All-Hands Siri Team Meeting Leaks to Bloomberg 

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg today:

Apple Inc.’s top executive overseeing its Siri virtual assistant told staff that delays to key features have been ugly and embarrassing, and a decision to publicly promote the technology before it was ready made matters worse.

Robby Walker, who serves as a senior director at Apple, delivered the stark comments during an all-hands meeting for the Siri division, saying that the team was facing a bad period. Walker also said that it’s unclear when the enhancements will actually launch, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the gathering was private.

Robby Walker is not Apple’s “top executive overseeing its Siri virtual assistant”. Take your pick of whether that’s SVP John Giannandrea or CEO Tim Cook, but Walker reports to Giannandrea. Gurman, of course, knows this better than I do; I suspect he knows Apple’s entire org chart. But it makes Bloomberg’s headline — “Apple’s Siri Chief Calls AI Delays Ugly and Embarrassing, Promises Fixes” — misleading. Also somewhat misleading in that headline is that these comments from Walker were clearly not meant to leak. This is not a public apology, like the one Tim Cook wrote and signed in 2012 in the aftermath of the Apple Maps launch with iOS 6.

Still, he praised the team for developing “incredibly impressive” features and vowed to deliver an industry-leading virtual assistant to consumers.

Those two words are the only direct quote in the first nine paragraphs of Bloomberg’s report, which is kind of crazy, because the second half of Gurman’s story is full of quotes. I suspect his editors did Gurman a disservice on this one. The quotes are juicy AF, but don’t really start until the 10th paragraph. Like, for example, which Siri features does Walker think are “incredibly impressive”? No snark, I’d love to know. Is it Siri’s sports knowledge? The new product knowledge feature, that gives incomplete and/or incorrect instructions for how to toggle preferences in Settings? OK I guess that’s some snark, but I sincerely and honestly would love to know which Siri features the senior director in charge of Siri considers “incredibly impressive”.

Walker told staff in the meeting that the delays were especially “ugly” because Apple had already showed off the features publicly. “This was not one of these situations where we get to show people our plan after it’s done,” he said. “We showed people before.”

“To make matters worse,” Walker said, Apple’s marketing communications department wanted to promote the enhancements.

Again, this meeting clearly was not intended to leak. (It’s perhaps another knock against the Siri team, in addition to the quality of their output, that they leak internal meetings.) But that comes across as Walker blaming marketing.

Walker also raised doubts about even meeting the current release expectations. Though Apple is aiming for iOS 19, it “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then,” Walker said. The company has several more priorities in development, and trade-offs will need to be made, he said.

“We have other commitments across Apple to other projects,” Walker said, citing new software and hardware initiatives. “We want to keep our commitments to those, and we understand those are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred.” He said decisions on timing will be made on a “case-by-case basis” as work progresses on products planned for next year.

“Customers are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri,” he said. “We’re going to ship these features and more as soon as they are ready.”

The customers still haven’t gotten their appetizers, but it’s time to start the entrees, so the kitchen staff is working on those now. But don’t worry, they hope to get the appetizers out alongside dessert. But it’s OK because dessert might be late too.

As of Friday, Apple doesn’t plan to immediately fire any top executives over the AI crisis, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

I’d be very curious to know just how many people could possibly be familiar with this particular matter. Because this particular matter comes down to what Tim Cook is thinking. I’m thinking it’s about six people he might discuss this with. Wait, no, I just thought of a seventh. I’m going to say seven, tops. But maybe I’m wrong, and Tim Cook is the chatty sort, who openly talks with a large number of senior managers about whom he might fire.

Walker said the decision to delay the features was made because of quality issues and that the company has found the technology only works properly up to two-thirds to 80% of the time. He said the group “can make more progress to get those percentages up, so that users get something they can really count on.”

It’s unclear exactly which features these are in reference to, but presumably they’re not the “incredibly impressive” ones. Because something that “only works properly up to two-thirds” of the time only seems regular impressive to me, not incredibly impressive. Maybe it’s the ones that work properly four out of five times that are incredible?

Walker compared the endeavor to an attempt to swim to Hawaii. “We swam hundreds of miles — we set a Guinness Book for World Records for swimming distance — but we still didn’t swim to Hawaii,” he said. “And we were being jumped on, not for the amazing swimming that we did, but the fact that we didn’t get to the destination.”

I’d say it’s a little more like selling customers tickets for a cruise that includes a stop in Hawaii, then never actually getting to Hawaii, and hoping they didn’t notice when the ship returns to port to disembark.

He showed examples during the meeting of the technology working: It was able to locate his driver’s license number on command and find specific photos of a child. He also demonstrated how the technology could precisely manipulate apps via voice control. It embedded content in an email, added recipients and made other changes.

That’s the biggest actual news in the report, and it’s in paragraph 23.

Walker said that some staffers may feel “relieved” over the delays. “If you were using these features in the build, you were probably wondering: Are these ready? How do I feel about shipping these to our customers? Is this the right choice?”

He added that some employees “might be feeling embarrassed.”

Again, I’ll reiterate that this was a private meeting, not meant to leak. Maybe it’s an inaccurate summary. I hope it is. But as reported by Gurman, this meeting reeks of you-all-deserve-participation-trophies-to-reward-your-hard-work-and-it’s-OK-to-feel-embarrassed vibes. What’s needed, quite obviously, is some “What is it supposed to do? / So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” vibes.

I Imagined It and Genmoji’d It 

As a postscript to that last item, it occurred to me that because we’re close friends, I have a lot of photos of Paul Kafasis in my library. Here’s one from a year ago you can use as a reference. I wondered how Genmoji would do with “An owl who looks like Paul Kafasis, wearing a Celtics jersey, holding a basketball.” Here’s the best one, from my Mac running MacOS 15.3.1 Sequoia.

Genmoji output for “An owl who looks like Paul Kafasis, wearing a Celtics jersey, holding a basketball.”

It does resemble Paul. Not sure about how owl-like it is, the “holding” part, the slopping of “Celtics”, or the quality of orthodontia over in Genmojiworld.

The Legend of Larry Owl 

Paul Kafasis, on a seemingly local-to-Boston Genmoji billboard from Apple:

Eventually, though, the penny dropped. After my umpteenth time passing the billboard, while trying to distract myself from the single-digit temperatures and the brutal wind chill, I realized what I’d been missing. That’s not just a basketball-playing foul fowl.

You see, the Last Tenement is located just a few hundred feet from TD Garden, home arena for the reigning NBA champion Boston Celtics. The Celtics have had many great players over the years, but only one had the last name “Bird”. Yes, this billboard is surely an allusion to the Hick from French Lick, Larry Bird.

It was obvious once I finally saw it, and I was so amused that I went by with my phone to snap the above pic. At that point, I noticed that the cartoon’s basketball jersey even seems to feature Larry Legend’s #33. It’s cut off, perhaps in the hopes of avoiding a lawsuit, but those numbers really can’t be anything else.

I can’t believe Kafasis didn’t recognize the caricature immediately, but he’s a bit younger than me and didn’t grow up like I did, familiarizing myself with the early 1980s “Familiar Birds of North America” illustrated guide from ... checks notes ... Playboy.

U.S. Lawmakers Urge U.K. Secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal to Hold Public Hearing Regarding Demand for Secret iCloud Backdoor 

Zack Whittaker, reporting for TechCrunch:

A group of bipartisan U.S. lawmakers are urging the head of the U.K.’s surveillance court to hold an open hearing into Apple’s anticipated challenge of an alleged secret U.K. government legal demand.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, along with four other federal lawmakers, said in a letter this week to the president of the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) that it is “in the public interest” that any hearings about the alleged order are not held in secret.

From the letter, signed by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Alex Padilla (D-CA), and Congresspeople Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Warren Davidson (R-OH):

We write to request the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) remove the cloak of secrecy related to notices given to American technology companies by the United Kingdom, which infringes on free speech and privacy, undermines important United States Congress and U.K. parliamentary oversight, harms national security, and ultimately, undermines the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. [...]

Given the significant technical complexity of this issue, as well as the important national security harms that will result from weakening cybersecurity defenses, it is imperative that the U.K.’s technical demands of Apple — and of any other U.S. companies — be subjected to robust, public analysis and debate by cybersecurity experts. Secret court hearings featuring intelligence agencies and a handful of individuals approved by them do not enable robust challenges on highly technical matters. Moreover, given the potential impact on U.S. national security, it is vital that American cybersecurity experts be permitted to analyze and comment on the security of what is proposed.

Thursday, 13 March 2025

Swift Assist Hasn’t Shipped, and Isn’t Yet in Beta 

Michael Tsai:

Swift Assist was supposed to arrive in 2024, but it never even appeared in a beta. Apple hasn’t announced that it’s postponed or cancelled. It’s not even mentioned in the release notes.

Apple announced two AI-powered features for Xcode last year: predictive code completion and Swift Assist. Predictive code completion is basically getting suggestions for what you might intend to write next. Swift Assist is far more ambitious, runs only in the cloud (via Private Cloud Compute), and promises to write entire components for you. So much like the rest of Apple Intelligence, it’s the simpler thing that has shipped, and the more radical ambitious thing that has not.

I looked into Swift Assist this week while researching, and checking my notes from WWDC, for my long piece yesterday. I had an entire briefing with the Xcode team at WWDC last year, and alas, I was late for it (previous briefing, with a different team, had started late), so I missed some stuff and my notes are unusually terse. What I wanted to check my notes for is whether or not I was shown a live demo of Swift Assist last June. But my notes don’t say, and my own memory is completely unsure whether the demos I saw performed were only for predictive code completion, or included Swift Assist.

If anyone else who was in those WWDC briefings remembers whether Swift Assist was actually demoed, please let me know. I’m genuinely curious if Swift Assist was another thing — like all of “more personalized Siri” — that wasn’t even in demonstratable shape at WWDC.

Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

Wednesday, 12 March 2025

In the two decades I’ve been in this racket, I’ve never been angrier at myself for missing a story than I am about Apple’s announcement on Friday that the “more personalized Siri” features of Apple Intelligence, scheduled to appear between now and WWDC, would be delayed until “the coming year”.

I should have my head examined.

This announcement dropped as a surprise, and certainly took me by surprise to some extent, but it was all there from the start. I should have been pointing out red flags starting back at WWDC last year, and I am embarrassed and sorry that I didn’t see what should have been very clear to me from the start.

How I missed this is twofold. First, I’d been lulled into complacency by Apple’s track record of consistently shipping pre-announced products and features. Their record in that regard wasn’t perfect, but the exceptions tended to be around the edges. (Nobody was particularly clamoring for Apple to make a multi-device inductive charging mat, so it never generated too much controversy when AirPower turned out to be a complete bust.) Second, I was foolishly distracted by the “Apple Intelligence” brand umbrella. It’s a fine idea for Apple to brand its AI features under an umbrella term like that, similar to how a bunch of disparate features that allow different Apple devices to interoperate are under the “Continuity” umbrella. But there’s no such thing, technically speaking, as “Continuity”. It’s not like there’s an Xcode project inside Apple named Continuity.xcodeproj, and all the code that supports everything from AirDrop to Sidecar to iPhone Mirroring to clipboard sharing is all implemented in the same framework of code. It’s a marketing term, but a useful one — it helps Apple explain the features, and helps users understand them.

The same goes for “Apple Intelligence”. It doesn’t exist as a single thing or project. It’s a marketing term for a collection of features, apps, and services. Putting it all under a single obvious, easily remembered — and easily promoted — name makes it easier for users to understand that Apple is launching a new initiative. It also makes it easier for Apple to just say “These are the devices that qualify for all of these features, and other devices — older ones, less expensive ones — get none of them.”

Let’s say Apple were to quietly abandon the dumb Image Playground app next year. It just disappears from iOS 19 and MacOS 16. That would just be Apple eliminating a silly app that almost no one uses or should use. That wouldn’t be a setback or rollback of “Apple Intelligence”. I would actually argue that axing Image Playground would improve Apple Intelligence; its mere existence greatly lowers the expectations for how good the whole thing is.1

What I mean by that is that it was clear to me from the WWDC keynote onward that some of the features and aspects of Apple Intelligence were more ambitious than others. Some were downright trivial; others were proposing to redefine how we will do our jobs and interact with our most-used devices. That was clear. But yet somehow I didn’t focus on it. Apple itself strongly hinted that the various features in Apple Intelligence wouldn’t all ship at the same time. What they didn’t spell out, but anyone could intuit, was that the more trivial features would ship first, and the more ambitious features later. That’s where the red flags should have been obvious to me.

In broad strokes, there are four stages of “doneness” or “realness” to features announced by any company:

  1. Features that the company’s own product representatives will demo, themselves, in front of the media. Smaller, more personal demonstrations are more credible than on-stage demos. But the stakes for demo fail are higher in an auditorium full of observers.

  2. Features that the company will allow members of the media (or other invited outside observers and experts) to try themselves, for a limited time, under the company’s supervision and guidance. Vision Pro demos were like this at WWDC 2023. A bunch of us got to use pre-release hardware and in-progress software for 30 minutes. It wasn’t like free range “Do whatever you want” — it was a guided tour. But we were the ones actually using the product. Apple allowed hands-on demos for a handful of media (not me) at Macworld Expo back in 2007 with prototype original iPhones — some of the “apps” were just screenshots, but most of the iPhone actually worked.

  3. Features that are released as beta software for developers, enthusiasts, and the media to use on their own devices, without limitation or supervision.

  4. Features that actually ship to regular users, and hardware that regular users can just go out and buy.

As of today — March 2025 — every feature in Apple Intelligence that has actually shipped was at level 1 back at WWDC. After the keynote, dozens of us in the press were invited to a series of small-group briefings where we got to watch Apple reps demo features like Writing Tools, Photos Clean Up, Genmoji, and more. We got to see predictive code completion in Xcode. What has shipped, as of today, they were able to show, in some functional state, in June.

For example, there was a demo involving a draft email message on an iPad, and the Apple rep used Writing Tools to make it “more friendly”. I was in a group of just four or five other members of the media, watching this. As usual, we were encouraged to interrupt with questions. Knowing that LLMs are non-deterministic, I asked whether, as the Apple rep was performing this same demo for each successive group of media members, the “more friendly” result was exactly the same each time. He laughed and said no — that while the results are very similar each time, and he hopes they continue to be (hence the laughing), that there were subtle differences sometimes between different runs of the same demo. As I recall, he even used Undo to go back to the original message text, invoked Writing Tools to make it “more friendly” again, and we could see that a few of the word choices were slightly different. That answered both my explicit question and my implicit one: Writing Tools generates non-deterministic results, and, more importantly, what we were watching really was a live demo.

We didn’t get to try any of the Apple Intelligence features ourselves. There was no Apple Intelligence “hands on”. But we did see a bunch of features demoed, live, by Apple folks. In my above hierarchy of realness, they were all at level 1.

But we didn’t see all aspects of Apple Intelligence demoed. None of the “more personalized Siri” features, the ones that Apple, in its own statement announcing their postponement, described as having “more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps”. Those features encompass three main things:

  • “Personal context” — Knowing details and information about you from a “semantic index”, built from the contents of your email, messages, files, contacts, and more. In theory, eventually, all the information on your device that you wish to share with Siri will be in this semantic index. If you can look it up on your device, Siri will be able to look it up on your device.
  • “Onscreen awareness” — Giving Siri awareness of whatever is displayed on your screen. Apple’s own example usage: “If a friend texts you their new address, you can say ‘Add this address to their contact card,’ and Siri will take care of it.”

  • “In-app actions” — Giving Siri the ability, through the App Intents framework, to do things in and across apps that you can do, the old fashioned way (yourself) in and across apps. Again, here’s Apple’s own example usage:

    You can make a request like “Send the email I drafted to April and Lilly” and Siri knows which email you’re referencing and which app it’s in. And Siri can take actions across apps, so after you ask Siri to enhance a photo for you by saying “Make this photo pop,” you can ask Siri to drop it in a specific note in the Notes app — without lifting a finger.

There were no demonstrations of any of that. Those features were all at level 0 on my hierarchy. That level is called vaporware. They were features Apple said existed, which they claimed would be shipping in the next year, and which they portrayed, to great effect, in the signature “Siri, when is my mom’s flight landing?” segment of the WWDC keynote itself, starting around the 1h:22m mark. Apple was either unwilling or unable to demonstrate those features in action back in June, even with Apple product marketing reps performing the demos from a prepared script using prepared devices.

This shouldn’t have just raised a concern in my head. It should have set off blinding red flashing lights and deafening klaxon alarms.

Even the very engineers working on a project never know exactly how long something is going to take to complete. An outsider observing a scripted demo of incomplete software knows far less (than the engineers) just how much more work it needs. But you can make a rough judgment. And that’s where my aforementioned hierarchy of realness comes into play. Even outsiders can judge how close a public beta (stage 3) feels to readiness. A feature or product that Apple will allow the press to play with, hands-on (stage 2) is further along than a feature or product that Apple is only willing to demonstrate themselves (stage 1).

But a feature or product that Apple is unwilling to demonstrate, at all, is unknowable. Is it mostly working, and close to, but not quite, demonstratable? Is it only kinda sorta working — partially functional, but far from being complete? Fully functional but prone to crashing — or in the case of AI, prone to hallucinations and falsehoods? Or is it complete fiction, just an idea at this point?

What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowledge Navigator” concept video in 1987 was the Apple that was on a course to near-bankruptcy a decade later. Modern Apple — the post-NeXT-reunification Apple of the last quarter century — does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products and features.

Until WWDC last year, that is.

My deeply misguided mental framework for “Apple Intelligence” last year at WWDC was something like this: Some of these features are further along than others, and Apple is showing us those features in action first, and they will surely be the features that ship first over the course of the next year. The other features must be coming to demonstratable status soon. But the mental framework I should have used was more like this: Some of these features are merely table stakes for generative AI in 2024, but others are ambitious, groundbreaking, and, given their access to personal data, potentially dangerous. Apple is only showing us the table-stakes features, and isn’t demonstrating any of the ambitious, groundbreaking, risky features.

It gets worse. Come September, Apple held its annual big event at Apple Park to unveil the iPhone 16 lineup. Apple Intelligence features were highlighted in the announcement. Members of the media from around the world were gathered. That was a new opportunity, three months after WWDC, for Apple to demonstrate — or even better, offer hands-on access to the press to try themselves — the new personalized Siri features. They did not. No demos, at all. But they did promote them, once again, in the event keynote.2

But yet while Apple still wouldn’t demonstrate these features in person, they did commission and broadcast a TV commercial showing these purported features in action, presenting them as a reason to purchase a new iPhone — a commercial they pulled, without comment, from YouTube this week.

Last week’s announcement — “It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year” — was, if you think about it, another opportunity to demonstrate the current state of these features. Rather than simply issue a statement to the media, they could have invited select members of the press to Apple Park, or Apple’s offices in New York, or even just remotely over a WebEx conference call, and demonstrated the current state of these features live, on an actual device. That didn’t happen. If these features exist in any sort of working state at all, no one outside Apple has vouched for their existence, let alone for their quality.

Duke Nukem Intelligence

Why did Apple show these personalized Siri features at WWDC last year, and promise their arrival during the first year of Apple Intelligence? Why, for that matter, do they now claim to “anticipate rolling them out in the coming year” if they still currently do not exist in demonstratable form? (If they do exist today in demonstratable form, they should, you know, demonstrate them.)

I’m not trying to be obtuse here. It’s obvious why some executives at Apple might have hoped they could promote features like these at WWDC last year. Generative AI is the biggest thing to happen in the computer industry since previous breakthroughs this century like mobile (starting with the iPhone, followed by Android), social media (Meta), and cloud computing (Microsoft, Google, and Amazon). Nobody knows where it’s going but wherever it’s heading, it’s going to be big, important, and perhaps profitable. Wall Street certainly noticed. And prior to WWDC last year, Apple wasn’t in the game. They needed to pitch their AI story. And a story that involved nothing but table-stakes AI features isn’t nearly as compelling a story as one that involves innovative, breakthrough, ambitious personal features.

But while there’s an obvious appeal to Apple pitching the most compelling, most ambitious AI story possible, the only thing that was essential was telling a story that was true. If the truth was that Apple only had features ready to ship in the coming year that were table stakes compared to the rest of the industry, that’s the story they needed to tell. Put as good a spin on it as possible, but them’s the breaks when you’re late to the game.

The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They’re inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.

The Apple of the Jobs exile years — the Sculley / Spindler / Amelio Apple of 1987–1997 — promoted all sorts of amazing concepts that were no more real than the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, and promised all sorts of hardware and (especially) software that never saw the light of day. Promoting what you hope to be able to someday ship is way easier and more exciting than promoting what you know is actually ready to ship. However close to financial bankruptcy Apple was when Steve Jobs returned as CEO after the NeXT reunification, the company was already completely bankrupt of credibility. Apple today is the most profitable and financially successful company in the history of the world. Everyone notices such success, and the corresponding accumulation of great wealth. Less noticed, but to my mind the more impressive achievement, is that over the last three decades, the company also accumulated an abundant reserve of credibility. When Apple showed a feature, you could bank on that feature being real. When they said something was set to ship in the coming year, it would ship in the coming year. In the worst case, maybe that “year” would have to be stretched to 13 or 14 months. You can stretch the truth and maintain credibility, but you can’t maintain credibility with bullshit. And the “more personalized Siri” features, it turns out, were bullshit.

Keynote by keynote, product by product, feature by feature, year after year after year, Apple went from a company that you couldn’t believe would even remain solvent, to, by far, the most credible company in tech. Apple remains at no risk of financial bankruptcy (and in fact remains the most profitable company in the world). But their credibility is now damaged. Careers will end before Apple might ever return to the level of “if they say it, you can believe it” credibility the company had earned at the start of June 2024.

Damaged is arguably too passive. It was squandered. This didn’t happen to Apple. Decision makers within the company did it.

Who decided these features should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and advertise these features in a TV commercial, and promote them as a selling point of the iPhone 16 lineup — not just any products, but the very crown jewels of the company and the envy of the entire industry — when those features still remained in such an unfinished or perhaps even downright non-functional state that they still could not be demoed to the press? Not just couldn’t be shipped as beta software. Not just couldn’t be used by members of the press in a hands-on experience, but could not even be shown to work by Apple employees on Apple-controlled devices in an Apple-controlled environment? But yet they advertised them in a commercial for the iPhone 16, when it turns out they won’t ship, in the best case scenario, until months after the iPhone 17 lineup is unveiled?

When that whole campaign of commercials appeared, I — along with many other observers — was distracted by the fact that none of the features in Apple Intelligence had yet shipped. It’s highly unusual, and arguably ill-considered, for Apple to advertise any features that haven’t yet shipped. But one of those commercials was not at all like the others. The other commercials featured Apple Intelligence features that were close to shipping. We know today they were close to shipping because they were either in the iOS 18.1 betas already, in September, or would soon appear in developer betas for iOS 18.2 and 18.3. Right now, today, they’ve all actually shipped and are in the hands of iPhone 16 users. But the “Siri, what’s the name of the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grenel?” commercial was entirely based on a feature Apple still has never even demonstrated.

Who said “Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it”? And who said “Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t promote this now?” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook.

Even with everything Apple overpromised (if not outright lied about) at the WWDC keynote, the initial takeaway from WWDC from the news media was wrongly focused on their partnership with OpenAI. The conventional wisdom coming out of the keynote was that Apple had just announced something called “Apple Intelligence” but it was powered by ChatGPT, when in fact, the story Apple told was that they — Apple — had built an entire system called Apple Intelligence, entirely powered by Apple’s own AI technology, and that it spanned from on-device execution all the way to a new Private Cloud Compute infrastructure they not only owned but are powering with their own custom-designed server hardware based on Apple Silicon chips. And that on top of all that, as a proverbial cherry on top, Apple also was adding an optional integration layer with ChatGPT.

So, yes, given that the news media gave credit for Apple’s own actual announced achievements to OpenAI, Apple surely would have been given even less credit had they not announced the “more personalized Siri” features. It’s easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks arguing “We need to show something that only Apple can do.” But it turns out they announced something Apple couldn’t do. And now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in AI, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when. Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work.

‘So Why the Fuck Doesn’t It Do That?’

In May 2011, Fortune published an extraordinary look inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky, at what we now know to be the peak, and (alas) end, of the Steve Jobs era. The piece opens thus:

Apple doesn’t often fail, and when it does, it isn’t a pretty sight at 1 Infinite Loop. In the summer of 2008, when Apple launched the first version of its iPhone that worked on third-generation mobile networks, it also debuted MobileMe, an e-mail system that was supposed to provide the seamless synchronization features that corporate users love about their BlackBerry smartphones. MobileMe was a dud. Users complained about lost e-mails, and syncing was spotty at best. Though reviewers gushed over the new iPhone, they panned the MobileMe service.

Steve Jobs doesn’t tolerate duds. Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the MobileMe team, gathering them in the Town Hall auditorium in Building 4 of Apple’s campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question:

“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he told them. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.” The public humiliation particularly infuriated Jobs. Walt Mossberg, the influential Wall Street Journal gadget columnist, had panned MobileMe. “Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us,” Jobs said. On the spot, Jobs named a new executive to run the group.

Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Siri and Apple Intelligence debacle. If such a meeting hasn’t yet occurred or doesn’t happen soon, then, I fear, that’s all she wrote. The ride is over. When mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things, and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three. 

  1. Image Playground would make a ton of sense not as a consumer-facing app, but as an example project for developers. Long ago, Apple used to share the source code for TextEdit as an example project for Mac developers. (TextEdit is actually a low-key great application, though. It’s genuinely useful, reliable, and understandable.) Apple shares tons of sample code at WWDC each year. Image Playground would be a great sample project. The silly app icon even looks like something from a WWDC sample project. What Image Playground is not is a credible useful generative AI tool. Yet Apple keeps talking about it — and showing it off in new hardware demonstrations — like it’s something they should be proud of and that anyone might credibly use for real-world work or even personal purposes. Image Playground does exemplify just how state-of-the-art the generative AI features are in Apple Intelligence, but not in the way Apple seems to think. ↩︎

  2. Skip to the 53-minute mark of Apple’s September “It’s Glowtime” event introducing the iPhones 16, and it’s Craig Federighi who says the following:

    “Siri will be able to tap into your personal context to help you in ways that are unique to you. Like pulling up the recommendation for the TV show that your brother sent you last month. And Siri will gain onscreen awareness. So when your friend texts you about a new album, you’ll be able to simply say, ‘Play that.’ And then you’ll be able to take hundreds of new actions in your apps, like updating a friend’s contact card with his new address, or adding a set of photos to a specific album. With Siri’s personal context understanding and action capabilities, you’ll be able to simply say, ‘Send Erica the photos from Saturday’s barbecue’, and Siri will dig up the photos and send them right off.”

    That’s about 40 seconds of keynote time I bet Federighi regrets — and that I suspect he was skeptical about including. It’s telling though, that unlike WWDC, Apple didn’t show those features or spend even a full minute talking about at the iPhone 16 event — despite the fact that, ostensibly, those features should have been three months closer to shipping than they were in June. Federighi’s title is SVP of software, and Apple Intelligence and Siri are “software”, but John Giannandrea (SVP of machine learning and AI strategy) is Federighi’s peer, not subordinate, on the org chart — both report directly to Tim Cook — and is responsible for Siri and Apple Intelligence. Why it was Federighi, not Giannandrea, pitching those features in the iPhone 16 event keynote almost certainly comes down to Federighi’s presentation skills and stage presence, not responsibility for the features themselves. But who’s going on camera to pitch these features and promise their future availability the next time? ↩︎︎

Wednesday, 12 March 2025

Brazilian Court Gives Apple 90 Days to Allow Sideloading on iOS 

Filipe Espósito, reporting last week for 9to5Mac:

As reported by Brazilian newspaper Valor Econômico (via O Globo), a federal judge in Brazil ruled on Wednesday that Apple will have to open up the iOS ecosystem to third-party apps in Brazil just like the company did in the EU. The judge considers that the “limitations” imposed by the company on developers could jeopardize the entry of new competitors in the segment. [...]

But now Judge Pablo Zuniga has ordered that Apple will have to implement the required changes in Brazil within the next three months. The judge states that, despite Apple’s claims, the company “has already complied with similar obligations in other countries, without demonstrating a significant impact or irreparable damage to its business model.”

Presumably Apple will just roll out in Brazil the same compliance rules, policies, and APIs that they started offering last year in the EU. But will Brazilian users get access to EU third-party app marketplaces, and vice-versa? Or will Apple try to segregate these app marketplaces region-by-region, such that Brazilian users will only get access to Brazilian third-party app marketplaces, and EU users will remain limited only to EU third-party app marketplaces?

I asked Riley Testut, the founder of AltStore PAL, if he knew the answers to those questions. His answer, via iMessage:

We haven’t heard anything from Apple (unsurprisingly), but I think it’ll be somewhere in the middle. It’s likely Apple will add some requirements for existing marketplaces to launch in Brazil like they did with EU (e.g. requiring us to have a subsidiary in Brazil) so we’ll all need to get approval again. But assuming marketplaces meet all requirements, I think users in both places will eventually be able use e.g. AltStore PAL and Epic Games Store.

“In the middle” sounds about right from Apple’s perspective too. They’re not going to make this as easy as possible, but I don’t expect them to make it obstinately spiteful either.

Apple Adds Disclaimers Regarding Delayed AI Siri Features 

Benjamin Mayo 9to5Mac:

Apple is still reeling from the last-week’s news that the most compelling new Apple Intelligence features for Siri have been indefinitely delayed. Over the weekend, it pulled a YouTube ad showcasing personal context running on the iPhone 16. Now, it has updated the Apple website with a new disclaimer wherever the unreleased Siri features are mentioned on the iPhone marketing pages. [...]

The new message to customers found on Apple’s website is different, but equally as vague. It reads:

Siri’s personal context understanding, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions are in development and will be available with a future software update.

Google Changes Chrome Extension Policies Following the Honey Link Scandal 

Jay Peters, The Verge:

Google has updated its affiliate ads policy for Chrome extensions after creators accused PayPal’s popular Honey browser extension of being a “scam.”

Honey was accused of taking affiliate revenue from the same influencers it paid for promotion by using its Chrome extension to swap in its own affiliate link before you checked out. According to the updated Google policy posted today, this isn’t allowed in most cases

I wouldn’t say they were merely accused — they were caught, red-handed.

A New System-Wide UI Look for iOS — Let Alone MacOS, Too — Would Be a Huge Deal

Tuesday, 11 March 2025

Ben Lovejoy, writing at 9to5Mac:

Our editor-in-chief Chance Miller wryly commented that a radical new look would serve as a great way to distract from the ever-slowing progress on the new Siri. But in truth, I think many more Apple users will be wowed by a new look than would ever care about Siri.

If that’s the way it works out — with a new visual look drawing attention from lackluster progress on the AI front — surely the timing will be coincidental, but some accidents are happy accidents, as Bob Ross used to say.

Sure, the new look introduced with iOS 7 was a massively controversial one, and many thought that then Apple design chief Jony Ive should never have been allowed anywhere near the software side of the business. But love it or hate it, you certainly couldn’t ignore it.

The same will be true of a new 3D look, which might even include some (much more modern) skeuomorphic elements. Probably as many will hate it as love it when it’s first introduced, as that seems to be true of any significant change made by the company, but it will likely make more of a bang than any improvement to Siri the company may introduce, then or later.

There should be no question that all of what Lovejoy is saying here is true. If Apple launches an all-new systemwide UI theme for iOS 19, something even half as radical a change as iOS 7’s theme was, it will be the only thing most users notice or opine about. Humans are fundamentally visual creatures and we notice visual changes. And, most humans are resistant to change. A lot of people simply dislike change, even changes for the better. (Honestly, I think that’s what the iOS 18 Photos complaints are about. Complaints about change itself.)

Part of what makes Apple Apple is that the company is (or at least should be) led by people who both have great taste and trust their own instincts. No one’s taste is perfect. Even Steve Jobs pushed through a few clunkers. But if you have great taste and confidence, you’ll do what your gut says is right.

When a company only pushes out changes that avoid controversy, it leads to paralysis. Then stagnation. Earlier today, Cabel Sasser wrote:

One of my strongest early developer memories was being in the “UI Feedback Forum” at WWDC after they introduced Aqua. Think of a live Q&A, but developers giving notes to a team of Apple engineers.

To these veteran Mac coders, the reaction to Aqua was universally negative. People were actively very angry. It’s a waste! It’s ugly! It’s confusing! How could you. It went on and on, and I was surprised because Aqua looked cool and fun to me.

After that WWDC, they never did another Feedback Forum.

It’s true. What a lot of Mac users wanted was a Mac OS X that looked like Mac OS 9.1 The Aqua look and feel was definitely polarizing. And Apple dialed back its most exuberant details with each subsequent Mac OS X update — less transparency, subtler pinstripes (pinstripes!), etc. But iOS 7 was equally polarizing, and its excesses also got dialed back (or perhaps better, said, dialed back up) with each successive iOS release — a little more depth, some subtle hints of texture.

Either Apple is never going to ship an altogether new UI theme, or they’ll ship one and a large number of people will declare it utter garbage and proof that Apple has completely lost its way. Maybe it will be garbage and proof that Apple has lost its way! Or, maybe it will actually prove to be a great new look that starts a decade-long industry-wide trend that all other companies will soon follow — which is what happened with Aqua’s 3D “lickability”, and happened again with iOS 7’s austere flattening. But either way, you won’t be able to judge it by asking for a show of hands from the general population when it’s unveiled. You either have taste or you don’t, and most people don’t, at least when judging something new and unfamiliar. 

  1. Which is actually what 1999’s Mac OS X Server 1.0 looked like. It really was the best-looking version of the classic Platinum UI theme Apple ever released. ↩︎

Tuesday, 11 March 2025

Aaron ‘Homeboy’ Tilley Among Those Laid Off From the WSJ’s Tech Staff Last Week 

Last week The Wall Street Journal laid off about a dozen tech reporters and editors — not on the fun side, where folks like Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen work, but on the straight news side. Chris Roush at Talking Biz News obtained a memo sent to the staff from WSJ editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, which concluded:

We’re also creating a new Tech & Media enterprise team, reporting to Sarah, and we’re creating two new jobs on this team based in San Francisco. In the coming weeks, we’ll be reconfiguring beats on the tech team to give more of them a wide ambit. Fewer will focus narrowly on individual companies. We are also advertising for a new tech-focused job on Heard in New York.

These changes do mean that some reporters and editors in San Francisco and New York will be leaving us. I want to thank them for their contributions to the Journal. I want to especially thank Jason Dean, who is departing, for his long and distinguished service.

It was the reporters who focused on specific companies who got laid off, including the Journal’s beat reporter for Apple for the last 6 years, Aaron Tilley. Tilley was last in the news himself a month ago, when one of his former sources, a now-former Apple engineer named Andrew Aude, settled a lawsuit filed by Apple (and who addressed Tilley in text messages as “Homeboy”) and issued the following public apology:

I spent nearly eight years as a software engineer at Apple. During that time, I was given access to sensitive internal Apple information, including what were then unreleased products and features. But instead of keeping this information secret, I made the mistake of sharing this information with journalists who covered the company. I did not realize it at the time, but this turned out to be a profound and expensive mistake. Hundreds of professional relationships I had spent years building were ruined. And my otherwise successful career as a software engineer was derailed, and it will likely be very difficult to rebuild it. Leaking was not worth it. I sincerely apologize to my former colleagues who not only worked tirelessly on projects for Apple, but work hard to keep them secret. They deserved better.

I have no idea whether this fiasco had anything to do with Tilley being laid off (perhaps not, given Tucker’s decision to have fewer reporters on staff who “focus narrowly on individual companies”) but it couldn’t have helped. It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement to have someone publicly declaring that they deeply regret ever having been a source for a Wall Street Journal reporter, and that doing so not only cost them their job but ruined their entire career.

It also probably didn’t help Tilley’s case that he wasn’t very good at covering Apple.

Steal My Tesla 

New service for disgruntled/embarrassed Tesla owners:

Our team at Steal My Tesla has years of experience in the automotive industry, with a special focus on luxury vehicles, premium wheels and rims, catalytic converters, and driver assistance systems. Trust us to handle your Tesla acquisition with professionalism and discretion.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in 2016, on Donald Trump as President: ‘This Is Not Going to End Well One Way or the Other’ 

A clip from this 2016 interview with Marco Rubio — then a candidate for the Republican presidential primary, today Trump’s secretary of state — by CNN’s Jake Tapper is making the rounds on social media. It’s extraordinary. I’m linking here to the full video, hosted on Rubio’s own YouTube account (for now — watch for this to go down the memory hole) starting at the 7:54 mark:

Tapper: You compared Donald Trump to a third world dictator yesterday in an interview with The New York Times. How so?

Rubio: Well, I don’t know about a dictator. I said a third world strong man. You know, he’s running for president. So no matter what, he won’t be a dictator unless our republic completely crumbles, which I don’t anticipate it will. But, yeah, here’s what happens in many countries around the world: You have a leader that emerges and basically says, Don’t put your faith in yourselves. Don’t put your faith in society. Put your faith in me. I’m a strong leader, and I’m going to make things better — all by myself. This is very typical. You see it in the third world. You see it a lot in Latin America for decades. It’s basically the argument he’s making. That he, single-handedly, is going to turn the country around. We’ve never been that kind of country.

We have a president. The president is an American citizen who serves for a period of time, constrained by the constitution and the powers vested in that office. The president works for the people, not the people for the president. And if you listen to the way he describes himself and what he’s going to do, he’s going to single-handedly do this and do that without regard for whether it’s legal or not.

Look, I think people are going to have to make up their mind. I can tell you this. No matter what happens in this election, for years to come, there are many people on the right, in the media, and voters at large that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump, because this is not going to end well one way or the other. He’s going to be the nominee, and he’s going to lose. Or, he’ll have thrown this party into its most chaotic and divisive period ever. And that’s unfortunate because the Republican Party is the home of the limited government free enterprise movement in America. And if it crumbles or divides or it splits apart, it’ll be very difficult to elect candidates that hold those views at any level of government until we can bring the party back together.

Breathtakingly prescient and succinct.

The New Yorker Modernizes a Few Words in Its Style Guide 

Andrew Boynton, head of copy at The New Yorker:

Keen-eyed grammar fans may notice some changes in our pages — and in this newsletter. Last fall, David Remnick, the editor, suggested convening a group to talk about the magazine’s house style, to see if any rules might bear reëxamination. The group — comprising copy editors, current and former, and editors — met this past January and came up with a list of styles that might qualify for changes, and in a subsequent meeting the following month the director of copy and production and I came up with a limited list of proposals. It was decided that, while no one wanted to change some of the long-standing “quirky” styles (teen-ager, per cent, etc.), some of newer vintage could go. Along with a few other changes, “in-box” is now “inbox,” “Web site” is now “website,” “Internet” is now “internet,” and “cell phone” is now “cellphone” (though everyone acknowledges that the word “cell” in this context will soon disappear altogether).

Some of you may lament the changes as being radically modern, while others are likely to greet them as long overdue. Welcome to 1995, you may be thinking. (Italicized thoughts are new, too.) Regardless, it should be noted that the diaeresis (see that “reëxamination,” above) has overwhelming support at the magazine, and will remain.

I’m in favor of all these changes except for lowercasing “Internet”. I actually started lowercasing it years ago — I think right around when the AP changed its style — but I was chatting post-Dithering with Ben Thompson a week or two ago and he offhandedly mentioned that lowercasing “internet” is a pet stylistic peeve of his, because there’s only one Internet. He said that and I was like, Yeah! — But so why did I start lowercasing it? The Internet is a lot like the Earth. It’s everywhere. It is our universe, in a sense, from the human-scale perspective. But it’s a unique and distinct thing, thus deserving to be treated as a proper noun. (The universe doesn’t get capitalized because while it’s a one-off, it’s not a name. We speak of the universe like we speak of the planet, which is lowercase.) It’s almost disrespectful to lowercase it, and the Internet is one of the great achievements in the history of mankind.

New MLB Caps Are So Fugly They Make MAGA Hats Look Well-Designed 

If these caps were a student project it’d get an F. Who thinks you can print one logo on top of another? They look like mistakes, like caps that got run through the embroidery machine twice. The only good one is for the “ASHOS”, which comes close to the actual word everyone uses for that team of cheaters.

Update, 3pm ET: It looks like maybe MLB and New Era (the hatmakers) have put the whole lineup of caps out of their misery.

Josh Marshall on Kevin Drum 

Josh Marshall:

I think more than anything I admired Kevin’s restraint and his caution. Blogging is a hustle and the incentives for hyperbole and breathlessness are endless. That makes most people easy to ignore. But Kevin — who had a whole career in the normal-person rat race before he started this — sweated the details. He had a serious mind for facts and numbers and he knew how to work with data. His posts were always overflowing with numbers and charts and levels of detail and nitty gritty I couldn’t pile into my brain because I was too scattered and unfocused. When he said something, you had to take it seriously. When he disagreed with you, you knew it was time to re-check your work. Kevin was almost all signal and very little noise. That was his defining mark.

Kevin Drum, Pioneering Political Blogger and Columnist, Dies at 66 

Marian Drum, posting yesterday on Kevin Drum’s site:

With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025.

No public memorial services are planned.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to the charity or political cause of your choice.

He was writing right up until the end. No one, on either side of the political spectrum, better wrote about “DEI”. Just in the last week, he had posts on Ukraine/Russia, the LA Times’s stupid new AI-generated “bias meter”, the looming congressional budget crisis, Trump’s tariff crusade. He remained on top of everything that’s going on, not only while cancer was killing him, but while he was stoically keeping his readers fully abreast of his declining health. I mean, Christ, read this update from February 12 — I thought that was it. Dying from cancer is harrowing. He knew the end was near, and as with everything he wrote in his long career, he had the numbers to back it.

I didn’t know Drum personally at all, but there’s a certain kinship amongst bloggers from the very turn of the century. I’ve read Drum’s site continuously for over 20 years and I don’t know anyone whose style and approach can fill the void he leaves. He was obviously a very kind and generous person, but his approach to policy was ruthlessly (and thus to me, admirably) data and evidence driven. Strong opinions, loosely held. He brimmed with curiosity. Who, what, when, and where are all good questions but why is the most interesting one, and Drum always wanted to figure out why. I sure didn’t get his love for cats, but I’m also so glad he shared stuff like that. His approach to actual politics could come across as wonky, but his personality was always there. As natural-born a blogger as anyone who’s ever done it.

I miss his voice already.

Monday, 10 March 2025

Front Page Tech on a New UI Style for iOS 19, Back on January 17 

Jon Prosser, in a YouTube video with mocked-up animations showing exactly what he’s talking about, 51 days ago:

Today we have your very first exclusive look at the changes coming to iOS 19 — with a redesigned camera app and possibly ... a redesigned iOS.

Basic idea is something very much akin to the look and feel of VisionOS, but brought to the Camera app, and perhaps throughout the entire system (or just parts of it) in iOS 19. Seems cool, seems fresh, and seems aligned with where Apple has been heading.

Here’s Parker Ortolani, himself a talented designer with a particularly keen eye for trends, writing on his blog February 4 after Apple Invites debuted:

The rumored Apple Invites app has arrived. While I obviously haven’t had much time to play with it, I have quickly browsed through the UI and wanted to share some observations. The last new Apple app, Apple Sports, already felt out of place in iOS 18. It has a more visionOS or watchOS-like design language utilizing colorful backgrounds, glassy floating UI elements, expanding buttons, and lots of layered shapes. Apple Invites takes it all even further. It’s got big beautiful cards, translucent cells, big bold buttons, and an emphasis on content. It feels so clearly like a hint of what is to come in a future iOS update. It’s almost screaming it in our faces. It seems awfully suspect that Apple’s two latest apps have a whole new design language that does not mesh with the rest of the OS.

Now comes today, with Mark Gurman dropping this vagueness at Bloomberg:

The revamp — due later this year — will fundamentally change the look of the operating systems and make Apple’s various software platforms more consistent, according to people familiar with the effort. That includes updating the style of icons, menus, apps, windows and system buttons. As part of the push, the company is working to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the project hasn’t been announced. The design is loosely based on the Vision Pro’s software, they said.

That’s it. No screenshots. No mockups. No specific description of the changes. Just “loosely based on the Vision Pro’s software”. Jon Prosser not only said this was coming, but commissioned full, realistic animations to illustrate it, 51 days ago. And astute observers like Ortolani and others have observed, for over a month, that Apple itself is starting to hint at this new design language in its own already-shipping new apps for iOS.

I’m so old I remember when YouTubers made videos about months-old Gurman stories, not the other way around. There’s weak sauce, and then there’s eating paste.

Yours Truly Guesting on ‘Upgrade’ With Jason Snell 

Upgrade:

It’s been a quiet week, so John Gruber briefly joins Jason to discuss Apple’s AI delay, new Macs, new iPads, and the future of Apple regulation worldwide.

Recorded earlier today, so it covers, somehow, all of last week’s Apple news — and last week was a kind of crazy week in Appletown. I even squeezed in some parenting advice for Myke Hurley, who’s out on paternity leave.

Saturday, 8 March 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Putting a Stink on the Letter X’ 

Craig Hockenberry returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s new hardware this week — M3 iPad Airs, A16 regular iPads, M4 MacBook Airs, and the M4 Max and surprising M3 Ultra Mac Studios. And we go deep on The Iconfactory’s years-in-the-making new app, Tapestry — a universal timeline for the Internet.

Exclusively sponsored by:

Broccoli, the Man — and Vegetable — Behind the Bond Franchise 

This whole 1989 profile of Albert “Cubby” Broccoli by John Culhane for the LA Times is full of enjoyable nuggets, but this fact blew my mind:

Giovanni Broccoli and his brother emigrated to Long Island from Calabria at the turn of the century. According to research done in Florence by Broccoli’s wife of 30 years, Dana, the brothers were descended from the Broccolis of Carrera, who first crossed two Italian vegetables, cauliflower and rabe, to produce the dark green, thick-stalked vegetable that took their name and eventually supported them in the United States.

Giovanni’s brother started a broccoli farm on Long Island, and soon all of Giovanni’s family worked for him. “Myself, my brother, my mother, my father — all working on our hands and knees,” said Broccoli, who picked up the nickname Cubby (after a round-faced comic strip character) at about that time. “Later on, we had our own farm.”

Two weeks ago on The Talk Show, I even joked with Paul Kafasis about the fact that in over 30,000 posts in Daring Fireball’s history, the only ones that contain the string “broccoli” are ones about the Bond movies, not the vegetable. Until now I guess.

(Via Dave Rutledge.)

Yours Truly on The Vergecast, on the Cinematic Future of James Bond Under Amazon’s Stewardship 

Pierce, David Pierce:

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about the future of Bond. (James Bond.) John Gruber, the author of Daring Fireball and a preeminent Bond expert, joins the show to talk about Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, its struggles with the Broccoli family over what to do with the Bond franchise, and why so many fans of the series are worried about what might happen when a company like Amazon takes over a beloved name. Will Bond turn out like Marvel, or Star Wars? Or something else entirely? We’ll see — but history suggests we shouldn’t be too optimistic.

I’m deeply pessimistic about the future of the Bond franchise, but I do love talking and thinking about it. Really enjoyed this chat.

Simon Willison on the Privacy/Security Risks of Personalized Siri, vis-à-vis Prompt Injection 

Simon Willison:

These new Apple Intelligence features involve Siri responding to requests to access information in applications and then performing actions on the user’s behalf.

This is the worst possible combination for prompt injection attacks! Any time an LLM-based system has access to private data, tools it can call and exposure to potentially malicious instructions (like emails and text messages from untrusted strangers) there’s a significant risk that an attacker might subvert those tools and use them to damage or exfiltrate a user’s data.

I published this piece about the risk of prompt injection to personal digital assistants back in November 2023, and nothing has changed since then to make me think this is any less of an open problem.

Prompt injection seems to be a problem that LLM providers can mitigate, but cannot completely solve. They can tighten the lid, but they can’t completely seal it. But with your private information, the lid needs to be provably sealed — an airtight seal, not a “well, don’t turn it upside down or shake it” seal. So a pessimistic way to look at this personalized Siri imbroglio is that Apple cannot afford to get this wrong, but the nature of LLMs’ susceptibility to prompt injection might mean it’s impossible to ever get right. And if it is possible, it will require groundbreaking achievements. It’s not enough for Apple to “catch up”. They have to solve a vexing problem — as yet unsolved by OpenAI, Google, or any other leading AI lab — to deliver what they’ve already promised.

So Apple had promised for this year — and oft promoted — an entire set of features that they not only have now acknowledged will not ship this year, but which they might, in fact, never be able to ship. Makes me wonder how many people inside Apple were voicing these concerns a year ago, and why they lost the debate to start promising these features last June and advertising them in September.

Apple Pulls Bella Ramsey Ad That Promoted Vaporware Personalized Siri Feature 

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Since last fall, Apple has been marketing the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence with an unreleased Siri feature. After confirming today that the more personal version of Siri isn’t coming anytime soon, Apple has pulled the ad in question.

The commercial starred Bella Ramsey who should probably win an award for acting like Siri worked.

In the ad spot, Ramsey sees someone familiar approaching and asks Siri the name of the person they had a meeting with the previous month at a specific restaurant.

Siri immediately responded with the name presumably based on a calendar event, email, or message on Ramsey’s iPhone.

I think that was the only TV commercial Apple ran showing the “personalized Siri through App Intents” feature that Apple has now admitted won’t ship in iOS 18, but I saw that commercial a lot during the baseball playoffs and NFL season. (I tend only to see TV commercials while watching sports.) The other Bella-Ramsey–starring Apple Intelligence ads all showcase Apple Intelligence features that are now shipping. But did Apple run other ads (TV, print, billboard) promoting this non-existent feature? I’m wondering what else they might send down the memory hole now that they’re facing reality on these personalized Siri features.

Apple’s product pages for Apple Intelligence, iOS 18, and MacOS 15 Sequoia are lousy with references to these “new era for Siri” features that we now know aren’t going to ship this year. This is a marketing fiasco.

Friday, 7 March 2025

Reuters on Apple’s Personalized Siri Apple Intelligence Delay 

Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters:

Some artificial intelligence improvements to Apple’s voice assistant Siri will be delayed until 2026, the company said on Friday.

In a statement, Apple said it has “been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”

I really don’t mean to be overly pedantic (so I’ve edited this post since original publication), but Apple’s statement reads “in the coming year”, so I think it’s possible we could see those features in iOS 19.0, 19.1, or 19.2 before the end of 2025. Would I want to bet on that? No. This feels like something of a reset, not just a “we need a few months” type thing.

Apple did not give a reason for the delays. The iPhone maker had previously indicated the features would come in 2025.

Again, hairsplitting, but I actually think “It’s going to take us longer than we thought” is a pretty good explanation.

Apple Is Delaying the ‘More Personalized Siri’ Apple Intelligence Features

Friday, 7 March 2025

Here’s a statement I got this morning from Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy, verbatim:

“Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”

This is a Friday sort of wah-waaah sad-trombone news drop, but it’s good that Apple is getting on top of it, and setting expectations accurately.

Reading between the lines, and based on my PhD-level fluency in Cupertino-ese, what Apple is saying here is that these “more personalized Siri” features are being punted from this year’s OS cycle to next year’s: to iOS 19 and MacOS 16. Apple’s years in this context aren’t calendar years, but Apple’s OS product years. Those years effectively start at WWDC. The problem, from Apple’s perspective, messaging-wise, is that they don’t talk about future products. They haven’t officially acknowledged there is going to be an iOS 19 or MacOS 16. They haven’t even yet announced that there’s going to be a WWDC 2025. But they do want to set expectations accurately, especially for a feature as high profile — from Apple’s own marketing push — as Apple Intelligence. So here we are.

It was already pretty obvious these features weren’t coming in iOS 18.4/MacOS 15.4, because they’re not in the developer betas that are already out. And if these features were coming in iOS 18.5/MacOS 15.5, or even iOS 18.6/MacOS 15.6, Apple wouldn’t have felt the need to issue this “It’s going to take us longer than we thought...” statement today. Delivering the “more personalized Siri” in iOS 18.5 or even 18.6 would have been delivering them on the originally announced schedule — the “coming year” that began with WWDC 2024. That would have been the tail end of that “year”, but within it. But Apple, being limited to the self-imposed opaque verbiage of Cupertino-ese, isn’t going to spell that out. But trust me, you can bank on it: what they’re announcing today is that these features are coming in iOS 19/MacOS 16.

Siri has improved in several useful, but iterative, ways under the Apple Intelligence umbrella in this year’s OS cycle (iOS/iPadOS 18 + MacOS 15 Sequoia), but the big “more personalized Siri” that was shown at WWDC last June is the Siri-related Apple Intelligence stuff that people are, justifiably, most excited about. This is the “App Intents” stuff — the features requiring Siri to have access to and, effectively, understanding of your personal information, in your apps, stored privately on your devices. These are the most helpful-sounding, most practical, most futuristic features of Apple Intelligence. And they’re the sort of features Apple is almost uniquely positioned to offer, alongside only Google, as the provider of a mobile platform and device ecosystem.

From Apple’s own announcement, after the WWDC keynote:

Siri will be able to deliver intelligence that’s tailored to the user and their on-device information. For example, a user can say, “Play that podcast that Jamie recommended,” and Siri will locate and play the episode, without the user having to remember whether it was mentioned in a text or an email. Or they could ask, “When is Mom’s flight landing?” and Siri will find the flight details and cross-reference them with real-time flight tracking to give an arrival time.

“When is Mom’s flight landing?” is easily understood, by we humans, and a really good example of the sort of Siri interaction that would be obviously useful. But you can also pretty easily see how complex it is on Apple’s side. Siri has long been able to do the “Mom” thing. Your spouse, your kids — you’ve long able to tell Siri to call or text those people by nickname like that. But getting your mom’s flight information out of your email (which I think was the premise of this demo in the WWDC keynote — that the flight info was stored in a message in Mail) or from text messages, and then knowing how to check for current flight status information for that flight, is something far beyond the ken of current Siri. Getting the information requires access to your most personal information — your own email and messages. Getting the correct information from your messages requires the common sense of understanding that you’re obviously asking about some sort of current trip your mom is taking, not, say, an email she sent you about a flight back in 2019, or one from 2022, or even one from December last year. The Siri we currently know lacks that sort of common sense. And then lastly, after getting the correct flight from your email, performing this task requires Siri to have the agency to go look up the current status of that particular flight — and get it right every time it provides an answer.

If Siri answers, “Your mom’s flight is arriving at 4:30 this afternoon, and it’s currently showing an on-time arrival,” you really want that information to be correct if you’ve promised to pick her up at the airport. You’ll be annoyed if you drive to the airport and it turns out she’s not actually landing until 7:30. And you’ll be in real trouble if she’s landing at 1:30 and you show up three hours later, having banked on Siri’s answer being accurate.

It’s very unusual, to say the least, for Apple to announce a product delay.1 The white iPhone 4 was supposed to debut alongside the black one in June 2010, but, bizarrely, was delayed several times (which I had fun with more than once) and wound up not shipping until the end of April the next year, 10 months late. The original AirPods were announced alongside the iPhones 7 in September 2016, and were supposed to ship in October. They wound up being delayed until December. Apple’s statement in October 2016, regarding the AirPods being delayed, as given to Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch:

“The early response to AirPods has been incredible. We don’t believe in shipping a product before it’s ready, and we need a little more time before AirPods are ready for our customers.”

This is exactly why Apple hews to an almost religious policy of not announcing products before they’re ready. When they do make exceptions — when they lapse, as it were, as cited above (and below) — they often regret it. You can’t break a promise you never made, and you can’t miss a ship date you never announced. Even with talented teams and realistic managers, there’s often a long span between how long you expect a project to take and how long it actually winds up taking. Engineering schedules often slip even with predictable technologies, and the non-deterministic nature of LLMs makes their future inherently unpredictable.

Most of Apple Intelligence has felt like Apple has pushed it out a year ahead of the company’s usual level of baked-ness. I’ve held all year long that if the entire industry — along with Wall Street — weren’t in the midst of a generative-AI/LLM mania, that “Apple Intelligence” wouldn’t have been announced until this year’s WWDC, not last year’s. Today’s announcement is disappointing, but to me utterly unsurprising. The Siri integration with personal data through App Intents has never felt like something that was going to be ready for real customer usage in this year’s OS cycle. And if it’s Apple’s general policy not to ship a product before it’s ready, that applies tenfold for a product involving LLM access to deeply private on-device information. It’s better to ship late, but ready, than to ship something unfinished or unreliable to hit a promised deadline. And with something like next-generation Siri, I’d say that’s downright essential. Apple can take the bad publicity today’s announcement is engendering; they cannot afford to squander the trust of their users. 

  1. The granddaddy of modern-era Apple product delays, of course, is AirPower — the multi-device (iPhones, Apple Watch, AirPods) charging device that Apple pre-announced in September 2017, alongside the iPhone X and iPhone 8. When announced, Apple said AirPower would ship in “2018”. It wound up never shipping, but the plug wasn’t officially pulled (so to speak) until 29 March 2019, an absurd 18 months after it was announced. ↩︎

Thursday, 6 March 2025

Nate Silver on the Demise of FiveThirtyEight 

Nate Silver, writing at his Silver Bulletin:

Last night, as President Trump delivered his State of the Union address, the Wall Street Journal reported that ABC News would lay off the remaining staff at 538 as part of broader cuts within corporate parent Disney. Having been through several rounds of this before, including two years ago when the staff was cut by more than half and my tenure expired too, I know it’s a brutal process for everyone involved. It’s also tough being in a business while having a constant anvil over your head, as we had in pretty much every odd-numbered (non-election) year from 2017 onward at 538/FiveThirtyEight. I don’t know all of the staffers from the most recent iteration of the site, but the ones I have met or who I overlapped with are all extremely conscientious and hard-working people and were often forced to work double-duty as jobs were cut but frequently not replaced. My heart goes out to them, and I’m happy to provide recommendations for people I worked with there.

Beyond that, I wasn’t inclined to say too much more, but it felt weirder not to say anything at all. And it’s easier to say something here than filter it through a reporter or something.

ABC Shuts Down FiveThirtyEight, and Pulls the Plug on Its Website

Thursday, 6 March 2025

Oliver Darcy, reporting at Status (paywalled, alas), on the sudden demise of FiveThirtyEight:

On Wednesday morning, shortly after sending an all-staff memo announcing layoffs at ABC News, network president Almin Karamehmedovic joined a virtual meeting with the FiveThirtyEight team. The 15 staffers at the political analysis site owned by ABC News had learned the previous evening — via a Wall Street Journal report — that they were being let go. Now, they were hearing it from Karamehmedovic himself.

But Karamehmedovic, like other managers carrying out mass layoffs at ABC News that day, had little to say about it. I’m told he appeared to be reading from a script as he delivered the devastating news. He offered no explanation for why the Disney-owned network had decided to shutter FiveThirtyEight, which it acquired in 2018 along with data whiz and then-editor Nate Silver. He took no questions. He simply thanked the employees for their work, told them a human resources staffer would follow up, and ended the meeting. The entire affair, I’m told, lasted about 15 minutes. Soon after, employees had their access to ABC News’ systems shut off and the FiveThirtyEight website was pulled offline. Just like that, it was over.

Business is business, and layoffs and closures are never anything but traumatic. But there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way. And one of the wrong ways is having the staff find out they’re all fired by reading it from The Wall Street Journal. This guy Karamehmedovic sounds like a real Grade-A dickhead.

And what is the deal with these companies that just unceremoniously pull the plug on websites when they close them? Why not keep the FiveThirtyEight site up and running — at least for a while, if not in perpetuity? It costs practically nothing to run a server for a static/archived website. I don’t get it. It betrays a profound level of disrespect for the work that the site hosted. It’s ABC’s business if they want to close FiveThirtyEight as an ongoing concern, but the years of work deserves to remain online, both out of respect for the people who made it and for the audience that might still want to refer to it. Disney didn’t burn the movies from now-closed subsidiary studios like Touchstone Pictures.

There’s a vast gulf between the old world of print and the new world of online publishing. The difference is profound, but largely overlooked, because it’s human nature to just adapt to the nature of different forms of media and quickly accept current media forms as “normal”. With print, issues were largely ephemeral to the audience. You’d get a newspaper every day, and magazines every week or month, and you’d throw them out after you’d finished reading them. If you wanted to look back at what the paper had published about something a year, a month, or even just a few days ago, you were out of luck, in terms of being able to just look it up on the spot. Librarians did the yeoman’s work of archiving newspapers and magazines to microfilm, so nothing was truly gone or forgotten, but it was an enormous hassle to access microfilm archives. You pretty much had to know the dates of the issues you wanted to see, and you had to do the “searching” with your eyeballs, page by page. The ability of anyone, today, to just instantly access week-, month-, year-, and even decades-old stories is a breathtaking advantage of web publications. And for the last 15 years or so, we’ve had the ability to do this from little machines we all carry in our pockets everywhere we go. It’s truly remarkable.

But the standard behavior when closing a web publication is to just pull the plug. When the whole company goes under, that’s one thing. But when there’s a parent company, especially a thriving one, there’s no justification for pulling the plug other than spiteful disregard for the work. From the perspective of a company the size of Disney, it would cost veritable pennies to keep FiveThirtyEight’s website around forever. What a disgrace. 

Wednesday, 5 March 2025

Apple Announces, With Much Surprise, Mac Studios With M4 Max and M3 Ultra (!) Chips 

Jason Snell, at Six Colors:

With the M4 Mac mini being powerfully tempting for desktop Mac users who crave power, Apple has upgraded the Mac Studio to blast past the mini in terms of performance. The base model, still starting at $1999, is powered by the M4 Max chip previously available only in the M4 MacBook Pro. And the new high-end Mac Studio, starting at the same $3999 price tag, is powered by a monstrous chip with 32 CPU cores (including 24 performance cores) and up to 80 GPU cores. It’s a chip never seen before anywhere — the M3 Ultra.

You heard me. For Apple’s fastest Mac ever — and it’s clear that it will be — Apple’s shipping a chip based on two high-end chips (fused together with Apple’s UltraFusion technology) from Apple’s previous processor generation. Weird, right? It seems like a few things are going on here: first, that the development of the Ultra chip takes longer and that Apple won’t commit to shipping an Ultra chip in every chip generation. Second, that the first-generation three-nanometer chip process of Apple’s chipmaking partner, TSMC, isn’t as dead and buried as generally thought. Just this week Apple also introduced an iPad Air with an M3 processor, and of course the new iPad mini shipped with an A17 Pro processor based on the same process.

This M3/M4 generational fork — the M3 Ultra chip debuting in new Mac Studio models alongside the M4 Max — was so unexpected that, during my embargoed press briefing about the news yesterday, I thought the Apple rep misspoke when he said M3, not M4, for the Ultra models. But no, the Ultra chip really is a generation behind. When asked the obvious question — why — Apple’s answer was straightforward: the Ultra chips take a lot longer to engineer.

The M4 Max Studio models are, computationally, equivalent (exactly, I think) with the M4 Max MacBook Pros that debuted October 30, maxing out (no pun intended) at 16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, 8 TB of storage, and 128 GB of RAM. The M4 Max Studio models start at $2,000, but that starting price only gets you a 14-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 512 GB of storage, and a measly 36 GB of RAM.

The intriguing M3 Ultra models start at $4,000, which gets you a 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 1 TB of storage, and a healthy 96 GB of RAM. Available upgrades to, uh, ultra out the Ultra models:

  • 32-core CPU + 80-core GPU: +$1,500
  • 256 GB of RAM: +$1,600
  • 512 GB of RAM: +$4,000 (only available with the 32-core CPU/80-core GPU)

SSD storage options for the Ultra models go up to 16 TB (a cool $4,600 over the base storage).

Apple Announces, With Little Surprise, M4 MacBook Airs 

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Let’s start with the surprises. Both M4 MacBook Air models are priced $100 less than their predecessors: $1199 for the 15-inch model and $999 for the 13-incher. If I’m not mistaken, this is the first time that the new-generation design of MacBook Air introduced with the M2 chip has been available at the classic $999 price at launch. (The M1 Air, based on the Intel-era visual design, debuted at $999, but the M2 Air debuted at $1199 and only reached $999 when it was offered as an older model alongside the M3 Air.) As of now, the M4 Air can hold down the sub-$1000 price point all on its own, and previous models are mostly discontinued.

Another surprise is the the new color option: Space Gray is out. The ultra-dark-blue Midnight remains, as do the classic Silver and hint-of-champagne Starlight. The new color is Sky Blue, which apparently is a metallic light blue that really shows itself as a color gradient when viewed at various angles.

Very cool that the new M4 starts at $999. Each successive generation of Apple Silicon, at least in laptops, is getting more and more predictably regular.

Who Cares About Getting News That’s True When You’re Getting It Fast With a $32,000/Year Bloomberg Terminal Subscription? 

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg on 6 December 2024, regarding Apple’s first in-house cellular modem, “Apple Plans Three-Year Modem Rollout in Bid to Top Qualcomm”:

For now, the modem won’t be used in Apple’s higher-end products. It’s set to come to a new mid-tier iPhone later next year, code-named D23, that features a far-thinner design than current models. The chip will also start rolling out as early as 2025 in Apple’s lower-end iPads.

We now know the name of that modem, the C1, from its debut in the iPhone 16e last month. Then, also on December 6, in a separate report headlined “Apple Explores Macs, Headsets With Built-In Cellular Data”:

The first modem will also appear in low-end iPads next year, with the 2026 update coming to Pro versions of the iPhone and iPad.

The cellular models of the new 11th generation iPads announced yesterday do not, it turns out, use the C1. The specs don’t match those of the iPhone 16e, and when I asked an Apple representative, they confirmed that none of the new iPads (including the Airs) use the C1 modem. (But, Apple reassured me, they all offer terrific cellular networking.)

I’m not saying Gurman was wrong, because there are nine full months left in 2025 for Apple to release a 12th-generation low-end iPad with the C1. The previous (10th) generation came out in October 2022, but the 9th generation came in September 2021, just 13 months prior. And this week’s new M3 iPad Airs replaced M2 models that arrived just 10 months ago. But, you know, it sure seems doubtful Apple is going to rev this hardware in 2025, so I’ll place my bet that he was wrong about this too.

(And yes, a Bloomberg Terminal subscription really does start at $32,000/year per seat.)

Mark Gurman, Ace Reporter, on the New Regular iPads 

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg, on January 12:

The new entry-level iPads — J481 and J482 — will get faster processors and Apple Intelligence. The current models have the A14 chip and 4 gigabytes of memory. Look for the new versions to have the A17 Pro chip, matching the iPad mini, and a bump to 8 gigabytes of memory. That’s the minimum needed to support the new AI platform.

The new iPads sport the A16 chip and thus do not support Apple Intelligence. But who cares about little details like that when you know the codenames, which is what really matters.

I’ll bet what happened is that Gurman was right, and the new iPads were set to use the A17 Pro chip and support Apple Intelligence. But after Gurman spoiled it seven weeks ago, Apple scrapped those plans and changed the chips to the A16 just to spite him.

Tapbots Releases Ivory 2.3 — and Announces That Phoenix, a Bluesky Client, Is Coming 

Tapbots:

v2.3 is now available on the App Store for Mac and iOS/iPadOS! What’s new?

  • Grouped Notifications (Mention and Notification tabs are now merged)
  • Support for AlphaNumeric Post IDs (Can now log into more services like GoToSocial)
  • Accessibility Improvements
  • Bug Fixes

I don’t like grouped notifications, but I’ve got nothing to complain about, because there’s a simple toggle at the top to just show mentions. Perfect.

The big news from Tapbots, though, is the announcement of Phoenix, a dedicated client for Bluesky:

Why two different clients? Why not one that supports both?

While there may be some conveniences of an app that supports multiple social media protocols, we believe the experience will be much better overall if we keep them separate. We do plan to provide a way to cross-post between them so you don’t have to write duplicate posts.

Hear hear to that.

Your Source for Scoops Half a Day Before They’re Announced Publicly 

Mark Gurman, yesterday at noon ET:

It’s not an “Air” — but the new Mac Studio, codenamed J575, appears to be imminent. It could be announced as early as this week along with the new MacBook Airs. There are signs these will come with an M4 Max but that its new Ultra chip will actually be an M3 Ultra.

Quite the scoop breaking this news after Apple started briefing media about it under NDA yesterday.

He’s not fooling anyone by dropping the J575 codename (which Apple would never include in a media briefing). That’s a bit of ham-fisted misdirection to make it seem like his source for this came from a product-aware source inside Apple, when in fact he almost certainly got it from someone in the media yesterday. (Codenames in and of themselves aren’t much of a secret inside Apple. That’s one reason they keep them so boring: letter-digit-digit-digit, usually.)

Apple conducted virtual media briefings yesterday for the iPad (M3 iPad Airs and A16 regular iPads) and Mac (M4 MacBook Airs and M4 Max/M3 Ultra Mac Studios). Apple announced the new iPads on Apple Newsroom yesterday morning at 9:00am ET, before those media briefings took place — the briefings were a recap of the announced news. Apple announced the new Macs today at 9:00am ET, after yesterday’s media briefings, which were under embargo until this morning. If you think it’s a coincidence that Gurman dropped zero last-minute tidbits about the new iPads (which were not briefed to the press ahead of time), but did drop the surprise M3 Ultra Mac Studio news (which was briefed, under embargo, ahead of time), I have a bridge to sell you.

He did the same thing with the VisionOS 2.4 news (Apple Intelligence, the new Spatial Gallery app, guest mode improvements). Apple held media briefings to share this news on Friday 14 February, under the condition that it was embargoed until the VisionOS 2.4 beta dropped the next week. But Gurman ran a report at Bloomberg with the embargoed info on Saturday 15 February. The only stuff he’s right about lately is what he gets from someone (or someones?) in the media leaking him embargoed info. It’s not going to take Sherlock Holmes for Apple to figure this out, especially when most of the Mac briefings yesterday were later in the day, after Gurman’s tweets. I’d put even money on him burning his source yesterday.

Tuesday, 4 March 2025

Trump 2.0 Is More Idiocracy Than Kakistocracy 

Ron Filipkowski:

Trump’s Sec of Agriculture Brooke Rollins says the solution to high egg prices for Americans is to get some chickens and raise them in your backyard.

No exaggeration. She’s selling the idea of everyone raising chickens in their back yards as “awesome”, with a laugh and a smile. And then the Fox News host (Rachel Campos-Duffy — wife of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — this whole world is comprised of socially-inbred reality-TV has-beens), smiling and laughing, concludes with “I think everyone who isn’t a farmer right now wants to be, so you’re in the right department, Brooke!”

This is a cult. No sense of “Hey, maybe this egg situation wasn’t so simple. Maybe this blowhard president isn’t going to solve the bird flu and halt inflation on day one...” — as they check their calendar and see that we’re already up to day 43 and their supermarket hasn’t had any eggs, at any price, in a week. No, instead, they’ve decided the answer is that all good-thinking Americans now happily want to be chicken farmers.

Next month: the fun of home dentistry.

Taska Is Now Part of Leitmotif (Developers of Kaleidoscope) 

Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac:

Leitmotif, the team behind the awesome diff and merge Mac app Kaleidoscope, is expanding its portfolio of native Mac apps for developers. The company has acquired Taska, a native Mac app that serves as a frontend for web services like GitHub and GitLab. [...] To celebrate its release of Taska 1.3, Leitmotif is discounting its apps by 50% for a limited time.

When Taska debuted last year, its original developers (Made by Windmill) sponsored DF for the week to promote it (the app was briefly named Sonar, before some sort of legal contretemps prompted a change), and thanking them, I wrote:

Taska combines the lightweight UI of a to-do app with the power of enterprise-level issue tracking, all in a native app built by long-time Mac nerds. The interface is deceptively simple, and very intuitive. Fast and fluid too. Everything that’s great about native Mac apps is exemplified by Taska. If you’ve ever thought, “Man, if only Apple made a native GitHub client...”, you should run, not walk, to download it.

Taska saves all your changes directly to GitHub/GitLab using their official APIs, so your data remains secure on GitHub’s servers — not Taska’s. Do you have team members not using Taska? No problem. Changes you make in Taska are 100% compatible with the web UI.

Leitmotif’s Kaleidoscope is a longtime stalwart in any Mac nerd’s toolbox. I can’t think of a better sibling to an app like Taska. (A few weeks ago I ran into a gnarly syncing glitch with a long log file, where there wasn’t just an old version and new one, but two different “new” versions from two different machines. Kaleidoscope got me out of that jam, no sweat.)

‘When Your Last Name Is Null, Nothing Works’ 

Funny piece — if your surname isn’t “Null” — by Oyin Adedoyin for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it, he joked to himself.

In 2018 he paid a $35 parking ticket. Soon afterward, he said, his mailbox was flooded with hundreds of traffic tickets for incidents he hadn’t been involved in. Tickets were from other counties and cities for vehicles of different colors, makes and models. A database had associated the word “null” with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles.

Brings to mind the classic “Little Bobby Tables” from XKCD.

‘Money Job’ 

Ben Stiller, in a delightful piece for The New York Times on working up the gumption to tell Gene Hackman — with whom he was working in Wes Anderson’s excellent The Royal Tenenbaums, his favorite Hackman movie:

“ … but I have to say for me, there is one movie you made that means so much to me. It might sound crazy, but I think it’s the reason I wanted to make movies. It’s ‘The Poseidon Adventure.’ It literally was my favorite movie when it came out. I think I was 7 or something and I went to see it in the theater about 10 times, then watched it repeatedly whenever it was on TV. It was so formative, and you were so good in it, and it just for me was my favorite movie for so long because of the excitement of that incredible score and those actors and the action and just all of it. It really changed my life and just … made me want to make movies.”

He smiled a little. He looked forward, thinking, perhaps about the movie, as if it hadn’t crossed his mind for a long time. Then he grinned and said:

“Money job.”

I can hear those words in Hackman’s voice. And I can see the grin.

Apple Updates iPad Air (M2→M3) and Regular iPad (A14→A16), and Revamps Magic Keyboard for iPad Air 

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

The most consequential part of the Air’s update — perhaps the only real update — is the M3 processor, which brings with it GPU-based capabilities like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and video encoding and decoding for ProRes and ProRes RAW.

Otherwise, the Air is basically unchanged: it comes in 11-inch and 13-inch versions, features the same cameras, battery life, the exact same dimensions, and the same accessory compatibility as its M2-based predecessor. It even comes in the same colors — Space Gray, Blue, Purple, and Starlight — at the same prices starting at $599.

A true speed-bump update — no big whoop, but it’s good for the platform for devices to get regular speed-bump updates in between major new revisions. The previous M2 iPad Air models only came out in May of last year, alongside the M4 iPad Pro models. Just like those M2 iPad Air models, these new M3 iPad Airs have 9-core GPUs. The current (not for long?) M3 MacBook Airs are offered with 8- and 10-core GPUs. I presume these 9-core M3 chips used for the iPad Air are binned chips that didn’t have 10 good GPU cores?

The new Magic Keyboard for Air is interesting in that it seems to meld parts of the older Magic Keyboard with the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro last May. While the new Magic Keyboard includes a function row and a larger trackpad like its Pro compatriot, it lacks haptics in the trackpad and backlit keys, and it seems to be built on the same design of the original silicone exterior instead of the new aluminum-based model. But you get some cost savings for that: it’s just $269 instead of $299. Also, it only comes in white — black keyboards are for pros, I guess.

$269 feels like a crummy deal. The new-from-last-year $299 Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, with an aluminum top, feels way more than $30 better than the old-style silicone-covered ones like this new Magic Keyboard for iPad Air. It kind of feels like a design failure of some sort that these new iPad Airs can’t use the same Magic Keyboards as the iPad Pros of the same size.

The base iPad’s update is perhaps somewhat more disappointing, as that model was introduced in 2022 and its A16 processor will make it one of the few current main-line Apple devices — perhaps only — not to support Apple Intelligence.

The recently updated iPad Mini (October) has an A17 Pro chip, and thus supports Apple Intelligence. But the iPad Mini starts at $500, and the regular iPad still starts at just $350. The just-plain iPad is really the only “budget” device that Apple makes. There are no iPhone or Mac models in that price range.

Apple Hasn’t Updated Its US Government Transparency Report Since June 2023, 20 Months Ago 

Apple:

Apple is committed to being transparent about government requests for customer data and how we respond. We publish a Transparency Report twice a year disclosing the number of government requests for customer data Apple receives globally.

Apple’s most recent report for the United States covers January to June 2023. They didn’t always lag this far behind. In November 2021 they issued the report for the second half of 2020, so that report came out 11 months after the period it covered. In September 2023 they issued the report covering January to June 2022, 15 months after the period covered. For all I know, they’ll come out with the report for the second half of 2023 sometime this month, continuing to lag 15 months behind the reporting periods. But if that’s the standard schedule for publishing these reports, they should say so. We should know when to expect them.

I don’t think there’s anything worrisome or fishy going on here, but given the recent brouhaha over the UK’s secret gag order demand for Apple to build a backdoor into iCloud Advanced Data Protection, along with the Biden administration’s shameful downplaying of that demand, it has me looking as much at what Apple doesn’t say about government data demands as what Apple does say about them.

iFixit’s iPhone 16e Teardown 

Elizabeth Chamberlain, writing for iFixit:

But it’s still missing MagSafe, for no obvious reason other than making the phone less appealing to consumers than the rest of the 16 lineup. Wireless charging without the perfect alignment that MagSafe allows is troubling.

I’ve been waiting for iFixit’s teardown to see if removing MagSafe components might help explain the 16e’s physically larger battery. It doesn’t seem to. The 16e battery seems taller, not thicker, and the MagSafe components in an iPhone 15 don’t seem thick or space consuming. But there remains a very obvious reason for its exclusion: cost. The 16e is priced $200 less than a comparable regular 16, so something has to give, and MagSafe, alas, is one of those things.

The 16e did garner a 7/10 repairability score — very high for an Apple product from iFixit. But their party line is that you still shouldn’t buy one, opting instead for a refurbished older iPhone 14. Refurb iPhones are great, and they’re popular for a reason, but it feels like recommending refurb over new is dogma for iFixit at this point. When’s the last time they recommended any new product? For $600 I think it’s hard to beat a new iPhone 16e for current value and future-proofing.

The Free Speech Will Continue Until Trump’s Morale Improves 

President Donald Trump, on his very popular bespoke social network (random capitalization and various typos sic):

All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

  • Trump, both he and his supporters keep claiming, represents the party of free speech. Got it.
  • There are going to be widespread protests against Trump and his policies. Large protests were rampant in his 1.0 administration; they seem almost guaranteed in 2.0. Trump and his cronies feel entitled to act lawlessly and chaotically, with little regard for the law and no regard whatsoever for traditions and norms, while expecting those who disagree with them to keep quiet and, I don’t know, just watch? It doesn’t work that way. Chaos begets chaos. Orderly citizenship stems from orderly leadership.
  • Trump, embarrassed by raucous protests in 2020, asked his defense secretary and military leaders, “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?” Those men said no. Trump doesn’t seem to have any no-men around him this time.
  • Trump is the sort of angry old kook who thinks Norman Fell’s Mr. McCleery was the hero, not the butt of jokes, in The Graduate.
Claim Chowder: October 2022 Rumors Regarding the iPhone 16e (a.k.a. ‘SE 4’) 

Hartley Charlton, writing for MacRumors in October 2022:

The fourth-generation iPhone SE will feature a 6.1-inch LCD display and a “notch” cutout at the top of the display, according to Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) analyst Ross Young.

Good call on the size and notch, but the 16e display is OLED, not LCD. Overall, though, I’ll award Young a Being Right Point for this call from 2022.

Moving to an all-screen design, there will no longer be space for a capacitive Touch ID Home button in the device’s bottom bezel. Multiple reports, including information from MyDrivers and Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggest that Apple is planning to add a Touch ID Side button to the iPhone SE, much like the iPad Air and iPad mini.

Real shocker there that Kuo and the fabulists at “MyDrivers” were wrong on that. If you follow Charlton’s link on Kuo’s name above, it points to this 2019 report wherein Kuo reported that Apple was planning a 2021 iPhone that would have neither a Lightning nor USB-C port “and provide the completely wireless experience”.

Monday, 3 March 2025

Framous 1.0 

Chance Miller, writing last week at 9to5Mac:

Dark Noise developer Charlie Chapman is out with a new Mac utility called “Framous.” The app aims to be the best way to add device frames to screenshots. [...]

Here are the ways Framous aims to streamline this process:

  • Auto-detect your device based on your screenshot to pick the right frame from a growing library of devices
  • Combine multiple devices into a single image, or bulk export multiple separate images at once
  • Quick customization options to change frame colors and more
  • Automate your screenshot framing with Shortcuts support for even more efficient workflows

There are a bunch of ways you can add device frames to screenshots like this, but none as clever, fast, and easy as Framous. I love it. So many little details. You can just drop a screenshot in and copy a framed version out with zero fuss, but there are also all sorts of tweaks and adjustments you can make, right down to choosing which shade of titanium to color your specific iPhone Pro model. Chapman has a great 20-minute walkthrough video showing all of Framous’s features, and he posted a bunch of shorter videos showcasing specific features to Mastodon. I was sold after watching just one of these.

Framous is completely free to use with nice-looking generic device frames, and a $20 one-time purchase to unlock the exquisitely-detailed “real” frames covering all devices through the end of 2025. Or, a $10/year subscription to keep up to date with future device frames. Available at the Mac App Store.

Why Can’t We Screenshot Frames From DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices?

Saturday, 1 March 2025

Nora Deligter, writing for Screen Slate in June 2023, “Elegy for the Screenshot”:

About five years ago, Catherine Pearson started taking screenshots of every bouquet featured on The Nanny (1993–1999), the six-season CBS sitcom that was then streaming on Netflix. She was just becoming a florist, and she found the arrangements — ornate, colorful, and distinctly tropical — inspirational. She now keeps them in a folder on her desktop, alongside screenshots of flower arrangements featured on Poirot (1989–2013), the British detective drama. A few months ago, however, Pearson suddenly found that when her fingers danced instinctively toward Command-Shift-3, she was greeted by a black box where her flowers used to be, a censored version of what she had meant to capture.

It was around this time when streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel imposed a quiet embargo on the screenshot. At first, there were workarounds: users could continue to screenshot by using the browser Brave or by downloading extensions or third-party tools like Fireshot. But gradually, the digital-rights-management tech adapted and became more sophisticated. Today, it is nearly impossible to take a screenshot from the most popular streaming services, at least not on a Macintosh computer. [...]

For PC users, this story takes a different, and happier, turn. With the use of Snipping Tool — a utility exclusive to Microsoft Windows, users are free to screen grab content from all streaming platforms. This seems like a pointed oversight, a choice on the part of streamers to exclude Mac users (though they make up a tiny fraction of the market) because of their assumed cultural class. This assumption isn’t unreasonable. Out of everyone interviewed for this article, only one of them was a PC user.

Deligter’s essay has been sitting in my long (and ever-growing) list of things to link to ever since she published it back in 2023. I referenced it in my post earlier today re: Matthew Green’s entreaty to Apple to add “disappearing messages” to iMessage, and re-reading it made me annoyed enough to finally write about it.

I’m not entirely sure what the technical answer to this is, but on MacOS, it seemingly involves the GPU and video decoding hardware. These DRM blackouts happen at such a low level that no high-level software — any sort of utility you might install — can route around them. I think Windows still offers easy screenshotting of frames from DRM video not because the streaming services somehow don’t care about what Windows users do (which, when you think about it, would be a weird thing not to care about, given Windows’s market share), but because Windows uses a less sophisticated imaging pipeline. Or perhaps rather than less sophisticated, it’s more accurate to say less integrated. These DRM blackouts on Apple devices (you can’t capture screenshots from DRM video on iPhones or iPads either) are enabled through the deep integration between the OS and the hardware, thus enabling the blackouts to be imposed at the hardware level. And I don’t think the streaming services opt into this screenshot prohibition other than by “protecting” their video with DRM in the first place. If a video is DRM-protected, you can’t screenshot it; if it’s not, you can.

On the Mac, it used to be the case that DRM video was blacked-out from screen capture in Safari, but not in Chrome (or the dozens of various Chromium-derived browsers). But at some point a few years back, you stopped being able to capture screenshots from DRM videos in Chrome, too — by default. But in Chrome’s Settings page, under System, if you disable “Use graphics acceleration when available” and relaunch Chrome, boom, you can screenshot everything in a Chrome window, including DRM video. You can go to the magic URL chrome://gpu/ before and after toggling this setting to see a full report on the differences — as you’d expect, it turns off all hardware acceleration for video encoding/decoding, compositing, and more. You wouldn’t want to browse like this all the time (certainly not on battery power), but it’s a great trick to know for capturing stills from videos.

What I don’t understand is why Apple bothered supporting this in the first place for hardware-accelerated video (which is all video on iOS platforms — there is no workaround like using Chrome with hardware acceleration disabled on iPhone or iPad). No one is going to create bootleg copies of DRM-protected video one screenshotted still frame at a time — and even if they tried, they’d be capturing only the images, not the sound. And it’s not like this “feature” in MacOS and iOS has put an end to bootlegging DRM-protected video content. This “feature” accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they’re watching.