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Lex.Games: Free daily word games from Lex Friedman. Not the weird Elon stan;
the real Lex Friedman.

Wednesday, 26 March 2025

The Atlantic Has an Owner Committed to the Cause: Laurene Powell Jobs ★

Oliver Darcy, writing at Status (paywalled — great content, terrible CMS experience that keeps logging me out on all my devices and requires a stupid email magic link to get back in), in a brief interview with Atlantic editor-in-chief and man of the moment Jeffrey Goldberg:

It goes without saying that there are many ironies associated with this particular story. One of them is that Goldberg, a journalist who Donald Trump loathes for his past reporting (remember the “suckers and losers” piece), somehow became the unintended recipient of high-level, real-time military intelligence from inside his own inner circle. One wonders whether any heads will roll as a result of the whole matter. On Monday, Trump again made his disdain for Goldberg known, blasting him at a press conference and absurdly claiming The Atlantic is “a magazine that is going out of business.”

If anything, of course, publishing a story like the one Goldberg did on Monday proves how strong the outlet currently is. That type of muscular journalism requires skill, strong leadership, and the backing of a courageous publisher. I asked Goldberg about owner Laurene Powell Jobs’ role in the matter. He declined to comment specifically on this particular story, but offered words of praise: “Laurene Powell Jobs is a stalwart and brave publisher at a time when cowardice rules the day.”

If it had been a Washington Post reporter who was inadvertently included on the Trump national security team’s Signal group chat, would they have run the story? No fucking way with that abject lickspittle coward Jeff Bezos running the show.

Apple Now Selling PCs From Other Companies at Apple.com ★

The work remains mysterious and important.

2026 Porsches Still Won’t Have Next-Gen CarPlay, Which Was Announced in 2022 ★

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

Apple’s next-generation CarPlay experience is still nowhere to be seen following Porsche’s announcement of a major upgrade of its infotainment system for 2026.

The upcoming 2026 model year Porsche Taycan, 911, Panamera, and Cayenne feature an upgraded version of the Porsche Communication Management (PCM) system, making it more responsive, adding Dolby Atmos support, and integrating Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. The new system brings the Porsche App Center, a kind of app store for the vehicle, to all of the new models.

It continues to support the standard version of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Support for Apple’s next-generation CarPlay experience is again conspicuously missing from Porsche’s new lineup, and the automaker did not mention it at all during its latest announcement — another bleak sign for the delayed feature.

I’d crack a joke about it looking less and less likely that next-gen CarPlay was going to appear in 2024, but I already did that in January, when Apple itself took the date off its CarPlay page. That announcement came at WWDC 2022.

In this case (unlike the advanced personalized features of Apple Intelligence) it was actually sensible for Apple to pre-announce the existence of next-gen CarPlay, given the reliance on third parties. But it also should have been clear just how incredibly hard it would be to get third party carmakers up to snuff on being able to ship it, so Apple giving a date, any date, was always odd. Apple doesn’t make a car, and you can’t promise what you can’t control. They should have just said “soon”.

Calling the White House’s Bluff, The Atlantic Releases the ‘Houthi PC Small Group’ Signal Text Thread ★

Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris, reporting once again for The Atlantic:

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat — the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz — we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump — combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts — have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.

I linked yesterday to a quote from Hannah Arendt, whom Wikipedia aptly describes as “one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century”. The quote I linked to was her observation that the ranks of authoritarian governments inevitably wind up being filled with “crackpots and fools” because they’re the people whose loyalty is most assured. In some sense the Jedi mind trick is real — it works on the weak-minded. Regardless of one’s political beliefs, no intelligent person of integrity (as opposed to, say, a foreign mole) would participate in a discussion of obviously classified and highly sensitive war plans in a Signal chat. It’s jarring to see it so clearly but U.S. national security is now led entirely by morons.

Most of the quotes on the Goodreads page I linked to, culled from Arendt’s seminal The Origins of Totalitarianism, are related to truth, not idiocy. Here’s one:

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.

And:

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

And:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

When The Atlantic’s initial story hit, everyone responsible in the Trump administration, right up to the president himself, just immediately began telling bald-faced lies about what happened, despite the fact that they knew Jeffrey Goldberg literally had the receipts to prove otherwise. That works, until it doesn’t.

Tuesday, 25 March 2025

Of Course Trump Has Surrounded Himself With Idiots This Time Around ★

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Eight years of Trump was going to be eight years too many no matter how it worked out, but the four year Biden term between Trump terms makes the difference clear. Trump corrected what he perceived as a lack of loyalty/fealty in his first term by surrounding himself with nothing but morons this time.

Notification Summary Miscues ★

Paul Kafasis:

Since they were first enabled last year, I have frequently found Apple Intelligence’s notification summaries for emails to be something less than helpful. Here are some I spotted in just the past few days.

The first one of these is particularly interesting because it highlights a key area where LLMs are frustratingly stupid. Kafasis got a notification summary from Apple Intelligence claiming “Package shipped for $427 order” for a used book he’d purchased. The email from Amazon, from which Apple Intelligence gleaned the information, had the price formatted thus: $4²⁷ — omitting the decimal and putting the cents in superscript. That’s a centuries-old formatting idiom for prices that remains common — e.g. at Walmart — to this day. But Apple Intelligence just sees dollar-sign, four, two, seven, and thus $427.

That’s just stupid.

But where it really gets frustrating is that everyone has to learn this at some point. If you were at Walmart with a kid, and the kid asked why, say, dog food is so expensive, pointing to a sign that says it cost $9⁸⁷ per bag, you’d explain it, once, and the kid would never forget it. “Oh, that’s just another way of writing nine dollars and eighty-seven cents — they do it that way to emphasize the dollar amount and de-emphasize the cents, which really don’t matter.” This would make intuitive sense to the child as well, because they know dog food probably costs about $10 per bag, not $1,000 per bag.

There is no way to properly explain something like this to an LLM (yet?). You can’t teach it like we do with children. Or at least you can’t do it in a way that jibes with our human sense of “learning” — it’s more like how the Guy Pearce protagonist “learns” in Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Here, tattoo another thing to remember on your arm. But at least ChatGPT is trying to learn about us, albeit in its crude Memento-like way. With Apple Intelligence in particular, you can’t teach it at all. There’s no place in the system where you can correct the very simple, easily-explained mistake it made upon seeing $4²⁷ in an email. The next time an email from Amazon comes with a price formatted like that, Apple Intelligence is likely to summarize it the exact same wrong way — off by a factor of 100 — again. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

OPSEC Isn’t Even the Worst Part of ‘SignalGate’ ★

Josh Marshal, writing at Talking Points Memo:

Especially in the national security domain, many things the government does have to remain secret. Sometimes those things remain secret for years or decades. But they’re not secrets from the U.S. government. The U.S. government owns all those communications, all those facts of its own history. Using a Signal app like this is hiding what’s happening from the government itself. And that is almost certainly not an unintended byproduct but the very reason for the use. These are disappearing communications. They won’t be in the National Archives. Future administrations won’t know what happened. There also won’t be any records to determine whether crimes were committed.

This all goes to the fundamental point Trump has never been able to accept: that the U.S. government is the property of the American people and it persists over time with individual officeholders merely temporary occupants charged with administering an entity they don’t own or possess.

Think this is hyperbole? Remember that when Trump held his notorious meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2019 he confiscated his translator’s notes and ordered him not to divulge anything that had been discussed. Remember that Trump got impeached over an extortion plot recorded in the government record of his phone call with President Zelensky. An intelligence analyst discovered what had happened and decided he needed to report the conduct. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’ve already happened. And he’s even been caught. Which is probably one reason there’s so much use of Signal.

The Problem Is Far More Than Just Whether Signal Is ‘Secure’ ★

Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel, reporting for Politico:

The app’s security is viewed as fairly strong due to its robust privacy features and minimal data collection, as well as default end-to-end encryption of all messages and voice calls. The app also includes a function that deletes all messages from a conversation within a set time frame, adding an additional layer of data protection. But experts agree that it shouldn’t be used by government officials as an alternative to communicating through more secure, sanctioned government communications — which Signal is not.

“It’s so unbelievable,” a former White House official, granted anonymity to discuss The Atlantic’s report candidly, said Monday. “These guys all have traveling security details to set up secure comms for them, wherever they are.”

Signal’s encryption is more than just “fairly strong”. It’s very strong, arguably the gold standard in consumer-available communications. But that’s not the point. The point is it’s a consumer application. This whole fiasco happened because you can just mistakenly add the wrong person to a group conversation, which wouldn’t be possible if the Trump national security team were using appropriate channels.

And the disappearing messages thing doesn’t add security. It adds some level of privacy, but it’s an additional factor that makes all of this completely illegal. But avoiding any future scrutiny is almost certainly one reason Trump’s kakistocratic cabinet is using Signal in the first place.

The former White House official pointed out that members of Trump’s Cabinet — including the vice president, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, among others — were likely using personal devices, since in most cases, Signal cannot be downloaded onto official federal devices. This alone creates a host of cybersecurity issues.

Wrote one DF reader (who has professional experience in this area) to me today, “There is no legal way whatsoever that classified information can be communicated over the public Internet — private device, personally owned device, Chromebook, anything. It is all wildly illegal.”

Days After the Trump National Security Team’s Signal Leak, the Pentagon Warned That Russian Hackers Are Using Phishing Attacks to Abuse Signal’s ‘Linked Devices’ Feature ★

NPR:

Several days after top national security officials accidentally included a reporter in a Signal chat about bombing Houthi sites in Yemen, a Pentagon-wide advisory warned against using the messaging app, even for unclassified information.

“A vulnerability has been identified in the Signal messenger application,” begins the department-wide email, dated March 18, obtained by NPR. The memo continues, “Russian professional hacking groups are employing the ‘linked devices’ features to spy on encrypted conversations.” It notes that Google has identified Russian hacking groups who are “targeting Signal Messenger to spy on persons of interest.”

It’s not a weakness in Signal’s cryptography, it’s a hole in their device-mirroring setup. From that Google Threat Intelligence post, published last month:

The most novel and widely used technique underpinning Russian-aligned attempts to compromise Signal accounts is the abuse of the app’s legitimate “linked devices” feature that enables Signal to be used on multiple devices concurrently. Because linking an additional device typically requires scanning a quick-response (QR) code, threat actors have resorted to crafting malicious QR codes that, when scanned, will link a victim’s account to an actor-controlled Signal instance. If successful, future messages will be delivered synchronously to both the victim and the threat actor in real-time, providing a persistent means to eavesdrop on the victim’s secure conversations without the need for full-device compromise.

You’d have to be a bit of a doofus to fall for such a phishing attack if you were in a national security leadership position, but, well, our national security leadership positions are currently occupied by what the Russians call “useful idiots”.

New York Post: ‘European Union to Fine Meta Up to $1B or More for Breaching DMA’ ★

Thomas Barrabi, reporting for The New York Post:

The European Union is set to slap Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta with a fine that could stretch to $1 billion or more for allegedly violating its strict antitrust rules, The Post has learned — setting up a possible showdown with President Trump, who has compared the EU’s penalties to “overseas extortion.”

The European Commission, the EU’s antitrust watchdog, is expected to conclude that Meta is not in compliance with the Digital Markets Act, sources close to the situation told The Post on Monday. [...] The fine is expected to be hundreds of millions of dollars and potentially more than $1 billion, the sources said. [...]

Apple is also in the EU’s crosshairs and a fine against the iPhone maker could be announced this week or next week, the sources said. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Apple and Meta were likely to face “modest fines” for DMA breaches. EU antitrust chief Theresa Ribera previously said a decision on enforcement actions for both companies was coming in March.

Reuters Reports European Commission Will Decline to Fine Apple Over Browser Choice Screen, But Hints It Will Over Anti-Steering Provisions ★

Foo Yun Chee, reporting for Reuters under the headline “Exclusive: Apple Set to Stave Off EU Fine Into Browser Options, Sources Say”:

Apple is set to stave off a possible fine and an EU order over its browser options on iPhones after it made changes to comply with landmark EU rules aimed at reining in Big Tech, people with direct knowledge of the matter said on Tuesday. The European Commission, which launched an investigation in March last year under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), is expected to close its investigation early next week, the people said.

A win’s a win and a closed investigation’s a closed investigation, but the browser choice screen never seemed like a problem for Apple. I follow this stuff closely, and have even written (at times extensively) about how dumb and ineffective these mandatory browser choice screens are, and I didn’t realize this investigation was still open, because it seemed so clear Apple had done what they needed to for compliance.

So, more interesting to me is this bit buried lower in the article, suggesting the EC is going to fine Apple next week over non-compliance with the DMA’s anti-steering provisions:

The Commission’s decision to close the investigation early next week will come at the same time as it hands out fines to Apple and Meta Platforms for DMA violations and orders to comply with the legislation, the people said.

In this second Apple case, the issue is whether the company imposes restrictions that hinder app developers from informing users about offers outside its App Store free of charge.

WWDC 2025 Dates: June 9–13 ★

Apple Newsroom:

To celebrate the start of WWDC, Apple will also host an in-person experience on June 9 that will provide developers with the opportunity to watch the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union at Apple Park, meet with Apple experts one-on-one and in group labs, and take part in special activities. Space will be limited; details on how to apply to attend can be found on the WWDC25 website.

Right on time: in recent years, WWDC dates have been announced on:

• Tuesday 30 March 2021
• Tuesday 5 April 2022
• Wednesday 29 March 2023
• Tuesday 26 March 2024

and now today, Tuesday 25 March 2025. Last Tuesday in March next year is March 31 — that’s my guess for next year’s announcement.

And, yes, the “25” in the logo has a decidedly glassy look and some animation that’s just plain fun.

Tuesday, 25 March 2025

Threads Is Losing to Bluesky ★

Jon Passantino, writing at Status:

Now Threads feels rather lifeless. While users still post there, for many it has become something of a second-tier platform — a place that they dump content out of habit, not because they’re having real conversations or finding meaningful engagement.

Matt Birchler:

I believe Meta that there are hundreds of millions of people signing on every month, but they seem to be doing absolutely nothing there. More interesting stuff is on Bluesky and Mastodon, and better conversation happens on those platforms as well.

I feel the same way. Threads has dropped to a decided #3 for me after Mastodon and Bluesky, and (a) I don’t really have room in my head or time in my day for 3 of these platforms, and (b) I’m more than OK with Meta’s entry falling by the wayside.

Like, if the answer at the moment for Twitter-style social media is Bluesky (general audience) and Mastodon (nerds), that’s ... the best outcome? Even X (chaos and Musk sycophancy) seems to have a better, more defined vision for what it’s supposed to be than Threads.

Monday, 24 March 2025

‘Tim, Don’t Kill My Vibe’ ★

Bryan Irace:

Barring a sharp correction, Apple looks increasingly likely to miss out on a generation of developers conditioned to first reach for tools like Cursor, Replit, or v0 — especially as Apple’s own AI tooling remains notably absent. This goes well beyond enabling new entrants to “vibe code” — experienced mobile developers who, despite history with Xcode and a predilection for building native apps, are begrudgingly swapping out their tools in acknowledgement of the inarguable productivity benefits. [...]

App Review has always long been a major source of developer frustration. Authoritarian yet inconsistent policy enforcement aside, it’s simply too hard to distribute software even to your own Apple devices, let alone someone else’s. This isn’t new by any means, but as the time to build an app shrinks from weeks/months to hours/days, it feels more egregious — and thus like more of a liability — than ever before.

This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece. I feel like Irace is onto something here that I haven’t seen anyone put their finger on before.

The App Store, when it debuted, made developers deliriously happy. The UIKit frameworks (a.k.a. CocoaTouch), Objective-C, and Xcode were all way better ways to create apps for mobile devices than anything else at the time. And for distribution, going through Apple and the App Store was way easier and way more democratic, and 70/30 was way more generous to developers, than anything from the various phone carriers around the world. You’d be lucky to get a 30/70 split from the carriers, and they’d only deal with large corporate developers. There were no indie or hobbyist mobile app developers before the App Store. (It’s kind of nutty in hindsight that network carriers were the only distribution channel for apps 17 years ago.)

17 years is a long time, though. And developers long ago stopped seeing the App Store as something that makes them happy, or that reduces friction and hassle from their lives. Instead they view it as a major source of friction and hassle. Apple should have focused on keeping the App Store as a thing that makes developers (mostly) happy all along, not (as things stand today) mostly miserable.

Basically, the threat to Apple that the App Store poses is not regulators coming for it. That’s a distraction. The threat, as I’ve long tried to argue, perhaps unsuccessfully, is that market forces will work against it eventually. Developers have long since grown resentful toward the technical and bureaucratic hassles of publishing through the App Store, and the size of the purchase commissions Apple keeps for itself. Apple’s commission percentages haven’t grown over time, but a 70/30 split that in 2008 seemed remarkably generous (or even the newer 85/15 small-business split) today seems like a platform engaging in usury and abusive rent-seeking.

AI might be the disruption that brings about the “eventually”, because now it’s coming for the developer tooling experience too. If Apple’s native programming frameworks and developer tools aren’t the best, most satisfying, most productive ways to create great apps, what’s left that makes developers happy to be creating for the iOS platform?

Apple should move mountains to refocus itself on making the experience of developing for (and on) Apple platforms the best in the world, including distribution and monetization. Instead, they seem to be resting on the assumption that it’s a privilege, self-evident to all, just to be allowed to develop for Apple platforms.

Software Update for AirPods Max to Enable Lossless Audio and ‘Ultra-Low Latency’ ★

Apple Newsroom:

Next month, a new software update will bring lossless audio and ultra-low latency audio to AirPods Max, delivering the ultimate listening experience and even greater performance for music production. With the included USB-C cable, users can enjoy the highest-quality audio across music, movies, and games, while music creators can experience significant enhancements to songwriting, beat making, production, and mixing.

Apple also started selling a new $40 USB-C to 3.5mm audio cable — male USB-C on the side that goes into your AirPods Max, male headphone jack on the other side to go into the audio-out port on a Mac or, say, an airplane seat.

Getting a Modern LLM Running on a 2005 PowerBook G4 ★

Andrew Rossignol:

I have been diving into the world of large language models (LLMs), and a question began to gnaw at me: could I bring the cutting-edge of AI to the nostalgic glow of my trusty 2005 PowerBook G4? Armed with a 1.5GHz processor, a full gigabyte of RAM, and a limiting 32-bit address space, I embarked on an experiment that actually yielded results. I have successfully managed to achieve LLM inference on this classic piece of Apple history, proving that even yesteryear’s hardware can have a taste of tomorrow’s AI.

A fun project, well-explained. Even a great choice of computer to run it on — the 12-inch PowerBook G4 is one of the best-looking computers ever made. (Via Joe Rossignol.)

‘On Tyranny’ by Timothy Snyder ★

I read Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny after the election. A collection of 20 essays — each relatively brief, some exceptionally brief — it’s more booklet than book, and can easily be consumed in an afternoon or a few evenings. I finished it with an unsettled feeling. I read it again last week, and my feeling now is both more unsettled and more resolute.

Snyder, a plain-speaking history professor at Yale, has a core message, which he’s been hammering since before Trump’s re-election: Do not obey in advance. Resist. The following passage hit me harder on this second reading, two months into Trump 2.0, than it did in November. From Chapter 19: “Be a Patriot”:

It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It is not patriotic to cultivate a relationship with Kim Jong Un; or to say that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are superior leaders. It is not patriotic to call upon foreign leaders to intervene in American presidential elections. It is not patriotic to cite Russian propaganda at rallies. It is not patriotic to share an adviser with Russian oligarchs. It is not patriotic to appoint advisers with financial interests in Russian companies. It is not patriotic to appoint a National Security Advisor who likes to be called “General Misha,” nor to pardon him for his crimes. It is not patriotic when that pardoned official calls for martial law. It is not patriotic to refer to American soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” It is not patriotic to take health care from families, nor to golf your way through a national epidemic in which half a million Americans die. It is not patriotic to try to sabotage an American election, nor to claim victory after defeat. It is not patriotic to try to end democracy.

A nationalist might do all these things, but a nationalist is not a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.”

A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well — and wishing that it would do better.

Democracy failed in Europe in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, and it is failing not only in much of Europe but in many parts of the world today. It is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures. A nationalist will say that “it can’t happen here,” which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.

I highly recommend the book. Get it at Amazon, Bookshop.org, or Apple Books.

The Trump Administration Accidentally Included Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor of The Atlantic, in a Signal Group Chat That Revealed War Plans for Yemen ★

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic (News+ link):

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining. [...]

The notion of a journalist being accidentally included in a war-planning group of national security leaders — and the very notion that U.S. national security leaders would use Signal to conduct such a group — is so preposterous that Goldberg had assumed the group was a hoax, with the intention of embarrassing him. But it was real.

Earlier today, I emailed Waltz and sent him a message on his Signal account. I also wrote to Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe, Tulsi Gabbard, and other officials. In an email, I outlined some of my questions: Is the “Houthi PC small group” a genuine Signal thread? Did they know that I was included in this group? Was I (on the off chance) included on purpose? If not, who did they think I was? Did anyone realize who I was when I was added, or when I removed myself from the group? Do senior Trump-administration officials use Signal regularly for sensitive discussions? Do the officials believe that the use of such a channel could endanger American personnel?

I’ll add: Do they sniff glue and eat paste?

There’s so much chaos at the moment resulting from the Trump administration’s actions during these first two months that it’s easy to overlook one salient fact: Trump has chosen to surround himself with idiots.

Sunday, 23 March 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Podcasting Technology Cadence’ ★

MG Siegler returns to the show to talk about the drama surrounding Siri and Apple Intelligence.

Sponsored by:

• WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users. Check out their latest features from Launch Week.
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Friday, 21 March 2025

Weekly Sponsorships Here at Daring Fireball ★

How has your week been? My week was ... busy. That includes a new episode of The Talk Show recorded yesterday, dropping in your favorite podcast app soon. Amidst all the writing (and talking) I’ve been doing, I’m also working on filling up open weeks on the sponsorship schedule for Q2.

After a very full February and March, I’ve got a bunch of openings in the next few months — and openings for the next two weeks, starting with this Monday. Update: The coming week just sold, but the next week, starting March 31, remains open.

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.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.

WorkOS: Launch Week ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF, once again, this last week. This has been WorkOS’s Launch Week, and they’ve got a slew of new features to show. Honestly, though, you should check out their Launch Week page just to look at it — it’s beautiful, fun retro-modern pixel-art goodness. Great typography too. I wish every website looked even half this cool.

New features launched just this week include:

• WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]”
• WorkOS Vault — Encryption Key Management (EKM) and Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK)
• AuthKit Integrations — Native support for several new identity providers including LinkedIn, Slack, GitLab, BitBucket, Intuit, and more.

Ookla: ‘A First Look at How Apple’s C1 Modem Performs With Early Adopters’ ★

Ookla, the company behind the Speedtest download/upload bandwidth testing app:

Although it’s early in the adoption curve for the iPhone 16e, we analyzed the performance of the new device from March 1st through March 12th, and compared it to the performance of iPhone 16, which has a similar design and the same 6.1” screen. Both devices run on the same Apple-designed A18 SoC.

When we compare Speedtest Intelligence data from the top 90th percentile (those with the highest performance experience) of iPhone 16e and iPhone 16 users from all three of the top U.S. operators, we see the iPhone 16 performing better in download speeds. However, at the opposite end, with the 10th percentile of users (those who experience the lowest performance) we see the iPhone 16e performing better than the iPhone 16.

There are some differences, but overall the 16e’s cellular performance seems great for the frequencies it supports. And given the efficiency claims from Apple, it might be the better overall modem. (I also think the frequencies it doesn’t support don’t really matter all that much in real-world practice. If you know that you really make use of the crazy-high speeds of mmWave from Verizon, then you know the C1 modem is not for you.)

if the System Clipboard has an image
    play a sound
else
    simulate the keystroke ⌘V

Friday, 21 March 2025

Yahoo Sold TechCrunch ★

Emma Roth, The Verge:

TechCrunch has a new owner, again. Yahoo has sold the tech news site to the private equity firm Regent for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement on Friday.

Regent is the same company that snapped up Foundry, the firm behind outlets like PCWorld, Macworld, and TechAdvisor on Thursday. Founded in 2005, TechCrunch has experienced many shakeups in ownership after AOL acquired the site in 2010.

A lot of shakeups in a lot of media companies’ ownership lately. Steady as she goes here at The Daring Fireball Company, a subsidiary of Fedora World Media Industries.

Matthew Belloni on the ‘Apple TV+ Experiment’ ★

Matthew Belloni has a very good take on Apple TV+ at Puck (that’s a gift link that should get you through their paywall — but which requires you creating a free account, sorry):

All of which fed into the self-centered fears of my lunch date. What, if anything, does the current state of Apple mean for its entertainment business? After all, more than five years into the Apple TV+ experiment, it’s never been entirely clear what C.E.O. Tim Cook and services chief Eddy Cue are up to in Hollywood. Certainly not making money, at least not in the traditional sense. The Information reported today that Apple lost $1 billion on Apple TV+ last year, following a Bloomberg report that more than $20 billion has been shoveled into making original shows and movies since 2019. That’s not nothing, even for a company worth $3 trillion.

The “loss” number is a bit misleading, of course, considering Apple has always said that a key goal is to leverage Leo DiCaprio and Reese Witherspoon to thicken its brand halo and the device “ecosystem,” ultimately boosting its other businesses. But still… for all its billions, Apple TV+ has accumulated only about 45 million subscribers worldwide, according to today’s Information report and other estimates.

That’s far less than Disney+, Max, and Paramount+, all of which launched around the same time. Those rival services are attached to legacy studios with rich libraries, but they’re not attached to a company with $65 billion in cash on hand and a device in the pockets of 1 billion people that also delivers bundle-friendly music, news, and games. Apple declined to confirm or comment on any numbers, but a source there suggested the subscriber number is higher than 45 million and that the global nature of the sub base is being undercounted by U.S.-oriented research firms. Maybe. The company reveals zero performance data beyond B.S. “biggest weekend ever!” press releases that the trades accept without skepticism and producers like Ben Stiller and David Ellison post with “blessed” emojis on their social media. No one outside the company really knows how the Apple TV+ business is performing.

One interesting nugget is this chart, which suggests that subscriptions to TV+ have boomed since Apple and Amazon worked out a deal to sell TV+ subscriptions through Amazon Channels in Prime Video at the end of last year. That deal has, seemingly, moved the needle. Another interesting nugget is that TV+ seems to suffer from a higher churn rate than other streaming services. Said Belloni’s Puck colleague Julia Alexander, “Fewer than 35 percent of all subscribers keep the service for longer than six months.”

That’s kind of crazy. I’d think TV+ would have less churn, not more, than the industry average — that the Apple TV+ audience is small but loyal. Perhaps this is the unsurprising side effect of Apple giving away 3-month trials when you purchase new devices. But I also truly wonder if TV+ subscriptions are the hardest for industry groups to measure, because so many people who do subscribe watch through tvOS (or, on their phones, on iOS) where everything is private. Belloni hints at this, and says little birdies at Apple told him the TV+ subscriber base is larger than they’re getting credit for.

And how do you count Apple One subscribers toward TV+’s subscriber base? My vague theory about Cue and Cook’s thinking about getting into this business has been about making it one leg among several on the stool of reasons to subscribe to Apple One. That Apple will take subscribers who are only subscribed to TV+, or only subscribed to TV+ and Apple Music, but what they really want is to get people to subscribe to Apple One, which, because it includes iCloud storage, almost certainly has very little churn.

Belloni closes thus:

Apple wouldn’t be the first tech powerhouse to dabble in professionally produced content only to retreat. [...] Neither Cook nor Cue has suggested anything like that, and Apple, in just over five years, has become a reliable partner and a high-quality buyer for Hollywood shows and movies. In some ways, it’s remarkable how fast Apple TV+ became part of the entertainment community. Whether that lasts is the question.

Here’s where I will point out that Apple isn’t like other tech companies. Apple isn’t a move fast and break things company. They’re a measure twice, cut once company. When they commit to something, they tend to stay committed. And they’re very, very good at playing long games that require patience, especially when entering new markets. Look at Apple Pay. 10 years ago, it was widely panned as a flop after a slow first year. Now it’s everywhere.

Is Apple’s Spending on TV+ Content a ‘Loss’ or a ‘Cost’? ★

Jill Goldsmith, Deadline:

Apple is losing more than $1 billion a year on streamer Apple TV+, according to a report in the Information that cited two people familiar with the matter. The tech giant has spent over $5 billion a year on content since launching Apple TV+ in 2019 but trimmed that by about $500 million last year, the report said.

The headline on Wayne Ma’s report at The Information set the framework: “Apple Streaming Losses Top $1 Billion a Year” — the story got picked up widely, and almost everyone who did framed it in terms of losing or a loss. But is it a loss when Apple expected the business to be unprofitable for a decade or more? From Scharon Harding’s paraphrasing at Ars Technica of Ma’s paywalled report:

Apple TV+ being Apple’s only service not turning a profit isn’t good, but it’s also expected. Like other streaming services, Apple TV+ wasn’t expected to be profitable until years after its launch. An Apple TV+ employee that The Information said reviewed the streaming service’s business plan said Apple TV+ is expected to lose $15 billion to $20 billion during its first 10 years.

For comparison, Disney’s direct-to-consumer streaming business had operating losses of $11.4 billion between the launch of Disney+ in fall 2020 and April 2024. Disney’s streaming business became profitable for the first time in its fiscal quarter ending on June 29, 2024.

The above two paragraphs of essential context are buried 13 paragraphs down. If Apple expected TV+ to operate in the red, to the tune of $15–20 billion over its first decade, and halfway through that decade (TV+ debuted in November 2019) it operated in the red to the tune of $1 billion for the year — doesn’t that mean costs are exactly in line with their expectations?

The insinuation here is that Apple’s pissing this money away and doesn’t know what they’re doing. Maybe they are! But if so it was exactly Eddy Cue and Tim Cook’s strategy to piss this money away. If Apple had expected TV+ to be profitable or break-even in 2024, then a $1 billion operating loss would be a story. But as it stands it’s just a cost. How much did Apple “lose” on electricity bills last year?

iOS 18 Software Updates Keep Re-Enabling Apple Intelligence for Users Who Had Turned It Off ★

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors last week:

With new iOS software updates, Apple has been automatically turning Apple Intelligence on again even for users who have disabled it, a decision that has become increasingly frustrating for those that don’t want to use Apple Intelligence .

After installing iOS 18.3.2, iPhone users have noticed that Apple Intelligence is automatically turned on, regardless of whether it was turned off prior to the update being installed. There is an Apple Intelligence splash screen that comes up after updating, and there is no option other than tapping “Continue,” which turns on Apple Intelligence .

If you’ve updated to iOS 18.3.2 and do not want Apple Intelligence enabled, you will need to go the Settings app, tap on Apple Intelligence, and then toggle it off. When Apple Intelligence is enabled, it consumes up to 7GB of storage space for local AI models, which is an inconvenience when storage space is limited.

I’d been seeing complaints about this, including from some friends who are developers and/or had previously worked on iOS as engineers at Apple. A bunch of regular DF readers have written to complain about it too. I wouldn’t call it a deluge, but I’ve gotten an unusual number of complaints about this. (And at CNet, Jeff Carlson reports the same thing happening with MacOS 15.3.2.)

I hadn’t experienced it personally because I have Apple Intelligence enabled on my iPhone. But my year-old iPhone 15 Pro was still running iOS 18.2. So I disabled Apple Intelligence on that phone, then updated it to 18.3.2. When it finished, Apple Intelligence was re-enabled. I also tried this on my iPhone 16e review unit, which was still running iOS 18.3.1 (albeit a version of 18.3.1 with a unique build number for the 16e). I turned Apple Intelligence off, upgraded to 18.3.2, and on that iPhone, Apple Intelligence remained off after the software upgrade completed.

So I don’t know if this is a bug that only affects some iPhones, or a deliberate growth hacking decision from Apple to keep turning this back on for people who have explicitly turned it off. But it’s definitely happening.

And while the 7 GB of storage space required for the model is a legitimate technical reason to turn it off, I think (judging from my email from DF readers) the main reason people disable Apple Intelligence is that they don’t like it, don’t trust it, and to some degree object to it. It could take up no additional storage space at all and they’d still want it disabled on their devices, and they are fucking angry that Apple’s own software updates keep turning it back on. Put aside the quality or utility of Apple Intelligence as it stands today, and there are people who object to the whole thing on principle or, I don’t know, just vibes alone. Feelings are strong about this. Turning it back on automatically, after a user had turned it off manually, leads those users to correctly distrust Apple Intelligence specifically and Apple in general.

If it’s a bug, it’s a bug that makes Apple look like a bunch of gross shysters. If it’s not a bug, it means Apple is a bunch of gross shysters. I’d wager on bug — especially after seeing it not happen on my 16e review unit. I’m thinking it’s something where it’s supposed to be enabled by default, once, for people who’ve never explicitly turned Apple Intelligence on or off previously, but that for some devices where it has been turned off explicitly, somehow the software update is mistaking it for the setting never having been touched. Apple needs to get it together on this one.

Apple Sued for False Advertising Over Apple Intelligence ★

Ina Fried, reporting for Axios:

The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, seeks class action status and unspecified financial damages on behalf of those who purchased Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones and other devices.

“Apple’s advertisements saturated the internet, television, and other airwaves to cultivate a clear and reasonable consumer expectation that these transformative features would be available upon the iPhone’s release,” the suit reads. “This drove unprecedented excitement in the market, even for Apple, as the company knew it would, and as part of Apple’s ongoing effort to convince consumers to upgrade at a premium price and to distinguish itself from competitors deemed to be winning the AI-arms race.”

Most of these class action lawsuits are bullshit, but it’s hard to argue with the basic premise of this one.

Thursday, 20 March 2025

The Seneca ★

This is beautiful and crazy, and no, I’m not going to buy one, but damn I’m tempted and I’d sure like to try one. I’m glad it exists.

Gurman: Tim Cook Has Put Mike Rockwell in Charge of Siri, Reporting to Craig Federighi ★

Mark Gurman, with a blockbuster scoop for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is undergoing a rare shake-up of its executive ranks, aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and stumbles, according to people familiar with the situation.

Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven’t been announced.

Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giannandrea’s command. Apple is poised to announce the changes to employees this week. The iPhone maker’s senior leaders — a group known as the Top 100 — just met at a secretive, annual offsite gathering to discuss the future of the company. Its AI efforts were a key talking point at the summit, Bloomberg News has reported. [...]

My quick take on this is that it’s a turf battle that Craig Federighi just won. It’s not just putting a new executive in charge of Siri, it’s moving Siri under Federighi’s group.

How Gurman got this scoop before Apple had announced the changes — even internally — is rather unbelievable. It’s not “Bloomberg” that got this scoop. It’s Mark Gurman. And trust me, Apple PR did not leak this to him deliberately. I’m sure they’re now accelerating an announcement, at least internally, framing it on their own terms. I can only guess that Gurman hinted at his sourcing in the passage above: Tim Cook must have announced these changes at the Top 100 retreat this week, and at least two of those attendees leaked the news to Gurman. Unprecedented.

Also:

Rockwell is currently the vice president in charge of the Vision Products Group, or VPG, the division that developed Apple’s headset. As part of the changes, he’ll be leaving that team and handing the reins to Paul Meade, an executive who has run hardware engineering for the Vision Pro under Rockwell.

I don’t find it surprising at all that Rockwell was given this task.

Giannandrea will remain at the company, even with Rockwell taking over Siri. An abrupt departure would signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous — something Apple is reluctant to acknowledge. Giannandrea’s other responsibilities include oversight of research, testing and technologies related to AI. The company also has a team reporting to Giannandrea investigating robotics.

This I find a little surprising. But maybe I shouldn’t. I don’t buy Gurman’s argument that dismissing Giannandrea would “signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous”. Apple already signaled that publicly when they announced that all of the ambitious features for Siri and Apple Intelligence that were promised for this year’s OS cycle would be postponed until next year’s OS cycle. That’s public tumult. But I mean, you can see for yourself that Apple’s AI efforts have been “tumultuous” by asking Siri on your iPhone, right now, what month it is.

What Apple needs to signal is that they don’t expect to deliver a significantly better Siri without making significant changes to the team behind Siri.

But maybe the answer is as simple as that Giannandrea is good at leading and managing teams doing advanced research that is abstracted from product. So move the products out of his division and into Federighi’s, and put someone who knows how to ship directly in charge of Siri. Leave Giannandrea in charge of a division focused on research and technology. Attention has moved on from “machine learning” to LLMs, but Apple’s machine learning game has gotten very good.

HealthKit as a Model for an Open Semantic Index From Apple ★

Here’s an update I just appended to my post yesterday, after linking to Gus Mueller’s suggestion that Apple open up a semantic index to third-party AI apps:

HealthKit already works a lot like what Mueller is suggesting here (for, say, “SemanticKit”). With explicit user permission — that can be revoked at any time — third party apps can both read from and write to your Health data. Apple does a lot of that itself, both through Apple Watch and from the various activity-related things an iPhone can track, but third-party apps and devices are welcome participants, in a private, easily-understood way.

Nobody is suggesting Apple should give up on AI. Quite the opposite. They really need to go from being a joke to being good at it, fast. But there’s no reason at all they should build out a strategy that relies on Apple doing all of it themselves, and Apple users relying solely on Apple’s own AI. Do it like Health — a model that has proven to be:

• profitable (for Apple itself, selling devices like Watches);
• popular (with users, who actually use it, understand it, and like it);
• private;
• and open to third-party developers, device makers, and medical service providers.

(Thanks to Bill Welense for the suggestion.)

The M1 MacBook Air Lives on at Walmart, Now Just $650 ★

Last March, when Apple introduced the then new M3 MacBook Airs, they moved the base model 13-inch M2 MacBook Air into the magic $999 spot in their own lineup, replacing the M1 MacBook Air. But mid-March it was announced that Walmart would begin selling the M1 MacBook Air — in one tech-spec configuration (8 GB RAM, 256 SSD), but three colors (gold, silver, space gray) for just $700.

This year Apple replaced the entire lineup of MacBook Airs that it sells itself with M4-based models, including the $999 starting-price model. Online, Walmart sells a handful of MacBook models now, at, per Walmart’s brand, slightly lower prices than Apple itself. But the one and only MacBook they seem to stock in their retail stores is the classic wedge-shaped M1 MacBook Air — now down to $650.

It’s over four years old now, and yes, 8 GB RAM and 256 GB of storage are meager, but it’s almost certainly the best new laptop you can buy for that price. Assuming Apple thinks this partnership is a success, eventually they’ll have to replace this with a more recent MacBook Air. But I suspect the main reason it’s still the M1 Air (and hasn’t been replaced by, say, the M2 Air) is not about the specs or performance, per se, but rather simply how it looks. It looks like an older MacBook. Walmart might not get an updated MacBook with a more-recent-than-M1 chip until Apple refreshes the industrial design on its current MacBook Airs.

Wednesday, 19 March 2025

‘Hey Siri, What Month Is It?’ ★

Whole Reddit thread examining this simple question: “What month is it?” and Siri’s “I’m sorry, I don’t understand” response (which I just reproduced on my iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.4b4). One guy changed the question to “What month is it currently?” and got the answer “It is 2025.”

Update: Ask Siri (with Apple Intelligence™) “ChatGPT, what month is it?” and, though you’ll have to wait a few extra seconds, you’ll get the right answer each time. Perhaps the current month is “broad world knowledge” and Siri shouldn’t even attempt to answer such a complex question on its own?

Apple Intelligence Is Coming to iOS in the EU in April ★

News from Apple that I let slip by a few weeks ago, but that seems apt again today:

Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system that delivers helpful and relevant intelligence, will soon be available in more languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (simplified) — as well as localized English for Singapore and India.

These new languages will be accessible in nearly all regions around the world with the release of iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4 in April, and developers can start to test these releases today.

With the upcoming software updates, iPhone and iPad users in the EU will have access to Apple Intelligence features for the first time, and Apple Intelligence will expand to a new platform in U.S. English with Apple Vision Pro — helping users communicate, collaborate, and express themselves in entirely new ways.

Given that Apple Intelligence isn’t exactly setting the world on fire, I think in the grand scheme of things, it’ll wind up being filed away under “Oh yeah, remember that?” that the EU got it 4-5 months after it debuted. (Clean Up in Photos is often great, and I genuinely enjoy notification summaries and miss them now that they’re disabled for news apps; the rest I don’t use, and the most ambitious aspects of Apple Intelligence are (you may have heard) delayed for everyone, not just the EU.)

Apple was concerned that the EU’s hardline interpretation of the DMA was such that the European Commission considered it a violation of the DMA that Apple Intelligence wasn’t an interchangeable component. Like the way the EC forced Apple to open up iOS to alternative app marketplaces — there was uncertainty whether they’d demand the same for system-integrated AI. And if that’s what the EC had demanded, they simply wouldn’t have gotten system-integrated AI for years. But I’m not sure how to square up today’s decisions — requiring Apple to enable third-party alternatives to system-level features like AirPlay and AirDrop — with an interpretation that the EU will be fine with Apple Intelligence only offering Apple’s own AI (along with Apple’s approved partners, like OpenAI).

I think the regime change at the European Commission has changed things to some degree, but quietly. Former competition chief Margrethe Vestager was a firebrand. Back in June last year, after Apple had announced that Apple Intelligence would be delayed indefinitely in the EU for iOS, she made clear that she thought it was anti-competitive:

“I find that very interesting that they say we will now deploy AI where we’re not obliged to enable competition. I think that is that is the most sort of stunning open declaration that they know 100% that this is another way of disabling competition where they have a stronghold already.”

But Vestager is gone, and until today we hadn’t heard a whit about DMA compliance from her successor, Teresa Ribera. In September, when the proceedings that resulted in today’s decisions opened, I wrote:

Also worth noting: Margrethe Vestager is on her way out, about to be replaced by Spanish socialist Teresa Ribera, a career climate expert (which, possibly, might give her an affinity for Apple, far and away the most climate-friendly large tech company) with no experience in competition law. To me that makes Ribera an odd choice for the competition chief job, but apparently that makes sense in the EU. It remains unclear to me whether Ribera supports Vestager’s crusade against the DMA’s designated “gatekeepers”. If she doesn’t, is this all for naught?

Until today, that remained an open question. Now it appears the Commission’s crusading course is unchanged — it’s just no longer accompanied by inflammatory commentary from the commissioners in charge.

EU Adopts New ‘Interoperability’ Requirements for Apple Under DMA ★

The European Commission, today:

Today, the European Commission adopted two decisions under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) specifying the measures that Apple has to take to comply with certain aspects of its interoperability obligation. [...]

The first set of measures concerns nine iOS connectivity features, predominantly used for connected devices such as smartwatches, headphones or TVs. The measures will grant device manufacturers and app developers improved access to iPhone features that interact with such devices (e.g. displaying notifications on smartwatches), faster data transfers (e.g. peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connections, and near-field communication) and easier device set-up (e.g. pairing).

Benjamin Mayo, reporting for 9to5Mac:

In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple firmly rebuked the EU decision announced today about specific interoperability requirements the company must implement over the coming months.

Apple said “Today’s decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple’s ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don’t have to play by the same rules. It’s bad for our products and for our European users. We will continue to work with the European Commission to help them understand our concerns on behalf of our users”.

In regards to customer privacy, Apple is especially concerned with the requirements surrounding opening up access to the iOS notification system. The company indicated these measures would allow companies to suck up all user notifications in an unencrypted form to their servers, sidestepping all privacy protections Apple typically enforces.

My interpretation of the adopted decision is that the EU is requiring Apple to treat iOS like a PC operating system, like MacOS or Windows, where users can install third-party software that runs, unfettered, in the background.

Apple’s statement makes clear their staunch opposition to these decisions. But at least at a superficial level, the European Commission’s tenor has changed. The quotes from the Commission executives (Teresa Ribera, who replaced firebrand Margrethe Vestager as competition chief, and Henna Virkkunen) are anodyne. Nothing of the vituperativeness of the quotes from Vestager and Thierry Breton in years past. But the decisions themselves make clear that the EU isn’t backing down from its general position of seeing itself as the rightful decision-maker for how iOS should function and be engineered, and that Apple’s core competitive asset — making devices that work better together than those from other companies — isn’t legal under the DMA.

Sebastiaan de With’s iPhone 16e Camera Review: ‘The Essentials’ ★

Sebastiaan de With:

You can speculate what the ‘e’ in ‘16e’ stands for, but in my head it stands for ‘essential’. Some things that I consider particularly essential to the iPhone are all there: fantastic build quality, an OLED screen, iOS and all its apps, and Face ID. It even has satellite connectivity. Some other things I also consider essential are not here: MagSafe is very missed, for instance, but also multiple cameras. It would be reasonable to look at Apple’s Camera app, then, and see what comprises the ‘essential’ iPhone camera experience according to Apple.

Apple Silicon Is Groundbreaking for AI ★

Alex Cheema is the founder of EXO Labs, an AI company focused on “AI you can trust with your data” by making systems that run locally, on computers you own and control. Apple provided him with two M3 Ultra Mac Studios, each maxed out with 512 GB of unified memory. Within a day, he had them linked together by Thunderbolt 5 and had the full DeepSeek R1 model running on his desk.

Sure, that’s over $20,000 of computing hardware. But to my knowledge there is no other way in the world to run the full DeepSeek R1 model for even close to $20,000, let alone doing it on your desk rather than a data center. It’s an exclusive advantage, made possible by Apple Silicon’s general performance and the breakthrough of Apple’s unified memory architecture, which lets the GPU cores access the same RAM as the CPU cores.

Apple has tremendous technical advantages to offer in AI. But they’re marketing Genmojis of hot dogs carrying briefcases.

‘Apple Needs to Get Out of the Way With AI’ ★

Gus Mueller:

A week or so ago I was grousing to some friends that Apple needs to open up things on the Mac so other LLMs can step in where Siri is failing. In theory we (developers) could do this today, but I would love to see a blessed system where Apple provided APIs to other LLM providers.

Are there security concerns? Yes, of course there are, there always will be. But I would like the choice.

The crux of the issue in my mind is this: Apple has a lot of good ideas, but they don’t have a monopoly on them. I would like some other folks to come in and try their ideas out. I would like things to advance at the pace of the industry, and not Apple’s. Maybe with a blessed system in place, Apple could watch and see how people use LLMs and other generative models (instead of giving us Genmoji that look like something Fisher-Price would make). And maybe open up the existing Apple-only models to developers. There are locally installed image processing models that I would love to take advantage of in my apps.

The analogy I used, talking with Jason Snell during my guest stint on Upgrade last week, was to the heyday of desktop publishing. The Mac was the platform for graphic design because it was the best platform for using design apps. Fonts worked better and looked better on the Mac. Printing worked better from Macs. Peripherals worked better. The apps themselves looked better on the Mac than they did on Windows. The Mac had taste and designers (hopefully) have taste. Graphic designers could understand how their machines worked, and maintain them themselves, in a way they couldn’t with PCs.

But Apple didn’t make any of the actual apps. Companies like Adobe and Macromedia and Aldus did. Independent small developers made niche extensions for use inside apps like Photoshop, FreeHand, and QuarkXPress. When a new app came along like InDesign — which quickly ate Quark’s lunch — the Mac remained the dominant platform to use.

Making a great platform where other developers can innovate is one of Apple’s core strengths. Apple got even better at it once Mac OS X hit its stride in the 2000s — the Cocoa APIs really did empower outside developers to make world-class apps providing experiences that couldn’t be matched on other platforms like Windows or Linux. Then it happened again, with a much bigger audience, with iOS. What desktop publishing was to the Mac in the 1990s, social media was to the iPhone in the 2010s. Apple didn’t make the apps — they made the best platform to use those apps.

Apple should be laser focused on doing this for AI now. Where I quibble with Mueller is that I don’t want Apple to get out of the way. I want Apple to pave the roads to create the way. Apple doesn’t have to make the cars (literally) — just pave the best roads. Make the Mac the best platform for outside developers to create innovative AI systems and experiences. Make iOS the best consumer device to use AI apps from any outside developer. Work on APIs and frameworks for the AI age. No company has ever been better than Apple at designing and delivering those sort of APIs. Lean into that. It’s as useful, relevant, and profitable an institutional strength (and set of values) today as ever.

In a follow-up post, Mueller shows he’s thinking like I’m thinking:

But off the top of my head, here’s one idea that I think could really help and reap benefits for both Apple and developers.

Build a semantic index (SI), and allow apps to access it via permissions given similar to what we do for Address Book or Photos.

Maybe even make the permissions to the SI a bit more fine-grained than you normally would for other personal databases. Historical GPS locations? Scraping contents of the screen over time? Indexed contents of document folder(s)? Make these options for what goes into the SI.

And of course, the same would be true for building the SI. As a user, I’d love to be able to say “sure, capture what’s on the screen and scrape the text out of that, but nope - you better not track where I’ve been over time”.

HealthKit already works a lot like what Mueller is suggesting here (for, say, “SemanticKit”). With explicit user permission — that can be revoked at any time — third party apps can both read from and write to your Health data. Apple does a lot of that itself, both through Apple Watch and from the various activity-related things an iPhone can track, but third-party apps and devices are welcome participants, in a private, easily-understood way.

‘A Delightful and Simple User Experience’ ★

Scharon Harding, writing for Ars Technica:

Reports of Roku customers seeing video ads automatically play before they could view the OS’ home screen started appearing online this week. A Reddit user, for example, posted yesterday: “I just turned on my Roku and got an ... ad for a movie, before I got to the regular Roku home screen.” Multiple apparent users reported seeing an ad for the movie Moana 2. The ads have a close option, but some users appear to have not seen it.

When reached for comment, a Roku spokesperson shared a company statement that confirms that the autoplaying ads are expected behavior but not a permanent part of Roku OS currently. Instead, Roku claimed, it was just trying the ad capability out. [...]

“Our recent test is just the latest example, as we explore new ways to showcase brands and programming while still providing a delightful and simple user experience.”

What I’d find delightful and simple is disconnecting my Roku box and throwing it out the window.

Two New PebbleOS Watches ★

Eric Migicovsky:

We’re excited to announce two new smartwatches that run open source PebbleOS and are compatible with thousands of your beloved Pebble apps.

• Core 2 Duo has an ultra crisp black and white display, polycarbonate frame, costs $149 and starts shipping in July.
• Core Time 2 has a larger 64-colour display, metal frame, costs $225 and starts shipping in December.

My advice would have been to return with just one watch. Make a decision: color or monochrome. I’d sort of lean toward black-and-white, to differentiate it from Apple Watch and other high-end smartwatches. They’re never going to out-color Apple on display quality, so why not go the other way and lean in on black-and-white utility and contrast?

I would also suggest that whining about the fact that iOS doesn’t allow third-party devices the sort of integration that Apple Watch offers isn’t the path forward. Instead of arguing that “Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones”, lean into the ways that Pebble can be awesome because it isn’t an Apple Watch. 30-day battery life is awesome. I don’t think Apple Watch will ever offer that. Being able to run whatever apps — including watch faces — that you want on your own Pebble watch is awesome, and I know Apple Watch will never offer that. Lean into what Pebble watches can do that Apple Watches can’t. If the experience as a Pebble owner can be a lot better paired with an Android phone than an iPhone, lean into that. Show how much better it is on Android than iOS. Compete.

If you can’t show how much better Pebble is when paired to an Android device (which they couldn’t do 10 years ago), then what’s the point?

Did TikTok Swing the Election to Trump? ★

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire regarding pollster David Shor’s appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast:

His surveys indicate a clear causal relationship: People who relied on TikTok for news were much more likely to swing toward Trump than those who got their information from TV. His most striking data point:

When you zoom in on people who get their news from TikTok but don’t care very much about politics, this group is eight percentage points more Republican than they were four years ago — which is a lot.

What remains unclear is why this shift happened. Was TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, subtly adjusting its algorithm to undermine Democrats? Or was the platform simply reflecting broader anti-incumbent sentiment? Shor concedes:

You could tell a story that maybe just anti-incumbent stuff is going to do really well on TikTok, and Democrats are going to do great now. I don’t really know. But I think that, for whatever reason, this major shift really helped Republicans.

It used to be that getting your message out required persuading reporters, editors, and gatekeepers — people trained to vet and verify information.

Now anyone can make a short video, and if it’s compelling enough, it spreads like wildfire — except that it may be following a path predetermined by TikTok’s algorithms.

I worry that the liberal/left response to this will be to declare, with exasperation, that people shouldn’t be getting their news or forming their political opinions by what they see on TikTok. You need to meet people where they are, and craft messages for the media they consume.