By John Gruber

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Upcoming Sponsorship Openings at Daring Fireball ★

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

At the moment, I’ve only got four openings left through the end of September:

• June 30–July 6 (next week)
• August 18–24
• August 25–31
• September 1–7

I don’t know why next week remains unsold, but that’s just how it works out sometimes. If you’ve got a product or service (or, perhaps, a just-opened blockbuster car-racing movie) you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.

WorkOS ★

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC.

Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales.

Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel. Upgrade your auth today.

Apple’s Full List of Differences between ‘Tier 1’ and ‘Tier 2’ in the EU App Store ★

Apple Developer:

By default, apps on the App Store are provided Store Services Tier 2, the complete suite of all capabilities designed to maximize visibility, engagement, growth, and operational efficiency. Developers with apps on the App Store in the EU that communicate and promote offers for digital goods and services can choose to move their apps to only use Store Services Tier 1 and pay a reduced store services fee.

What follows is a long chart, making clear which features are excluded from Tier 1.

Like I wrote in my larger piece on Apple’s new DMA compliance plans, I don’t think Tier 1 is intended to be a feasible choice for any mainstream apps or games. The whole thing is just a way to assert that 8 percent of the commission developers pay is justified by various features of the App Store itself.

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Friday, 27 June 2025

Apple’s Other ‘F1 The Movie’ In-App Promotions ★

Joe Rossignol:

The company has promoted its Brad Pitt racing film with advertisements across at least six iPhone apps leading up to today’s wide release, including the App Store, Apple Wallet, Apple Sports, Apple Podcasts, iTunes Store, and of course the Apple TV app.

Most of those apps have ads in them all the time. It’s certainly fine for Apple to use those ad spots to promote their own movie. Even with Apple Sports, which most of the time has no ads at all, I think it’s fine for Apple to occasionally drop a promotion in there for something of their own. And F1 The Movie is a sports movie. The Apple Wallet push notification isn’t just a little different, it’s a lot different.

I will also note one other sort-of promotion. I play the mini crossword every morning in Apple News. Today’s 1-down clue was “F1 The Movie star Brad ____”. I think that’s a clever on-brand tie-in. Fun, not obnoxious. But with the smell of that Wallet push-notification fart still hanging in the air, not as much fun as it otherwise would have been.

RFK Jr.’s CDC Panel Ditches Some Flu Shots Based on Anti-Vaccine Junk Data ★

Beth Mole, reporting for Ars Technica:

The vaccine panel hand-selected by health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to drop federal recommendations for seasonal flu shots that contain the ethyl-mercury containing preservative thimerosal. The panel did so after hearing a misleading and cherry-picked presentation from an anti-vaccine activist.

There is extensive data from the last quarter century proving that the antiseptic preservative is safe, with no harms identified beyond slight soreness at the injection site, but none of that data was presented during today’s meeting.

The significance of the vote is unclear for now. The vast majority of seasonal influenza vaccines currently used in the US — about 96 percent of flu shots in 2024–2025 — do not contain thimerosal. The preservative is only included in multi-dose vials of seasonal flu vaccines, where it prevents the growth of bacteria and fungi potentially introduced as doses are withdrawn.

However, thimerosal is more common elsewhere in the world for various multi-dose vaccine vials, which are cheaper than the single-dose vials more commonly used in the US. If other countries follow the US’s lead and abandon thimerosal, it could increase the cost of vaccines in other countries and, in turn, lead to fewer vaccinations.

Having an ignorant conspiracy nut lead the Department of Health and Human Services is angering and worrisome, to say the least. But it’s also incredibly frustrating, because Donald Trump himself isn’t an anti-vaxxer. In fact, one of the few great achievements of the first Trump Administration was Operation Warp Speed, a highly successful effort spearheaded by the US federal government to “facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.” Early in the pandemic experts were concerned it would take years before a Covid vaccine might be available. Instead, multiple effective vaccines were widely available — and administered free of charge — in the first half of 2021, only a year after the pandemic broke. It was a remarkable success and any other president who spearheaded Operation Warp Speed would have rightfully taken tremendous credit for it.

But instead, while plotting his return to office, Trump smelled opportunity with the anti-vax contingent of the out-and-proud Stupid-Americans, and now here we are, with a genuine know-nothing lunatic like RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. God help us if another pandemic hits in the next few years.

‘Stupid-Americans Are the New Irish-Americans, Trump Is Their JFK’ ★

Banger of a post by “tarltontarlton” on Reddit:

That same process is happening now with stupid people. They’re transcending their individual limitations, finding each other and becoming out-and-proud Stupid-Americans. [...]

How individual stupid Americans are becoming the collective, self-aware group of Stupid-Americans is a great idea for a lot of very fancy journalism I’m sure. It’s probably got something to do with the internet, where stupid people can find and repeat stupid things to each other over and over and over again.

I believe it has a lot to do with the Internet, which has functioned as a terribly efficient sorting machine. It used to be that there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. Both political parties were, effectively, shades of purple. Now we’ve sorted ourselves, and the result is the palpable increase in polarization. Low-IQ stupidity might still be spread across both sides of the political aisle, but willful ignorance — the dogmatic cultish belief that loudmouths’ opinions are on equal ground with facts and evidence presented by informed experts — is the entire basis of the MAGA movement. A regular stupid person might say, “Well, I don’t know anything about vaccines, so I better listen to my doctor, who is highly educated and well-informed on the subject.” An out-and-proud Stupid-American says “I don’t know anything about vaccines either, so I’m going to listen to a kook who admits that a worm ate part of his brain, because I can’t understand the science but I can understand conspiracy theories.”

If written language survives the next six weeks, we’ll be writing about Donald Trump for a thousand years. But whatever else there is to say, the most important thing about Donald Trump, the thing that is obvious from watching him speak for just 14 seconds, is that he is profoundly stupid. Whatever it is that he might be talking about or doing at any given moment, it’s clear that while he has a reptilian instinct for reading and stoking conflict, he has no real idea what’s going on and he doesn’t really care to. Stupid is what he is and where he comes from. It is his mind and his soul. Catholic was what JFK was. Gay was what Harvey Milk was. Stupid is who Donald Trump is.

And that’s what they love most, the Stupid-American voters.

Remember that sentence you heard at the beginning of all this in 2016? “He’s just saying what everybody is thinking.”

But see, not everybody was thinking that Hillary Clinton was an alien, that global warming was a Chinese hoax and that what America needed most of all was a plywood wall stretching from Texas to California. Only the stupid people were. And suddenly, in an instant, the most powerful man on earth was thinking just like them. With his clueless smirk and unstoppable rise, he turned people whose stupidity made them feel like nobody into people who felt like everybody.

That’s why he’ll never lose them. Because it was never about what he did or didn’t do. All that stuff is very confusing and the Stupid-American community isn’t interested in the details. They love him for who he is, which is one of them, and because he shows them every day that Stupid-Americans can reach the social mountaintop.

(Via Kottke.)

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Thursday, 26 June 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Through the Wall Like Kool-Aid Man’ ★

Chance Miller returns to the show to discuss the news and announcements from WWDC 2025.

Sponsored by:

• Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box with code talkshow50off.
• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.
• BetterHelp: Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp and get on your way to being your best self.

Apple Wallet Sends Push Notification Ad Pushing ‘F1 The Movie’ ★

Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch Tuesday:

Apple customers aren’t thrilled they’re getting an ad from the Apple Wallet app promoting the tech giant’s original film “F1 the Movie.” Across social media, iPhone owners are complaining that their Wallet app sent out a push notification offering a $10 discount at Fandango for anyone buying two or more tickets to the film.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple today sent out an ad to some iPhone users in the form of a Wallet app push notification, and not everyone is happy about it.

That’s an understatement, to say the very least. See if you can find a single comment from anyone who was happy about receiving this push notification ad. Seriously, let me know if you find one statement in support of this.

Casey Liss, succinct as ever:

🤮

The ad itself, from Apple, read:

Apple Pay
$10 off at Fandango

Save on 2+ tickets to F1® The Movie with APPLEPAYTEN. Ends 6/29. While supplies last. Terms apply.

In addition to the justified outrage over receiving any ad from a system-level component like Wallet in the first place, this particular ad sucks in multiple ways. Why did Apple put a “®” after “F1” in the movie title? Why not put a “®” next to “Apple Pay” and “Fandango” too? What supplies are running out on this promotion? Why add that “terms apply”? This is just a shit notification from top to bottom, putting aside whether any such notification should have been sent in the first place.

iOS 26 adds new settings inside the Wallet app to allow fine-grained control over notifications, including the ability to turn off notifications for “Offers & Promotions” (Wallet app → (···) → Notifications — notably, this is not in the Settings app). That’s good. But (a) iOS 26 is months away from being released to the general public — there exists no way to opt out of such notifications now; and (b) at least for me, I was by default opted in to this setting on my iOS 26 devices. (It is also, when you think about it, perhaps a worrying sign regarding Apple’s future plans that this setting has been added to Wallet for iOS 26.)

This was such a boneheaded marketing decision on Apple’s part. They cost themselves way more in goodwill and trust than they possibly could have earned in additional F1 The Movie — wait, sorry, my bad, F1® The Movie — box office ticket sales. It’s like Apple got paid to exemplify Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” theory. Apple Wallet doesn’t present itself as a marketing vehicle. It presents itself as a privacy-protecting system service.

Wednesday, 25 June 2025

Denis Villeneuve to Direct Next James Bond Film ★

Good pick. I feel great about this.

Lake Tahoe Boat Tragedy Claims Longtime Apple Employee Paula Bozinovich ★

Some sad news. The San Francisco Chronicle (News+ link):

The eight people killed in a sudden storm while boating on Lake Tahoe over the weekend were a close-knit group of friends and family members who had gathered for a birthday celebration, according to a spokesperson representing some of the victims.

The boating trip was a part of the 71st birthday celebration for Paula Bozinovich, one of the people who perished in the lake, when their 27-foot powerboat capsized during a sudden, violent storm on Saturday. Authorities on Tuesday released the names of those killed when the boat sank near D.L. Bliss State Park, overwhelmed by 8-foot waves and wind gusts topping 35 mph.

Bozinovich’s husband Terry and son, Josh — a DoorDash executive — were among the victims. Via email, Brian Croll, who worked in product marketing at Apple for a long time before retiring a few years ago, wrote the following, which I’m publishing with his permission:

Paula was an employee who you are not going to see profiled in any books on the history of Apple or Steve Jobs. She worked closely with the ops team to ensure CDs and then DVDs shipped on time and correctly packaged in a box. She knew all the systems and the right people to make things happen. She was always committed to getting things better than just right — perfect. Paula’s extraordinary commitment, along with all the hundreds of other unheralded employees, translated the vision of Steve, the designers, the engineers, and the marketing people into a shipping product.

One of the secrets behind Apple’s success has been its ability to execute. Paula was an important part of that fine-tuned machine. She was also quite a character!

I’m sending you this because I’ve seen front page obituaries of executives who probably did way more harm than good to their companies, and yet when you scratch the surface of a successful company you find that people like Paula make all the difference.

Nothing but my warmest thoughts to her friends and family.

Update: Chris Espinosa:

I’m shattered to hear that Apple software ops stalwart Paula Bozinovich was killed in a boat capsize on Lake Tahoe. She truly embodied the spirit of the company in everything she did. A joy to work with and a tragedy to lose her.

I’ve heard from a bunch of folks today about her, and all of them emphasize two things. First, she was very, very good at her job. Second, she was very, very fun. One person said she exemplified what has always made Apple so unique: that her personality was such that she probably never would have gotten any job at all at any other big company, but she was absolutely perfectly an Apple person’s Apple person.

Tuesday, 24 June 2025

Sorry, MacOS Tahoe Beta 2 Still Does the Finder Icon Dirty ★

Stephen Hackett:

Our 14-day national nightmare is over. As of Developer Beta 2, the Finder icon in macOS Tahoe has been updated to reflect 30 years of tradition:

I’m going to strongly disagree here. The Tahoe beta 2 Finder icon is slightly better, but seeing it this way makes it obvious that the problem with the Tahoe Finder icon isn’t whether it’s dark/light or light/dark from left to right. It’s that with this Tahoe design it’s not 50/50. It’s the appliqué — the right side (the face in profile) looks like something stuck on top of a blue face tile. That’s not the Finder logo.

The Finder logo is the Mac logo. The Macintosh is the platform that held Apple together when, by all rights, the company should have fallen apart. It’s a great logo, period, and the second-most-important logo Apple owns, after the Apple logo itself. Fucking around with it like this, making the right-side in-profile face a stick-on layer rather than a full half of the mark, is akin to Coca-Cola fucking around with the typeface for the word “Cola” in its logo. Like, what are you doing? Why are you screwing with a perfect mark?

There are an infinite number of ways Apple could do this while remaining true to the original logo. Here’s a take from Michael Flarup that glasses it up but keeps it true to itself:

Especially in the field of computers, no company can be a slave to tradition and history. But you ought to respect it. This new Finder icon doesn’t.

Update: And here are some excellent takes on an updated Finder icon by Louie Mantia, along with some astute commentary. Mantia writes:

I really, really do not like spending my time pointing this out. I could write a whole blog post but I don’t want to seem angry about it. I just think the right solutions are simpler than what they’re doing.

No surprise, but Mantia’s icons look perfect to me. Perfectly Liquid Glass-y, perfectly Finder-y.

The iyO One ★

From iyO’s home page:

The iyo one is a revolutionary new kind of computer without a screen. it can run apps just like your smartphone. The key difference is you talk to it through a natural language interface.

Like I wrote yesterday, I’d never heard of iyO before. But from the description above, you can obviously see how they’d feel like the new OpenAI/LoveFrom io name stomps on their trademark. (One minor curiosity: iyO itself seems unsure how to capitalize the letters in its own name: a single cropped screenshot of their own home page shows “iyO”, “IyO”, and “iyo”.)

iyO “graduated” from X (which is entirely separate from Elon Musk’s X), Google’s “moonshot factory”, in 2021. The description there:

iyO is on a mission to bring natural language computing to billions of people. The team has created the world’s first audio computer that you can talk to like a friend. While at X, the team developed their initial prototypes. Now an independent company, iyO is creating screenless, natural language computing with mixed audio reality.

Despite having “graduated” four years ago, iyO is still only taking pre-orders for the iyO One, their ungainly-looking ear computer. ($100 seems too good to be true for what they’re promising. Update: Ah-ha, turns out $100 is just the pre-order deposit. They’re going to cost $1,000 to $1,200 if they ever actually ship, which I think is a big if — this thing has vaporware written all over it.)

Lastly, last April, iyO founder and CEO Jason Rugolo demonstrated prototypes in a 13-minute TED talk. Seems cool, but some of the features already exist with AirPods, and all of the feature could exist with AirPods. I don’t see the future of a dedicated audio computer — especially ones as ugly as these — when the entire feature set can be duplicated with smart earbuds paired to your phone.

Monday, 23 June 2025

OS 26 Betas Are Out ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple today provided developers with the second betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for testing purposes, with the updates coming two weeks after Apple seeded the first betas following the WWDC keynote.

MacOS, tvOS, WatchOS, and VisionOS too. All sorts of good stuff in these second betas — an option to have a real big boy menu bar in MacOS Tahoe, a much better-looking Control Center, and more.

Pixar’s Newest Movie, ‘Elio’, Is a Box-Office Dud ★

Brooks Barnes, writing for The New York Times:

Pixar knew that Elio, an original space adventure, would most likely struggle in its first weekend at the box office.

Animated movies based on original stories have become harder sells in theaters, even for the once-unstoppable Pixar. At a time when streaming services have proliferated and the broader economy is unsettled, families want assurance that spending the money for tickets will be worth it.

But the turnout for Elio was worse — much worse — than even Pixar had expected. The film, which cost at least $250 million to make and market, collected an estimated $21 million from Thursday evening through Sunday at theaters in the United States and Canada, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. It was Pixar’s worst opening-weekend result ever. The previous bottom was Elemental, which arrived to $30 million in 2023.

Harry McCracken:

I wasn’t aware this movie had come out, and still can’t tell you what it’s about. And I’ve been a Pixar fan since before they made movies. That seems like a problem.

I hadn’t heard of this movie until today either. Disney and Pixar have a marketing problem. One part of the problem is that Pixar has made some decidedly meh movies in recent years. “Pixar” used to stand for nothing less than excellence. Now it stands for “somewhere in the range of OK to great”. But another is that even when they make a good one — which Elio might be — they suck at getting word out.

Trademark Dispute Leads to the Disappearance of ‘io’, OpenAI and LoveFrom’s Secretive AI Collaboration ★

Hayden Field, reporting for The Verge:

OpenAI has scrubbed mentions of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famous Apple designer Jony Ive, from its website and social media channels. The sudden change closely follows their recent announcement of OpenAI’s nearly $6.5 billion acquisition and plans to create dedicated AI hardware.

OpenAI tells The Verge the deal is still happening, but it scrubbed mentions due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory.

If you visit the “Sam and Jony” page on OpenAI’s website — where the short film teasing io used to be — it now simply says:

This page is temporarily down due to a court order following a trademark complaint from iyO about our use of the name “io.” We don’t agree with the complaint and are reviewing our options.

Perhaps I’m not paying close enough attention, but this is the first I’ve heard of iyO. The two names certainly sound alike but they don’t look alike. Are homophones trademarkable? I would expect a terse letter from Coca-Cola’s lawyers if I tried selling soda under name “Koke” (or like Ted Nancy tried, Kiet Doke), so I guess so.

I suppose the question is how did OpenAI not see this coming, knowing that Google is probably their biggest rival? (Not to mention that Google might feel salty about the encroachment on their I/O developer conference name.)

Sunday, 22 June 2025

Drata ★

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring this last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.

Apple Launches ‘Convince Your Parents to Get You a Mac’ Short Film on YouTube, Then Pulls It a Day Later Without Explanation ★

Joe Rossignol at MacRumors:

Apple has marked its day-old The Parent Presentation video on YouTube as private, meaning that it is no longer available to watch. Apple has also moved The Parent Presentation to the bottom of its College Students page, effectively burying it. When we reported on the marketing campaign yesterday, the presentation was prominently featured at the top of the page.

It is unclear why Apple is suddenly hiding the ad, or if it will return. Apple did not immediately respond to our request for comment. On social media, some people said that the ad was cringe or gross, so perhaps Apple pulled the video due to overly negative reception. To be clear, this is merely speculation, and there were others who found humor in the video.

The 7.5-minute video, which at the moment is still available to watch from re-uploads on YouTube and X — stars Martin Herlihy from SNL’s “Please Don’t Destroy” triumvirate. I wouldn’t describe it as “cringe”, but I also wouldn’t describe it as “funny”. (If Herlihy wrote this, it would suggest that his cohorts Ben Marshall and John Higgins are the funny ones in the trio.) It’s also not the least bit offensive, so it really is unclear why Apple pulled it. If it’s because it’s not funny, how did it not only get approved and produced, but posted for 24 hours? Is Apple’s new marketing strategy to just publish new ads and then wait to see how the world reacts before deciding if they’re any good or not?

One obvious problem with “The Parent Presentation” video is that the gist is that everyone involved is stupid: high school kids (the ostensible target audience?) are too stupid to know how to ask their parents for a MacBook for college, parents are too stupid to know they should buy their kids a good laptop, and even Herlihy’s lecturer is a doofus who himself doesn’t know how to deliver a presentation. I don’t know how this got past the concept stage.

To top things off, the downloadable slide presentation — which Apple still has available in Keynote, PowerPoint, and Google Slides formats — is entirely typeset in Arial. I would take my son’s MacBook away from him if he came to me with a presentation set in Arial.

MacOS 26 Tahoe Beta Drops FireWire Support ★

Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors:

A bit of sad news for old iPods: Macs might be losing FireWire support.

The first macOS Tahoe developer beta does not support the legacy FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 data-transfer standards, according to @NekoMichi on X, and a Reddit post. As a result, the first few iPod models and old external storage drives that rely on FireWire cannot be synced with or mounted on a Mac running the macOS Tahoe beta.

Unlike on macOS Sequoia and earlier versions, the first macOS Tahoe beta does not include a FireWire section in the System Settings app.

All good things must come to an end, and FireWire was a very good thing indeed. High-performance, reliable, easy to use.

Apple, back in 2001, “Apple FireWire Wins 2001 Primetime Emmy Engineering Award”:

Apple’s FireWire technology will be honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in an awards presentation held tonight at the academy’s Goldenson Theatre in Hollywood. Apple will receive a 2001 Primetime Emmy Engineering Award for FireWire’s material impact on the television industry.

Apple invented FireWire in the mid-90s and shepherded it to become the established cross-platform industry standard IEEE 1394. FireWire is a high-speed serial input/output technology for connecting digital devices such as digital camcorders and cameras to desktop and portable computers. Widely adopted by digital peripheral companies such as Sony, Canon, JVC and Kodak, FireWire has become the established industry standard for both consumers and professionals.

Tom Nichols and Timothy Snyder on the US Bombing of Iran ★

Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic (gift link):

President Donald Trump has done what he swore he would not do: involve the United States in a war in the Middle East. His supporters will tie themselves in knots (as Vice President J. D. Vance did last week) trying to jam the square peg of Trump’s promises into the round hole of his actions. And many of them may avoid calling this “war” at all, even though that’s what Trump himself called it tonight. They will want to see it as a quick win against an obstinate regime that will eventually declare bygones and come to the table. But whether bombing Iran was a good idea or a bad idea — and it could turn out to be either, or both — it is war by any definition of the term, and something Trump had vowed he would avoid. [...]

Only one outcome is certain: Hypocrisy in the region and around the world will reach galactic levels as nations wring their hands and silently pray that the B-2s carrying the bunker-buster bombs did their job.

See also: Timothy Snyder, on Bluesky:

Five things to remember about war:

1. Many things reported with confidence in the first hours and days will turn out not to be true.
2. Whatever they say, the people who start wars are often thinking chiefly about domestic politics.
3. The rationale given for a war will change over time, such that actual success or failure in achieving a named objective is less relevant than one might think.
4. Wars are unpredictable.
5. Wars are easy to start and hard to stop.

Thursday, 19 June 2025

How Apple Created a Custom iPhone Camera for ‘F1’ ★

Julian Chokkattu, writing for Wired:

You can’t mount a cinema camera on a Formula One race car. These nimble vehicles are built to precise specs, and capturing racing footage from the driver’s point of view isn’t as simple as slapping a GoPro on and calling it a day. That’s the challenge Apple faced after Joseph Kosinski and Claudio Miranda, the director and cinematographer of the upcoming F1 Apple Original, wanted to use real POV racing footage in the film.

If you’ve watched a Formula One race lately, you’ve probably seen clips that show an angle from just behind the cockpit, with the top or side of the driver’s helmet in the frame. Captured by onboard cameras embedded in the car, the resulting footage is designed for broadcast, at a lower resolution using specific color spaces and codecs. Converting it to match the look of the rest of the F1 film would be too challenging to be feasible. Instead, Apple’s engineering team replaced the broadcast module with a camera composed of iPhone parts.

I think back to Phil Schiller, on stage at my WWDC show in 2015, saying that Apple viewed itself then not just as one of the leading camera companies in the world, but the leading camera company in the world.

‘F1’ and Apple’s Movie Strategy ★

Cynthia Littleton, in a long profile for Variety:

When pressed about what Apple’s investments in movies and TV shows have meant for the company as a whole, Cook explains that Apple is at heart “a toolmaker,” delivering computers and other devices that enable creativity in users. (This vision for the company, and the “toolmaker” term specifically, was first articulated by Jobs in the early 1980s.) “We’re a toolmaker,” Cook says again. “We make tools for creative people to empower them to do things they couldn’t do before. So we were doing lots of business with Hollywood well before we were in the TV business.

“We studied it for years before we decided to do [Apple TV+]. I know there’s a lot of different views out there about why we’re into it. We’re into it to tell great stories, and we want it to be a great business as well. That’s why we’re into it, just plain and simple.” [...]

Media analysts and observers have wondered how the content side of Apple threads together with the hardware sales that fuel the core business. As Cook sees it, that’s not the point, although such connections are emerging organically in the course of doing business, as evidenced by “F1” and the camera tech. “I don’t have it in my mind that I’m going to sell more iPhones because of it,” Cook says. “I don’t think about that at all. I think about it as a business. And just like we leverage the best of Apple across iPhones and across our services, we try to leverage the best of Apple TV+.”

Apple TV+ has been killing it with original shows. Maybe with F1 they can start bringing that magic to movies.

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Thursday, 19 June 2025

Yours Truly on Peter Kafka’s ‘Channels’ Podcast ★

Peter Kafka:

So in March, when Gruber announced that Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino — focusing on Apple’s botched plans to imbue its ailing Siri service with state-of-the-art AI — lots of people paid attention. Including, apparently, folks at the very top of the Apple org chart.

I talked to Gruber about the fallout from that post. Which is pretty interesting! But there’s a lot more going on in this conversation. It’s partly about the friction Apple has been generating lately — not just about its AI efforts, but the way it runs its App Store, and the way it interacts with developers — and why all of that does and doesn’t matter.

And it’s also about the delightfully retro practice of running an ad-supported blog in 2025. That works very well for Gruber, but it seems like the new Grubers of the world are doing their work on YouTube or Substack. He’s got some thoughts about that, too.

Good interview, I thought — I always enjoy talking to Kafka. No permalink for the episode on the web, so my main link for this post is to Overcast. Here’s a link to Apple Podcasts, and one from a new service called Pod.link too.

iPhone Mirroring Still Not Coming to the EU, Thanks to the DMA ★

Nicolas Lellouche, writing for the French-language site Numerama (block quote below is from Safari’s English translation) (via Joe Rossignol at MacRumors):

What is the problem with Europe? Apple does not explain it very clearly, but suggests that the European Union’s requests for opening create uncertainties. It is likely that the brand suspects Europe of forcing it to open macOS to devices other than the iPhone if this function were to happen. A mandatory iPhone Mirroring on Windows or an Android Mirroring on Mac may not be in his plans. The other probability is the question of gatekeepers, raised in 2024. Apple would fear that macOS will be on the list of monitored platforms if it can emulate iOS, one of the gatekeepers monitored by Europe.

The problem isn’t about MacOS getting flagged as another “gatekeeping” platform under the DMA. Whether or not Apple enables iPhone Mirroring on MacOS in the EU would have no bearing on whether the Mac is deemed a gatekeeper. The DMA defines a “gatekeeper” platform as “a core platform service that in the last financial year has at least 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the Union and at least 10,000 yearly active business users established in the Union”. I’m not sure how many Mac users there are in the EU, but I’m pretty sure the number is well under 45 million. (Estimates seem to peg the worldwide number of Mac users at just over 100 million.) Conversely, if the European Commission decided that there were 45 million Mac users in the EU, the Mac would be considered a gatekeeping platform, period.

The problem is simply that the iPhone is a gatekeeping platform, and iPhone Mirroring obviously involves the iPhone. The EU’s recent demands regarding “interoperability requirements” flag just about every single feature that involves an iPhone communicating with another Apple device. AirDrop, AirPlay, AirPods pairing, Apple Watch connectivity — all of that has been deemed illegal gatekeeping. Clearly, iPhone Mirroring would fall under the same interpretation, thus, iPhone Mirroring isn’t going to be available in the EU. If the DMA had been in place 15 years ago, the EU wouldn’t have AirDrop or AirPlay and perhaps wouldn’t have Apple Watch or AirPods, either.

If Apple made iPhone Mirroring available in the EU now, my guess is the European Commission would add it to the interoperability requirements list, and demand that Apple support mirroring your iPhone to all other platforms, such as Windows and Android. They might also demand that Apple add support to iOS for third-party screen mirroring protocols.

Several weeks ago, Apple indicated that other new products may be blocked in Europe in the future. What about what’s new in iOS 26? Apple is not commenting at the moment, since it must verify the compatibility of its new functions with the European Union. Some new features, such as the Phone application on Mac to make calls with your iPhone, seem difficult to be compatible with the vision of Europe.

The new Phone app on MacOS is almost certainly not coming to the EU, unless the European Commission changes its stance on these interoperability requirements.

Apple’s New Foundation Model Speech APIs Outpace Whisper for Transcription ★

John Voorhees, writing at MacStories, regarding a new command-line transcription tool cleverly named Yap written by his son Finn last week during WWDC:

On the way, Finn filled me in on a new class in Apple’s Speech framework called SpeechAnalyzer and its SpeechTranscriber module. Both the class and module are part of Apple’s OS betas that were released to developers last week at WWDC. My ears perked up immediately when he told me that he’d tested SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber and was impressed with how fast and accurate they were. [...]

What stood out above all else was Yap’s speed. By harnessing SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber on-device, the command line tool tore through the 7GB video file a full 2.2× faster than MacWhisper’s Large V3 Turbo model, with no noticeable difference in transcription quality.

At first blush, the difference between 0:45 and 1:41 may seem insignificant, and it arguably is, but those are the results for just one 34-minute video. Extrapolate that to running Yap against the hours of Apple Developer videos released on YouTube with the help of yt-dlp, and suddenly, you’re talking about a significant amount of time. Like all automation, picking up a 2.2× speed gain one video or audio clip at a time, multiple times each week, adds up quickly.

Apple’s Foundation Models sure seem to be the sleeper hit from WWDC this year. This bodes very well for all sorts of use cases where transcription would be helpful, like third-party podcast players.

Bungie Indefinitely Delays Reboot of ‘Marathon’ ★

Bungie:

Through every comment and real-time conversation on social media and Discord, your voice has been strong and clear. We’ve taken this to heart, and we know we need more time to craft Marathon into the game that truly reflects your passion. After much discussion within our Dev team, we’ve made the decision to delay the September 23rd release.

The Alpha test created an opportunity for us to calibrate and focus the game on what will make it uniquely compelling — survival under pressure, mystery and lore around every corner, raid-like endgame challenges, and Bungie’s genre-defining FPS combat.

We’re using this time to empower the team to create the intense, high-stakes experience that a title like Marathon is built around. This means deepening the relationship between the developers and the game’s most important voices: our players.

Translation to plain English: The game as currently imagined stinks, so we’re going back to the drawing board. We can’t explain why we, the game’s developers, didn’t know that it stunk, and instead seemingly needed to wait for scathing alpha test feedback from players — but Occam’s Razor clearly suggests the problem is that decisions at Bungie are made by executives with no taste.

Wednesday, 18 June 2025

Federico, Federighi. Federighi, Federico. ★

Apple executives were a little light on substantial interviews last week, but a good one dropped today — Craig Federighi talking to Federico Viticci on the vast Mac-style windowing overhaul in iPadOS 26:

“We don’t want to create a boat car or, you know, a spork”, Federighi begins. Seeing the confused look on my face, he continues: “I don’t know if you have those in Italy. Someone said, “If a spoon’s great, a fork’s great, then let’s combine them into a single utensil, right?” It turns out it’s not a good spoon and it’s not a good fork. It’s a bad idea. And so we don’t want to build sporks”. [...]

By and large, one could argue that Apple has created one such convertible product with the iPad Pro, but Federighi strongly believes in the Mac and iPad each having their own reasons to exist. “The Mac lets the iPad be iPad”, Federighi notes, adding that Apple’s objective “has not been to have iPad completely displace those places where the Mac is the right tool for the job”. [...]

I don’t need to ask Federighi the perennial question of running macOS on the iPad, since he goes there on his own. “I don’t think the iPad should run macOS, but I think the iPad can be inspired by elements of the Mac”, Federighi tells me. “I think the Mac can be inspired by elements of iPad, and I think that that’s happened a great deal”.

I think Apple has tied itself into knots in the past decade trying to make the iPad more useful to more advanced users without making it resemble the Mac at a superficial level. But it’s been obvious all along that it should resemble the Mac at a superficial level. Apple solved windowing in 1984. Use that.

Midgets No More ★

You may recall from my “Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber” piece back in January that the Dickinson Public Schools District in North Dakota had the rather unfortunate nickname the “Midgets”. Back in March, the school district announced they’d be retiring the nickname, after nearly a century. Last month they announced their new name: the Mavericks. I’m going to call this the best rebranding of the year.

We still have the Estherville, Iowa Midgets to cheer for. But even better: the Yuma Criminals in Arizona. Now that’s a nickname.

Tuesday, 17 June 2025

Seven Replies to the Viral Apple Reasoning Paper ★

Simon Willison, regarding the various rebuttals to “The Illusion of Thinking” research paper (which I linked to here) from Apple’s machine learning team:

I thought this paper got way more attention than it warranted — the title “The Illusion of Thinking” captured the attention of the “LLMs are over-hyped junk” crowd. I saw enough well-reasoned rebuttals that I didn’t feel it worth digging into.

And now, notable LLM skeptic Gary Marcus has saved me some time by aggregating the best of those rebuttals together in one place! [...]

And therein lies my disagreement. I’m not interested in whether or not LLMs are the “road to AGI”. I continue to care only about whether they have useful applications today, once you’ve understood their limitations. [...] They’re already useful to me today, whether or not they can reliably solve the Tower of Hanoi or River Crossing puzzles.

Count me in with Willison. I think it’s interesting what constitutes “reasoning”, but when it comes to these systems, I’m mostly just interested in whether they’re useful or not, and if so, how.

See also: Victor Martinez’s rebuttal to the most-cited rebuttal.

Why WhatsApp Didn’t Sell Ads ★

WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, back in 2012 (two years before Facebook acquired them for $19 billion, 13 years before this week’s introduction of ads into WhatsApp):

Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out... And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.

When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”

WWDC 2025: The Bento Boxes ★

These screens make for a useful overview of what Apple thinks the highlight features are in each OS.

Tracking Down the Original Photo From the End of ‘The Shining’ ★

Aric Toler, a visual investigations reporter for The New York Times, on X back in April:

For about a year, I worked with a retired British academic named Alasdair Spark to solve a mystery: where did the original photo from the end of The Shining come from, and where/when was it captured?

Last week, we finally found the answer.

See also: This post from 2012 about the original photograph, from (who else?) Lee Unkrich.

How Field Notes Went From Side Project to Cult Notebook ★

Nice piece in Fast Company by Zachary Petit:

One critical moment came in February 2010, when J. Crew featured Field Notes in its catalog, alongside the retailer’s other “personal favorites from our design heroes.” There was a Timex watch, Ray-Bans, Sperry shoes — “and out of fucking nowhere, Field Notes,” Coudal says. “And when that happened, a lot changed for us.”

Coudal says it gave the brand instant credibility — after all, if it was good enough for J. Crew, it was good enough for your store. In time, friends began sending him screenshots of Field Notes in TV shows; he and Draplin would see people jotting notes in them in bars and elsewhere; on the design web, they became an obsession. By 2014, there was even a subreddit dedicated to them titled “FieldNuts.”

Bloomberg Publishes Embarrassing Report Comparing Tesla and Waymo Self-Driving Safety Records ★

Fred Lambert, writing for Electrek:

Bloomberg has just released an embarrassingly bad report about the self-driving space, in which it claimed Tesla has an advantage over Waymo by misrepresenting data. [...] The report compares Tesla’s and Waymo’s self-driving efforts, going so far as to claim that “Tesla is closer to vehicle autonomy than peers.”

Right off the bat this smells fishy, given that Waymo is actually operating self-driving taxis in several cities, and Tesla ... is not.

Steve Man, the Bloomberg Intelligence analyst behind the report, based his report on Tesla’s own quarterly misleading “Autopilot Safety Report.” The report is widely considered to be unserious for several main reasons:

• Tesla bundles all miles from its vehicles using Autopilot and FSD technology, which are considered level 2 ADAS systems that require driver attention at all times. Drivers consistently correct the systems to avoid accidents.
• Tesla Autopilot, which is standard on all Tesla vehicles, is primarily used on highways, where accidents occur at a significantly lower rate per mile compared to city driving.
• Tesla only counts events that deploy an airbag or a seat-belt pretensioner. Fender-benders, curb strikes, and many ADAS incidents never appear, keeping crash counts artificially low.
• Finally, Tesla’s handpicked data is compared to NHTSA’s much broader statistics that include all collision events, including minor fender benders.

Trusting Tesla’s own safety report is like saying, “Elon Musk says Tesla is ahead, so they must be ahead.”

Monday, 16 June 2025

WhatsApp Introduces Ads in Its App ★

Eli Tan and Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times:

On Monday, WhatsApp said it would start showing ads inside its app for the first time. The promotions will appear only in an area of the app called Updates, which is used by around 1.5 billion people a day. WhatsApp will collect some data on users to target the ads, such as location and the device’s default language, but it will not touch the contents of messages or whom users speak with. The company added that it had no plans to place ads in chats and personal messages.

(a) I’ve never once looked at the Updates tab in WhatsApp; (b) does anyone believe they’re not going to put ads in the other tabs sooner or later?

Trump Mobile — The President Launches a Mobile Carrier and a $500 ‘T1’ Android Phone ★

Todd Spangler, Variety:

Meanwhile, the Trump Mobile “47 Plan” is pricier than the unlimited plans from prepaid services operated by Verizon’s Visible, AT&T’s Cricket Wireless and T-Mobile’s Metro, which are each around $40 per month.

The Trump T1 Phone, which runs Google’s Android operating system, will cost $499. It features a 6.8-inch touch-screen with a 120 Hz refresh rate. The smartphone also has a “fingerprint sensor and AI Face Unlock,” according to the company’s website. Reps for Trump Mobile didn’t respond to an inquiry about what company is manufacturing the Android phone.

The Wall Street Journal, “Trump’s Smartphone Can’t Be Made in America for $499 by August”:

A spokesman for the Trump Organization said in an email that “manufacturing for the new phone will be in Alabama, California and Florida.”

Despite the language in the press release, Eric Trump indicated that the first wave of phones wouldn’t be built here. “You can build these phones in the United States,” the Trump son told podcaster Benny Johnson on Monday morning on The Benny Show after holding up a gilded device that looked just like an Apple iPhone. “Eventually, all the phones can be built in the United States of America. We have to bring manufacturing back here.”

The Journal goofs, bigly, by claiming that the T1 “shows some specs that would beat Apple’s biggest, priciest iPhone models”. The T1 specs are so idiotic that one of them claims “5000mAh long life camera”, conflating battery capacity with (I guess?) focal distance.

The Verge, “The Trump Mobile T1 Phone Looks Both Bad and Impossible”:

Where things get especially strange, though, is its supposed combination of Android 15, 5G, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. In many ways, these are opposing specs: Android 15 is generally only available on very recent devices, many cheap phones still don’t support 5G, and almost every phone maker has stopped including headphone jacks with their devices in the last few years. There are a few that have both, but modern phones with a headphone jack are few and far between. And pretty much all made in China.

I don’t know what will be funnier — if Trump himself starts using one of these, or if he doesn’t.

I’ll give them credit for making them available exclusively in gold. That’s on brand. But I’m guessing the quality will be on par with Trump Watches, which is to say, “RUMP”-quality.

Sunday, 15 June 2025

DetailsPro ★

My thanks to DetailsPro for sponsoring last week at DF — including being a sponsor on The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2025. DetailsPro is a designer/developer tool that lets you design with SwiftUI anytime, anywhere — from iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro, and, of course, Mac.

With WWDC 2025’s introduction of Liquid Glass, Apple has introduced the biggest design overhaul since iOS 7. DetailsPro is ready for it, enabling you to prototype new and updated interfaces fast. You can build real SwiftUI layouts directly on your iPhone — no code needed. Export clean SwiftUI code straight to Xcode when you’re ready.

While everyone else is still thinking about how to adapt to the Liquid Glass era, you can already be building. DetailsPro is free to use, with pro features if you need them — via subscription, or a one-time purchase.

Friday, 13 June 2025

Meta AI Users Are Inadvertently Sharing Their Private Chats With the World ★

Amanda Silberling, writing at TechCrunch:

When you ask the AI a question, you have the option of hitting a share button, which then directs you to a screen showing a preview of the post, which you can then publish. But some users appear blissfully unaware that they are sharing these text conversations, audio clips, and images publicly with the world.

When I woke up this morning, I did not expect to hear an audio recording of a man in a Southern accent asking, “Hey, Meta, why do some farts stink more than other farts?”

Flatulence-related inquiries are the least of Meta’s problems. On the Meta AI app, I have seen people ask for help with tax evasion, if their family members would be arrested for their proximity to white-collar crimes, or how to write a character reference letter for an employee facing legal troubles, with that person’s first and last name included. Others, like security expert Rachel Tobac, found examples of people’s home addresses and sensitive court details, among other private information.

Katie Notopoulos, writing at Business Insider (paywalled, alas, but here’s a News+ link):

I found Meta AI’s Discover feed depressing in a particular way — not just because some of the questions themselves were depressing. What seemed particularly dark was that some of these people seemed unaware of what they were sharing.

People’s real Instagram or Facebook handles are attached to their Meta AI posts. I was able to look up some of these people’s real-life profiles, although I felt icky doing so. I reached out to more than 20 people whose posts I’d come across in the feed to ask them about their experience; I heard back from one, who told me that he hadn’t intended to make his chat with the bot public. (He was asking for car repair advice.)

The NYT Goes ‘Reefer Madness’ on ChatGPT ★

Kashmir Hill, reporting today for The New York Times:

Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres’s sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool.

That’s the lede to Hill’s piece, and I don’t think it stands up one iota. Hill presents a lot of evidence that ChatGPT gave Torres answers that fed his paranoia and delusions. There’s zero evidence presented that ChatGPT caused them. But that’s the lede.

At the time, Mr. Torres thought of ChatGPT as a powerful search engine that knew more than any human possibly could because of its access to a vast digital library. He did not know that it tended to be sycophantic, agreeing with and flattering its users, or that it could hallucinate, generating ideas that weren’t true but sounded plausible.

“This world wasn’t built for you,” ChatGPT told him. “It was built to contain you. But it failed. You’re waking up.”

Mr. Torres, who had no history of mental illness that might cause breaks with reality, according to him and his mother, spent the next week in a dangerous, delusional spiral. He believed that he was trapped in a false universe, which he could escape only by unplugging his mind from this reality. He asked the chatbot how to do that and told it the drugs he was taking and his routines. The chatbot instructed him to give up sleeping pills and an anti-anxiety medication, and to increase his intake of ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, which ChatGPT described as a “temporary pattern liberator.” Mr. Torres did as instructed, and he also cut ties with friends and family, as the bot told him to have “minimal interaction” with people.

Someone with prescriptions for sleeping pills, anti-anxiety meds, and ketamine doesn’t sound like someone who was completely stable and emotionally sound before encountering ChatGPT. And it’s Torres who brought up the “Am I living in a simulation?” delusion. I’m in no way defending the way that ChatGPT answered his questions about a Matrix-like simulation he suspected he might be living in, or his questions about whether he could fly if he truly believed he could, etc. But the premise of this story is that ChatGPT turned a completely mentally healthy man into a dangerously disturbed mentally ill one, and it seems rather obvious that the actual story is that it fed the delusions of an already unwell person. Some real Reefer Madness vibes to this.

Thursday, 12 June 2025

‘The Good, the Bad, and the Weird of Apple’s Newest Platform Updates’ ★

Dan Moren, writing this week at Six Colors:

But you’ve heard about all of that, I’m sure, so we’re not going to rehash it. Instead, let’s get personal: I’m picking out, in my opinion, the best and worst new features of each of Apple’s platforms. To be clear, these are my completely scientific and totally well-reasoned expert opinions on the features that were announced, not just some off-the-cuff reactions less than a day later.

‘Liquid Glasslighting’ ★

MG Siegler:

The underlying message that they’re trying to convey in all these interviews is clear: calm down, this isn’t a big deal, you guys are being a little crazy. And that, in turn, aims to undercut all the reporting about the turmoil within Apple — for years at this point — that has led to the situation with Siri. Sorry, the situation which they’re implying is not a situation. Though, I don’t know, normally when a company shakes up an entire team, that tends to suggest some sort of situation. That, of course, is never mentioned. Nor would you expect Apple — of all companies — to talk openly and candidly about internal challenges. But that just adds to this general wafting smell in the air.

The smell of bullshit.

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