gross that the follow-the-money chain here ultimately leads to pay-to-win games from established brands like Hasbro (Monopoly Go) and, of all companies, Disney (Disney Solitaire). Look at these games’ App Store listings, and you’ll see: (a) their in-app purchases are clearly meant to capitalize on addicts, and (b) their privacy report cards are appalling. And Apple is taking 30 percent of all this. Honest to god, how would it be any worse if Apple started selling cigarettes in its retail stores? Because there’d be butts to clean up outside the glass doors?

Colliding With Reality, Indeed ★

Anton Troianovski, reporting for The New York Times under the headline “Trump’s Portrayal of the War in Iran Collides With Reality”:

President Trump is trying to cast his Iran war as all but over, a done-and-dusted success.

But after years of trying to impose his own reality on the world, he has now run into a crisis that is not bending to his narrative.

On the one hand, I’m loath to complain about the Times finally stating the obvious and treating Trump like they would any other official. Same goes for a Peter-Baker-bylined piece this week, “Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate”. Finally. It was good that the Times’s reporting on Biden’s mental acuity two years ago was sharp enough to draw the ire of the Biden administration. But Biden never once said anything crazy. Forgetful? Slightly confused? Sure. But Trump is saying and tweeting crazy-ass stuff every day now. A steady stream of abject unhinged nuttiness. For chrissake he badgered kindergarteners at the White House Easter egg roll about Biden’s use of an autopen.

But on the other hand, when exactly has Trump “run into a crisis” that did “bend to his narrative”? He’s a bullshitter, and so good at bullshitting that his bullshit often flies. That’s very different from reality bending to meet the bullshit.

The difference with Iran is that war is about as close as anything gets to being bullshit-proof. Trump created a crisis that can’t be bullshitted.

(Also, take it easy on the Oompa-Loompa makeup, sir.)

How to Format 10-Digit Phone Numbers ★

The Associated Press Stylebook, on Threads:

We updated our style for telephone numbers in 2024 to drop parentheses. We now recommend the form: 212-621-1500.

For international numbers use 011 (from the United States), the country code, the city code and the telephone number: 011-44-20-7535-1515.

Use hyphens, not periods. No parentheses. The form for toll-free numbers: 800-111-1000. If extension numbers are needed, use a comma to separate the main number from the extension: 212-621-1500, Ext. 2.

I have long been annoyed that U.S. phone numbers are so often formatted in the outdated (123) 555-1234 format. The use of parentheses for the area code dates back to the old days, when you only needed to dial the area code to call a number outside your own area code. (The same era whence comes the verb dial.) Until 10-digit dialing with mandatory area codes started to become standard in the late 1990s, you only needed to dial seven digits to call a local number.

Apple’s Contacts app (and I think the system-wide Contacts framework, used by third-party apps like Flexibits’s excellent Cardhop), will go so far as to reformat numbers entered in 123-555-1234 format as (123) 555-1234. Apple should update the formatting to go the other way, and turn phone numbers with the area code in parentheses into the 123-555-1234 format. It’s only because area codes used to be optional that they were put in parentheses. Given that 7-digit dialing is never going to return, we should abolish the parentheses too.

Chance Miller: ‘Netflix Ruined Its Apple TV App by Switching to a Custom Video Player’ ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

The change began rolling out a few weeks ago, and user frustration is mounting. On Reddit, there’s a growing thread of Netflix subscribers saying they are canceling their subscription because of this change to the Apple TV app. [...]

The change also means you lose access to full payback controls using the Apple TV Remote app on your iPhone. You can’t enable Enhance Dialogue from the video player. That clever Apple TV feature that automatically enables subtitles when you rewind? Gone.

One of my most-used tvOS video player features is the ability to tap the Siri Remote to see when what I’m currently watching will end. It’s great for trying to decide whether you have time for one more episode before bed. That feature is gone in Netflix as part of this change.

FlatpanelsHD has a great roundup of all the features on Apple TV that rely on an app using the native video player.

Someone tried to argue with me when I complained about this horrendous regression that Netflix users somehow want consistency across different platforms — that users want the same Netflix player on Apple TV as on Roku, Amazon Fire, Google TV, and whatever crap is built into their “smart” TV. Nonsense. Why would users of one platform care what the Netflix player is like on other platforms? Apple TV users buy Apple TV boxes because they want the Apple TV experience. Maybe Netflix wants to present the same experience everywhere. Maybe Netflix wants to save on engineering costs by having a write-once-run-like-shit-everywhere video player. That’s a Netflix concern, not a user concern.

From the perspective of users, this change to the tvOS Netflix app just sucks. There’s no upside at all. Nothing is better, much is worse, and a slew of cool platform features are now gone.

Apple Pay Express Mode for Transit, When Used With a Visa Card, Is Vulnerable to Scam Tap-to-Pay Readers ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

The process requires the victim to have Express Transit Mode enabled for payments, and a Visa card linked for those payments, among other steps. As it turns out, it’s a Visa-related security loophole rather than an iPhone issue, and it doesn’t work with a Mastercard or an American Express card because other cards use different security methods. It also doesn’t work with Samsung Pay on Samsung devices, and it requires the specific combination of a Visa card and an iPhone. Apple told Veritasium that it’s an issue with the Visa system, but something unlikely to occur in the real world.

The video, hosted by the Veritasium YouTube channel, but starring Marques Brownlee as the victim, takes over 15 minutes before clarifying that the exploit only works with Visa cards, and only when a Visa card is set as your card for Express Transit Mode. Until then, the video implies that the exploit can work against any iPhone that has Apple Pay configured, with any sort of credit card. The technical explanation of how the hack works is pretty good though.

As I wrote a year ago (when Apple was looking for a new partner to replace Goldman Sachs as the bank for Apple Card), Visa is the most popular credit and debit card in the U.S., by a significant margin. If you don’t use Express Mode, you’re safe. If you do use Express Mode, I suggest any card other than a Visa.

Update: It’s worth noting that according to Apple, Express Mode is turned on by default “when you add an eligible transit card or other compatible card”.

Bonus Thought Regarding the Name ‘iPhone Ultra’ ★

One more thought re: the item I posted this week speculating on what Apple will name their much-rumored two-screen folding iPhone this year. If they do name it “iPhone Ultra”, I think Apple using that name for the folding iPhone will imply that they have no plans whatsoever to ever make a “rugged” iPhone — a model akin to Apple Watch Ultra.

I suspect Apple has no plans for a dedicated rugged iPhone. People who want that just buy extra-thick cases for regular iPhones. A watch is different. I know some people put their Apple Watches in ungainly protective “cases”, but they look hideous, which is why you see so few people using them. For aesthetically pleasing ruggedness, the watch case itself needs to be designed for it. But maybe there is a large enough potential market for such an iPhone — especially if such a device had significantly longer battery life than any regular iPhone, as an Apple Watch Ultra does relative to a regular Apple Watch.

But if Apple calls the folding iPhone “Ultra”, stop holding your breath for such an Apple-Watch-Ultra-style iPhone. In the same way that “Air” means very different things on Mac, iPad, and iPhone, so too might “Ultra”.

Rory Goss’s Accessibility Story ★

Feature story and short film, well worth watching, from Apple:

One winter day in January 2024, 16‑year‑old Rory Goss experienced something jarring while in construction class at Abbey Christian Brothers’ Grammar School in Newry, Northern Ireland. He could no longer see the whiteboard at the front of the room.

As a straight‑A student in 11th grade, Rory was in the midst of studying for his A‑levels and was about to start applying to university. Passionate about golf and cars, and eager to start driving lessons, he had no idea what was happening to his eyesight.

Within weeks, he was diagnosed with Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy, a rare genetic condition that damages the optic nerve and can lead to sudden, severe vision loss. Over the next six months, his vision deteriorated by 95%, meaning he was legally blind as he began his 12th grade exams.

Apple just posted this feature this week, but it’s serendipitously aligned with my recent (and not-so-recent) posts about the screen zooming features in MacOS and iOS. Goss zooms in and out with extraordinary dexterity and fleetness. It’s quite extraordinary. Particularly moving for me is his illustration — created on an iPad, using Apple Pencil — where he attempts to illustrate what his vision now looks like.

Wednesday, 15 April 2026

So Close to Getting It ★

David Pierce, last week in his Installer column/newsletter for The Verge, singing the praises of the version 5.0 update to Sofa (the praises of which I just sang):

Sofa 5. A huge update to an Installerverse favorite, this app is now a great way to manage everything you want to watch, read, play, and even do IRL. I never quite made it stick when it was mostly just movies and shows, but now I think of it as like a Notion for my personal life. Apple devices only, alas, but boy do I love this app.

Pierce, I just noted today, also just wrote a feature story at The Verge about his decision to buy a new iPhone — after trying an array of new Android phones and admitting to a (questionable, IMO) personal preference for Android over iOS — because there are so many better apps on iOS that don’t have equivalent-quality counterparts on Android. In that earlier piece, Pierce wrote:

Lots of the apps I use every day — apps like Puzzmo, NotePlan, Mimestream, and Unread — either don’t exist on Android at all or only exist as web apps. Most of the ones that do work on both platforms are better on iOS. And forget about the kind of handcrafted, small-developer stuff — apps like Acme Weather, Current, and Quiche, just to name a few recent favorites — that’s all over the App Store and absolutely nowhere to be found on Android.

These apps don’t just happen to be both exquisitely crafted and exclusive to iOS (and in some cases, MacOS). They’re exquisitely crafted because they are idiomatic native apps designed to adhere to Apple’s platforms. Not all native apps are great, of course, but most great apps are native — and most great native apps are native to iOS or MacOS.

So there ought be no “alas” to describe Sofa being exclusive to Apple devices, but instead a “thank you” to developer Shawn Hickman for keeping it exclusive, and thus keeping it great.

Sofa 5.0 ★

Shawn Hickman:

A show you started last month. A book on your nightstand. A game you keep meaning to get back to. Finding something new is easy. Remembering where you left off is the hard part.

Sofa 5 helps you keep track of this stuff. Progress rings show up on covers throughout the app so you can see where you stand at a glance. Your home screen shows what’s next with one-tap checkboxes to keep things moving.

Five ways to track, depending on what fits: just enjoy with zero setup, tap to log, count pages, check off episodes, or keep a journal as you go. Pick one and switch anytime.

It’s a well-established cliché that no one ever finds the perfect to-do app or “task management system” unless they create it themselves. That’s certainly true for me (and resulted in my co-creating Vesper). Keeping track of things you want or need to do is too close to codifying how you think and remember things in your own mind, and we all think and remember in unique ways. We thus crave unique apps or systems to manage our tasks, ones that fit our minds just right. That’s why there are a zillion to-do apps, including a bunch that are actually good. And, these days, that’s why there are so many people creating their own personal to-do apps using AI coding systems.

Because media-tracking apps are just a subset of to-do apps, all the same things hold true for them. So, just like how I occasionally flit back and forth between general-purpose to-do apps, or become enamored with a new one, I’ve switched between several media-tracking apps over the years. These are apps where you keep lists of movies and shows you want to watch, books you want to read, and then log them, perhaps with notes or ratings, as you watch them.

It’s an endlessly fascinating app genre. Sofa is a really good example, one that I’ve used on and off for years. (Disclaimer: I started using Sofa when it was the weekly sponsor on DF back in 2022, but I’ve kept using it since then because it’s so good.) I’ve been using Sofa v5 for months now, including while it was in beta, and it is a big improvement to an already very good, very thoughtful app. A lot of people use general-purpose to-do apps to track movies and shows to watch, books to read, and games to play. Sofa 5 goes the other way, and expands what started as a dedicated media tracker into something you can use to track, well, anything you want to do.

Sofa is quite useful for free, and super useful with a paid subscription. If you’re even vaguely unsatisfied with your current app or system for tracking media to watch / read / play, you should check it out.

Lisa Melton: ‘Memories of Steve’ (and Memories of Safari’s Unique Page-Loading Indicator in Particular) ★

Lisa Melton, who ran the team that created Safari, regarding her interactions with Steve Jobs:

When Steve asked you a question? You didn’t ramble and, whatever you did, you didn’t make up an answer. If you didn’t know, you just said that you didn’t know. But then you told him when you’d have an answer. Again, this was just good advice to anyone “managing up,” as they say.

This is A+ advice for dealing with anyone, period. If you don’t know, say “I don’t know.” So many people have a deep aversion to saying that. And if you can say “I don’t know, but I’ll find out in «some short amount of time here»”, say that.

Here’s the bit that’s relevant this week:

Steve didn’t like the status bar and didn’t see the need for it. “Who looks at URLs when you hover your mouse over a link?” He thought it was just too geeky.

Fortunately, Scott and I convinced Steve to keep the status bar as an option, not visible by default. But that meant we had a new problem. Where should we put the progress bar to indicate how much of the page was left to load?

Before, the progress bar lived inside the status bar. So we needed to find it a new home. We discussed all sorts of silly ideas including making it vertical along the edge of the window.

Remember, this was back in the day before the spinning gear or other smaller affordances were widely used to indicate progress. In the age of barber-pole blue Aqua, it had to be a bar.

The room got quiet. Steve and I sat side-by-side in front of the demo machine staring at Safari. Suddenly we turned to each other and said at the same time, “In the page address field!”

Smiles all around. Which I followed with, “I’ll have a working version of that for you by the end of the week.” Over-committing my engineering team, of course.

But I didn’t care. I had just invented something with the Big Guy. True, it was a trifle, but there’s no feeling like sharing even a tiny byline with Steve.

This of course, is contra John Calhoun’s offhand recollection (in a Hacker News thread last month) that Steve Lemay “also invented the early Safari URL text field that also doubled as a progress bar”. Melton is a direct source, so there’s no reason to doubt her recollection of having conceived of the idea alongside Steve Jobs. These recollections are not, of course, mutually exclusive — perhaps Lemay was a designer assigned to flesh out the idea, and Calhoun remembers him as a proponent of the idea.

Anyway, this whole essay from Melton just goes down like butter. So good.

Wednesday, 15 April 2026

Screen Zooming on iOS and iPadOS ★

Steven Troughton-Smith:

If you want to pixel-peep on iOS or iPadOS, it also has the Zoom accessibility setting, and can be controlled via touch, keyboard, or trackpad. It works for display mirroring too, and has other options like a minimap and HUD (‘Zoom Controller’).

These settings are in Settings → Accessibility → Zoom. I prefer switching the Zoom Region from the default Window Zoom (which gives you large magnifier glass window to drag around the screen) to Full Screen Zoom, which is more like how zooming works on the Mac.

On iPadOS, you should go into the Keyboard Shortcuts panel (inside Accessibility → Zoom) and turn on Zoom with Scroll Wheel. This lets you zoom Mac-style, using the Control key, when you have a keyboard and trackpad/mouse connected.

(You can, of course, zoom on VisionOS too.)

Tuesday, 14 April 2026

Fraudulent Cryptocurrency App in Mac App Store Stole $9.5 Million From 50-Some Users ★

Molly White, at Web3 Is Going Just Great:

After a fake version of the Ledger cryptocurrency wallet app made it onto the normally highly curated Apple App store, customers lost $9.5 million dollars to the malicious product. Believing it was a genuine Ledger product, people entered their seed phrases into the app, then discovered their wallets were immediately drained.

One victim, a musician who goes by G. Love, wrote: “I lost my retirement fund in a hack/Scam when I switched my Ledger over to my new computer and by accident downloaded a malicious ledger app from the Apple store. All my BTC gone in an instant.” According to him, he lost 5.9 BTC (~$445,000).

The legit (if that adjective can be used for cryptocurrency apps) Ledger Live Mac app is only available as a direct download from Ledger’s website. They also do have an app in the App Store, but it’s iPhone-only.

On the Name of Apple’s Foldable iPhone ★

Tim Hardwick, last week at MacRumors:

Apple’s first foldable iPhone may not carry the speculative media-derived “Fold” branding after all, according to Chinese leaker Digital Chat Station. In a new post on Weibo, the oft-accurate leaker claimed that Apple’s book-style foldable could launch as the “iPhone Ultra.” Meanwhile, domestic Chinese manufacturers are allegedly deciding whether to follow Apple’s lead by tentatively branding their own upcoming foldables as “Ultra” models, but likely with a lighter price tag — Apple’s version is expected to cost between $2,000 and $2,500.

I have no inside knowledge about what Apple plans to name this device, but I’ll eat my proverbial hat if they name it “iPhone Fold”. That name is so dumb it’s what Samsung calls their foldables. You don’t name a device for what it does, you name it for what it connotes. A good name conveys feeling, not just function. “iPhone Ultra” or “iPhone Max” would both work, and Ultra sounds more luxe. So while unsurprising, that’s probably the best bet, even without the reliable word of Mr. Digital Chat Station.

But if you want my take on a wildcard name, one with some history, how about “iPhone Duo”?

Speaking of Tips ★

The Houston Chronicle:

Kristin Tips, the longtime presiding officer of the embattled Texas Funeral Service Commission, is no longer on the board. “Governor Abbott appreciates Kristin Tips’ service,” Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, said in an email Tuesday. “An announcement on a replacement will be made at a later date.” [...]

Tips, who has run San Antonio’s prestigious Mission Park Funeral Chapels, Cemeteries & Crematories with her husband, Dick Tips, was appointed to the board by the governor in 2017 and made the presiding officer in May 2024. Tips did not respond to a request for comment.

I don’t have any questions for her, but I have at least one for her husband.

Apple Has Hidden the Pre-Creator-Studio Versions of Keynote, Numbers, and Pages in the Mac App Store ★

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

On the iPhone and iPad, Apple made the new Creator Studio features available as updates to the existing App Store releases.

On the Mac though, the rollout was a lot more confusing. Apple kept the old iWork apps for Mac available on the App Store and launched entirely separate iWork versions with the Creator Studio features. Starting today, though, that oddity is no more. Per Aaron Perris, Apple has officially removed the old Pages, Keynote, and Numbers apps from the App Store.

If you’ve previously downloaded these apps, you’ll still find them in your download history and can re-download from there. But new users will only see one option on the App Store: the Creator Studio-compatible apps.

One reason — perhaps the reason? — this was necessarily more complex on MacOS is that the iWork apps used to have different bundle identifiers on iOS and Mac. On the Mac, the old (classic?) version of Keynote has the bundle identifier com.apple.iWork.Keynote. On iOS, it was always just com.apple.Keynote, without the iWork part. To make the single-subscription bundle work across both platforms, Apple seemingly needed to unify the bundle IDs, and they unified them using the iOS versions, sans the iWork part. The new Creator Studio versions of the Mac apps now have the same bundle IDs as the iOS versions. You can see this using Terminal, if, like me, you currently have both versions of these apps installed side-by-side:

% mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r \
    /Applications/Numbers.app 

Result: com.apple.iWork.Numbers

% mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r \
    /Applications/Numbers\ Creator\ Studio.app

Result: com.apple.Numbers

You can also see from the above that while the display names for the new versions remain just “Keynote”, “Numbers”, and “Pages”, the actual names of the .app bundles in the file system are now “Keynote Creator Studio.app”, “Numbers Creator Studio.app”, and “Pages Creator Studio.app”. That’s how two apps that both appear to have the same name can exist next to each other in the same Applications folder.

I’ll leave the final word to Basic Apple Guy:

Goodbye Keynote, Numbers, and Pages, and long live Keynote: Design Presentations, Numbers: Make Spreadsheets, and Pages: Create Documents

Google Will Finally Begin Punishing Sites for Back-Button Hijacking in June ★

Google, on their Search Central Blog:

Today, we are expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as “back button hijacking”, which will become an explicit violation of the “malicious practices” of spam policies, leading to potential spam actions.

What is back button hijacking?
When a user clicks the “back” button in the browser, they have a clear expectation: they want to return to the previous page. Back button hijacking breaks this fundamental expectation. It occurs when a site interferes with a user’s browser navigation and prevents them from using their back button to immediately get back to the page they came from. Instead, users might be sent to pages they never visited before, be presented with unsolicited recommendations or ads, or are otherwise just prevented from normally browsing the web.

Why are we taking action?
We believe that the user experience comes first. Back button hijacking interferes with the browser’s functionality, breaks the expected user journey, and results in user frustration.

Good for Google to penalize sites playing such dirty tricks, but, if they believe the user experience comes first, why are they only addressing this now in 2026? Here’s a Reddit thread from 15 years ago: “Why the fuck do websites hijack the back button? Its fucking annoying”. And why are they waiting until June to enforce it? Penalize these dickheads now.

I don’t see much back-button hijacking personally, perhaps because I don’t visit sketchy websites, but this entire issue only exists because of JavaScript. If web pages were documents, this wouldn’t even be possible.

Amazon to Acquire Globalstar, Announces Agreement With Apple to Continue Service for iPhone and Apple Watch ★

Amazon:

Today Amazon.com, Inc. and Globalstar, Inc. announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire Globalstar, enabling Amazon Leo to add direct-to-device (D2D) services to its low Earth orbit satellite network and extend cellular coverage to customers beyond the reach of terrestrial networks. In addition, Amazon and Apple announced an agreement for Amazon Leo to power satellite services for iPhone and Apple Watch, including Emergency SOS via satellite. [...]

Greg Joswiak, quoted in Amazon’s press release:

“Apple and Amazon have a long and proven track record of working together through Amazon’s core infrastructure services, and we look forward to building on that collaboration with Amazon Leo. This ensures our users will continue to have access to the vital satellite features they have come to rely on, including Emergency SOS, Messages, Find My, and Roadside Assistance via satellite, so they can stay safe and connected while off the grid.”

The Verge’s headline catches my initial reaction: “Apple and Amazon Are Teaming Up to Challenge Starlink’s Smartphone Ambitions”. Apple owned a 20 percent stake in Globalstar, so they were more than a bystander. But I think the deal speaks to the fact that amongst the tech titans, Apple and Amazon are more allies than rivals.

John Calhoun on Steve Lemay ★

Speaking of John Calhoun, he chimed in on a Hacker News thread last month regarding his experience working with Steve Lemay at Apple:

I think Steve Lemay is a good guy. I kind of fought with him when I was an engineer, he was a young, new designer (at Apple). But I always respected his point of view — even when we argued.

When Jobs came back to Apple in the latter 1990’s “Design” slowly came to have an outsized role. I was one half of the engineering team that owned Preview (the application) when Steve Lemay became a seemingly regular presence in the hallway. As the new “Aqua” UI elements arrived in the OS like the “drawer” and toolbar, Steve and his boss (forgetting his name right now — Greg Somebody?) were often making calls about our UI implementation.

I guarantee that was Greg Christie, who is in my opinion the least-known-but-most-missed person at Apple.

Steve Lemay insisted the drawer live on the right side of the window. This was inexplicable to me. I saw the layout of Preview as hierarchical: the left side of the content driving the right side. You click a thumbnail on the left (in the drawer) the window content on the right changes to reflect the thumbnail clicked on.

Steve said, no, drawer on the right.

“Why? Why the hell would we do that?”

Steve was quick: “The Preview app is about the content. The content is king.”

I admit that I still disagreed with him after the exchange, but I had a new respect for him as a designer because he was able to articulate a rationale for his decision. I suppose I was prejudiced to expect hand-waving from designers.

It’s a good sign when you lose an argument but gain respect for those arguing the opposing side. (And, Calhoun notes, the Preview sidebar eventually did move to the left, after split views replaced drawers in AppKit.)

(Addendum: Steve also invented the early Safari URL text field that also doubled as a progress bar. Instant hate from me when I saw it: it was as if the text of the URL you entered was being selected as the page loaded. So I’m old-school and Steve had some new ideas…)

I had the same reaction as Calhoun when I first wrote about Safari, two days after it was announced and released as a public beta at Macworld Expo in January 2003. (That was a year before I created Markdown, so I had to edit raw HTML just now to update a few broken links to working versions at the Internet Archive.) I wrote then:

Progress Bar Behind Location Field
Hideous. It looks like partially-selected text. Please scrap it.

But by 2009, reviewing the public beta of Safari 4, I had changed my mind, and admitted I was wrong in my initial assessment of the progress-bar-in-location-field combo control:

But I quickly grew accustomed to it, and soon grew to miss it when using other browsers. It was, I soon decided, a damn clever way to show progress in a way that was prominent while the page was actually loading, and without taking up any additional space on the screen after loading was complete.

That innovation is a nice feather in Lemay’s cap.

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