The Exception That Proves the Rule: the Walmart M1 MacBook Air Still Has Just 8 GB RAM 

While it’s true that after this week’s Mac announcements, every new Mac Apple sells now comes with at least 16 GB of RAM, Nick Heer reminds us that there remains a new Mac available with just 8 GB: the rather remarkable [Walmart-exclusive $650 M1 MacBook Air]w.

Apple Q3 FY2024 Results 

Apple:

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $94.9 billion, up 6 percent year over year, and quarterly diluted earnings per share of $0.97. Diluted earnings per share was $1.64, up 12 percent year over year when excluding the one-time charge recognized during the fourth quarter of 2024 related to the impact of the reversal of the European General Court’s State Aid decision.

Jason Snell (along with his usual assortment of excellent charts illustrating Apple’s results):

The one twist: Apple recognized a one-time charge of $14.8 billion related to Apple finally having lost a long-time tax case in the European Union. That’s a lot of cash — almost exactly half of the quarter’s total income, in fact.

All in all, Apple’s business was relatively flat. iPhone sales were up 6% but flat for the fiscal year; Mac sales were up 2%, which is about how they’ve been all year; Services continues to have reliable double-digit growth, but the rate of growth slowed to 12% year-over-year.

Every product/division did fine.

‘Dodgers Capture World Series by Storming Back in Game 5 to Upend Yankees’ 

Both teams had stretches of greatness on both sides of the game. Home runs. Clutch hitting in late innings. Freddie Fucking Freeman. Innings of unhittable pitching. There’s no question in my mind these are the two most talented teams in baseball. But one team made a bunch of glaring mistakes, throughout the series (and especially so tonight), and the other team made few mistakes at all.

As a lifelong Yankees fan who watched or listened to every inning of the many American League Championship Series and World Series they’ve played in since 1996, I have some experience with the various emotional results of a deep postseason baseball run. There is a new Netflix documentary devoted to one such series that did not end well for the Yankees. This year is not the worst feeling. It hurts. This sucks. But this is not the worst. These two teams were evenly matched talent-wise, but the Dodgers played much better baseball. Objectively they deserved to win. The years that really hurt are the ones when your side plays as well or even better than their opponent but loses the series anyway (usually in game 7) because there is a significant aspect of high-level baseball that comes down to chance. This was not one of those years for the Yankees.

This was a well-earned championship by the Dodgers.

(And at least they got to celebrate this at a nice ballpark.)

Apple Unveils New M4 MacBook Pro Lineup, Including, Hallelujah, a Nano-Texture Display Option 

Apple Newsroom:

Now available in space black and silver finishes, the 14-inch MacBook Pro includes the blazing-fast performance of M4 and three Thunderbolt 4 ports, starting with 16GB of memory, all at just $1,599. The 14- and 16-inch models with M4 Pro and M4 Max offer Thunderbolt 5 for faster transfer speeds and advanced connectivity. All models include a Liquid Retina XDR display that gets even better with an all-new nano-texture display option and up to 1000 nits of brightness for SDR content, an advanced 12MP Center Stage camera, along with up to 24 hours of battery life, the longest ever in a Mac.

The base model, with the regular M4 chip, is less of a not-so-pro forgotten stepchild now. It gets a third Thunderbolt port, and is available in the same space black as the M4 Pro and Max models — last year the dark version of the plain M3 MacBook Pro was boring space gray.

After the M4 iMacs were announced Monday, my fingers were crossed for a nano-texture MacBook Pro display, and I was rewarded. The option costs just $150 on both the 14- and 16-inch models. Can’t wait to see it in person. Can we get a nano-texture display option for iPhones next year too? Matte’s where it’s at, baby.

See Also: Apple’s 15-minute mini-keynote, with a 2-minute gag at the end.

Russian Court Hits Google With a Fine Larger Than the World’s GDP 

Joshua Nelken-Zitser, Business Insider:

A legal dispute between Google and Russia over suspended YouTube accounts has led to a fine so large that it exceeds all the money on Earth. Ivan Morozov, a Moscow-based lawyer, told the state-run TASS newswire that a Russian court ordered the tech giant to restore Russian media accounts on YouTube, a Google-owned company.

He said that Google’s failure to do so has resulted in a fine that had been regularly doubling for years. There is no cap on the total, the lawyer said. Morozov, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, said that the cumulative amount has now reached 2 undecillion rubles — an almost unfathomable figure.

At the current exchange rate, the fine is equivalent to about $20.6 decillion. A decillion is a figure followed by 33 zeros — which, in this case, puts the fine at $20,604,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

This certainly makes the EU’s fines based on a percentage of companies’ global revenue seem fair and reasonable.

Sidenote of the Week: All MacBook Air Models Now Start With 16 GB RAM 

Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple today in its new MacBook Pro press release announced that the MacBook Air lineup now starts with 16GB of RAM, up from 8GB previously. This change applies to the 13-inch model with the M2 chip, the 13-inch model with the M3 chip, and the 15-inch model with the M3 chip. In the U.S., the MacBook Air lineup continues to start at $999, so there is no price increase associated with the boost in RAM.

We all know Apple Intelligence has steep memory requirements, which is one factor why it’s only available on iOS devices with 8 GB or more of RAM. But 8 GB of RAM on a Mac is, practically speaking, less than 8 GB of RAM on an iPhone or iPad, because of the profound differences in how memory is managed and application life cycles work on MacOS. On MacOS, every app that looks like it’s running is actually running. And there’s no hard limit on how many apps you can run. Even if your Mac runs out of actual memory, MacOS will use swap files to handle the overflow. iOS doesn’t work that way. iOS freezes apps in the background, freeing up memory — and while M-series-based iPads do support a limited form of virtual memory swap, A-series-based iOS devices (including all iPhones) do not.

Even taking Apple Intelligence out of the equation, Apple’s MacBook lineup was years overdue for a bump in base RAM. A few months ago David Schaub created a graph showing the base RAM of Apple laptops on a logarithmic scale since 1999. Today marks only the second time in the Tim Cook era that base Mac RAM went up. (Schaub made another graph for Mac desktops that goes all the way back to 1984, and the change in slope during the Cook era is even more striking on that chart.) Base RAM on Macs has been stuck at 8 GB since 2017. Even if you count the architecture transition from Intel x86 to Apple Silicon as a de facto bump in base memory — which is arguably fair, given the performance characteristics of an 8 GB Apple Silicon Mac compared to an 8 GB Intel Mac — Macs were still grossly overdue for a bump in base memory.

So I’m not surprised that Apple took this opportunity to double base RAM in the M3 MacBook Air models. I am quite surprised, though, that they went as far as to double the base RAM even in the entry-level $999 M2 MacBook Air. Finally.

Cancelling Your Amazon Prime Membership to Protest Bezos’s Bootlicking at the Washington Post Is Like Pissing in the Ocean 

Ellen Cushing, in a well-meaning piece for The Atlantic:

NPR, citing internal Post correspondence, reported that “more than 1,600 digital subscriptions had been cancelled less than four hours after the news broke.”

It was a reasonable impulse. But if Bezos is indeed why the Post is no longer endorsing candidates, and if people are worried about his outsize influence on our society, they should not be canceling their newspaper subscriptions. They should be canceling their Amazon Prime subscriptions.

Cushing wrote that Saturday; NPR yesterday reported that the Post had lost over 200,000 subscribers in the wake of Bezos blocking the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Today that number has grown to a whopping and still-growing 250,000.

I understand the sentiment but I disagree that it would be, in any way, an effective protest for two reasons. First, the Washington Post did this, not Amazon. Bezos isn’t even Amazon’s CEO anymore. I get it — he’s Amazon’s founder, and his personal wealth is largely based on his Amazon stock. But unsubscribing from the Post right now sends a direct message to the organization that prompted our collective ire.

Second, the number of Post readers and subscribers who are justifiably outraged by this constitute a significant number of the Post’s entire audience. NPR’s story pegged the Post’s pre-protest subscriber base at 2.5 million (including both print and digital). Amazon has about 200 million Prime members.

  • 250,000 un-subscriptions from The Washington Post = 10% of their base
  • 250,000 un-subscriptions from Amazon Prime = 0.1% of their base

Those of us who care about this constitute no more than a tiny insignificant sliver of Amazon’s Prime subscriber base. 250,000 lost subscribers in a weekend is a shocking slap in the face for The Washington Post. It’s a significant chunk of their entire base. 250,000 lost subscribers to Amazon Prime is like taking a piss in the ocean. It doesn’t matter.

If you feel better personally cancelling your Prime membership, do it. But don’t think for a second it will matter one iota to Amazon’s bottom line. The Post, on the other hand, is reeling.

Apple Unveils Mac Minis With M4 and M4 Pro Chips 

Apple Newsroom:

With M4 Pro, it takes the advanced technologies in M4 and scales them up to tackle even more demanding workloads. For more convenient connectivity, it features front and back ports, and for the first time includes Thunderbolt 5 for faster data transfer speeds on the M4 Pro model.

The M4 Mac Mini Thunderbolt story is simple not too complicated: the three rear ports on models with the regular M4 are Thunderbolt 4; the three rear ports on models with the M4 Pro are Thunderbolt 5. The front ports are just USB-C, no Thunderbolt, on all Mac Mini models. Why you might care: Thunderbolt 4 supports 40 Gbps symmetrical send/receive; Thunderbolt 5 supports 80 Gbps symmetrical send/receive or 120 Gbps send / 40 Gbps receive (e.g., for displays).

The new Mac mini footprint is less than half the size of the previous design at just 5 by 5 inches, so it takes up much less space on a desk. The super-compact system is enabled by the incredible power efficiency of Apple silicon and an innovative thermal architecture, which guides air to different levels of the system, while all venting is done through the foot.

The new Mini form factor sports a dramatically smaller footprint, but because it’s taller (which ought to be better for thermals), the difference isn’t as great by volume:

HeightWidthDepthAreaVolume
M4 Mac Mini5 cm12.7 cm12.7 cm161 cm2807 cm3
Previous Mac Minis3.58 cm19.7 cm19.7 cm388 cm21,389 cm3
M2 Mac Studio9.5 cm19.7 cm19.7 cm388 cm23,689 cm3
Apple TV 4K3.1 cm9.3 cm9.3 cm87 cm2268 cm3


No cheating either: the power supply remains inside the Mac Mini case. (But as shown above, the Mac Mini remains quite a bit larger than an Apple TV 4K.) One odd detail is the placement of the power button on the bottom of the case.

Base RAM goes from 8 to 16 GB (which appears to be true for all M4-based Macs) and goes up to a maximum of 64 GB with the M4 Pro, and all M4 Mac Minis support up to three displays. See Apple’s Compare page for more details on what’s new and changed.

Also interesting is the announcement format. Rather than one 30–40 minute video announcing all M4 Macs at once, Apple has made separate 10-minute-ish mini keynotes for each. iMacs yesterday, Mac Mini today, and presumably MacBook Pros tomorrow. And rather than shoot inside Steve Jobs Theater, they filmed at the new Observatory building — a smaller setting for smaller announcements.

Lastly: a fun 2-minute stop-motion introduction commercial.

MacRumors: ‘M1 vs. M3 vs. M4 iMac Buyer’s Guide’ 

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

The 2021 and 2023 iMacs have now been discontinued by Apple and prices at third-party resellers are falling. As such, some customers may be weighing up whether to pick up a 2021 or 2023 iMac instead of the latest model, while some existing iMac users may be wondering if it’s now time to upgrade to the M4 model.

The three Apple silicon iMac models share the overwhelming majority of their features, so should you consider buying or sticking with the first- or second-generation models to save money? This breakdown also serves as a way to see all the differences that the 2024 iMac brings to the table.

Super-useful comparison table of what changed between the M1, M3, and now M4 revisions.

Apple’s own ever-handy “Compare” tool on the iMac website is useful too. Here’s a comparison between the new M4 2-port and 4-port models, alongside last year’s 4-port M3 model. One difference: the entry-priced $1,300 2-port model, which has an 8-core CPU (rather than 10-core), ships with a Magic Keyboard that doesn’t have a Touch ID button; all of the 4-port/10-core configurations ship with a Touch-ID–equipped keyboard. Apple charges $150 for the Magic Keyboard With Touch ID and $100 for the one with a “lock button” instead; the bigger one with a numeric keypad is $180. Also, the new USB-C keyboards, mice, and trackpads are only available in white or black — the only way to get the color-matching models is to buy an iMac.


In Defense, I Swear, of the Magic Mouse’s Charging Port Placement

Jay Peters, The Verge, “Apple Put the Magic Mouse’s Charging Port on the Bottom Again”:

Apple’s new USB-C-equipped Magic Mouse somehow still has the charging port on the bottom. While Apple could have used the launch as an opportunity to move the charging port from the underside of the device — where the port has remained for nearly a decade, despite other updates to the mouse and being mocked for the decision — the port is still there.

This new $99 Magic Mouse means that, for the foreseeable future, Apple still thinks that the best way to charge your Magic Mouse is by flipping it over to plug it in, making it so you can’t use it. Why?

We’ve all been waiting for Apple to update the “Magic” input peripherals — keyboards, trackpads, and mice — to USB-C, and they’re finally here. None of them seem significantly changed aside from the port, including, as Peters notes, that the refreshed Magic Mouse doesn’t move the charging port from the bottom. It’s just USB-C instead of Lightning now. This will antagonize the vocal contingent of people who think the port placement is not merely ill-considered, but downright absurd. But I’m not surprised in the least that Apple didn’t change it. The contingent of Magic Mouse port-on-the-belly haters is, as I said, vocal, but I also think it’s small.

Yes, with the charging port on the mouse’s belly, you cannot use it while it charges. There are obvious downsides to that. But those positing the Magic Mouse as absurd act as though Apple doesn’t know this. Of course Apple knows this. Apple obviously just sees this as a trade-off worth making. Apple wants the mouse to be visually symmetric, and they want the top surface to slope all the way down to the desk or table top it rests upon. You can’t achieve that with an exposed port.

My other hunch is that the Magic Mouse’s designers actually see the inability to use it while plugged in as a feature, not a bug. They want you to use it wirelessly, so you have to use it wirelessly. A wired mouse feels different because the cable adds a bit of tension. Sometimes with a tethered mouse, especially if the mouse is lightweight, it’ll move a little from cable tension when you let go of it. If you could use it wired, some users would use it wired. That can’t happen with a mouse whose port is on the bottom.

I know for a fact that Apple designers have considered designs for a mouse with the port exposed at the front, and everything they came up with looked worse. Putting the port on the belly is putting form over function, but in this case Apple’s designers think the better form is worth the trade-off. With this design, the mouse looks better 100 percent of the time it’s in use, and it looks a bit silly every few months when you need to charge it.1

We’re willing to accept the annoyance of forcing a few-minute break in your work if you run it down to 0%, in exchange for a more elegant appearance and preventing you from using it with a feel we don’t intend for it to have” is their choice. I for one salute that commitment. I also suspect the overwhelming majority of Magic Mouse users have no complaints about the charging port. In Tim Cook’s parlance, I suspect it has high “customer sat”. Apple does make design mistakes, but when they do, they fix them. Those flaky, undependable butterfly MacBook keyboards lasted five years, but during that stretch, Apple shipped several “OK, we think we fixed it this time” tweaks, like adding a “silicone membrane” in 2018, before finally throwing in the towel and abandoning the butterfly switch design entirely. That 5-year stretch shows that while Apple doesn’t necessarily fix design mistakes quickly, they attempt to fix them quickly.

But the Magic Mouse has charged like this since 2015, with no tweaks. That’s 9 years. It sucks when it runs out of juice right in the middle of working, but that happens only every few months, and you get warnings before it’s entirely drained. All told, it’s fine. Apple sticking with this design in the face of vociferous peanut gallery mockery reminds me of the company’s noble commitment to a single-button mouse, in the name of simplicity, after Windows popularized two-button mice in the 1990s. If you don’t like the Magic Mouse, MacOS has built-in support for third-party mice (as did classic Mac OS have support for multi-button third-party mice). The Magic Mouse charging port placement is an opinionated design, not an absurd design.

That said, I will profess that I haven’t personally used any Apple mouse since the ADB era (in the aforementioned 1990s).2 Modern Apple mice just aren’t physically comfortable for my mouse grip, don’t support third-party mouse drivers like SteerMouse (which lets me set the mouse speed way faster than Apple’s system mouse driver), and I prefer a physical scroll wheel (with reversed, a.k.a. unnatural, direction). I charged up and used a Magic Mouse while writing this article, and within one hour my wrist started to ache. I also think the Magic Mouse clicks too loudly. No joke, my daily driver for the last 4 years has been this simple Lenovo mouse I bought on a lark back in December 2020. So take my mouse opinions with that ThinkPad-branded grain of salt. 


  1. It’d be more elegant in all ways but energy efficiency if Magic Mouse charged wirelessly too, using a MagSafe puck or Apple Watch charger. And if that were the case it might keep people from wishfully thinking they ought to be able to use it while it charges. ↩︎︎

  2. My favorite was the Malaysian-made one with the heavy gray mouse ball, not the Taiwanese-made one with the lightweight black ball. ↩︎


Jeff Bezos: ‘The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media’ 

Jeff Bezos, in an op-ed in his Washington Post:

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first. Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. [...]

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

Bezos has always been a good writer, and this piece is no exception. But deciding to change the Post’s policy on election endorsements 12 days before any election, let alone this election, is not “inadequate planning”. Changing the policy, say, this summer, before the Republican National Convention, would be “inadequate planning”. Now though? No.

And how does any of this square with the fact that The Washington Post has an entire editorial and opinion section, that runs bylined opinion columns and commentary from the editorial board every day? You know, the section where this very column by Bezos ran?

As regards trust: declining to endorse a candidate won’t “tip the scales” an iota for Trump supporters who view The Washington Post as “fake news”. All it has done is wipe out large amounts of trust among readers who do — or at least until last week did — put their faith in the publication.

Update: Dr. Drang:

If I’m following Bezos’s logic, he must not just run the Post without letting his other business interests interfere, he must appear to run the Post without letting his other business interests interfere. The easy way to do that would be to keep his hands off the editorial board. I wonder why that didn’t occur to him? (No, I don’t really wonder.)

I wish I’d thought to make that point — Bezos’s own analogy shows how calamitous a decision this was to block an endorsement less than two weeks away from the election.

The Washington Post Has Lost Over 200,000 Subscribers (and Counting) After Trump Bootlicker Jeff Bezos Blocked Endorsement of Kamala Harris 

David Folkenflik, reporting for NPR:

The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

Those former subscribers who, like me, were subscribed through the App Store should already be included in that number. Apple sends developers a server notification upon cancellation, and developers can query the status of the auto-renew toggle at any time.

“It’s a colossal number,” former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told NPR. “The problem is, people don’t know why the decision was made. We basically know the decision was made but we don’t know what led to it.”

I misread this statement at first, thinking that Brauchli was saying that we don’t know why so many Post subscribers were cancelling their subscriptions. But I realized after a second read that he’s saying we don’t know why owner Jeff Bezos and publisher/CEO Will Lewis blocked the endorsement, less than two weeks out from Election Day. But we sort of do know. It’s because they’re worried Trump will win and punish, in whatever ways he can, Amazon (which has government contracts for AWS cloud services), Blue Origin (which has contracts with NASA), and Bezos personally. There’s no other explanation for this decision coming when it did, on the cusp of the election.*

Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.” Few people inside the paper credit that rationale given the timing, however, just days before a neck-and-neck race between Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Former Executive Editor Marty Baron voiced that skepticism in an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday.

“If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would’ve been fine,” Baron said. “It’s a certainly reasonable decision. But this was made within a couple of weeks of the election, and there was no substantive serious deliberation with the editorial board of the paper. It was clearly made for other reasons, not for reasons of high principle.”

It just doesn’t hold water to make a policy change like this 12 fucking days before any election, let alone this election. Part of what is so damaging about this to the entirety of the Post’s institutional credibility — not just its editorial page — is that Lewis’s announcement of the no-endorsement is so laughably false. Lying hurts any person or institution’s credibility. But it’s absolute poison to a news organization. And the publisher/CEO of the Post tried to sell an obvious post hoc justification. It sounds ridiculous but Bezos and Lewis would have been better off just flat out admitting they were blocking the endorsement because they fear backlash from Trump if he wins. At least that would ring true. If you’re going to serve us a pile of dog shit on a plate, tell us it’s a turd. Don’t try to tell us it’s a sandwich.

Credibility is the only true asset a news publication has.

* OK, there’s one other plausible explanation, which is that Jeff Bezos wants to see Trump win. I don’t buy that. Not because I know Bezos’s politics (although Bezos’s statements and charitable contributions on climate change certainly don’t suggest support for Donald “It’s a Hoax” Trump, a man so profoundly ignorant that he’s repeatedly espoused the belief that even if sea levels are rising, it’d be good for the world, because the result, somehow, will be more oceanfront real estate). I just don’t think Bezos would block a Post endorsement of Harris even if he personally were voting and rooting for Trump. Nothing about his stewardship of the Post since purchasing it for $250 million in 2013 suggests he’d do so. He didn’t block the Post from endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016, nor Joe Biden in 2020. What’s different in 2024 isn’t that Harris offers a different vision than Clinton or Biden, but that Trump has laid clear his agenda of vengeance and retribution against his domestic political enemies, real and imagined, if he returns to the White House.

Apple Introduces M4 iMacs, With Updated Colors, a Nano-Texture Display Option, and USB-C Input Peripherals 

Apple Newsroom, in the first of what I expect to be a few days’ worth of M4 Mac updates:

The new iMac is available in an array of beautiful new colors, and the 24-inch 4.5K Retina display offers a new nano-texture glass option. iMac features a new 12MP Center Stage camera with Desk View, up to four Thunderbolt 4 ports, and color-matched accessories that include USB-C.

The new colors don’t seem all that different from the old ones, except for green, which seems much more just-plain-green green. The old iMac green was more like teal? It also seems like maybe the new colors are a bit less saturated on the back. The previous pink iMacs looked downright red from the back; the new ones look pink all around.

As a don’t-know-how-I-lived-without-it fan of the nano-texture Studio Display, I’m glad to see a nano-texture option available for the M4 iMacs. (It’s a $200 upgrade.) Fingers crossed that they offer a nano-texture option for the M4 MacBook Pros.

Apple Intelligence Is Available Today, With the Release of iOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1 

Nice rundown of the first wave of Apple Intelligence features from Apple Newsroom. As I wrote last week, my favorite thus far is the notification summaries. The key is not to think of them as a replacement for actually reading the messages — they just serve the same purpose as a well-written Subject line in an email. They just answer — usually quite well — “What’s this stack of notifications about?”

Update: It’s not obvious, especially given Apple’s own hype over Apple Intelligence launching to the public with today’s releases, but you still need to sign up for the Apple Intelligence waitlist to get “early access”. When I signed up during the iOS 18.1 beta cycle, it only took an hour or so before I got in. No idea if that will hold true now that it’s a public release.

(The image generation features (Image Playground, Genmoji, Image Wand) in the next round of Apple Intelligence, in the beta releases of iOS 18.2 and MacOS 15.2 that dropped last week, require a separate waiting list. I signed up for that a few hours after the betas were released last Wednesday, October 23, and I’m still waiting as I type this. The only people I know who have access to the image generation features are those who signed up for it within the first hour — maybe less — of the betas appearing.)

WorkOS 

My thanks to WorkOS for, once again, sponsoring the week at Daring Fireball. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. Start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code. Ship complex features like SSO and SCIM (pronounced skim) provisioning in minutes instead of months.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.


Profiles in Cowardice: Owner Jeff Bezos and Publisher William Lewis of The Washington Post

Sewell Chan, writing for Columbia Journalism Review on Wednesday, “Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Resigns After Owner Blocks Presidential Endorsement”:

Mariel Garza, the editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times, resigned on Wednesday after the newspaper’s owner blocked the editorial board’s plans to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told me in a phone conversation. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

On October 11, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the newspaper for $500 million in 2018, informed the paper’s editorial board that the Times would not be making an endorsement for president.

Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, was like, “Hold my beer...” Here’s William Lewis, CEO and publisher of the Post, which Bezos wholly owns:

The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.

The only rational explanation for this decision is cowardice on Bezos’s part in the face of Donald Trump’s vindictiveness. Lewis tries, haplessly, to couch this as a return to the Post’s “roots”, hand-wavingly justifying the decision by pointing out that, prior to 1976, the newspaper declined to issue endorsements:

That was strong reasoning, but in 1976 for understandable reasons at the time, we changed this long-standing policy and endorsed Jimmy Carter as president. But we had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to.

We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility.

It’s that last one.

The “understandable reasons” for The Washington Fucking Post to endorse Carter in 1976, not delineated by Lewis, were — you know — the crimes of Republican Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, as reported by the Post’s own legendary reporting duo, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein are having none of Lewis’s and Bezos’s bullshit, issuing a clear condemnation of the decision (which, conspicuously, the Post’s own news desk published):

“We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 12 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.”

Marty Baron, recently-retired executive editor of the Post, on X, minced even fewer words:

This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. @realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.

A joint column signed by 17 current Washington Post columnists:

The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake. It represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love. This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them — the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020. [...] An independent newspaper might someday choose to back away from making presidential endorsements. But this isn’t the right moment, when one candidate is advocating positions that directly threaten freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution.

Alexandra Petri — one of those 17 columnists — in a solo column, mocking the absurdity of Lewis’s justification for the decision:

We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president. It is time we got back to those “roots,” I’m told!

Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean, and certainly there were no Post subscribers.

Garza, the editor who resigned in protest from the LA Times, made clear in her interview with CJR that the point of newspaper endorsements is not based on the premise that they sway elections:

“I didn’t think we were going to change our readers’ minds — our readers, for the most part, are Harris supporters,” Garza told me. “We’re a very liberal paper. I didn’t think we were going to change the outcome of the election in California. But two things concern me: This is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what. And an endorsement was the logical next step after a series of editorials we’ve been writing about how dangerous Trump is to democracy, about his unfitness to be president, about his threats to jail his enemies. We have made the case in editorial after editorial that he shouldn’t be reelected. [...]”

“And it’s perplexing to readers, and possibly suspicious, that we didn’t endorse her this time.”

Chan, the CJR writer Garza spoke to, continues:

Indeed, hours after Semafor reported on Tuesday that Soon-Shiong had blocked the endorsement, former president Donald Trump’s rapid-response team sent out an email calling the newspaper’s decision “the latest blow” for Harris.

“In Kamala’s own home state, the Los Angeles Times — the state’s largest newspaper — has declined to endorse the Harris-Walz ticket, despite endorsing the Democrat nominees in every election for decades,” the campaign said. “Even her fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job. The Times previously endorsed Kamala in her 2010 and 2014 races for California attorney general, as well as her 2016 race for US Senate — but not this time.”

What’s so maddeningly disingenuous about this is that it’s not “the newspapers” that refused to endorse Harris. It was their cowardly owners. Both newspapers had already written their Harris endorsements. Liberal newspapers breaking tradition to not endorse anyone is worse than if their owners had forced them to endorse Trump instead. A Trump endorsement from the LA Times or Washington Post would be absurd. No one, not even the derpiest of MAGA trolls, would believe that. It would be like a steakhouse endorsing veganism. But refusing to endorse Harris? That, on the surface, is plausibly suspicious.

Before this week, I’d never heard of Patrick Soon-Shiong, the LA Times’s owner. I just assume now he’s a self-interested idiot. But Jeff Bezos turning coward surprises me. I didn’t have Bezos pegged as a chickenshit. When he bought the Post, I sincerely thought he was saving it, not destroying it. What’s the point of having so much “fuck you” money if you’re afraid to tell a petty tyrant like Donald Trump to pound sand? And Bezos is smart, really smart, which makes it baffling that he thinks Trump, if elected, might remember this craven gesture of abject subservience, and decline to lash out against Amazon, Blue Origin, or Bezos personally, after a single negative news story in The Washington Post. Transactions work only one way with Donald Trump. Toward him. Only going on stage with Trump and dancing like a dipshit might actually gain derp Führer’s favor.

Jonathan Last, writing at The Bulwark, “The Guardrails Are Already Crumpling”:

These guys can hear the music. They’ve seen the sides being chosen: Elon Musk and Peter Theil assembling with Trump’s gangster government in waiting. They see Mark Zuckerberg praising Trump as a “badass.” And now they see Bezos getting in line, too.

What’s remarkable is that Trump didn’t have to arrest Bezos to secure his compliance. Trump didn’t even have to win the election. Just the fact that he has an even-money chance to become president was threat enough.

Or maybe that’s not remarkable. One of Timothy Snyder’s rules for resisting authoritarians is that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” People surrender preemptively much more often than you might expect.

Two weeks ago, Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter wrote what might be the most prophetic essay of the year. They warned about “anticipatory obedience” in the media.

Seventeen days later, Bezos made his demonstration.

In case you needed reminding: The “guardrails” aren’t guardrails. They’re people.

And they’re already collapsing. Before a single state has been called.

This is no time to get squishy. I have never once unsubscribed from a newspaper in protest, and I certainly haven’t encouraged you to. But there’s a line for everything, and this abject cowardice, in the face of the greatest threat to our democracy itself since the Civil War, crossed that line. I’ve been a paying subscriber to The Washington Post for many years. Not anymore. I recommend you do the same. 


Joz Teases Mac Announcements Next Week 

Greg Joswiak, on X:

Mac (😉) your calendars! We have an exciting week of announcements ahead, starting on Monday morning. Stay tuned…

Presumably these will include M4 refreshes of the MacBook Pro lineup (as foretold by those bizarre leaks to Russian YouTubers two weeks ago), iMac, and Mac Mini. And the Mac Mini, reports Mark Gurman, is set to sport an all-new, much-smaller form factor.

Jury Finds Masimo Smartwatches Infringed Apple Patents, Awards Apple Just Enough to Buy One Apple Watch SE 

Reuters:

Apple convinced a federal jury on Friday that early versions of health monitoring tech company Masimo’s smartwatches infringe two of its design patents as part of a broader intellectual property dispute between the companies. The jury, in Delaware, agreed with Apple that previous iterations of Masimo’s W1 and Freedom watches and chargers willfully violated Apple’s patent rights in smartwatch designs.

But the jury awarded the tech giant, which is worth about $3.5 trillion, just $250 in damages — the statutory minimum for infringement in the United States. Apple’s attorneys told the court the “ultimate purpose” of its lawsuit was not money, but to win an injunction against sales of Masimo’s smartwatches after an infringement ruling.

On that front, jury also determined that Masimo’s current watches did not infringe Apple patents covering inventions that the tech giant had accused Masimo of copying.

$250 is just enough for Apple to buy one of its own 40mm Apple Watch SE models. (No sales tax in Delaware.) That’s about all Apple got out of this. This victory doesn’t change the ITC import ban that prevents Apple from enabling the blood oxygen sensor on watches sold in the U.S. after December 2023. It might have, if Apple had been able to win a verdict holding that Masimo’s current watches also infringe patents held by Apple. Florian Mueller, writing at IP Fray:

In order to understand the reason why Apple sued over a product practically no one buys, one has to understand the indirect ramifications for Masimo’s U.S. import ban on Apple Watches with a pulse oximetry feature. Only the indirect implications matter in this case. The short version is that if Masimo couldn’t have continued to sell its own smartwatch, they’d have lost a legally required basis for preventing Apple from selling smartwatches.


Vision Pro Bites Dog

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas — here’s Techmeme’s roundup of summaries and regurgitations), “Apple Sharply Scales Back Production of Vision Pro”:

Apple has sharply scaled back production of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset since the early summer and could stop making the existing version of the device entirely by year end, according to multiple people directly involved in building components for the device.

The move suggests that Apple has enough inventory built up to meet demand for the foreseeable future. It follows Apple’s decision earlier this year to focus on building a model that’s cheaper than the current version — which retails for $3,500 — for possible release by the end of 2025, as The Information has previously reported. [...]

Counterpoint Research said Apple sold around 370,000 headsets in the first three quarters of this year and estimates that it will only sell around 50,000 more units by year end.

I’ll start by pointing out, just as an example of conventional wisdom, that the Time magazine story I linked to earlier today, about Vision Pros being used by surgeons, flatly described Vision Pro as “a commercial flop”.

There’s no question that Vision Pro sales are, by the standards of most Apple products, low. On a unit basis, they’re a rounding error compared to products like the iPhone, iPads, Macs, and AirPods. Apple stopped releasing unit sale numbers for any of its products long ago, but working backwards from iPhone revenue numbers, which Apple does release, most estimates peg iPhone unit sales at around 210–240 million per year. That’s about 600,000 iPhones sold per day. So if we accept Counterpoint’s above-cited estimate for Vision Pro unit sales — which seems about right — that means Apple sells about 1.5× more iPhones on an average day than they’ll sell Vision Pros in the entire year. I find that a useful perspective.

But all of this coverage, from The Information’s report on production pausing to Time’s offhand dismissal of Vision Pro as a “commercial flop”, insinuates (in the case of The Information) or just presumes (Time’s case) that Vision Pro sales are significantly lower than Apple expected. The Information doesn’t say that. In fact, their report yesterday goes out of its way not to compare actual sales to expectations — an omission I’ll return to shortly. Nobody compares Vision Pro sales to Apple’s expectations, because seemingly no one outside the company knows how many Vision Pro units Apple expected or hoped to sell. My gut feeling, though, is that Vision Pro sales are, at worst, just a little on the low side of where Apple’s internal expectations were. Most of that gut feeling is simply based on everything that was reported about Vision Pro before it hit the market.

Start with the obvious. Vision Pro costs around $4,000 per unit, all told, which is far more expensive than iPhones, iPads, and even any consumer-grade Mac. The vast majority of Apple’s entire customer base has never spent more than $2,000 on any electronic device, I bet. It’s a brand-new computing platform without much software. It’s a brand-new entertainment device without much exclusive content for the device. It’s big and heavy for a headset and requires a tethered connection to a battery pack, and even with the battery as an external puck, lasts only a little over 2 hours unplugged from a power source. Apple knows all of this — especially regarding consumer price sensitivity — and thus knows better than anyone that all together it makes for a hard sell. Tellingly, Apple — universally regarded as one of the best marketing companies in the world — has bought very little advertising to promote Vision Pro. It’s almost as though — hear me out — Apple launched Vision Pro in 2023 for long-term strategic reasons, not with short-term sales in mind. How many units did even the biggest optimists inside Apple expect them to sell, even if Apple could manufacture as many units as needed to meet surprisingly high demand?

But here’s the key. Apple almost certainly could not manufacture as many Vision Pro units as it wanted, if market demand had turned out to be much higher than expected. If, against expectations, Vision Pro were today the hottest item on gift wishlists for the upcoming holiday season, you’d have to buy them on the secondhand market at a markup, not at retail price from Apple.

I’ve mentioned this before, but in June 2023 TheElec reported that Sony, the exclusive supplier of the high-resolution OLED displays in Vision Pro, only has the physical capacity to manufacture 900,000 units per year, and with two displays per Vision Pro, that put a maximum capacity on Vision Pro production at about 450,000 headsets for the year. That’s only slightly higher than the actual sales estimate The Information cites from Counterpoint Research, of 420,000 units.

News publications love to cite their own previous reporting when it turned out to be accurate. Who doesn’t love to gloat? I sure do. Which thus makes it highly conspicuous that The Information is painting ~420,000 unit sales of Vision Pro as a grand disappointment, when, on 31 May 2023, Wayne Ma himself reported the following, under the headline “Apple’s Learning Curve: How Headset’s Design Caused Production Challenges”:

The headset is the most complicated hardware product Apple has ever created due to its unconventional curved shape, thinness and ultralight weight — which has resulted in an expected budget-busting price tag of around $3,000.[...]

Those and other design details have made it hard to manufacture the device at scale and have pushed up the headset’s prospective retail price, according to those people, along with industry analysts. Apple is expected to ship fewer than half a million headsets in the first year of its release, according to people involved in its supply chain. That figure is in line with projections from equity analysts and other reports. By comparison, it took Apple about two years to sell 1 million iPods, only 74 days to sell 1 million iPhones and less than a day to sell 1 million Apple Watches.

That May 2023 report refers to it as “the headset” because it wasn’t even announced — and named — until WWDC a few weeks later. So before it was even announced, Ma reported that it would cost at least $3,000 and would sell fewer than 500,000 units in its first year. He was right about the price, and here we are in October 2024 with estimated sales numbers of ... fewer than 500,000 units in its first year.

I’m not trying to whistle past the graveyard here. Surely Apple hoped Vision Pro demand — not sales, necessarily, but demand — might have been higher than it is. What’s noteworthy in this latest report from The Information is the claim that Apple is pausing component orders for now, having enough on hand to meet actual demand for the foreseeable future. In the hypothetical world where demand for Vision Pro is much stronger than it actually is today, Apple might still only be able to sell 450,000 units in the first year, but would keep producing them as fast as they can heading into 2025. But I really doubt that Apple considers actual Vision Pro demand much worse than mildly disappointing. Again, they never launched a major ad campaign. Not at launch, not in the summer, and not now, heading into the holidays.

At the very end of this new report, The Information writes:

In an interview published on Sunday, Apple CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal the Vision Pro wasn’t a “mass-market product” because of its high price. But he said there were enough early adopters that were still willing to buy the device.

“People who want to have tomorrow’s technology today — that’s who it’s for,” he told the newspaper. “Fortunately, there’s enough people who are in that camp that it’s exciting.”

That’s the closest they come to suggesting that Apple is OK with Vision Pro’s sales to date — by quoting Tim Cook, who, of course, is obviously going to put as positive a spin as he can on anything related to Apple.

A headline like, say, “Vision Pro Sales Are Exactly in Line With Expectations” is not going to hit people as a big story, but “Apple Sharply Scales Back Production of Vision Pro” does. It’s the same reason the classic “Man Bites Dog” grabs attention but “Dog Bites Man” does not. Apple is a company that is famous for making spectacularly popular products. Vision Pro is definitely not a spectacularly popular product. But it’s disingenuous, to say the least, for an October 2024 report to suggest that Vision Pro sales are surprisingly weak when they’re almost exactly in line with uncannily accurate expectations set in a May 2023 report by the exact same reporter at the same publication. 


Surgeons Are Wearing Vision Pro to Perform Laparoscopic Procedures 

Andrew R. Chow, reporting for Time:

Twenty-four years ago, the surgeon Santiago Horgan performed the first robotically assisted gastric-bypass surgery in the world, a major medical breakthrough. Now Horgan is working with a new tool that he argues could be even more transformative in operating rooms: the Apple Vision Pro.

Over the last month, Horgan and other surgeons at the University of California, San Diego have performed more than 20 minimally invasive operations while wearing Apple’s mixed-reality headsets.

The details of this particular use case are largely about ergonomics, and the advantage Vision Pro provides seems profound:

In laparoscopic surgery, doctors send a tiny camera through a small incision in a patient’s body, and the camera’s view is projected onto a monitor. Doctors must then operate on a patient while looking up at the screen, a tricky feat of hand-eye coordination, while processing other visual variables in a pressurized environment. “I’m usually turning around and stopping the operation to see a CT scan; looking to see what happened with the endoscopy [another small camera that provides a closer look at organs]; looking at the monitor for the heart rate,” Horgan says.

As a result, most surgeons report experiencing discomfort while performing minimal-access surgery, a 2022 study found. About one-fifth of surgeons polled said they would consider retiring early because their pain was so frequent and uncomfortable. A good mixed-reality headset, then, might allow a surgeon to look at a patient’s surgical area and, without looking up, virtual screens that show them the laparoscopy camera and a patient’s vitals.

20 percent of surgeons saying they’re considering retiring early because of the discomfort from this is a high number! And the $3,500–4,000 price for Vision Pro isn’t merely acceptable in this context, it’s a downright bargain:

Christopher Longhurst, chief clinical and innovation officer at UC San Diego Health, says that while the Vision Pro’s price tag of $3,499 might seem daunting to a regular consumer, it’s inexpensive compared to most medical equipment. “The monitors in the operating room are probably $20,000 to $30,000,” he says. “So $3,500 for a headset is like budget dust in the healthcare setting.”

Makes me wonder if these high-end professional and industrial use cases are to the Vision platform this decade what desktop publishing was to the Mac in the 80s? Years ahead of mass market appeal, but a revolutionary breakthrough for a longstanding industry. Such a clear value to those in the industry that they’re not just merely ambivalently accepting the new platform, but champing at the bit to switch to them. Something for the platform to build from until boom, there’s a tipping point where it expands into the mass market. I got into graphic design and desktop publishing my sophomore year of college, in 1992, and by that time the industries of graphic design and professional printing were entirely Macintosh-based, yet the platform (counting the LaserWriter) was only 6 or 7 years old.

But in the fall of 1984, the Macintosh was considered a flop.

Every New Feature and Change in iOS 18.2 Beta 1 

Chance Miller at 9to5Mac has done the yeoman’s work of providing a full illustrated change log for iOS 18.2 beta 1. Here’s one I wasn’t expecting, but which now that I think about it, isn’t surprising:

iOS 18.2 lets users set default apps for Messaging and Calling worldwide. This is managed through a new “Defaults” menu in the Settings app, where you can set defaults for these apps in the US:

  • Email
  • Messaging
  • Calling
  • Call Filtering
  • Browser App
  • Passwords & Codes
  • Keyboards

Clearly this wouldn’t be in iOS 18.2 anywhere in the world if the European Commission weren’t demanding it for DMA compliance, but given that Apple had to do it for the EU, why not make it worldwide? This isn’t a “We think this is a bad idea” thing from Apple’s perspective, like, say, alternative app stores. It’s a “We don’t think this is all that important an idea” thing.

DMA compliance features that Apple wouldn’t have otherwise prioritized, but isn’t outright opposed to, are likely to be made available worldwide. Features Apple is opposed to will remain exclusive to the EU. For example, in iOS 18.2 beta 1 in the EU, users can now “delete” apps like Photos and Camera. That’s a spectacularly dumb idea, so it’s only in the EU.

Today’s New iOS and MacOS Developer Betas Allow Developers Worldwide to Test EU-Specific Features 

Apple Developer News:

Following feedback from the European Commission and from developers, in these releases developers can develop and test EU-specific features, such as alternative browser engines, contactless apps, marketplace installations from web browsers, and marketplace apps, from anywhere in the world. Developers of apps that use alternative browser engines can now use WebKit in those same apps.

I just spent a few minutes trying to figure out how this works, but haven’t found it. If anyone can point me to the answer, let me know. It’s kind of bananas that EU-specific features couldn’t even be tested outside the EU until now.

Stage 2 of the Apple Intelligence Rollout Begins, With Developer Betas of iOS 18.2 and MacOS 15.2 Sequoia 

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple today seeded the first betas of upcoming iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2 updates to developers for testing purposes. The betas have been released while Apple is still working on iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, updates that are set to be released next week.

Apple is rolling out Apple Intelligence features in waves, and while the first wave coming next week is relatively small, the next one is pretty big. These first developer betas of iOS 18.2 and MacOS 15.2 include: categorization and priority inbox sorting in Mail, Genmoji, Image Playgrounds (including Image Wand, where a rough sketch in Notes can be transformed into a detailed image), and ChatGPT’s integration for more complex “world knowledge” requests. And, for iPhone 16 users, Visual Intelligence.

These developer betas also contain new APIs for third-party apps: the Writing Tools API (which will allow any text app to support the features only Apple’s first-party apps have access to in iOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1), Genmoji API (so third-party messaging apps can support them like Messages will), and Image Playground API.

With the initial wave in next week’s public releases of iOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1, most Apple Intelligence features announced at WWDC are still missing. With these new developer betas, only a few features remain absent: priority notifications, and Siri’s more advanced features like in-app actions and personal knowledge context (the “When’s my mom’s flight arriving?” feature).

Dodgers Legend Fernando Valenzuela Dies at 63, on the Cusp of the First Yankees-Dodgers World Series Since His Star Turn in 1981 

Andy McCullough, reporting for The Athletic:

Fernando Valenzuela, the Mexican southpaw who became an icon in Los Angeles during his rookie season with the Los Angeles Dodgers and remained a vibrant part of the franchise’s fabric for the next four decades, died Tuesday, the Dodgers confirmed. He was 63. [...]

In 2023, the Dodgers recognized Valenzuela’s indelible place within franchise lore by altering a club policy in his honor: Valenzuela became the first Dodger to see his number retired without reaching the Hall of Fame. Before the ceremony in August 2023, as his No. 34 took its place at Dodger Stadium in between Sandy Koufax’s No. 32 and Roy Campanella’s No. 39, Valenzuela pronounced himself shocked.

“It never crossed my mind that this would ever happen,” Valenzuela said. “Like being in the World Series my rookie year, I never thought that would happen.”

I’m only barely old enough to remember Fernandomania, but it was a genuine nationwide sensation. Everyone knew who “Fernando” was, even people who cared little to nothing about baseball. Every kid I knew, boys and girls alike, wanted a Fernando baseball card (or sticker — baseball stickers were the thing at the time).

In 1978, Valenzuela — the 12th of 12 children in a poor Mexican farming family — was a 17-year-old, pitching in an obscure Mexican pro league. A Dodgers scout who’d gone to evaluate a shortstop on the opposing team instead found himself captivated by Valenzuela’s pitching. Two years later he was an end-of-season call-up in the Dodgers’ big-league bullpen.

Then came 1981. Thanks to a fluke injury to the Dodgers’ intended starter, Valenzuela was their starting pitcher on opening day. He threw a complete game shutout. He started the season 8-0 with an ERA of 0.50. He pitched all 9 innings in each of those 8 games. His best pitch was a screwball (a breaking ball that curves the “wrong” way) — a bygone pitch no one even throws any more. His physique was more beer league than major league. His windup was comically exaggerated — more like Bugs Bunny than a typical major league pitcher. Down 2 games to 0, he led the Dodgers to victory in game 3 of the 1981 World Series against the Dodgers’ most-despised foe, the Yankees, and the Dodgers won the next 3 games to take the championship. He won both the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards. He spoke very little English at the time, but had a charisma that broke any language barrier. He was 20 years old.

I was 8 at the time, and already a very sore loser. Valenzuela was the first athlete I can remember from an opposing team whom I had mixed feelings about. You just couldn’t help but like him.

See More:Remembering Fernandomania” — a splendid 11-minute short film MLB produced a few years ago. The film does a great job emphasizing how much Valenzuela meant to the Mexican-American community in Los Angeles. His playing heyday was 40 years ago, but his influence on the Dodgers’ relationship to their then-still-kinda-new home city remains palpable today.

And One More: Watch this clip from 2017 and not get goosebumps. I dare you.

Intuit’s PR Team Has Seemingly Never Heard of the Streisand Effect 

Nilay Patel, after interviewing Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi for his Decoder podcast at The Verge:

It’s also not just lobbying: in 2022, a coalition of attorneys general from all 50 states got Intuit to agree to a $141 million settlement that required Intuit to refund low-income Americans who were eligible for free filing but were redirected to paid products. In 2023, the FTC found that TurboTax’s “free” marketing was willfully deceptive, and after the agency won an appeal early this year, Intuit was ordered to stop doing it.

I asked about that, and Sasan disagreed with me, and we went back and forth for a few minutes on it. It’s Decoder; we have exchanges like this all the time, and I didn’t think anything of it.

But then I got a note from Rick Heineman, the chief communications officer at Intuit, who called the line of questioning and my tone “inappropriate,” “egregious,” and “disappointing” and demanded that we delete that entire section of the recording. I mean, literally — he wrote a long email that ended with “at the very least the end portion of your interview should be deleted.”

We don’t do that here at The Verge.

What’s bananas about this is that the contentious segment of the interview ... wasn’t really all that contentious? If not for this controversy generated entirely by Intuit’s own comms chief, I’d have listened to the episode and might not have even thought twice about the whole segment on Intuit’s lobbying against the IRS and tax code being updated to eliminate the need for complicated tax filing. Of course Patel was going to bring this up. It’d have been shocking if he hadn’t. And I think Sasan presented Intuit’s case about as well it can be presented.

But now the episode has been the number one story at The Verge all day, and surely getting way more listens than the average Decoder episode — with listeners primed to pay attention to the segment on Intuit’s anti-tax-reform lobbying and the penalty they were fined for bilking low-income users into paid service they didn’t need.

And the Streisand effect isn’t counterintuitive. It’s obvious human nature. We want to look at and listen to things we’re told not to look at or listen to.

On the Cusp of Apple Intelligence’s Launch, Joanna Stern Interviews Craig Federighi 

Joanna Stern, writing for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

If you’re expecting AI fireworks, prepare for AI … sparklers. Back in June, at the company’s annual developers conference, executives showed off do-it-yourself emojis, ChatGPT integration and a Siri that can recall the name of a person you met months ago. Apple has even been running ads for some features. None are in this release.

“This is a big lift,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, told me at the company’s headquarters. “You could put something out there and have it be sort of a mess. Apple’s point of view is more like, ‘Let’s try to get each piece right and release it when it’s ready.’”

Yes, while other companies rush out generative-AI tools, sometimes with controversy, Apple is moving cautiously. Federighi denies the company is behind, saying it’s prioritizing privacy and responsibility.

It’s a very good interview, and also available on YouTube.

And yes, the higher-profile, more whiz-bang-y Apple Intelligence features aren’t shipping next week in iOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1. But as Stern herself points out in the article, the features that are shipping are genuinely useful. Notification summaries are good — the occasional mistakes can be funny, but overall it’s solid, and especially helpful for batches of notifications from the same app or group text. The Clean Up unwanted-object-remover in Photos is great. I still haven’t spent much time trying the writing tools, but Stern has, and finds them useful. These are tools that will be used in everyday situations, in the apps they already use, by normal, non-technical iOS and Mac users. There’s a reason Apple is doing a full-court media press on this.

Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’ 

Jeffrey Goldberg, in a must-read, must-share piece for The Atlantic (this is a gift link, which should get you through The Atlantic’s subscriber paywall, and which link I encourage you to share with every potential voter you know):

In their book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported that Trump asked John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump, at various points, had grown frustrated with military officials he deemed disloyal and disobedient. (Throughout the course of his presidency, Trump referred to flag officers as “my generals.”) According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly explained to Trump that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.” This correction did not move Trump to reconsider his view: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the president responded.

This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel. [...]

As president, Trump evinced extreme sensitivity to criticism from retired flag officers; at one point, he proposed calling back to active duty Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, two highly regarded Special Operations leaders who had become critical of Trump, so that they could be court-martialed. Esper, who was the defense secretary at the time, wrote in his memoir that he and Milley talked Trump out of the plan. [...] Trump has responded incredulously when told that American military personnel swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president.

There’s no hope for the deep-MAGA derps who actually cheer this on. Trump’s hope for another electoral victory, however, depends upon large swaths of conservative, or even just conservative-ish, voters who don’t take him seriously, who haven’t paid attention to all the red flags and evidence from his first term, and think he doesn’t mean what he says. He says a lot of crazy shit, yes, but when he talks about what he wants to do, he means it. There’s very little he said he wanted to do in his first term that he either didn’t do, or didn’t try to do.

Goldberg:

On separate occasions in 2020, Trump held private conversations in the White House with national-security officials about the George Floyd protests. “The Chinese generals would know what to do,” he said, according to former officials who described the conversations to me, referring to the leaders of the People’s Liberation Army, which carried out the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. (Pfeiffer denied that Trump said this.) Trump’s desire to deploy U.S. troops against American citizens is well documented. During the nerve-racking period of social unrest following Floyd’s death, Trump asked Milley and Esper, a West Point graduate and former infantry officer, if the Army could shoot protesters. “Trump seemed unable to think straight and calmly,” Esper wrote in his memoir. “The protests and violence had him so enraged that he was willing to send in active-duty forces to put down the protesters. Worse yet, he suggested we shoot them. I wondered about his sense of history, of propriety, and of his oath to the Constitution.” Esper told National Public Radio in 2022, “We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at General Milley, and said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?’” When defense officials argued against Trump’s desire, the president screamed, according to witnesses, “You are all fucking losers!”

There’s some hope our military leadership would resist such orders again. But there won’t be any civilian leaders like John Kelly or Mark Esper in a second Trump administration. It’d be sycophants all the way down.

Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator 

Michael S. Schmidt for The New York Times:

He said that, in his opinion, Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law. [...]

When Mr. Kelly left the White House in 2019, he decided he would speak out on the record only if Mr. Trump said something that he found deeply troubling or involved him and was wildly inaccurate. Mr. Trump’s recent comments about using the military against what he called the “enemy within” were so dangerous, he said, that he felt he had to speak out.

“And I think this issue of using the military on — to go after — American citizens is one of those things I think is a very, very bad thing — even to say it for political purposes to get elected — I think it’s a very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it,” Mr. Kelly said.

Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Trump was repeatedly told dating back to his first year in office why he should not use the U.S. military against Americans and the limits on his authority to do so. Mr. Trump nevertheless continued while in office to push the issue and claim that he did have the authority to take such actions, Mr. Kelly said.

Regarding Trump’s praise for Adolf Hitler:

“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” Mr. Kelly said Mr. Trump told him. [...]

“First of all, you should never say that,” Mr. Kelly said that he told Mr. Trump. “But if you knew what Hitler was all about from the beginning to the end, everything he did was in support of his racist, fascist life, you know, the, you know, philosophy, so that nothing he did, you could argue, was good — it was certainly not done for the right reason.”

Mr. Kelly said that would usually end the conversation. But Mr. Trump would occasionally bring it up again.

In his first term Trump had guardrails. He hadn’t expected to actually win in 2016 and while his administration was staffed with hard-right Republicans, they were men who respected the Constitution and rule of law. There is much to criticize about Trump’s attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr. But both were exactly the sort of people you’d expect as attorney general under any Republican president. In fact, Barr had previously served as attorney general, under George H.W. Bush from 1991–1993 — not exactly a time of tumult or growing fascism in the United States. For attorney general in a possible second administration, ABC News is reporting that Trump is considering Aileen Cannon, the apparatchik Florida judge — utterly unqualified for the federal bench but nominated by Trump in 2020 — who threw out Trump’s stolen classified documents case this summer. To call her decision unfounded in law and seemingly based on fealty to Trump personally is putting it mildly.


The Sordid Tale of Rudy Giuliani’s Yankees World Series Rings

The aforelinked piece on Rudy Giuliani losing his possessions to pay the two Georgia election officials he was convicted of defaming made reference to the dispute regarding his four World Series rings, from the Yankees championships during his time as mayor, in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000. The current dispute is over Giuliani’s deeply suspicious claim that he gave the rings to his nitwit son Andrew in 2018, so they’re no longer his for the court to take.

But how did Rudy get them in the first place? It’s generally reported that these rings were gifts from the Yankees, given to him, while mayor of New York, after each win. Here’s a report today from the AP that just glosses over their provenance.

The real story is — shocker — a scandal. An embarrassment for the Yankees, but almost certainly a crime on Giuliani’s part. That he received the rings in the first place seemingly wasn’t publicly known until 2007, during his ill-fated run for president, when he campaigned while wearing one of them. The whole sordid saga was exposed by reporter Wayne Barrett for The Village Voice in May 2007, in a 6,000-word feature under the headline “The Yankees’ Clean-Up Man”:

Giuliani has been seen on the campaign trail wearing a World Series ring, a valuable prize we never knew he had. Indeed, the Yankees have told the Voice that he has four rings, one for every world championship the Yankees won while he was mayor. Voice calls to other cities whose teams won the Series in the past decade have determined that Giuliani is the only mayor with a ring, much less four. If it sounds innocent, wait for the price tag. These are certainly no Canal Street cubic zirconia knockoffs.

With Giuliani’s name inscribed in the 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000 diamond-and-gold rings, memorabilia and baseball experts say they are collectively worth a minimum of $200,000. The Yankees say that Giuliani did pay for his rings — but only $16,000, and years after he had left office. Anyone paying for the rings is as unusual as a mayor getting one, since neither the Yankees nor any other recent champion have sold rings to virtually anyone. The meager payment, however, is less than half of the replacement value of the rings, and that’s a fraction of the market price, especially with the added value of Giuliani’s name.

What’s more troubling is that Giuliani’s receipt of the rings may be a serious breach of the law, and one that could still be prosecuted. New York officials are barred from taking a gift of greater than $50 value from anyone doing business with the city, and under Giuliani, that statute was enforced aggressively against others. His administration forced a fire department chief, for example, to retire, forfeit $93,105 in salary, and pay a $6,000 fine for taking Broadway tickets to two shows and a free week in a ski condo from a city vendor. The city’s Conflicts of Interest Board (COIB) has applied the gift rule to discounts as well, unless the cheaper rate “is available generally to all government employees.”

Needless to say, World Series rings were not available for purchase by anyone else, at any price.

Four sources, two from the manufacturer and two from City Hall, have told the Voice that a ring was made with Giuliani’s name on it in 1996 or early 1997. The City Hall sources also recall him receiving the ring at that time. In addition, one of these sources, joined by two other ex–Giuliani staffers, says the mayor did not take possession of the three additional rings until much later. The best recollection of these aides is that he got these rings as a package near the end of his term in 2001, just as his administration closed a number of critical deals with the Yankees. While the Yankees could offer no explanation for why he paid for three rings in one year and the 1996 ring a year later, the chronology cited by the sources suggests one. He paid for the three he received together, and then later remembered to pay for the one he’d gotten long before. He paid $2,000 less for the 1996 ring than he did for the others — another indication of how disconnected from market factors this reputed sale was, since many ring experts believe the 1996 ring, which ended a nearly two-decade Yankee drought, is the most valuable of the four.

I’ve quoted quite a bit here from Barrett’s reporting, but there’s so much more, all of it crooked as hell — a sordid tale of both large-scale graft and petty grift. It’s an extraordinary example of investigative reporting. Read it and laugh at now-disgraced Giuliani’s expense. Barrett’s report concludes:

Those who know Giuliani well say that when he thinks he’s in love, he waives all the rules of acceptable conduct. But the story of him and his team is not just a saga of disturbing infatuation and self-absorption. It is an object lesson in what kind of a president he would be, a window into his willingness to lend himself to a special interest, to blur all lines that ordinarily separate personal and public lives. It is not so much that he identified with the Yankees. It was himself that he was serving.

Turns out, we eventually got exactly that kind of president, and might get him again. It’s just that his name isn’t Giuliani. 


Rudy Giuliani Is Losing Everything to the Georgia Election Workers He Defamed 

Katelyn Polantz, reporting for CNN:

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered former Donald Trump attorney and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani to turn over all his valuable possessions and his Manhattan penthouse apartment to the control of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the Georgia election workers he defamed and to whom he now owes $150 million.

Judge Lewis Liman of the federal court in Manhattan said Giuliani must turn over his interest in the property to the women in seven days, to a receivership they will control. The judge’s turnover order of the luxury items is swift and simple, but the penthouse apartment will have its control transferred so Freeman and Moss can sell it, potentially for millions of dollars.

The women, who counted Georgia ballots after the 2020 election, will also be entitled to about $2 million in legal fees Giuliani has said the Trump campaign still owes him, the judge ruled.

In addition to the Trump campaign fees and the New York apartment, Giuliani must also turn over a collection of several watches, including ones given to him by European presidents after the September 11, 2001, attacks; a signed Joe DiMaggio jersey and other sports memorabilia; and a 1980 Mercedes once owned by the Hollywood star Lauren Bacall. Additionally, the judge ordered that Giuliani turn over his television, items of furniture and jewelry.

Liman hasn’t yet decided if Giuliani will be able to keep a Palm Beach, Florida, condominium he also owns, or the four New York Yankees World Series rings he has, which Giuliani’s son contends his father gave him.

Donald Trump has numerous super powers. One of them is the way that — to date — he’s suffered few consequences for crimes committed in his name. Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg didn’t just do time, he served hard time in Rikers Island. Former White House official Peter Navarro? Prison. Steve Bannon? Prison. Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen? Prison. The list goes on.

Now, as a result of his efforts on behalf of Trump to attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, Rudy Giuliani is seemingly destitute. Rightly so. The whole “America’s Mayor” schtick was unearned, but he had it. He had respect and wealth. Now he doesn’t even own a fucking television. His whole life thrown away in disgrace to do the bidding of Donald Trump, who at this point surely wouldn’t even answer a phone call from Giuliani, let alone actually help him.

Trump, meanwhile, is a nerve-rackingly close election away from escaping unscathed.

EU Considers Calculating X Corp Fines by Including Revenue From Elon Musk’s Other Firms 

Gian Volpicelli and Samuel Stolton, reporting for Bloomberg*:

Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc can slap online platforms with fines of as much as 6% of their yearly global revenue for failing to tackle illegal content and disinformation or follow transparency rules. Regulators are considering whether sales from SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI and the Boring Company, in addition to revenue generated from the social network, should be included to determine potential fines against X, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. [...]

X is a private company under Musk’s sole control. In considering revenue from his other companies, the commission is essentially weighing whether Musk himself should be regarded as the entity to fine as opposed to X itself, the people said. Tesla Inc.’s sales would be exempt from this calculation because it’s publicly traded and not under Musk’s full control, one of the people said. The commission hasn’t yet decided whether to penalize X, and the size of any potential fine is still under discussion, the people said.

It’d be one thing if X had been split off into a subsidiary of a larger original company, specifically to decrease the size of any potential revenue-based penalty. Like, say, if Apple suddenly decided to break off “iOS” into an independent company that licensed software to Apple to include on iPhones. But we all know that’s not what X is. X was Twitter, which was a publicly-traded company that Musk had no stake in, and which he then bought and made private.

If the EU actually decides to include revenue from SpaceX and Musk’s other companies in calculating a penalty against X, it would effectively be playing a one-sided form of Calvinball, where the rules just get made up out of whole cloth as they go along. (Except in “real” Calvinball, both sides get to change the rules as they see fit.) They’re the ones who chose percentage-of-global revenue as the basis for potential penalties. It’s not Musk’s fault that X Corp generates embarrassingly little (and decreasing) revenue. Wait, actually, that is his fault. He bought a bad business and made it a lot worse. It’s just not his fault that running X Corp into the ground financially means that he can pay any potential revenue-based penalty out of his pocket change.

* You know.

Yours Truly on the ‘Rad History’ Podcast to Talk About GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64 

Brian McCullough:

Did Nintendo try to kill GoldenEye 007 before it was completed? Why did Shigeru Miyamoto keep telling the development team to tone down the violence? And why did the famous multiplayer aspect of the game almost not happen? It’s slappers-only on Rad History, because we’re diving into the history of THE game of the late 1990s, GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64.

Had a blast talking about one of my very favorite video games ever. My main link here is to the YouTube version of the episode, but it’s also available as an audio episode for all podcast players, including Overcast and Apple Podcasts.

Yankees and Dodgers Resume the Best World Series Rivalry, Finally 

The New York Yankees are back in the World Series for the first time since 2009, and for the 41st time in franchise history. Their opponent: the Los Angeles Dodgers, who will appear for the 22nd time. This will be the 12th time the two teams have met in the World Series, but the first since 1981. (The Yankees won 8 of the previous 11.) A star-studded matchup with incredible history, to say the least. May the best team win.

See also: Jomboy’s pitch-by-pitch breakdown of Yankee hero Juan Soto’s series-clinching 3-run homer with 2 outs in the 10th inning against the Cleveland Guardians Saturday night. One of the best at-bats I’ve ever seen, and probably one of the top 5 home runs in the entire history of the Yankees.

Weather Up 

My thanks to Weather Up for sponsoring this week at DF. If you’re even a semi-regular reader, you know I’m an aficionado of weather apps. There are a bunch of really good ones — including Apple’s own — but there’s an incredible degree of variety and originality in their information design, style, and priorities. Weather Up is one of my favorites, and ever since version 3 shipped earlier this year, it’s been my primary iPhone weather widget, which, in turn, makes it my most-glanced-at weather app.

Widgets are where Weather Up really shines: informative, glanceable, and intuitively interactive, simultaneously presenting what’s going to happen in the next hour and the forecast for the next few days. Yes, this is my thank-you post for a paid sponsorship, but I absolutely mean this: Weather Up’s widget is the best.

The Weather Up app takes a different approach from the widget, presenting a map-first design. No other weather app (that I’m aware of) goes map-first presentation-wise — which is likely explained by the fact that, as Weather Up developer David Barnard explained on The Talk Show, weather map data is expensive.

In fact, all weather data costs money, and good weather data costs more. Most “free” weather apps are only free at the expense of your privacy. Because you generally grant your weather apps location access — for the obvious purpose of getting local weather info and notifications wherever you go — weather apps are a top category for privacy-invasive advertising.

The developers of Weather Up, on the other hand, are privacy fanatics. Weather Up takes extra steps to protect your data. GPS coordinates are rounded to prevent precise location tracking, data requests go through Weather Up’s servers to hide your IP address, and the app doesn’t collect or share any personal data. A Weather Up subscription normally costs a very reasonable $5/month or $40/year — but with this DF sponsorship link, you can start with a completely free 7-day trial and then pay just $20 for your first year, a 50 percent discount.

If you care about weather apps at all, I implore you to give Weather Up a try. You won’t regret it.

The European Union’s Interinstitutional Style Guide on Boldfacing for ‘Emphasis’ 

Here’s an interesting bit of follow-up. Last month, when linking to the European Commission’s announcement of “two specification proceedings to assist Apple in complying with its interoperability obligations under the Digital Markets Act”, I wrote a sidenote on the EC’s seemingly willy-nilly use of boldface text:

Honest question: Can someone explain to me the Commission’s use of boldfacing? In the first 265 words of the press release, 66 of them are bold, across 13 different spans. They seemingly use boldfacing the way Trump capitalizes words in his tweets: indiscriminately. I find it highly distracting, like trying to read a ransom letter. It’s not just this press release, they do it all the time.

It turns out, the EU publishes an Interinstitutional Style Guide, and it has an entire entry on emphasis:

Bold type is often used in titles and headings. It can also be used in running text to show changes of subject, to highlight keywords or for emphasis in the same way that some other languages use italics. However, it should be used sparingly.

If the text is already in bold roman, words to be emphasised should be in light roman characters.

Do not overuse typographical variations for emphasis. It can have a detrimental effect on getting the message across quickly and clearly, as shown in the following examples.

Their examples, showing how overuse of boldfacing makes text harder to read, look exactly like the announcement that prompted my sidenote. Whoever writes these announcements from the Commission should read the EU’s own style guide and follow its advice.

See Also: The EU style guide’s entry on italics, which they reserve for purposes other than emphasis.

FIDO Alliance Is Working on Making Passkeys Portable Across Platforms 

Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors:

The FIDO Alliance is developing new specifications to enable secure transfer of passkeys between different password managers and platforms. Announced on Monday, the initiative is the result of collaboration among members of the FIDO Alliance’s Credential Provider Special Interest Group, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, and others.

Passkeys are an industry standard developed by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium, and were integrated into Apple’s ecosystem with iOS 16, iPadOS 16.1, and macOS Ventura. They offer a more secure and convenient alternative to traditional passwords, allowing users to sign in to apps and websites in the same way they unlock their devices: With a fingerprint, a face scan, or a passcode. Passkeys are also resistant to online attacks like phishing, making them more secure than things like SMS one-time codes.

The draft specifications, called Credential Exchange Protocol (CXP) and Credential Exchange Format (CXF), will standardize the secure transfer of credentials across different providers. This addresses a current limitation where passkeys are often tied to specific ecosystems or password managers.

This initiative would address one of David Heinemeier Hansson’s primary complaints about passkeys, in a post I linked to earlier today.

Hardwick mentions un-phishability as an advantage of passkeys, and that’s very true. In fact, I think that was one of the primary selling points Apple emphasized when they introduced passkey support at WWDC two years ago. A scammer who gets a victim on the phone can’t trick them into revealing a passkey like they can with passwords or one-time numeric codes. But that use case is optimized for non-technical users.

A friend texted me with another argument for passkeys: it’s somewhat common for websites to break password autofill. Maybe it’s deliberate, in the name of fighting bots? But whether deliberate or not, with passkeys, they have to work with your browser’s connected password manager. So maybe passkeys are a net win for convenience, even for technically-knowledgeable users who are unlikely to fall for phishing scams.

Apple Passwords’ Generated Strong Password Format 

Speaking of passwords, Ricky Mondello — who has long been a leading member of Apple’s “Authentication Experience” team — has an interesting blog post describing the algorithm Apple uses when it suggests new strong passwords:

To make these passwords easier to type on suboptimal keyboard layouts like my colleague’s game controller, where the mode switching might be difficult, these new passwords are actually dominated by lowercase characters. And to make it easier to short-term have in your head little chunks of it to bring over to the other device, the passwords are based on syllables. That’s consonant, vowel, consonant patterns. With these considerations put together, in our experience, these passwords are actually a lot easier to type on a foreign, weird keyboard, in the rare instances where that might be needed for some of our users.

And we weren’t going to make any changes to our password format unless we can guarantee that it was as strong or stronger than our old format. So if you want to talk in terms of Shannon entropy once again, these new passwords have 71 bits of entropy, up from the 69 from the previous format. And a little tidbit for folks who are trying to match our math — [note that] we actually have a dictionary of offensive terms on device that we filter these generated passwords against and we’ll skip over passwords that we generate that contain those offensive substrings.

I’ve noticed some of these details, like that the passwords are comprised of little “fake words” and are dominated by lowercase letters, but I hadn’t noticed all of them. It’s a bunch of clever little touches, all in the aim of making strong passwords that are convenient in odd situations (like typing them with a game controller).

DHH Argues Against Passkeys 

David Heinemeier Hansson:

Yes, passwords have problems. If you’re using them without a password manager, you’re likely to reuse them across multiple services, and if you do, all it takes is one service with awful password practices (like storing them in plain text rather than hashing them with something like bcrypt), and a breach will mean hackers might get access to all your other services.

But just because we have a real problem doesn’t mean that all proposed solutions are actually going to be better. And at the moment, I don’t see how passkeys are actually better, and, worse still, can become better. Unless you accept the idea that all your passwords should be tied to one computing ecosystem, and thus make it hard to use alternative computers. [...]

Bottom line, I’m disappointed to report that passkeys don’t appear worth the complexity of implementation (which is substantial!) nor the complexity and gotchas of the user experience. So we’re sticking to passwords and emails. Encouraging opt-in 2FA and password managers, but not requiring them.

Passkeys seemed promising, but not all good intentions result in good solutions.

I don’t have strong feelings about passkeys, but I am vaguely unsettled by them. There’s no way to use passkeys without using a proper password manager, like Apple Passwords with iCloud Keychain, or 1Password. But if you’re using a proper password manager, your passwords should all be unique and random, and you should have convenient access to 2FA codes. So what’s the point of passkeys if they can only be used by people who are already using a good password manager? Perhaps the thinking is that too many users just can’t be budged from the risky habit of using passwords they have memorized, and passkeys are a way to break that habit because they can’t be memorized.

Also, I really dislike the practice of replacing passwords with email “magic links”. Autofilling a password from my keychain happens instantly; getting a magic link from email can take minutes sometimes, and even in the fastest case, it’s nowhere near instantaneous. Replacing something very fast — password autofill — with something slower is just a terrible idea. For people who actually prefer email magic links, it’s fine as an option, but it shouldn’t be the default, and it certainly shouldn’t be the only way to sign into an account.

Things Are Not Going Well at Automattic 

Samantha Cole, reporting for 404 Media:

In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic — and Mullenweg — could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.

“We were unaware that Matt redirected sign-up emails until current Automattic employees contacted our support team,” a spokesperson for Blind told me, adding that they’d “never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees from signing up for Blind by redirecting emails.”

That does not seem compatible with a culture of trust within a company. Cole also reports that Mullenweg has made another buyout offer this week, and is threatening employees who leak to the press. This very report from 404 Media, under the headline “Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos”, is not going to help. The whole situation is just very depressing.

The Secretive Dynasty That Controls the Boar’s Head Brand 

Maureen Farrell, writing for The New York Times:

In May 2022, the chief financial officer of Boar’s Head, the processed meat company, was asked a simple question under oath.

“Who is the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?”

“I’m not sure,” he replied.

“Who do you believe to be the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?” the lawyer persisted.

The executive, Steve Kourelakos, who had worked at the company for more than two decades and was being deposed in a lawsuit between owners, repeated his answer: “I’m not sure.”

It is odd, to say the least, when a top executive of a company claims not to know who his boss is. And Boar’s Head is no fly-by-night enterprise. The company is one of the country’s most recognizable deli-meat brands; it generates what employees and others estimate as roughly $3 billion in annual revenue and employs thousands of people.

There’s secretive, and then there’s secretive.

Apple Announces New iPad Mini, With A17 Pro and Pencil Pro Support 

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today introduced the new iPad mini, supercharged by the A17 Pro chip and Apple Intelligence, the easy-to-use personal intelligence system that understands personal context to deliver intelligence that is helpful and relevant while protecting user privacy. With a beloved ultraportable design, the new iPad mini is available in four gorgeous finishes, including a new blue and purple, and features the brilliant 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display. A17 Pro delivers a huge performance boost for even the most demanding tasks, with a faster CPU and GPU, a 2× faster Neural Engine than the previous-generation iPad mini, and support for Apple Intelligence. The versatility and advanced capabilities of the new iPad mini are taken to a whole new level with support for Apple Pencil Pro, opening up entirely new ways to be even more productive and creative. [...]

Starting at just $499 with 128GB — double the storage of the previous generation — the new iPad mini delivers incredible value and the full iPad experience in an ultraportable design.

Interesting that it sports the A17 Pro, not the regular A17. Update: Whoops, I got my A-series numbers confused — the A17 Pro is the chip from last year’s iPhone 15 Pro models, and, notably, there was no non-“Pro” variant. Still, though: an interesting chip to use for iPad Mini. Here’s a link to the tech specs for the 2021 6th-gen iPad Mini for comparison.

Also interesting that it still uses Touch ID, not Face ID. Not surprising though — the iPad Mini has always been sort of, but not quite, a mini iPad Air. And in the iPad lineup, Face ID remains a Pro-exclusive feature.

Sponsorship Openings at Daring Fireball, Q4 Edition 

After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is unusually open at the moment — including this upcoming week.

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

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

1Password 

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired longtime DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. In a 2023 survey of IT and security professionals, 50 percent of respondents said that their organization’s vulnerability management program had support from leadership to “a large/great extent”. That’s good for them. But it also leaves a full half of respondents without enough support from leadership.

If you’re trying to get buy-in at your own organization, come equipped with the facts about the risks you’re facing, and come with a clear plan to remediate them. To learn more about how vulnerability management is changing, read 1Password’s blog post, and come prepared.

Cabel Sasser’s Talk at XOXO 2024 

The less you know about this talk, the more you’ll enjoy watching it unfold. Just remarkably good. Trust me, watch it now, before anything about it is spoiled for you.