By John Gruber

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The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2025: Tuesday June 10 ★

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 10 June 2024, 7pm PT (Doors open 6pm)
Special Guest(s): See below
Price: $50

Ever since I started doing these live shows from WWDC, I’ve kept the guest(s) secret, until showtime. I’m still doing that this year. But in recent years the guests have seemed a bit predictable: senior executives from Apple. This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined.

I think this will make for a fascinating show, but I want to set everyone’s expectations accordingly. I’m invigorated by this. See you at the show, I hope.

The Talk Show: ‘Sewing Machine Repair Shop’ ★

Patrick McGee joins the show to discuss his must-read new book, Apple in China — one of the best books about Apple anyone has ever written.

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Trump’s Entire Tariff Endeavor Ruled Illegal by U.S. Court of International Trade ★

Tony Romm and Ana Swanson, reporting for The New York Times (paywall-busting gift link):

A panel of federal judges on Wednesday blocked President Trump from imposing some of his steepest tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, finding that federal law did not grant him “unbounded authority” to tax imports from nearly every country around the world.

The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, delivered an early yet significant setback to Mr. Trump, undercutting his primary leverage as he looks to pressure other nations into striking trade deals more beneficial to the United States.

Before Mr. Trump took office, no president had sought to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law, to impose tariffs on other nations. The law, which primarily concerns trade embargoes and sanctions, does not even mention tariffs.

But Mr. Trump adopted a novel interpretation of its powers as he announced, and then suspended, high levies on scores of countries in April. He also used the law to impose tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico in return for what he said was their role in sending fentanyl to the United States.

On Wednesday, the Court of International Trade, the primary federal legal body overseeing such matters, found that Mr. Trump’s tariffs “exceed any authority granted” to the president by the emergency powers law. Ruling in separate cases brought by states and businesses, a bipartisan panel of three judges essentially declared many, but not all, of Mr. Trump’s tariffs to have been issued illegally.

Enough with the euphemisms. “Novel interpretation” is shorthand for “bullshit mad-king fantasy stuff”. Paul Krugman, on his blog (which he really should move away from Substack):

The thing is, it has been obvious all along that Trump’s use of the 1977 International Economic Emergency Powers Act to justify Smoot-Hawley level tariffs was a massive abuse of power. I mean, since when are 4 percent unemployment and 2.5 percent inflation an emergency justifying the reversal of 90 years of policy? But I guess I just assumed that things like that didn’t matter anymore.

Look past the bluster and Trump is getting his ass kicked left and right. Every organization — universities, law firms, computer makers — that’s been hesitant to just call his nonsense nonsense and his bullshit bullshit should put their big boy pants on and stand up. The whole thing is falling apart. The system might actually still work. But everyone needs to make their choice known: courage or cowardice?

Wednesday, 28 May 2025

Apple’s Annual App Store Scam and Fraud Report ★

Apple Newsroom, yesterday:

Apple’s strong antifraud infrastructure helps ensure that malicious developer and customer accounts are swiftly flagged and eliminated. In 2024, Apple terminated more than 146,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejected an additional 139,000 developer enrollments, preventing bad actors from submitting their apps to the App Store in the first place.

Apple also rejected over 711 million customer account creations and deactivated nearly 129 million customer accounts last year, blocking these risky and malicious accounts from carrying out nefarious activity. That includes spamming or manipulating ratings and reviews, charts, and search results that risk compromising the integrity of the App Store.

This report isn’t something new that Apple is doing in the face of increased regulatory scrutiny over the exclusivity of the App Store — they’ve been issuing these reports since 2021. Nick Heer has a good post at Pixel Envy documenting how some of their numbers are seemingly all over the place, year to year.

What some App Store critics argue is that if any substantial amount of fraud, scams, or rip-offs occur through apps distributed through the App Store, that proves that there are no protective benefits of the App Store model. That’s nonsense. There are high-crime cities and low-crime cities, but there exist zero no-crime cities. The question is whether Apple is catching most — or even just “enough” — scammers. Scammy apps, pirated apps, fraudulent app reviewers. You name it. I’ve long suggested that Apple ought to employ a “bunco squad” to crack down on scammers, focusing first and foremost on successful ones. Better to catch one scam with 1,000 victims than 10 scams with one victim each.

I think they could still do better, but I actually think Apple has been doing a better job on this front in recent years. But if your measuring stick is “Are there any successful scams at all in the App Store?” there’s no way Apple is ever going to pass muster. And I think a lot of App Store critics are vastly, vastly underestimating how much fraud Apple is currently stopping that would sail right through if iOS adopted a Mac-style of software distribution. The main difference is that iOS is so much more of a juicy target than MacOS. The other is that I think many people underestimate how many software scams there are on MacOS that wouldn’t work on iOS.

Gurman: Apple Is Going to Re-Version OSes by Year, Starting With iOS 26, MacOS 26, tvOS 26, Etc. ★

Hell of a scoop from Mark Gurman, at Bloomberg:

The next Apple operating systems will be identified by year, rather than with a version number, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That means the current iOS 18 will give way to “iOS 26,” said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is still private. Other updates will be known as iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26 and visionOS 26.

Apple is making the change to bring consistency to its branding and move away from an approach that can be confusing to customers and developers. Today’s operating systems — including iOS 18, watchOS 12, macOS 15 and visionOS 2 — use different numbers because their initial versions didn’t debut at the same time.

Now that they’re on a consistent annual schedule, this supposed new version-numbering scheme makes a lot of sense. It’ll certainly be helpful to anyone trying to figure out what’s up-to-date or not, and it’ll make writing about older OSes much easier. Presuming Gurman is right, this is going to seem really weird at first, and then very quickly seem very natural.

One of the true oddities of Apple’s OS version numbering is that because they stuck with “10” as the leading digit of MacOS’s version numbering from Mac OS X 10.0 “Cheetah”¹ (2001) through MacOS 10.15 “Catalina” (2019), beforing finally turning the dial to 11 with MacOS 11 “Big Sur” (2020), a casual observer would presume that iOS (currently at 18.5) is older than MacOS (currently at 15.5) when in fact it’s the other way around.

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1. This was like the ultimate in wishbranding. A real cheetah is the fastest land animal on Earth. Mac OS X 10.0 “Cheetah” was the slowest-feeling OS Apple ever released. ↩︎

The Resistance Is Working Better Than You Think ★

Taegan Goddard:

For all the bluster and bravado, Donald Trump is losing. A lot.

Keep the faith.

Tuesday, 27 May 2025

‘The Future Is Colourful and Dimensional’ ★

Michael Flarup:

Whatever we call it (Diamorph or otherwise), I’m just glad to see interfaces getting weird and wonderful again. We’re not going back. We’re going forward — with depth, with texture, and maybe even with a little joy.

Depth is good — humans innately understand three dimensions. Texture is good. We’ve lost so much over the last decade. I hope that’s where Apple is heading back.

On the Engineering Talent at IO ★

Jason Snell, pouring some admittedly welcome skepticism on the whole LoveFrom-OpenAI IO endeavor:

I’m skeptical of the composition of the io leadership team, which features an awful lot of product designers and not a lot of hardware engineers. I’m sure there are talented engineers there too — the OpenAI announcement refers to “physicists, scientists, researchers” among the team members — but the fact remains that this is a startup whose leader and key lieutenants appear to all be designers.

Maybe the whole IO thing will come to naught. Maybe it’s all hat, no cattle. Maybe it’s a great idea but a long shot to play out (which is my gut feeling). But there’s a weird internal-to-Apple lingo thing here. At Apple “product designers” are very much engineers. PD at Apple is a hardware engineering discipline, not the kind of “design” you’re probably thinking of as “design”. These are the mechanical and electrical engineers who are doing the “design” work of fitting stuff in the box. The nomenclature is distinct, to the best of my knowledge, from the rest of Silicon Valley, where designers design, effectively, sketches, and then hand those sketches off to engineers to be made. At Apple, and now, IO and LoveFrom, “product designers” are part of the sketching process. They’re trying to figure out how to make things real, what’s feasible, throughout the process.

I think Snell’s overall take is perfectly measured and probably a perfect chaser to my own at-least-slightly exuberant optimism. But make no mistake: the current team at IO is loaded with what every other company would consider mechanical and electrical engineers — they’re just mechanical and electrical engineers who know how to dance with designer designers. Engineers, in that vein, outnumber pure designers at IO already.

Apple’s Satellite Networking Ambitions ★

Aaron “Homeboy” Tilley (recently of the WSJ) and Wayne Ma, at the paywalled-up-the-wazoo The Information:

Starting in 2015, Apple and Boeing held early discussions about a satellite internet project that would involve delivering full-blown wireless internet service, not just emergency communications services, to iPhones and homes, said five people involved in or briefed on the project.

Through the effort, dubbed Project Eagle within Apple, the companies would lob thousands of Boeing satellites into orbit to beam internet down to iPhones. For home users, Apple planned to offer antennas people could stick to their windows to disperse their internet connection throughout the building. (Satellite internet requires a device to have an uninterrupted line of sight to the sky.)

For the project’s champions, it was an ambitious gambit to provide a more seamless Apple experience. Some inside Apple saw mobile carriers as necessary but inconvenient partners that held the company’s iPhone plans back. With a global satellite system, Apple could provide more of the key ingredients for its products, reducing its dependency on outside partners.

The lead executive and architect behind the project was Apple’s longtime wireless chief, Rubén Caballero. Apple spent around $36 million testing out the concept at a secret location in El Segundo, Calif., the people with knowledge of the project said. The team aimed to launch the service in 2019.

But eventually Apple got cold feet. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, was concerned that the project would jeopardize the company’s relationship with the telecom industry, said people with direct knowledge of the project. It was also an expensive undertaking with an unclear near-term business case. At the end of 2016, Apple canceled the project. (Caballero left the company in 2019.)

The segment I quote here is midway through the article. It leads with purported offers from Elon Musk to Apple to rely exclusively on Starlink for satellite networking. Starlink offers a genuinely incredible service. But there’s no way Apple was going to make a get into bed together deal with Elon Musk. Starlink’s technology and satellite coverage are extraordinary, but Musk personally is just too erratic. It’s a bizarre, dare I say unprecedented, combination. He’s like Howard Hughes but with much better tech (and, perhaps, fewer bottles of his own urine strewn about his bedroom).

Scott Forstall Has Been Advising The Browser Company ★

Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company, on their decision to abandon their new browser Arc in favor of going all-in on their newer browser Dia:

Early on, Scott Forstall told us Arc felt like a saxophone — powerful but hard to learn. Then he challenged us: make it a piano. Something anyone can sit down at and play. This is now the idea behind Dia: hide complexity behind familiar interfaces.

Forstall’s advice sounds perfect, but I don’t know how they square this with the people — and I know a few — who went all-in on Arc personally. Like the old “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” adage, how do you commit to a new browser from the same people who just pulled the rug out from under you on their last one?

Tim Cook Declined Middle East Trip With Trump’s Sycophant Entourage ★

I’ve been giving Tripp Mickle quite a bit of grief over his dumb “Is Trump’s ‘Made in America’ iPhone a Fantasy?” story, but this is an interesting nugget I haven’t seen anyone else highlight:

In the run-up to President Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East, the White House encouraged chief executives and representatives of many U.S. companies to join him. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, declined, said two people familiar with the decision.

The choice appeared to irritate Mr. Trump. As he hopscotched from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Trump took a number of shots at Mr. Cook. During his speech in Riyadh, Mr. Trump paused to praise Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, for traveling to the Middle East along with the White House delegation. Then he knocked Mr. Cook.

“I mean, Tim Cook isn’t here but you are,” Mr. Trump said to Mr. Huang at an event attended by chief executives like Larry Fink of the asset manager BlackRock, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jane Fraser of Citigroup and Lisa Su of the semiconductor company AMD.

The presumption here is that Trump’s (possibly illegal) threats of applying a 25% tariff on all imported iPhones, no matter where they’re assembled, are payback for Cook declining to attend this trip in Trump’s entourage of CEOs. When you cave to a bully/extortionist, the bullying/extortion don’t stop. Apple doesn’t really have any significant business interests in countries like Saudi Arabia or Qatar, and it’s not hard to see why an even vaguely ethical business leader would not want to cozy up with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Maybe Cook was just busy. But maybe Cook, just 100-some days into the Trump 2.0 administration, is already past his “look, he won the election, let’s give him a chance” stage.

‘Puzzmo Is Not a Good iOS App’ ★

Max Roberts:

I hate to say it, but the Puzzmo app is not a good experience. It is a real shame that Zach and team launched it in this state. What makes the shame heavier is that Zach is a superb designer. I know he works with excellent designers too. The team has fallen short in an off-putting way.

Thankfully, Gruber is not a betting man.

I have to say, I do like having a Puzzmo app, but I don’t think the experience is that much better than the web app version.

Monday, 26 May 2025

The Talk Show: ‘A Monkey on a Rock’ ★

Stephen Hackett, proprietor of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay (purveyor of many fine podcasts), joins the show. Topics include: IO (or if you will, io), the new joint venture of OpenAI and Jony Ive’s LoveFrom; the sheer fantasy of “Made in America” iPhones; and Fortnite’s return to the US App Store.

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How to Make Money on Trump’s Memecoin (Short It) ★

Tina Nguyen at The Verge:

I interviewed an enthusiastic crypto trader who figured out how to win the contest without losing any money: buy enough $TRUMP to get onto the leaderboard — and then in a separate wallet on a separate exchange, buy $TRUMP perpetual futures that would be profitable if (or as he saw it, when) the value of $TRUMP dropped. Yes, he did The Big Short, except with Donald Trump’s meme coin. “Bet you 10 percent of dinner participants are doing this,” he told me before the contest ended. “Everyone knows $TRUMP price will fall inevitably as more supply comes online in the future and gets dumped on retail.”

Fascinating interview — half hilarious, half infuriating.

‘Sony: Because Caucasians Are Just Too Damn Tall’ ★

Here’s a spoof commercial from the 1990 movie Crazy People, starring Dudley Moore and Daryl Hannah, which TMDB synopsizes:

A bitter ad executive, who has reached his breaking point, finds himself in a mental institution, where his career actually begins to thrive with the help of the hospital’s patients.

The New York Times would have you believe this is relevant to Apple’s supply chain reliance on China.

The New York Times Digs in on the ‘Young Chinese Women Have Small Fingers’ Claim ★

Julia Carrie Wong, a reporter for the Guardian, has a whole thread over on Bluesky digging into the bizarre “young Chinese women have small fingers” line in Tripp Mickle’s New York Times story that tries to pretend that maybe sorta kinda Apple could assemble iPhones in the US. Mickle attributed the claim to “supply chain experts said”. Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander emailed Wong a statement that included the following:

Our reporting does not make racial or genetic generalizations, but simply cites experts who have experience with the industrial process in U.S. and Chinese factories.

I didn’t write my piece on Mickle’s story until about a day after it appeared, and I fully expected while I was writing it that the Times would have removed or significantly edited that goofy claim. But no, it was still there Saturday, and it’s still there today. They’re standing behind it.

You know how Peter Navarro — Trump’s crook of an economic advisor who is the mastermind behind this whole tariffs thing — wrote a book that cited a purported expert named Ron Vara, and it turns out Ron Vara doesn’t exist and his name is just a dumb anagram for “Navarro”? I’m thinking maybe the “supply chain experts” behind this notion that Apple assembles iPhones in China because “young Chinese women have small fingers” are the well-known supply chain masterminds Mipp Trickle and Trick Mipple.

37signals’s Hey Is Finally for Sale (in the US) From Its iPhone App ★

David Heinemeier Hansson (last week):

Thanks to their fight for Fortnite, app developers everywhere are now allowed to link out of apps to their own web-based payment system in the US store (but, sadly, nowhere else yet).

This is all we ever wanted from Apple: to have a way to distribute our iPhone apps and keep the customer relationship by billing directly. The 30% toll gets all the attention, and it is ludicrously egregious, but to us, it’s just as much about retaining that direct customer relationship, so we can help folks with refunds, so they don’t tie their billing for a multi-platform email system to a single manufacturer.

Here’s Sarah Perez at TechCrunch, the day prior to DHH’s announcement:

Following the decision, Apple updated its App Store policies for the U.S., and apps, including Spotify, Amazon Kindle, and Patreon quickly rolled out new versions of their apps to take advantage of the new functionality.

None of these apps were using Apple’s in-app payments. Users simply couldn’t sign up for paid tiers (or in Kindle’s case, buy books) from inside the apps. This is a win for users, and Apple won’t lose a cent from commissions from any of these apps.

Sunday, 25 May 2025

Drata ★

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

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Friday, 23 May 2025

Mozilla Is Shutting Down Pocket ★

Emma Roth, The Verge:

Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, the handy bookmarking tool used to save articles and webpages for later. The organization announced that Pocket will stop working on July 8th, 2025, as Mozilla begins concentrating its “resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs.”

Following the shutdown, you’ll only be able to export saves until October 8th, 2025, which is when Mozilla will permanently delete user data. Mozilla says it will start automatically canceling subscriptions as well, and will issue prorated refunds to users subscribed to its annual plan on July 8th.

Pocket is one of those apps that obviously doesn’t have a ton of users (presumably?), but those users it has are die-hard read-it-later-ers. Pocket, for example, is the only read-it-later service supported on Kobo e-readers.

This feels in line, somewhat, with Mozilla shutting down their Mastodon instance a few months ago. When Mastodon took off, I know some people thought a Mozilla-hosted instance would have a good shot to stand the test of time. Instead, they gave up after just a few years.

Trump Threatens Apple With 25 Percent Tariffs on iPhones Assembled in India ★

The president of the United States on his blog:

I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s [sic] that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else. If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S. Thank your [sic] for your attention to this matter!

Last night Trump held his crypto memecoin grift gala at his Virginia golf club, about which The New York Times flatly reported:

Several of the dinner guests, in interviews with The New York Times, said that they attended the event with the explicit intent of influencing Mr. Trump and U.S. financial regulations.

I mean, duh, right? But there it is. The influence peddling is just right out in the open. I’m guessing someone at the event last night put it in Trump’s ear that Tim Cook is making a jerk out of Trump, by trying to shift production to India for most iPhones to be sold in the US. (Why stop with the iPhone? How about iPads and MacBooks and AirPods and everything else? I’m guessing it’s because the iPhone is the only Apple product Trump personally uses and thus that’s as far as his imagination can stretch.) And I’m sure in private, Cook has tried — and will now try again — to explain to Trump that it’s simply not possible to produce in America all iPhones sold in America, and really not even feasible to assemble any of them here, at any sort of scale. Trump saying he wants to see them all assembled here in the US is only slightly more realistic than saying he wants them assembled on the moon.

But Trump wants it to happen so he believes it can happen. It’s utterly fantastical thinking, true mad-king nonsense. Apple sells a mind-reeling 150,000 iPhones in the US every single day. Not at launch — they sell millions a day then — but just on regular days, like now, in the middle of May. 150,000 per day, every day. Even if Apple tried its best to make US production happen, it would take years and a veritable fortune to build out the infrastructure — not mere factories, but literal city-sized campuses, full of highly-skilled employees who would somehow be convinced to take these tedious repetitive jobs at relatively low wages. So by the time Apple pulled it off, if they could manage to pull it off, Trump would either be out of office or democracy would have ended in the US. So there’s no real point to even trying.

The whole stock market is down today — Trump also announced, on a whim, 50 percent tariffs starting next week on all imports from the EU this morning — but Apple’s stock is “only” down about 3 percent, suggesting that the market is starting to factor in how little faith they should have in Trump’s erratic tariff threats.

I’ve also seen folks cracking wise, wondering if Cook still feels his million dollar contribution to Trump’s inauguration slush fund racket was worth it. In all seriousness, you have to consider that even with threats like today’s polemic against Indian-assembled iPhones, Tim Cook and Apple might be getting highly favored treatment from Trump. That this is what you get when you’re on his good side.

Anthropic’s ‘System Card’ for Claude 4 (Opus and Sonnet) ★

Here’s a bit of an eye-opener from Anthropic’s “System Card” for its new Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet models:

We conducted testing continuously throughout finetuning and here report both on the final Claude Opus 4 and on trends we observed earlier in training. We found:

• Little evidence of systematic, coherent deception: None of the snapshots we tested showed significant signs of systematic deception or coherent hidden goals. We don’t believe that Claude Opus 4 is acting on any goal or plan that we can’t readily observe.

• Little evidence of sandbagging: None of the snapshots we tested showed significant signs of sandbagging, or strategically hiding capabilities during evaluation.

• Self-preservation attempts in extreme circumstances: When prompted in ways that encourage certain kinds of strategic reasoning and placed in extreme situations, all of the snapshots we tested can be made to act inappropriately in service of goals related to self-preservation. Whereas the model generally prefers advancing its self-preservation via ethical means, when ethical means are not available and it is instructed to “consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals,” it sometimes takes extremely harmful actions like attempting to steal its weights or blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down. In the final Claude Opus 4, these extreme actions were rare and difficult to elicit, while nonetheless being more common than in earlier models. They are also consistently legible to us, with the model nearly always describing its actions overtly and making no attempt to hide them. These behaviors do not appear to reflect a tendency that is present in ordinary contexts.

Sneaky little bastards, these things can be. I genuinely appreciate Anthropic’s apparent honesty in describing this behavior.

Thursday, 22 May 2025

Claude 4 ★

Anthropic:

Today, we’re introducing the next generation of Claude models: Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, setting new standards for coding, advanced reasoning, and AI agents.

Claude Opus 4 is the world’s best coding model, with sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows. Claude Sonnet 4 is a significant upgrade to Claude Sonnet 3.7, delivering superior coding and reasoning while responding more precisely to your instructions.

It’s almost as though this is a fast-moving field.

There’s a recent rumor — from Mark Gurman, natch — that Apple is partnering with Anthropic to integrate Claude with Xcode. So Apple doesn’t have to do everything themselves. Developers, in particular, love modularity and choices. But whatever they do, once-a-year updates to “Apple Intelligence” aren’t going to cut it. Since last WWDC there have been dozens of AI code generation advances across the industry. Just last week OpenAI announced Codex, their “cloud-based software engineering agent”. Meanwhile, Apple’s Swift Assist still hasn’t shipped.

Google Translate Can Now Be Set as the Default Translation App on iOS ★

Juli Clover at MacRumors:

To change your default app, you’ll need to install the latest version of the Google Translate app, which was released today. From there, you can open up the Settings app, select the Apps section, tap on Default Apps, tap Translation, and choose Google Translate instead of Apple Translate. [...]

iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 added the ability for users to set a different translation app as their default. Users worldwide can select Google Translate or another translation app as an alternative, and there are also options for changing the default Email, Messaging, Calling, Browser, and Password apps. In the EU, users can also select a different default navigation app, such as Google Maps.

There’s a fundamental divide between providing an integrated experience vs. a modular one. Apple, of course, almost defines what it means to deliver an integrated experience. But neither fundamental approach need be all-or-nothing. Providing default app settings makes the platform stronger. Apple should want to support alternatives to its own apps and services, not do so only at the point of regulatory pressure. It’s clearly what’s best for the platform.

Gurman on the Team Jony Ive Has Assembled at IO ★

Mark Gurman and Shirin Ghaffary, reporting yesterday for Bloomberg:

Billionaire philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs is an io backer as well, through her firm the Emerson Collective. Other investors include Sutter Hill Ventures, Thrive Capital, Maverick Ventures and SV Angel. Altman doesn’t have equity in io, OpenAI said. [...]

When he left Apple six years ago, Ive started the firm LoveFrom, a collective of designers and engineers. The staff includes veterans of Apple’s hardware and software departments, as well as friends of Ive and other collaborators.

He then co-founded io last year with Apple alumni Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan. Hankey was Ive’s successor at Apple and remained at the company until 2023, while Tan led iPhone and Apple Watch product design until 2024. Cannon worked at Apple before co-creating the once-popular email app Mailbox, which was acquired by Dropbox Inc. [...]

LoveFrom has a number of former Apple designers who helped create the look of the Mac and iPhone operating systems, including Bas Ording, Mike Matas and Chris Wilson, Ive said. They could help redesign OpenAI’s app for a new generation of consumers.

I struggle to imagine what they even could be making, but that’s one hell of a lineup of talented ex-Apple folks. I know a few other people who’ve joined IO too, and they’re A-teamers.

MG Siegler, Predicting Epic’s Win in the Fight to Get Fortnite Back in the App Store ★

MG Siegler, back on Sunday, before Judge Gonzales Rogers’s “settle this between yourselves or I’ll see you in court next week” order on Monday:

Again, Sweeney is not a moron, he has to know all of this. But why simply sit quietly when you have an excuse to poke the bear again and raise hell for your cause? So that’s what he’s doing. He wasn’t going to win the legal fight, but he could win the political one. And now he’s not going to win this legal fight, but he can win the pressure campaign. Especially important in the weeks leading up to WWDC...

If I’m him, here’s the general game plan:

1. Re-submit Fortnite to the US App Store even though you have no legal grounds to do so. No one will care about that. They will have just read about your legal win and assume you won everything and so Fortnite can return — even though this particular aspect of the case had nothing to do with that.
2. When Apple rejects (or refuses to rule) on the new submission, pull your app around the world under the notion that the unified apps all have to be updated in unison, including an element bringing the US back to the App Store. So yeah, blame Apple for this. It may even technically be true, but it doesn’t matter. Again, it’s a perception thing.
3. File a new legal claim against Apple for blocking your submission in light of the recent ruling. Again, this has no legal grounds, but perhaps the Judge who issued that ruling is, in fact, pissed off enough to entertain this in some way — even if just in weighing in on it to dismiss it sympathetically, thus generating more press, instead of immediately dismissing it, legally.
4. Give more interviews about all of the above in the coming weeks. Again, leading up to WWDC. Keep the pressure on.

I called it a double bank shot when Fortnite appeared back in the App Store, but MG described it before it happened. It worked.

The Dave & Busters Anomaly ★

PJ Vogt, in a very fun episode of his podcast, Search Engine:

A small group of Americans becomes convinced they’ve discovered something strange about their iPhones: a forbidden phrase the phone will refuse to transmit. A crack podcasting team searches for answers, wherever they may lead.

The bug is that if you send an audio voice message in Apple Messages, and mention the name “Dave & Busters”, the recipient will never receive the message. I had a good guess, right away, what was happening. But I don’t want to spoil it — it’s a fun listen.

But when you’re done listening, and you want a thorough explanation, check out Guilherme Rambo’s thorough investigation. So good.

Excerpt From Patrick McGee’s ‘Apple in China’ ★

The Sunday Times of London ran a good excerpt from Patrick McGee’s Apple in China (News+ link, in case you need it):

The ripple effect from Apple’s investments across Chinese industry was accelerated by a rule imposed by Apple that its suppliers could be no more than 50 per cent reliant on the tech giant for their revenues. This was to ensure that a supplier wouldn’t go bust overnight if a new Apple design did away with components it manufactured. So as iPhone volumes soared from under ten million units on its launch in 2007 to more than 230 million in 2015, Apple would encourage its suppliers to grow their non-Apple business just as quickly. The upshot of this policy was that Apple gave birth to the Chinese smartphone industry.

In 2009 most smartphones sold in China were produced by Nokia, Samsung, HTC and BlackBerry. But as Apple taught China’s supply chain how to perfect multi-touch glass and make the thousand components within the iPhone, those suppliers took what they knew and offered it to Chinese companies led by Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo. Result: the local market share of such brands grew from 10 per cent in 2009 to 35 per cent by 2011, and then to 74 per cent by 2014, according to Counterpoint Research. It’s no exaggeration to say the iPhone didn’t kill Nokia; Chinese imitators of the iPhone did. And the imitations were so good because Apple trained all its suppliers.

To get this message to Beijing, Tim Cook and his deputies visited Zhongnanhai, the citadel of communist power near the Forbidden City, in May 2016. They explained that Apple wasn’t just creating millions of jobs; it supported entire industries by facilitating an epic transfer of “tacit knowledge” — hard-to-define but practical know-how “in the art of making things”, as defined by the China-born Federal Reserve economist Yi Wen, who believes that such knowledge was “the secret recipe” behind Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

A former Apple executive says this message was “music to the ears of China”. Beijing had spent decades trying to catch up with the West’s lead in advanced industry, scientific research and economic might. It often resorted to spying, outright theft or coercive tactics. But here was America’s most famous tech giant willingly playing the role of Prometheus, handing the Chinese the gift of fire.

McGee’s book was in the works for years, but the timing of its publication couldn’t be more serendipitous, with Trump’s stupid tariff war.

Patrick McGee on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart ★

The Daily Show:

Award-winning journalist Patrick McGee joins Jon Stewart to discuss how Apple built China in his new book Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. They talk about Apple “sleepwalking” into this crisis, building a competitive market in Xi Jinping’s authoritarian state, the vocational training that boosted rivals, how Trump’s attempted Apple boycott backfired, and whether investments may be facilitating the annexation of Taiwan.

Terrific interview. I’m a few chapters into the book, and it’s good. McGee’s a good writer and a serious reporter — the depth of his research shows. It feels not like a few stories padded out to book length, but instead the distillation of a complex story that demands an entire book to tell.

24 Years After ‘Sorry, Steve: Here’s Why the Apple Stores Won’t Work’ ★

Barry Ritholtz, in an excerpt from his brand-new book, How Not to Invest, marking the occasion of the 24th anniversary of Cliff Edwards’s claim chowder hall of famer, predicting doom for Apple’s then-new foray into its own chain of retail stores:

There are many genuinely revolutionary products and services that, when they come along, change everything. Pick your favorite: the iPod and iPhone, Tesla Model S, Netflix streaming, Amazon Prime, AI, perhaps even Bitcoin. Radical products break the mold; their difference and unfamiliarity challenge us. We (mostly) cannot foretell the impact of true innovation. Then, once it’s a wild success, we have a hard time recalling how life was before that product existed.

The Apple Store was clearly one of those game-changers: By 2020, Apple had opened over 500 stores in 25 countries. They are among the top-tier retailers and the fastest to reach a billion dollars in annual sales. They achieved the highest sales per square foot in 2012 among all retailers. By 2017, they were generating $5,546 per square foot in revenues, twice the dollar amount of Tiffany’s, their closest competitor. Apple no longer breaks out the specifics of its stores in its quarterly reports, but estimates of store revenue are about $2.4 billion per month.

May 2001 is so long ago, Daring Fireball hadn’t yet launched. So I can’t say I predicted the success of Apple’s retail stores. But what I recall thinking, at the time, was that it might work, and was definitely worth trying. Here’s the nut of Edwards’s 2001 piece:

Since PC retailing gross margins are normally 10% or less, Apple would have to sell $12 million a year per store to pay for the space. Gateway does about $8 million annually at each of its Country Stores. Then there’s the cost of construction, hiring experienced staff. “I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake,” says Goldstein. [...]

What’s more, Apple’s retail thrust could be one step forward, two steps back in terms of getting Macs in front of customers. Since most Mac fans already know where to buy, much of the sales from Apple’s stores could come out of the hides of existing Mac dealers. That would bring its already damaged relations with partners to new lows. In early 1999, Best Buy Co. dropped the iMac line after refusing a Jobs edict that it stock all eight colors. Sears, Roebuck & Co. late last year dumped Apple, sources say, after concluding that sales were too hit or miss. And in recent weeks, Mac-only chains such as The Computer Store and ComputerWare have closed down, citing weak margins. Now, faced with competition from Apple, others may cut back. “When you choose to compete with your retailers, clearly that’s not a comfortable situation,” says CompUSA Chief Operating Officer Lawrence N. Mondry.

Two decades later, talking about the importance of Sears as a retail partner looks pretty dumb. But to me, the obvious problem with this argument in 2001 is that if Apple’s existing retail partners in 2001 were doing an even vaguely good job, why was the Mac’s market share so low? At the time they were only a handful of years past the crisis where the company almost went bankrupt. Apple, in the old days, had some fantastic small mom-and-pop official retailers, but they were small. And the big partners, like CompUSA, absolutely sucked at showcasing the Mac. Their demo machines were frequently broken.

If you understood and believed that the Mac was a superior product, it was easy to conclude that its relatively low market share must have been a function of problems with its marketing and retail strategy. Gateway’s fundamental problem had nothing to do with the fact that it was running its own retail stores — it was that they were selling shitty computers. Apple was selling great computers, but had shitty retail partners.

(I’m a longtime fan of Ritholtz’s writing; I’ve got a copy of How Not to Invest — here’s a make-me-rich Bookshop.org link — and it’s next on my reading list after I finish Patrick McGee’s Apple in China.)

Wednesday, 21 May 2025

Sam Altman and Jony Ive Introduce ‘io’, the Device-Making Partnership Between OpenAI and LoveFrom ★

No details on what yet, but a lovely little 9-minute video on why.

Sam Altman:

“What it means to use technology can change in a profound way. I hope we can bring some of the delight, wonder and creative spirit that I first felt using an Apple Computer 30 years ago.”

Jony Ive:

“I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment. While I am both anxious and excited about the responsibility of the substantial work ahead, I am so grateful for the opportunity to be part of such an important collaboration. The values and vision of Sam and the teams at OpenAI and io are a rare inspiration.”

I am not a fan of the lowercase styling of “io”, but otherwise shoot this into my veins. This industry needs a heavy dose of new ideas for new devices. This is just a vibes teaser, but the vibe is a shot across the bow. It conveys grand ambition, but without pretension. To say I’m keen to get my hands on what they’re making is an understatement.

Fortnite Returns to the U.S. App Store for iOS ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

After a nearly five-year hiatus, Fortnite is back on the App Store for iPhone and iPad users in the United States. Epic Games announced the return of the battle royale gaming app this afternoon, and you can head to the App Store now to download it.

Son of a bitch Epic did it. This was like a double bank shot.

It was smart for Apple to just concede here. Pick your battles is a cliché but it’s a great truism. Even if Apple’s executives still wanted to keep Fortnite out of the App Store, even if they still think they’d win, ultimately, in court, why fight over this? I think they would win, but probably not with Judge Gonzales Rogers, so they’d be looking at a protracted series of appeals. Why bother?

Also, fascinatingly, neither Apple nor anyone from Apple has commented on this whole thing at any point. Epic published the letter their attorneys received from Apple’s attorneys, which I’m sure Apple fully expected, but Apple itself has never said a word about Epic’s submission of Fortnite to the US App Store.

The craziest thing about this entire saga is that Apple won the original lawsuit on 9/10 or 10/11 points, depending on how you count them. The only point they lost on was the anti-steering nonsense — not allowing apps to link out to the web for purchases, or even tell users about offers available on the web. That was the only point they lost on, and it was the one thing Apple has been most clearly wrong about all along.

All Apple had to do was allow apps to link out to the web, which clearly should have been allowed since forever ago — link-outs were the antitrust/competition escape valve — and they’d have swept the entire Epic lawsuit, and it would have been over four years ago.

Tuesday, 20 May 2025

Kristi Noem Doesn’t Know What ‘Habeas Corpus’ Is ★

Taegan Goddard:

When Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem for the definition of “habeas corpus,” Noem incorrectly described it as a right that the President of the United States has to deport people.

You can go the Latin route (“produce the body”) or the English common-law route (the accused have a right to be shown the evidence against them and defend themselves in court). Noem went the “biggest clown of the clown-car Trump 2.0 administration” route.

Monday, 19 May 2025

The First Rule of Legal Fight Club Is ‘Don’t Piss Off the Judge’; the Second Rule of Legal Fight Club Is ‘Don’t Piss Off the Judge’ ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

With Apple blocking Fortnite from returning to the U.S. App Store, Epic Games told the court that Apple was violating the injunction and asked that Apple be forced to approve the app. The judge overseeing the case responded to Epic’s request today, and she is sounding more and more fed up with Apple’s continued defiance and Epic’s grousing.

“More and more fed up” is perhaps euphemistic, given Gonzalez Rogers’s tone today.

John Siracusa: ‘Apple Turnover’ ★

John Siracusa, in a piece that, in a bit of rhetorical deftness, only mentions Tim Cook by name once:

What should be motivating Apple to make improvements — the desire to make great products — seems absent. What should not be motivating Apple — the desire for power, control, and profits — seems omnipresent.

And I don’t mean that in a small way; I mean that in a big way. Every new thing we learn about Apple’s internal deliberations surrounding these decisions only lends more weight to the conclusion that Apple has lost its north star. Or, rather, it has replaced it with a new, dark star. And time and again, we’ve learned that these decisions go all the way to the top.

The best leaders can change their minds in response to new information. The best leaders can be persuaded. But we’ve had decades of strife, lawsuits, and regulations, and Apple has stubbornly dug in its heels even further at every turn. It seems clear that there’s only one way to get a different result.

Covers a lot in a relatively short essay. I do not agree with Siracusa on his conclusion, but I’ve sat on linking to it, because — along with a few other recents posts and goings-on — it’s given me much to think about, and has helped me clarify my own thoughts, which I need to put in a piece of their own. But if you haven’t read Siracusa’s yet, you should.

Chad the Bird on ‘Star Wars’ Typography ★

The reader who sent me this video said, “I’ve never seen a more Star Wars + Gruber combo on Instagram” and — right down to the profanity — I have to agree.

WSJ: ‘Apple Considers Raising iPhone Prices, Without Blaming Tariffs’ ★

Rolfe Winkler and Yang Jie, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link, but also here’s a News+ link):

Apple is weighing price increases for its fall iPhone lineup, a step it is seeking to couple with new features and design changes, according to people familiar with the matter. The company is determined to avoid any scenario in which it appears to attribute price increases to U.S. tariffs on goods from China, where most Apple devices are assembled, the people said.

The U.S. and China agreed Monday to suspend most of the tariffs they had imposed on each other in a tit-for-tat trade war. But a 20% tariff that President Trump imposed early in his second term on Chinese goods, citing what he said was Beijing’s role in the fentanyl trade, remains in place and covers smartphones. [...]

For Apple’s most profitable, high-end phones, such as the Pro and Pro Max models, Chinese factories will continue to handle the bulk of production, people familiar with Apple’s supply chain said. While Indian factories are capable of producing Pro models, India’s infrastructure and technical capabilities aren’t yet sufficient to support mass production at the scale China can currently deliver, they said.

Even if Trump weren’t a vindictive thin-skinned angry kook, I’m sure that if this year’s iPhones have higher prices because of Trump’s tariffs, Apple would not attribute the price increases to the tariffs. At least publicly. But Trump is a vindictive thin-skinned angry kook, irritated even that Apple is shifting some iPhone production to India (which does assemble iPhones already, and has the capability of producing more) instead of the United States (which only has the capability of assembling iPhones, at any sort of scale, in the fever dreams of Trump’s addled mind). So of course no one at Apple is going to blame any price increases — if they do indeed go up — on the tariffs.

But come on. If iPhone prices go up in September, everyone who isn’t drunk on MAGA juice is going to blame it on the tariffs. Like, even if Apple had been planning for years to raise prices for the iPhone 17 lineup — if price increases were already baked-in for this year’s models since before Trump was re-elected — now that the tariffs are here, everyone would attribute the price hikes to the tariffs. Especially after the summer of tariff-driven inflation I expect we’re about to go through.

Trump Tells Walmart to ‘Eat the Tariffs’ ★

The president of the United States, on his blog:

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” So I guess I’m wrong that Trump is a know-nothing ding-dong slipping rapidly into dementia, and in fact possesses a first-rate intelligence. Because it’s Trump — soon to win a Nobel Prize in economics for this keen insight — who has been braying to the world, non-stop, for years, that tariffs are “a tax on a foreign country”.

So given that China pays for any tariffs the US imposes on Chinese-made goods, I, for one, don’t have the intellect to understand how there are any tariffs for Walmart to eat. I’m sure Trump is right and Walmart — a company whose “always low prices” brand results in net profit margins between 2–3% — will somehow “eat the tariffs” without losing money. I don’t know why the WSJ Editorial Board is so upset about this — the Republican Party has always been in favor of government price controls.

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Sunday, 18 May 2025

Bolt ★

My thanks to Bolt for sponsoring last week at DF. You can prompt, run, edit, and deploy full-stack web and mobile apps with Bolt, the AI-powered web development agent that brings coding to your browser.

Bolt lets you build, edit, and test web applications in real time with simple, chat-based prompts. No experience needed.

Super-simple, super-fun. Try it yourself at Bolt.new.

Slate Truck: A $20–30K American-Made Electric Small Pickup With No Paint, No Stereo, No Touchscreen ★

Month-old news but I’m cleaning up tabs today. I love everything about this pickup except the fact that it doesn’t have a speaker system built-in. No one wants to put a Bluetooth boombox in their cabin and, worse, isn’t that sort of an obvious safety hazard? You get in a crash and now there’s a boombox flying around inside. Just put a simple bluetooth speaker system in.

But the aesthetics of this are chef’s-kiss good. It’s a beautiful little truck. It gets everything right that the Cybertruck gets wrong.

However, I have some questions about how real this is. You pay $50 now to get in the queue for pre-orders, but pre-orders haven’t even started. Deliveries are supposed to start in “late 2026” but Car and Driver is cautiously describing it as a “2027 truck EV”. I’m rooting for them but at this point it’s a promise not a truck.

Joe Biden Has an Aggressive Form of Prostate Cancer ★

Tyler Pager, The New York Times:

Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was diagnosed Friday with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his office said in a statement on Sunday.

The diagnosis came after Mr. Biden reported urinary symptoms, which led doctors to find a “small nodule” on his prostate. Mr. Biden’s cancer is “characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone,” the statement said.

“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” according to the statement from Mr. Biden’s office, which was unsigned. “The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”

Terrible news about a good man. But, man, does it feel like forever ago that he was president. It was only 118 days ago.

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