Netflix Agrees to Buy Warner Bros., Including HBO, for $83 Billion 

Meg James, reporting for The Los Angeles Times (News+ link):

The two companies announced the blockbuster deal early Friday morning. The takeover would give Netflix such beloved characters as Batman, Harry Potter and Fred Flintstone.

Fred Flintstone?

“Our mission has always been to entertain the world,” Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, said in a statement. “By combining Warner Bros.’ incredible library of shows and movies — from timeless classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane to modern favorites like Harry Potter and Friends — with our culture-defining titles like Stranger Things, KPop Demon Hunters and Squid Game, we’ll be able to do that even better.”

Not sure Squid Game belongs in the same comparison as Citizen Kane, but the Warners library is incredibly deep. Stanley Kubrick’s post-2001: A Space Odyssey films were all for Warner Bros.

Netflix’s cash and stock transaction is valued at about $27.75 per Warner Bros. Discovery share. Netflix also agreed to take on more than $10 billion in Warner Bros. debt, pushing the deal’s value to $82.7 billion. [...] Warner’s cable channels, including CNN, TNT and HGTV, are not included in the deal. They will form a new publicly traded company, Discovery Global, in mid-2026.

I don’t know if this deal makes sense for Netflix, but Netflix has earned my trust. Netflix is a product-first company. They care about the quality of their content, their software, their service, and their brand. If you care about the Warner/HBO legacy, an acquisition by Netflix is a much, much better outcome than if David Ellison had bought it to merge with Paramount.

The LA Times article goes on to cite concerns from the movie theater industry, based on Netflix’s historic antipathy toward theatrical releases for its films. Netflix is promising to keep Warner Bros.’s film studio a separate operation, maintaining the studio’s current support for theatrical releases. I hope they do. I grew up loving going to the movies. I still enjoy it, but the truth is I go far less often as the years go on. Movie theaters shouldn’t be a protected class of business just because there’s so much affection and nostalgia for them. If they continue sliding into irrelevance, so be it. That’s how disruption, progress, and competition work.

Alan Dye Was in Tim Cook’s Blind Spot

Thursday, 4 December 2025

NBC News, back in March 2018:

Speaking at a town hall event hosted by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Recode’s Kara Swisher, Cook said Facebook put profits above all else when it allegedly allowed user data to be taken through connected apps. [...]

When asked what he would do if he were in Zuckerberg’s position, Cook replied: “What would I do? I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“The truth is we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer, if our customer was our product,” Cook said. “We’ve elected not to do that.”

“Privacy to us is a human right. It’s a civil liberty, and something that is unique to America. This is like freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” Cook said. “Privacy is right up there with that for us.”

Perhaps Cook now needs to define “us”.

This was a rather memorable interview. Cook’s “What would I do? I wouldn’t be in this situation” is one of the stone-coldest lines he’s ever zinged at a rival company. (In public, that is.) That was just ice cold. Cook is a consummate diplomat. Most non-founder big company CEOs are. Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Andy Jassy — none of them are known for throwing shade, let alone sharp elbows, at competitors. Cook has made an exception, multiple times, when it comes to Facebook/Meta (and to a lesser degree, Google).

So it’s not just that Alan Dye jumped ship from Apple for the chief designer officer role at another company.1 It’s not just that he left for a rival company. It’s that he left Apple for Meta, of all companies. Given what Cook has said about Meta publicly, one can only imagine what he thinks about them privately. Apple executives tend to stay at Apple. The stability of its executive team is unparalleled. But Dye is a senior leader who not only left for a rival, but the one rival that Cook and the rest of Apple’s senior leadership team consider the most antithetical to Apple’s ideals.

It would have been surprising if Dye had jumped ship to Google or Microsoft. It would have been a little more surprising if he’d left for Amazon, if only because Amazon seemingly places no cultural value whatsoever on design, as Apple practices it. But maybe with Amazon it would have been seen as Andy Jassy deciding to get serious about design, and thus, in a way, less surprising after the fact. But leaving Apple for Meta, of all companies, feels shocking. How could someone who would even consider leaving Apple for Meta rise to a level of such prominence at Apple, including as one of the few public faces of the company?

So it’s not just that Alan Dye is a fraud of a UI designer and leader, and that Apple’s senior leadership had a blind spot to the ways Dye’s leadership was steering Apple’s interface design deeply astray. That’s problem enough, as I emphasized in my piece yesterday. It’s also that it’s now clear that Dye’s moral compass was not aligned with Apple’s either. Tim Cook and the rest — or at least most? — of Apple’s senior leadership apparently couldn’t see that, either. 

  1. I’d have thrown OpenAI in that list of companies where it would have been surprising, but not shocking, for Dye to leave Apple for. But that simply wasn’t possible given Jony Ive’s relationship with Sam Altman, LoveFrom’s collaboration with OpenAI with the io project, and Ive’s utter disdain for Dye’s talent, leadership, and personality. ↩︎

Thursday, 4 December 2025

Alan Dye Comments on His Career Move in an Instagram Story 

Straight/dumb quotation marks. Some default Instagram typeface. That period just hanging there, outside the closing quote. This is the post from the man who led Apple’s software design for a decade.

Not to mention the gall to use any quote from Steve Jobs, let alone this particular one, which is enshrined by Apple on the wall outside Town Hall at the old Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino, and provides the title for the splendid book published (in a delightful interactive version on the web, and in gorgeous limited print editions) by the Steve Jobs Archive and LoveFrom.

“Just figure out what’s next” for Alan Dye, after his supposedly wonderful accomplishments at Apple, is ... going to work for Meta? Jiminy H. Christ, that takes stones.

Bad Dye Job

Wednesday, 3 December 2025

In my post earlier today on the then-breaking news that Alan Dye has left Apple to join Meta as chief design officer (a new title at the company1), I wrote:

It sounds like Dye chose to jump ship, and wasn’t squeezed out (as it seems with former AI chief John Giannandrea earlier this week). Gurman/Bloomberg are spinning this like a coup for Meta (headline: “Apple Design Executive Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup”), but I think this is the best personnel news at Apple in decades. Dye’s decade-long stint running Apple’s software design team has been, on the whole, terrible — and rather than getting better, the problems have been getting worse.

Dye’s replacement at Apple is longtime Apple designer Stephen Lemay. I’ve never met Lemay (or at least can’t recall meeting him), and prior to today never heard much about him. But that’s typical for Apple employees. Part of the job working for Apple is remaining under the radar and out of the public eye. What I’ve learned today is that Lemay, very much unlike Dye, is a career interface/interaction designer. Sources I’ve spoken to who’ve worked with Lemay at Apple speak highly of him, particularly his attention to detail and craftsmanship. Those things have been sorely lacking in the Dye era. Not everyone loves everything Lemay has worked on, but nobody bats 1.000 and designers love to critique each other’s work. I’ve chatted with people with criticisms of specific things Lemay has worked on or led at Apple (e.g. aspects of iPadOS multitasking that struck many of us as deliberately limiting, rather than empowering), but everyone I’ve spoken to is happy — if not downright giddy — at the news that Lemay is replacing Dye. Lemay is well-liked personally and deeply respected talent-wise. Said one source, in a position to know the choices, “I don’t think there was a better choice than Lemay.”

The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. (If you care about design, there’s nowhere to go but down after leaving Apple. What people overlooked is the obvious: Alan Dye doesn’t actually care about design.)

What I struggled with in the wake of today’s news is how to square the following contradiction:

  • Dye apparently left for Meta on his own; he wasn’t squeezed out.

  • Apple replacing Dye with Lemay seemingly signals a significant shift in direction, replacing a guy whose approach was almost entirely superficial/visual with a guy who’s spent his entire career sweating actual interaction details.

If Apple’s senior leadership would have been happy to have Dye remain as leader of Apple’s software design teams, why didn’t they replace him with a Dye acolyte? Conversely, if the decision makers at Apple saw the need for a directional change, why wasn’t Dye pushed out?2

The answer, I think, is that the decision to elevate Lemay wasn’t about direction, but loyalty. Why risk putting in a Dye-aligned replacement when that person might immediately get poached too? We know, from this year’s AI recruitment battles, that Zuckerberg is willing to throw almost unfathomable sums of money to poach talent he wants to hire from competitors. Gurman reported that Billy Sorrentino, a Dye deputy who has served as a senior director of design at Apple since 2016, is leaving for Meta with Dye.3 I don’t have any other names, but word on the street is that other members of Dye’s inner circle are leaving Apple for Meta with him. But those who remain — or who might remain, if they’d have been offered the promotion to replace Dye — simply can’t be trusted from the perspective of senior leadership, who were apparently blindsided by Dye’s departure for Meta. They wouldn’t have given Dye a prime spot in the WWDC keynote if they thought he might be leaving within months.

So the change in direction we may see — that many of us desperately hope to see — under Lemay’s leadership might be happenstance. More a factor of Lemay being politically safe, as someone predating Dye and outside Dye’s inner circle at Apple, than from Tim Cook or anyone else in senior leadership seeing a need for a directional change in UI design. But happenstance or not, it could be the best thing to happen to Apple’s HI design in the entire stretch since Steve Jobs’s passing and Scott Forstall’s ouster.

Putting Alan Dye in charge of user interface design was the one big mistake Jony Ive made as Apple’s Chief Design Officer.4 Dye had no background in user interface design — he came from a brand and print advertising background. Before joining Apple, he was design director for the fashion brand Kate Spade, and before that worked on branding for the ad agency Ogilvy. His promotion to lead Apple’s software interface design team under Ive happened in 2015, when Apple was launching Apple Watch, their closest foray into the world of fashion. It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.

The most galling moment in Dye’s entire tenure was the opening of this year’s iPhone event keynote in September, which began with a title card showing the oft-cited Jobs quote “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” The whole problem with the Dye era of HI design at Apple is that it has so largely — not entirely, but largely — been driven purely by how things look. There are a lot of things in Apple’s software — like app icons — that don’t even look good any more. But it’s the “how it works” part that has gone so horribly off the rails. Alan Dye seems like exactly the sort of person Jobs was describing in the first part of that quote: “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’”

I am not a Liquid Glass hater. I actually think, on the whole, iOS 26 is a better and more usable UI than iOS 18. But MacOS 26 Tahoe is a mess, visually, and I’m not sure there’s a single thing about its UI that is better than MacOS 15 Sequoia. There are new software features in Tahoe that are excellent and serve as legitimate enticements to upgrade. But I’m talking about the user interface — the work from Alan Dye’s HI team, not Craig Federighi’s teams. I think the fact that Liquid Glass is worse on MacOS than it is on iOS is not just a factor of iOS being Apple’s most popular, most profitable, most important platform — and thus garnering more of Apple’s internal attention. I think it’s also about the fact that the Mac interface, with multiple windows, bigger displays, and more complexity, demands more nuanced, more expert, interaction design skills. Things like depth, layering, and unambiguous indications of input focus are important aspects of any platform. But they’re more important on the platform which, by design, shoulders more complexity. Back in 2010, predicting a bright future for the Mac at a time when many pundits were thinking Apple would soon put the entire platform out to pasture, I wrote, “It’s the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light.” That remains as true today as it was 15 years ago. But Liquid Glass, especially as expressed on MacOS, is a lightweight poorly considered design system as a whole, and its conceptual thinness is not sufficient to properly allow the Mac to carry the weight it needs to bear.

Perhaps more tellingly, there should have been no need for the “clear/tinted” Liquid Glass preference setting that Apple added in the 26.1 OS releases. Alan Dye wasn’t fired, by all accounts, but that preference setting was as good a sign as any that he should have been. And it’s very much a sign that inside Apple, there’s a strong enough contingent of people who prioritize how things work — like, you know, whether you can read text against the background of an alert — to get a setting like this shipped, outside the Accessibility section of Settings.

It remains worrisome that Apple needed to luck into Dye leaving the company. But fortune favors the prepared, and Apple remains prepared by having an inordinate number of longtime talented HI designers at the company. The oddest thing about Alan Dye’s stint leading software design is that there are, effectively, zero design critics who’ve been on his side. The debate regarding Apple’s software design over the last decade isn’t between those on Dye’s side and those against. It’s only a matter of debating how bad it’s been, and how far it’s fallen from its previous remarkable heights. It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray. It was a big problem inside the company too. I’m aware of dozens of designers who’ve left Apple, out of frustration over the company’s direction, to work at places like LoveFrom, OpenAI, and their secretive joint venture io. I’m not sure there are any interaction designers at io who aren’t ex-Apple, and if there are, it’s only a handful. From the stories I’m aware of, the theme is identical: these are designers driven to do great work, and under Alan Dye, “doing great work” was no longer the guiding principle at Apple. If reaching the most users is your goal, go work on design at Google, or Microsoft, or Meta. (Design, of course, isn’t even a thing at Amazon.) Designers choose to work at Apple to do the best work in the industry. That has stopped being true under Alan Dye. The most talented designers I know are the harshest critics of Dye’s body of work, and the direction in which it’s been heading.

Back in June, after WWDC, I quoted from Alan Dye’s introduction of Liquid Glass during the keynote, and then quoted from Steve Jobs’s introduction of Aqua when he unveiled the Mac OS X Public Beta in January 2000. I wrote:

Re-watching Jobs’s introduction of Aqua for the umpteenth time, I still find it enthralling. I found Alan Dye’s introduction of Liquid Glass to be soporific, if not downright horseshitty.

One of the bits from Jobs’s Aqua introduction I quoted was this:

This is what the top of windows look like. These three buttons look like a traffic signal, don’t they? Red means close the window. Yellow means minimize the window. And green means maximize the window. Pretty simple. And tremendous fit and finish in this operating system. When you roll over these things, you get those. You see them? And when you are no longer the key window, they go transparent. So a lot of fit and finish in this.

After I published that post, I got a note from a designer friend who left Apple, in frustration, a few years ago. After watching Jobs’s Aqua introduction for the first time in years, he told me, “I’m really struck by Steve directly speaking to ‘radio buttons’ and ‘the key window’.” He had the feeling that Dye and his team looked down on interface designers who used terms like Jobs himself once used — in a public keynote, no less. That to Dye’s circle, such terms felt too much like “programmer talk”. But the history of Apple (and NeXT) user interface design is the opposite. Designers and programmers used to — and still should — speak the exact same language about such concepts. Steve Jobs certainly did, and something feels profoundly broken about that disconnect under Alan Dye’s leadership. It’s like the head of cinematography for a movie telling the camera team to stop talking about nerdy shit like “f-stops”. The head of cinematography shouldn’t just abide talking about f-stops and focal lengths, but love it. Said my friend to me, regarding his interactions with Dye and his team at Apple, “I swear I had conversations in which I mentioned ‘key window’ and no one knew what I meant.”

That won’t be a problem with Stephen Lemay. Understanding of fundamental principles will no longer be lacking. Lemay has been at Apple spanning the gamut between the Greg Christie/Bas Ording glory days and the current era. At the very least, Lemay running HI should stop the bleeding — both in terms of work quality and talent retention. I sincerely believe things might measurably improve, but I’m more sure that things will stop getting worse. That alone will be a win for everyone — even though the change was seemingly driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to poach Dye, not Tim Cook and Apple’s senior leadership realizing they should have shitcanned him long ago.

Alan Dye is not untalented. But his talents at Apple were in politics. His political skill was so profound that it was his decision to leave, despite the fact that his tenure is considered a disaster by actual designers inside and outside the company. He obviously figured out how to please Apple’s senior leadership. His departure today landed as a total surprise because his stature within the company seemed so secure. And so I think he might do very well at Meta. Not because he can bring world-class interaction design expertise — because he obviously can’t — but because the path to success at Meta has never been driven by design. It’s about getting done what Zuck wants done. Dye might excel at that. Dye was an anchor holding Apple back, but might elevate design at Meta.5

My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.” 

  1. Titles are just titles, and title inflation is a real problem at all big companies. But I always thought C-level executives by definition report directly to the CEO. That that was the whole point of a “chief whatever officer” title versus “senior vice president of whatever”. But according to Mark Gurman’s exclusive report at Bloomberg breaking this whole story (emphasis added):

    With the Dye hire, Meta is creating a new design studio and putting him in charge of design for hardware, software and AI integration for its interfaces. He will be reporting to Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who oversees Reality Labs. That group is tasked with developing wearable devices, such as smart glasses and virtual reality headsets. Dye’s major focus will be revamping Meta’s consumer devices with artificial intelligence features.

    If true, Dye doesn’t even report directly to Mark Zuckerberg. Oddly enough, after the retirement of COO Jeff Williams this year, Apple claimed the company’s design teams transitioned to reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook. ↩︎

  2. And man oh man am I curious who was involved with this decision, who had Tim Cook’s ear, and just how quickly they were forced to make it. Part of what made Stephen Lemay a popular choice within Apple’s ranks is that Lemay, by all accounts I’ve heard, isn’t a political operator and never angled for a promotion to a level of this prominence. His focus has always singularly been on the work. ↩︎︎

  3. Sorrentino was featured in a two-minute-plus segment in this year’s WWDC keynote, starting at the 38:25 mark, introducing the new iOS Visual Intelligence features. His star was rising at Apple. And Dye himself, of course, was given the spotlight to introduce and effectively take credit for Liquid Glass itself. At least until recently, no one at Apple saw this coming. ↩︎︎

  4. I have good reason to believe that Ive, in private, would be the first person to admit that. A fan of Liquid Glass Jony Ive is not. I believe he sees Dye as a graphic designer, not a user interface designer — and not a good graphic designer at that. I don’t think Alan Dye could get a job as a barista at LoveFrom. ↩︎︎

  5. It’s worth recalling that Zuckerberg sorta kinda tried this poach-design-talent-from-Apple thing before. Mike Matas, the wunderkind designer who became a sensation with Delicious Library in 2005, soon thereafter moved on to work at Apple, where he designed such things as the “slide to unlock” interface on the original iPhone. Matas was a key designer on that glorious first version of the iPhone’s OS. He then left Apple and formed Push Pop Press, and wound up at Facebook in 2011 after Facebook acquired Push Pop — before it had even shipped its core product. (I saw a still-in-development version of Push Pop’s publishing system in 2011, before Facebook bought them and shut down the product, and it remains to this day one of the most impressive, exciting, “this is the future” demos I’ve ever seen. It’s not merely a shame but a goddamn tragedy that it never even shipped.) Zuckerberg wound up assembling around Matas an entire little superteam of “Delicious” era designers and design-focused developers. That team wound up shipping Facebook Paper in 2014 — an iOS-exclusive alternative client for Facebook that espoused the same principles of elegance, exquisite attention to detail, and, especially, direct manipulation of content in lieu of user interface chrome, that infused Push Pop Press’s publishing system. Facebook Paper was so good it almost — almost — made me sign up for a Facebook account just so I could use it. But Facebook Paper went nowhere, fast. Zuckerberg lost his boner for “design”, Facebook Paper was pulled from the App Store in 2016, and the team behind Paper disbanded.

    Matas today works at LoveFrom, and remains, to my mind, one of the most singularly talented and interesting people in the field of interaction design. In some closer-to-ideal alternate universe, Matas would be running HI design at Apple today. ↩︎︎

Wednesday, 3 December 2025

Louie Mantia on The Talk Show in July, Talking About Alan Dye and Liquid Glass 

Back in July, I was lucky enough to have my friend Louie Mantia on The Talk Show to talk about Liquid Glass and (as I wrote in the show notes) “the worrisome state of Apple’s UI design overall”. This was probably my favorite episode of the show all year, and I think it holds up extremely well now that we’re all using Liquid Glass, across Apple’s platforms, in release versions.

Included in the show notes was a link to Mantia’s essay making his case against Dye’s decade-long stint leading Apple’s UI design teams, “A Responsibility to the Industry”, which began thus:

Firstly, I maintain that it makes absolutely no sense that Alan Dye has the power he has, because he simply has no taste. But what’s worse is that he wields that power so clumsily, so carelessly. And because it goes unchallenged, unchecked by someone higher than him, the entire industry suffers the consequences.

Here’s Mantia today, regarding the news of Dye leaving Apple for Meta:

And good riddance!!

Alan.app 

Tyler Hall, just one week ago:

Maybe it’s because my eyes are getting old or maybe it’s because the contrast between windows on macOS keeps getting worse. Either way, I built a tiny Mac app last night that draws a border around the active window. I named it “Alan”.

In Alan’s preferences, you can choose a preferred border width and colors for both light and dark mode.

That’s it. That’s the app.

The timing of this is remarkably serendipitous — releasing an app named “Alan” to fix an obvious glaring design shortcoming in recent versions of MacOS just one week before Alan Dye left Apple. (See Michael Tsai for more on the app’s name, including a callback to Greg Landweber’s classic Mac OS extension Aaron.)

It’s worth following Hall’s “the contrast between windows” link, which points to his own post from five years ago lamenting the decline in contrast between active and inactive windows in MacOS. That 2020 post of Hall’s refers back to Steve Jobs’s introduction of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in 2007:

As I was preparing the above video for this post, I completely forgot there was a final feature about the new Leopard Desktop that was highlighted in that keynote.

Jobs took time out of a keynote to callout that it was now easier to tell which window is focused. At 1:29 in that clip, you’ll hear an outsized “Wooo!” from some of the audience just for this one improvement.

Jobs even prepared a slide, highlighting “Prominent active window” as a noteworthy new feature. In 2007, the increase of visual prominence for the active window, going from 10.4 Tiger to 10.5 Leopard, drew applause from the audience. But the level of visual prominence indicating active/inactive windows was much higher in 10.4 Tiger than in any version of MacOS in the last decade under Alan Dye’s leadership.

Nick Heer on Alan (the app, and, indirectly, the man):

I wish it did not feel understandable for there to be an app that draws a big border around the currently active window. That should be something made sufficiently obvious by the system. Unfortunately, this is a problem plaguing the latest versions of MacOS and Windows alike, which is baffling to me. The bar for what constitutes acceptable user interface design seems to have fallen low enough that it is tripping everyone at the two major desktop operating system vendors.

Nick Heer Obtained Video of Alan Dye’s Exit From Apple 

That doesn’t look like one of the fancy Mitsubishi traction elevators at Apple Park, but otherwise, this jibes.

Alan Dye Leaves Apple for Meta, Replaced by Longtime Designer Stephen Lemay 

Mark Gurman, with blockbuster news at Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc. has poached Apple Inc.’s most prominent design executive in a major coup that underscores a push by the social networking giant into AI-equipped consumer devices.

The company is hiring Alan Dye, who has served as the head of Apple’s user interface design team since 2015, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Apple is replacing Dye with longtime designer Stephen Lemay, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the personnel changes haven’t been announced.

Apple confirmed the move in a statement provided to Bloomberg News.

“Steve Lemay has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999,” Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said in the statement. “He has always set an extraordinarily high bar for excellence and embodies Apple’s culture of collaboration and creativity.”

It sounds like Dye chose to jump ship, and wasn’t squeezed out (as it seems with former AI chief John Giannandrea earlier this week). Gurman/Bloomberg are spinning this like a coup for Meta (headline: “Apple Design Executive Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup”), but I think this is the best personnel news at Apple in decades. Dye’s decade-long stint running Apple’s software design team has been, on the whole, terrible — and rather than getting better, the problems have been getting worse.

Tuesday, 2 December 2025

Look How They Massacred My Boy 

Todd Vaziri, on the HBO Max Mad Men fiasco:

It appears as though this represents the original photography, unaltered before digital visual effects got involved. Somehow, this episode (along with many others) do not include all the digital visual effects that were in the original broadcasts and home video releases. It’s a bizarro mistake for Lionsgate and HBO Max to make and not discover until after the show was streaming to customers.

I decided to help illustrate the changes by diving in and creating images that might do better than words. The first thing I noticed is that, at least for season one, the episode titles and order were totally jumbled. The puke episode is “Red in the Face”, not “Babylon”.

So HBO Max not only ruined several episodes by “remastering” the wrong footage, but they both mis-numbered and mis-titled the episodes. Breathtaking ineptitude. Think about it. This is the entire raison d’être — streaming high quality movies and episodic series. That’s the one and only thing HBO Max does. And they have zero care or craft for what they do. They didn’t just do this to any show. They did it to one of the most cinematically beautiful and carefully crafted shows ever made.

Vaziri’s post, as is his wont, is replete with illustrated and animated examples of the mistakes in HBO’s versions compared to the correct originals available from AMC and iTunes. Vaziri notes:

The fun thing about this restoration mistake is that now we, the audience, get to see exactly how many digital visual effects were actually used in a show like “Mad Men”, which most would assume did not have any digital effects component. In this shot, not only were the techs and hose removed, but the spot where the pretend puke meets Slattery’s face has some clever digital warping to make it seem like the flow is truly coming from his mouth (as opposed to it appearing through a tube inches from his mouth, on the other side of his face).

HBO Max Butchers ‘Mad Men’ in Botched ‘Remastering’ 

Alan Sepinwall, writing for Wired (News+ link in case Wired’s paywall busts your balls):

Last month, HBO Max announced a major new addition to its library. Not only would the streamer be adding Mad Men — a show that HBO execs infamously passed on back when Matthew Weiner was a writer on The Sopranos — but it would be presenting the period drama’s episodes in a new 4K remastering. This would, according to the press release, give “audiences and longtime Mad Men fans the opportunity to enjoy the series’ authentically crafted elements with crisp detail and enhanced visual clarity.”

As it turned out, there was perhaps too much clarity. Not long after the series went live on HBO Max, a screencap began floating around social media from a scene in the Season One episode “Red in the Face,” where Roger Sterling is vomiting in front of a group of horrified Sterling Cooper clients. When it aired — and in the version still available on AMC+ — seven men are onscreen, all of them wearing period-appropriate suits and ties. The HBO Max version, on the other hand, features two men who appear very out of place in 1960: crew members lurking in the background, feeding a hose to create the illusion that actor John Slattery is puking.

It’s not like the crew members are only partially on-screen, or out of focus far in the background. They’re right there. It’s glaringly obvious that no one at HBO Max even watched this. That’s how rotten the culture at Warner Bros. Discovery is. They obtained the rights to one of the greatest TV shows ever made (one that I personally hold alongside The Sopranos as my favorite ever), processed the episodes in some sort of “remastering” that did not need to happen, and didn’t even bother to watch the fucking new versions they produced before putting them on their service for the world to stream.

AMC+ has the entire original series, as originally broadcast, and it looks gorgeous. I bought all seven seasons from iTunes back in the day, and they look as good, if not better, in those versions. David Zaslav — a well-known idiot — should go to prison for this.

Apple to Resist Order in India to Preload State-Run App on iPhones 

Aditya Kalra and Munsif Vengattil, reporting for Reuters:

Apple does not plan to comply with a mandate to preload its smartphones with a state-owned cyber safety app and will convey its concerns to New Delhi, three sources said, after the government’s move sparked surveillance concerns and a political uproar.

The Indian government has confidentially ordered companies including Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi to preload their phones with an app called Sanchar Saathi, or Communication Partner, within 90 days. The app is intended to track stolen phones, block them and prevent them from being misused.

The government also wants manufacturers to ensure that the app is not disabled. And for devices already in the supply chain, manufacturers should push the app to phones via software updates, Reuters was first to report on Monday. [...]

Apple however does not plan to comply with the directive and will tell the government it does not follow such mandates anywhere in the world as they raise a host of privacy and security issues for the company’s iOS ecosystem, said two of the industry sources who are familiar with Apple’s concerns. They declined to be named publicly as the company’s strategy is private.

The second source said Apple does not plan to go to court or take a public stand, but it will tell the government it cannot follow the order because of security vulnerabilities. Apple “can’t do this. Period,” the person said.

To my knowledge, there are no government-mandated apps pre-installed on iPhones anywhere in the world. I’m not even sure how that would work, technically, given that third-party apps have to come from the App Store and thus can’t be installed until after the iPhone is configured and the user signs into their App Store Apple Account.

The app order comes as Apple is locked in a court fight with an Indian watchdog over the nation’s antitrust penalty law. Apple has said it risks facing a fine of up to $38 billion in a case.

This is another one of those laws like the EU’s DMA, where maximum possible fines are based on a percentage of global revenue. No one in India seems to actually be threatening any such fine, but it’s ludicrous that it’s even possible.

Monday, 1 December 2025

Gurman Pooh-Poohs Financial Times Report That Tim Cook Is Retiring in First Half of 2026 

Speaking of Apple executive HR news, in his Power On Bloomberg column last weekend, Mark Gurman pooh-poohed the Financial Times’s recent report that Tim Cook was likely to retire early next year (paywalled, alas, but summarized by MacRumors):

In October, I wrote that the internal spotlight on Ternus was “intensifying,” and that barring unforeseen circumstances he would be the leading candidate. But I didn’t put a date on when a change might happen. Then, around midnight two Fridays ago, the Financial Times published a report with three central claims: Apple is “intensifying” succession planning; Ternus is likely the next CEO; and Cook is expected to step down between late January and June.

The first two points are anything but revelations if you’ve read Bloomberg coverage and Power On, or have simply been paying attention to the realities of Cook’s age and tenure. The timing, however, is another matter entirely. It’s a huge deal that the FT did this: A respected publication should only predict the CEO transition date for a company of Apple’s scale with a high level of confidence — based on people legitimately in the know.

This is where I have concerns. Based on everything I’ve learned in recent weeks, I don’t believe a departure by the middle of next year is likely. In fact, I would be shocked if Cook steps down in the time frame outlined by the FT. Some people have speculated that the story was a “test balloon” orchestrated by Apple or someone close to Cook to prepare Wall Street for a change, but that isn’t the case either. I believe the story was simply false.

They can’t both be right. Either the Financial Times or Bloomberg and Gurman will have a serving of claim chowder no later than June. But as Gurman points out, the only disagreement in their reporting is regarding timing: soon vs. soon-ish.

It could be that we see something like the following next year. Current board chairman Arthur Levinson turned 75 this year, the suggested age limit for Apple Board members. So maybe he rides off into the sunset and Apple names Cook, who already has a seat on the board, executive chairman. Maybe in February, ahead of Apple’s annual shareholder meeting. Then, in the second half of the year, Cook steps down as CEO, Ternus takes the CEO job, and Cook remains chairman of the board for the next decade or so. One change at a time, with a drip-drip series of leaks to trusted business news publications, like the one to the Financial Times last month — seemingly from the board itself — to make none of it come as a surprise.

I don’t think the leak — from multiple sources — to the FT was a “test balloon” (cue John Siracusa on ATP 666 regarding “trial balloon” being the correct idiom). It was more of a “heads up, this is what’s coming”.

John Giannandrea Is Out 

Apple Newsroom, “John Giannandrea to Retire From Apple”:

Apple today announced John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down from his position and will serve as an advisor to the company before retiring in the spring of 2026. Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramanya has joined Apple as vice president of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi. Subramanya will be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation. The balance of Giannandrea’s organization will shift to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue to align closer with similar organizations.

After the fiasco around Apple Intelligence and the “more personalized Siri” features — which were announced at WWDC in June 2024, but postponed until 2026 in a tail-between-their-legs announcement in March 2025 — and the executive reshuffling immediately after that delay was announced that put Mike Rockwell in charge of Siri and moved all or most of Apple Intelligence and Siri under Craig Federighi, it would have been much more surprising if Giannandrea had stayed at Apple. In fact, I’m surprised he wasn’t out before WWDC this past June.

I don’t think we need to wait for additional details to know that he was squeezed out. If, as Mark Gurman reported back in March, “Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development”, why was he still there?

As for Subramanya, according to his LinkedIn profile, he was at Google for 16 years, and left to join Microsoft only five months ago. Either he didn’t like working at Microsoft, or Apple made him an offer he couldn’t refuse (or, perhaps, both).

Signal Secure Backups Are Now Available on iOS

Monday, 1 December 2025

Signal Support:

Signal Secure Backups can help you safely restore your chats if something unexpected happens to your device (like dropping your phone in a lake). When this optional feature is enabled, your device will automatically back up your message history so you won’t lose important data if you get a new phone or reinstall Signal.

Your Secure Backup Archive is end-to-end encrypted and protected by a cryptographically secure 64-character recovery key that is never shared with the Signal service. Without your unique recovery key, no one (including Signal) can read, decrypt, or restore any of the data in your Secure Backup Archive.

Signal’s cloud storage service is optional (of course), and available to all users free of charge. At the free tier, it will back up the complete text of users’ chat history and the last 45 days of file attachments (images, video, etc.). For $2/month (through in-app purchase in the iPhone app), Signal will remove the 45-day window on media attachments, and store up to 100 GB of attachments — which, for most users, should be their complete history. (I don’t remember how far back in time my iCloud iMessage storage goes, but, as I type this, it includes 772,004 messages and consumes 83.4 GB of storage. I have a lot of images in there. 100 GB of storage feels pretty good for $2/month. My personal Signal account backup size is just 408 MB, which jibes with my gut feeling regarding how much I use Signal compared to iMessage — about one-half of one percent as much.)

Signal first announced this feature back in September in a blog post that has a lot of technical details about how it works, but until a week ago, it was only available on the Android version. It’s still labelled as a “beta” feature on iOS. I enabled it over the weekend and signed up for the $2/month subscription — both to back up all my attachments and to support the Signal Foundation. Now that I’m paying $2/month, however, I wish they’d stop periodically badgering me for donations when I launch the app.

I’m glad this feature became available when it did, and that I enabled it over the weekend. Yesterday I set up my personal new iPhone this year, and this morning, when I tried to transfer my Signal account from my old iPhone to the new one, after claiming to reach “100%” of the transfer, and the Signal app reporting on both the old (source) and new (destination) phones that the transfer was complete, the app crashed on both phones. After that, the Signal app was in factory-fresh state on both phones, without any trace of my account history. I then restored the new iPhone from my brand-new online Signal Secure Backup, and that worked perfectly. And it somehow took far, far less time than the old device-to-device transfer — maybe one minute, versus 15 minutes or so for the device-to-device transfer that wound up failing.

Until now, transferring my Signal account history from one phone to another always felt like delivering a crate full of eggs while riding a rickety old bicycle without brakes on a bumpy cobblestone street. Every time I did it device-to-device, it felt like I’d be lucky if it worked. And my experience trying it this morning — for the last time — proved me right. Signal proponents often defended this architecture by arguing that remaining only on device was a security benefit. In some ways that’s true, but there’s nothing “secure” about a transfer feature that loses all of your data if the transfer fails. (Signal data, by design, isn’t included in iCloud backups because Apple holds a key to unlock iCloud backups for customer service reasons, unless the user has enabled Advanced Data Protection.) Permanently losing all your data is a different form of “insecurity” than having it exfiltrated by an attacker or exposed to law enforcement agencies via a warrant issued to the cloud backup provider, but it’s a form of insecurity nonetheless.

Signal’s top priority has always been protecting your data from being obtained by others. That’s a noble idea, and central to Signal’s brand. But by placing that priority so far above everything else, it meant, until now, that you’d lose your entire account history if you lost or broke your primary phone. This new secure backup system shows that your data can remain secure while also being backed up off device. I’m glad the feature is finally here, but it should have been here years ago. A user-hostile “lose your phone, lose your account history” architecture may well be “secure” in a technical sense, but it’s the sort of brittleness that’s kept Signal from achieving more mainstream use. 

Sunday, 30 November 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Financial Boner’ 

Special guest: Tyler Hayes. Topics include how to get a small phone today, which way foldables should fold, the state of Apple TV (including its new “sonic logo”), and some holiday gift gadget recommendations.

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Saturday, 29 November 2025

Dekáf Coffee Roasters 

My thanks to Dekáf for sponsoring Daring Fireball this week. They’ve just launched a nice lineup of holiday gift bundles — curated sets of their most-loved coffees that make gift-buying easy.

Nine single origins. Six signature blends. Four Mizudashi cold brews. All micro-lot and top-rated coffees are shipped within 24 hours of roasting. No shortcuts. No crash. Dekáf is coffee at its most refined, just without the caffeine. I’ve gone through a few bags, and each one tasted great — like high quality regular coffee.

And, there’s a special offer just for DF readers: get 20% off with code DF.

Festivitas — Now for iOS, Thanks to Widgets 

Last year developer Simon Støvring launched a fun new app for the Mac called Festivitas, which let you decorate your menu bar and Dock with animated holiday lights and falling snow. This year he’s added an iOS version for iPhone and iPad that lets you create widgets to decorate your home screens with holidays lights and festive photo frames. Pure fun.

See also: Jason Snell on using Festivitas’s Shortcuts support to create an automation that gives a 10 percent chance of snow every 20 minutes. Støvring’s own Shortcuts examples (available in the app’s Settings window) include things like turning on the lights when music starts playing. With support for Shortcuts, users can create their own fun.

‘A Critter Carol’ — Apple’s 2025 Holiday Short Film 

Delightful, and there’s an equally delightful behind-the-scenes video.

Thursday, 27 November 2025

‘Fifteen Years’ 

A masterpiece from Randall Munroe, perfect for Thanksgiving.

Wednesday, 26 November 2025

David Lerner, Co-Founder of Tekserve, Dies at 72 

Sam Roberts, reporting for The New York Times:

David Lerner, a high school dropout and self-taught computer geek whose funky foothold in New York’s Flatiron district, Tekserve, was for decades a beloved discount mecca for Apple customers desperate to retrieve lost data and repair frozen hard drives, died on Nov. 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 72. [...]

Tekserve specialized in finding the cures for sick computers — including insect infestations — and recovering first novels and other priceless data, which the company said it was able to do about 85 percent of the time.

“We only charged for success,” Mr. Lerner said.

There were many great independent Apple resellers from the pre-Apple-Store era. There was only one that was legendary: Tekserve.

Running to the Press 

Regarding my earlier post on similarities between the 2010 App Store Guidelines and today’s: Notably absent from the current guidelines (I think for a very long time) is the specious but very Jobsian claim that “If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.” Getting the press on your side is one of the best ways for a developer to get an unjust App Store review decision overturned. Apple loathes negative publicity.

November Update to the App Store Review Guidelines 

Here’s the updated full guideline for section 4.1:

4.1 Copycats

(a) Come up with your own ideas. We know you have them, so make yours come to life. Don’t simply copy the latest popular app on the App Store, or make some minor changes to another app’s name or UI and pass it off as your own. In addition to risking an intellectual property infringement claim, it makes the App Store harder to navigate and just isn’t fair to your fellow developers.

(b) Submitting apps which impersonate other apps or services is considered a violation of the Developer Code of Conduct and may result in removal from the Apple Developer Program.

(c) You cannot use another developer’s icon, brand, or product name in your app’s icon or name, without approval from the developer.

It’s guideline (c) that’s new, but I like guideline (a) here. Not just the intent of it, but the language. It’s clear, direct, and human. It reminds me of the tone of the very early guidelines, when it seemed like Steve Jobs’s voice was detectable in some of them. In a post back in 2010, I wrote:

This new document is written in remarkably casual language. For example, a few bullet items from the beginning:

  • We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps.

  • If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.

  • If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you’re trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.

  • We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.

  • If your app is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.

Some of that language remains today. Here’s the current guideline for section 4.3:

4.3 Spam [...]

(b) Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already. We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience. Spamming the store may lead to your removal from the Apple Developer Program.

I could be wrong, but my sense is that Apple has, without much fanfare, cracked down on scams and rip-offs in the App Store. That doesn’t mean there’s none. But it’s like crime in a city: a low amount of crime is the practical ideal, not zero crime. Maybe Apple has empowered something like the “bunco squad” I’ve wanted for years? If I’m just unaware of blatant rip-offs running wild in the App Store, send examples my way.

Monday, 24 November 2025

Simple Rule of Thumb: AI Systems Shouldn’t Pretend to Be Human 

Dave Winer:

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it’s human, with a level of intimacy that you really don’t want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there’s a pseudo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it’s just a computer. I think AI’s should give up the pretense that they’re human, and this one should be first.

Amen.

‘A Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors’ 

Charlie Warzel, writing for The Atlantic:

X’s decision to show where accounts are based is, theoretically, a positive step in the direction of transparency for the platform, which has let troll and spam accounts proliferate since Musk’s purchase, in late 2022. And yet the scale of the deception — as revealed by the “About” feature — suggests that in his haste to turn X into a political weapon for the far right, Musk may have revealed that the platform he’s long called “the number 1 source of news on Earth” is really just a worthless, poisoned hall of mirrors.

Max Berger, on Bluesky:

If I’m understanding this correctly, X is owned by a white nationalist who pays poor people of color in developing countries to pretend to be working class white Americans to scare other white Americans into being afraid poor people of color from developing countries are going to ruin America?

Pretty much.

Department of Transportation Asks Travelers to ‘Bring Civility Back’ to Air Travel 

The New York Times:

Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, began a new campaign on Wednesday that he called “The Golden Age of Travel Starts With You,” complete with a 1960s-style public service announcement that spliced together scenes of the country’s first air travelers, dressed in suits and hats, with present-day clips of in-flight brawls and airport meltdowns. In the background, Frank Sinatra sings “Come Fly With Me.”.

From the Department of Transportation website:

Secretary Duffy posed a few key questions every flyer should ask themselves this holiday season to help Americans reach their destinations as quickly, efficiently and comfortably as possible:

  1. Are you helping a pregnant woman or the elderly with placing their bags in the overhead bin?
  2. Are you dressing with respect?
  3. Are you keeping control of your children and helping them through the airport?
  4. Are you saying thank you to your flight attendants?
  5. Are you saying please and thank you in general?

“Quiet, piggy.”

SuperDuper Security Update v3.11 

Dave Nanian and Bruce Lacey, at Shirt Pocket:

Mistakes are a part of life.

They’re not a great part, but when viewed “correctly”, they’re an opportunity.

Well, we have three opportunities, brought to our attention by a security researcher. They’re security vulnerabilities that have been in SuperDuper! since the very first version, released almost 22 years ago.

Today, we’re releasing fixes for the current release (the SuperDuper! v3.20 Beta is already fixed), a discussion of the problems, and the steps users can take to mitigate the issues if they cannot install the update.

We don’t know of any bad actors making use of these exploits as of this post.

Another good postmortem, with technical details and an apology.

Sunday, 23 November 2025

Clerk for iOS 

My thanks to Clerk for sponsoring last week at DF. Clerk makes authentication for iOS apps effortless — just drop in pre-built SwiftUI components for sign-in, MFA, and profile management. Fully customizable, always in sync with Apple’s design system, and packed with features developers love: social sign-in, user roles, and organization management.

Launch faster, stay secure, and scale confidently, whether you’re building the next big thing or a startup MVP. See how Clerk makes complete user management easy for modern iOS teams.

Exploring, in Detail, Apple’s Compliance With the EU’s DMA Mandate Regarding Apple Watch, Third-Party Accessories, and the Syncing of Saved Wi-Fi Networks From iPhones to Which They’re Paired

Sunday, 23 November 2025

There have been several new features that have been delayed in the EU while Apple tried to make them compliant with the DMA. iPhone Mirroring debuted over a year ago with iOS 18 and MacOS 15 Sequoia, but still remains unavailable today in the EU. Apple Intelligence was delayed in the EU until iOS 18.4 in April, but was available to most of the world in 18.1 last October. And, both most recently and briefly, the live translation feature for AirPods Pro 3, AirPods Pro 2, and AirPods 4, which debuted outside the EU with the launch of iOS 26.0 in September, will only become available in the EU next month, with the launch of iOS 26.2.

But now comes word of the first feature that Apple is limiting or removing in an existing product to comply with the DMA: Wi-Fi network sync between iPhone and Apple Watch, which is poised to change in the EU next month, with the 26.2 releases of iOS and WatchOS. The news was broken by Nicolas Lellouche, reporting for the French-language site Numerama. I’m quoting here from Safari’s English translation of his original report:

Apple has been warning for several months that it could one day, if it deems it necessary, disable functions in the European Union to “protect its users”. This day could arrive in December, with the iOS 26.2 update.

On November 4, Apple announced to Numerama that it had made the decision to disable Wi-Fi synchronization between an iPhone and an Apple Watch in Europe so as not to have to comply with the European Commission’s request, which wants to force it by the end of 2025 to open the iPhone’s Wi-Fi to third-party accessories. This announcement follows the opening of the AirPods Live Translation function in Europe, with a new API to allow competitors to use the microphones and speakers of AirPods and iPhone simultaneously. [...]

Apple indicates that the European Commission is asking it to replicate the link between an iPhone and an Apple Watch, but with third-party products. Apple, after thinking long about how to implement this function, finally decided to reject the European request. Since Europe requires that third-party products be treated like the Apple Watch, then Apple disables the function on Apple Watch. This allows it to comply with the DMA.

Lellouche’s report at Numerama broke this story (the reports at MacRumors and 9to5Mac are both based on Numerama’s), but the above is not an accurate summary of what Apple is doing with iOS 26.2.1 Apple is complying with the DMA, and they’re not disabling Wi-Fi network synchronization between an iPhone and a paired Apple Watch. What Apple is doing, in order to comply with the DMA, is changing how Wi-Fi networks sync with Apple Watch (in the EU), and offering new APIs in the EU for third-party paired devices to put them on equal (or near-equal?) footing with Apple Watch (in the EU).

This change should be relatively limited. Honestly, I don’t think many Apple Watch users in the EU will even notice. But it is at least mildly annoying, and the relatively minor, very specific nature of this particular DMA mandate makes it a telling example of the European Commission’s overreach.

Currently, when you pair a new Apple Watch with an iPhone, iOS transfers to WatchOS the iPhone’s entire list of saved Wi-Fi networks and their passwords — directly, device-to-device. As iOS learns of new networks that the user joins from their iPhone, that information continues to be shared with any Apple Watches paired to that iPhone. The utility of this is that if you’re wearing your Apple Watch, but don’t have your iPhone nearby, your watch will join an available saved Wi-Fi network at your location. Let’s say you go for a run or walk, with only your Apple Watch, and you stop at a cafe for a beverage. If you’ve ever joined the Wi-Fi network at that cafe from your iPhone (or iPad or Mac, assuming you sync your Apple Keychain via iCloud), your Apple Watch will join that network automatically. It should, and in my personal experience does, just work.

The EU mandate to Apple is not that Apple must grant to third-party devices and their iOS companion applications this same functionality as it stands today — that is to say, access to the entire history of the iPhone’s known Wi-Fi networks. The EU mandate is that Apple must grant to third-party devices the same level of access to Wi-Fi network information that Apple Watch has. Apple is complying with this mandate in two ways: (a) by changing how much Wi-Fi network information an Apple Watch gets from the iPhone to which it is paired; and (b) creating a new framework in iOS 26.2 (gated by a new entitlement), Wi-Fi Infrastructure, that provides a set of public APIs, available only to apps in the EU, to (per the framework’s description) “share Wi-Fi network credentials securely between devices and connected accessories.”

The change for Apple Watch in the EU is that starting with iOS 26.2, when a new (or reset) Apple Watch is set up, the Apple Watch will no longer have the user’s list of saved Wi-Fi networks automatically synced from their iPhone. Only future networks will be synced — the same level of access that the new Wi-Fi Infrastructure framework is making available to third-party accessories.

Under the new rules for Apple Watch in the EU, an existing (that is to say, already configured) watch that is upgraded to WatchOS 26.2 will still remember all Wi-Fi networks it already knew about. But a new Apple Watch will only be able to automatically connect to Wi-Fi networks that its associated iPhone saves after the Apple Watch was set up and paired. So when an EU Apple Watch owner with a new watch visits a known location, and doesn’t have their iPhone with them, the watch won’t be able to join that location’s Wi-Fi automatically, unless the paired iPhone has connected to and saved that network after the watch was paired.

With iOS 26.2, the behavior for users outside the EU will remain unchanged from iOS 26.1 and prior — both for Apple Watch and for third-party accessories.

A user’s Wi-Fi history can be used to glean significant information about them. Who they know (other homes’ networks), where they’ve been (medical providers, restaurants, airports), and more. Apple’s new policy for Apple Watch and third-party devices is DMA-compliant and prevents the sharing of historical networks, but with the sharing of future networks as the associated iPhone joins them, there’s still a risk here of third-party companies doing things with the user’s Wi-Fi network information that the user doesn’t understand, or want (but doesn’t realize they’ve consented to).

One way to look at Apple’s options for complying with this particular DMA mandate is by considering the extremes. On the one extreme, Apple could have just granted third-party peripherals in the EU the exact same access to users’ iPhone Wi-Fi network history that Apple Watch has gotten until now (and will continue to get outside the EU). On the other extreme, Apple could have cut off Wi-Fi network syncing to the Apple Watch altogether, requiring users to connect to each Wi-Fi network manually, using the Watch itself or the Apple Watch app on iPhone. Instead, Apple chose a middle ground — limiting Wi-Fi network history sync to the Apple Watch in the EU in ways that it isn’t limited anywhere else in the world, but granting third-party accessories in the EU access to these new Wi-Fi Infrastructure APIs that aren’t available outside the EU.

Critics might argue that while this middle ground is technically compliant with the DMA, it’s not compliant with the intention of the DMA, which would be for the Apple Watch not to lose any functionality in the EU, and for Apple to provide APIs to allow third-party devices all of the Wi-Fi syncing features currently available to Apple Watch. Apple would argue, and I agree, that the European Commission’s intentions are incoherent in this regard. The EC insists that Apple should protect users’ privacy and security, while also insisting that Apple grant access to third-party apps and devices that can potentially compromise users’ privacy and security.

There’s a reason why Apple isn’t offering the new Wi-Fi Infrastructure framework outside the EU, and that’s because they don’t believe it’s a good idea to grant any access at all to your saved Wi-Fi networks to third-party apps and devices. Especially without being able to specify, let alone enforce, a policy that Wi-Fi network information should be treated the way Apple treats it — remaining exclusively on device.

The skeptical take on Apple’s motivations in this situation is that Apple is spitefully removing functionality from Apple Watch rather than offering new APIs to provide third-party devices with the same functionality that Apple Watch currently has, and that Apple’s intention here is, somehow, primarily about trying to drive anti-DMA sentiment amongst its EU users. This is, in fact, the skeptical take on every single aspect of Apple’s compliance with the DMA: spiteful “malicious compliance” that, somehow, is intended to engender grassroots opposition to the DMA amongst Apple customers in the EU. I don’t think that’s an accurate take overall, but in this particular case with Apple Watch and Wi-Fi network sync, it’s almost silly.

Part of what makes this particular situation clarifying is that it’s so specific. It’s not about allowing third-party devices and their corresponding iOS apps to do everything that Apple Watches, and the Apple Watch iOS companion app, can do. It’s very specifically about the sharing of known Wi-Fi networks. (There will, surely, be other such situations to come regarding other features, for other Apple devices.) And as I described above, very few Apple Watch owners in the EU are likely to notice the change. How many Apple Watch users today realize that their watch automatically connects to known Wi-Fi networks when their iPhone is outside Bluetooth range?

If Apple were motivated by spite, and were trying to turn EU Apple Watch owners against the DMA, they’d just remove all Wi-Fi network syncing between the watch and its paired iPhone. Not just the historical list of all networks the iPhone has ever connected to, but the continuous sync of new networks the iPhone joins after the Apple Watch is paired. That would be a change Apple Watch users would be more likely to notice. But it’s not what Apple is doing. They’ve engineered an entire framework of public APIs to comply with the EC’s mandate.

But the reporting to date on this situation, starting with Numerama, paints the picture that Apple is dropping all Wi-Fi sync between WatchOS and iOS in the EU, and that Apple is refusing to make Wi-Fi network information available to third-party accessories.

Here’s Michael Tsai, after quoting from Tim Hardwick’s summary at MacRumors of Numerama’s report:

It seems perfectly reasonable that if I have a third-party watch I should be able to opt into having my phone share Wi-Fi info with it. You can debate whether mandating this is the proper role of government, but the status quo is clearly anti-competitive and bad for the user experience. I’m open to hearing a story where Apple’s position makes sense, but so far it just seems like FUD to me. What is the argument, exactly? That Fitbit, which already has its own GPS, is going to sell your access point–based location history? That Facebook is going to trick you into granting access to their app even though they have no corresponding device?

Tsai is making a few wrong assumptions here. First, Apple is enabling users (in the EU) to opt into having their iPhone share Wi-Fi information with third-party devices. Second, this mandate is not specific to smartwatches — it applies to any devices that can pair with an iPhone and have corresponding iOS partner apps. So Meta, with their lineup of smartglasses, does have corresponding devices. And, per Apple’s public statements, it is Meta in particular that has been zealously pursuing interoperability mandates pursuant to the DMA. I think it’s entirely possible that this entire issue regarding Wi-Fi network sharing was prompted by Meta’s interoperability requests to the European Commission.2

As for the argument regarding why Apple has chosen to comply in this way, what is essential to note is that none of this Wi-Fi network information shared between iOS and WatchOS is ever sent to or seen by Apple. Apple doesn’t see the network passwords, doesn’t see the names of the networks, and doesn’t even know when a device has joined a new network. All of this is exclusively on-device, and when the information is exchanged between an iPhone and paired Apple Watch, it’s transferred device-to-device. (This is also true when you use Apple’s features to share Wi-Fi passwords with nearby friends. It’s device-to-device and entirely private and secure. Apple doesn’t even know that person A sent a Wi-Fi password to person B, let alone know the name of the network or the password.)

Here’s Rui Carmo, at Tao of Mac:

As someone who relies a lot on the Watch (especially now that WhatsApp works locally on it), I’d say we have officially reached the point where Apple is on the verge of actively harming their user experience for no good reason whatsoever. I honestly don’t know if this is bull-headedness or malicious compliance.

On the other hand, someone at the EU clearly prefers being in the limelight by regulating against evil US corporations in ways that affect very small parts of the general population rather than, say, go after Asian smart TV manufacturers that are present in millions of homes and resell data on Europeans’ TV viewing habits.

No notes on Carmo’s second point. But regarding the first, his opinion is founded on incorrect assumptions. Apple clearly thinks it’s a bad idea to share any Wi-Fi information at all with third-party devices, but they’ve created an entire new framework for use within the EU to allow it, just so they can continue syncing any Wi-Fi network information at all with Apple Watch. Far from harming the user experience, Apple is bending over backwards to make the Apple Watch experience as good as possible while balancing the privacy and security implications of this DMA mandate. Rather than take away all Wi-Fi network syncing, Apple is leaving most of it in place, and only eliminating (in the EU) the part at the very beginning, where, during the set up process, all of the current networks saved on the iPhone are synced to the Apple Watch.

Given the mandate regarding the DMA, and given the privacy implications of sharing any of this information with third-party developers and peripheral makers, personally, I think it would have been reasonable for Apple to take the extreme position of simply disallowing Wi-Fi network information syncing to any and all devices, including Apple Watches, in the EU. There is no reason to trust third-party developers with any of this information. But Apple isn’t doing that, and they’ve undertaken a significant software engineering effort — just for the EU — to support the path they’ve chosen. Carmo’s critique seems predicated on the assumption that Apple is just cutting off all Wi-Fi network sharing.

Given that Apple’s compliance needs to account for potentially untrustworthy device makers — whether by intent, or incompetence — not syncing all known networks seems like a reasonable trade-off.

Leave it to Tim Sweeney to espouse the maximalist perspective:

Why simply not ask the user whether or not to share WiFi history identically whether connecting to an Apple product or a Meta product?

That is, in fact, what Apple is doing. But the privacy implications for a user are, in fact, different when an iPhone’s saved Wi-Fi networks are shared to, say, a Meta product than to another Apple product. It’s worth emphasizing that the European Commission’s mandate does not permit Apple to require those third-party companies to treat this information with the same privacy protections that Apple does. Apple keeps that information exclusively on-device, but Apple is not permitted to require third-party peripheral makers to do the same.

Consider the iOS system prompt for App Tracking Transparency: the user’s two choices are “Ask App Not to Track” and “Allow”. It’s a common and natural question why the first option is “Ask App Not to Track” rather than “Don’t Allow”. It would certainly look better if the options were “Don’t Allow” and “Allow”. But Apple deliberately made the first button “Ask App Not to Track” because ATT is, at least partially, a policy, not a complete technical guarantee. If an app prompts for ATT permission and the user chooses “Ask App Not to Track”, that app should definitely not go ahead and attempt to track the user’s activity across other apps. But, technically, it could try.3 I presume that if they do, if and when Apple notices, Apple will rap the developer’s knuckles in the App Store review process, or even suspend the app’s developer account. But one can see why Apple would want to avoid such a pissing match with Facebook/Meta again.4

Under the EU’s mandate to Apple regarding Wi-Fi network access for third-party devices and their corresponding iOS apps, Apple is not permitted even to set a policy that these apps must pinky swear to keep the information private and on-device. Nor is the EU itself demanding it. If a third-party device-maker wants to send your iPhone’s Wi-Fi network history and credentials to their servers and save it, that’s up to them, not Apple, per the EC. Apple sees that as a problem.5 You can argue — and some will, as I think Michael Tsai does in the passage I quote above, and as Tim Sweeney clearly does — that this ought to be up to the user. If a user says they’re fine with their Wi-Fi network information being shared with a third-party accessory they’ve paired with their iPhone, that’s up to them. That is a reasonable take. But I also think Apple’s perspective is reasonable as well — that they should be able to make products where this isn’t possible.

The “it should be up to the user” take benefits informed, technically savvy users. The “it shouldn’t be possible” take benefits uninformed, un-savvy users — users who in many cases have decided that they simply trust Apple. The iPhone brand message — the brand message behind the Apple ecosystem — is that Apple doesn’t allow things that are dangerous to security or privacy. I do not think most iPhone users expect a third-party device they pair to their iPhone to be able to send their entire history of Wi-Fi networks back to the company that made the device. (Most iPhone users also don’t realize how sensitive, privacy-wise, their complete Wi-Fi network history is.)

It’s fair to point out that the “it should be up to the user” take is more beneficial to third-party accessory makers than the “it shouldn’t be possible” take. And that this conflict of interest — where the same limitations that protect iPhone users’ privacy by definition disadvantage third-party devices in ways that Apple’s own devices that connect to iPhones are not — works not just in iPhone users’ favor, privacy-wise, but also in Apple’s favor, financially. Apple can sell more Apple Watches if they work better with iPhones than smartwatches from other companies do. That’s obviously true, but that’s just another way of saying that first-party products have inherent advantages that third-party products don’t, to which I say: Duh. Apple’s own peripherals, like Apple Watch, can do things that third-party peripherals can’t because Apple can trust its own devices, and its own software, in ways that it can’t trust devices and companion apps made by other companies.

It’s natural for a company to bootstrap a new product on the back of an existing successful one. Meta’s Threads social network, for example, uses the same usernames and sign-in system as Instagram, which is arguably the most successful social network in the world. Should Meta not have been permitted to do that? Or should they be forced to allow anyone to create new competing social networks using Instagram user accounts as the ID system?

It’d be pretty weird if Apple limited itself, when designing and engineering features that integrate experiences across its own devices, to what it would allow third-party developers to do. It’d be even weirder if Apple allowed third-party developers to do everything Apple’s own software can do.6

For at least the last 15 years, I’ve repeatedly emphasized that Apple’s priorities are in this order: Apple first, users second, developers third. The DMA attempts to invert that order, privileging developers first (in the ostensible name of fair competition with Apple, a designated “gatekeeper”), ahead of users, and ahead of Apple itself. So of course Apple is going to object to and resist mandates that require it to subordinate its own strategic desires — its own sense of how its products ought to be designed and engineered — especially when the primary beneficiary of the mandates aren’t users, but developers. Many of whom, especially the larger ones, are Apple’s competitors. But I also think it’s clear, with Apple in particular, that users prefer Apple’s priorities. People are happier with Apple putting users’ considerations ahead of developers’ than they are when developers are free to run roughshod over the software platform.

The clearest example of that is the App Store. It’s overwhelmingly developers, not users, who object to the App Store model — the exclusivity of distribution, the exclusivity of the vendor’s payment system, the vendor’s payment commissions, the vendor’s functional guidelines and restrictions, all of it. Users largely don’t have a problem with any of that. That’s why Apple commissioned and then publicized a study, just this month, that showed that DMA-driven changes saved developers €20 million in commissions, but that reduction in commissions didn’t lower the prices users pay. Developer-focused observers see that as a win for the DMA — that’s €20 million in developers’ pockets that otherwise would have gone into Apple’s already overflowing pockets. But a user-focused observer might see that as clarifying regarding the fact that the DMA wasn’t designed to benefit users, and isn’t benefiting users in practice either. Apple doesn’t care about €20 million. They fart bigger than that. They do care about clarifying who the DMA prioritizes first, and that it’s not users. (And, of course, that it’s not Apple itself.)

Users love the App Store model. With Apple in particular, users, by and large, like the idea that the platforms have stringent guardrails. Many buy iPhones because Apple exerts such control over the platform, not despite it. But that control is exactly why Apple has been so singularly targeted by the European Commission regarding DMA mandates, despite the fact that Samsung by itself — let alone the Android platform as a whole — sells more phones in Europe (and the world) than Apple does.

The bottom line is that users setting up new Apple Watches in the EU will now get a slightly worse experience in the name of parity with accessories made by third-party companies. It remains to be seen whether users of third-party iPhone accessories and peripherals in the EU will see any benefit at all (because the companies that make their devices will need to adopt these new EU-exclusive Wi-Fi Infrastructure APIs in their iOS companion apps) — and, if the users of third-party iPhone accessories do see the benefit of Wi-Fi network information syncing to their devices, whether their privacy will be respected. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that Apple is complying the least bit spitefully with regard to this mandate. 

  1. I’m quoting Apple/Safari’s French-to-English translation, but the gist seems exactly the same in Google’s translation as well. ↩︎

  2. It remains to be seen whether Meta will actually use the new Wi-Fi Infrastructure framework to allow their accessories, like their AI Glasses, to obtain Wi-Fi network information from Meta’s companion iOS app. I’m guessing they almost certainly would, if the Wi-Fi Infrastructure APIs were available globally. But these APIs are exclusive to the EU. Will Meta deem it worth the engineering effort to support this feature only for users in the EU? We shall see.

    It’s worth remembering that one of the initial DMA mandates the EU issued to Apple was that iOS must support third-party web browser rendering engines, and to comply with this, Apple spent significant (and I suspect that’s a vast understatement) engineering resources to create the BrowserEngineKit and BrowserEngineCore frameworks, and here we are at the end of 2025, nearly two years after Apple shipped those frameworks, and there are exactly zero browsers on iOS using alternative rendering engines. Zero. These frameworks might be the largest set of APIs ever created that never get used. I wouldn’t be surprised if the new Wi-Fi Infrastructure framework sees the same fate. (Meta might consider that a win, just knowing that Apple had to expend this effort for naught.) ↩︎︎

  3. Apple has a good layperson-approachable overview of App Tracking Transparency. At a technical level, an app must prompt for and receive the user’s permission (via the Allow button in the system-provided ATT prompt) in order to access the device’s advertising identifier. From that document: “Unless you receive permission from the user to enable tracking, the device’s advertising identifier value will be all zeros and you may not track them as described above.”

    But returning zeroes for the device’s advertising identifier doesn’t technically prevent a devious developer from attempting to uniquely identify and track the user by other means. If the button in the system prompt said “Don’t Allow”, rather than “Ask App Not to Track”, it would imply that Apple could guarantee the app isn’t tracking you (or trying to track you) without your permission. Apple can’t guarantee that, so they don’t imply that they can. ↩︎︎

  4. I’m not aware of any instances where an app has been accused of disregarding the ATT “Ask App Not to Track” request, but surely it has happened. If you’re aware of any such accusations, and how Apple responded, let me know. ↩︎︎

  5. I’m not arguing here that the European Commission doesn’t care about user privacy, or that I think the European Commission doesn’t realize that Wi-Fi network information is quite sensitive. I’m sure they do care about user privacy and do realize that Wi-Fi network information is privacy-sensitive. What I do think is that the European Commission believes the privacy of this information should only be guarded by law, and that they already have laws in place that protect such information. And thus it’s not Apple’s place — especially now that they’ve been deemed a “gatekeeper” that has the power to stymie competition — to attempt to protect that information, whether by technical limitations or by policy.

    Apple is certainly not opposed to privacy-protecting laws, in the abstract, but doesn’t see the law alone as protection enough. Apple’s perspective is that protecting their customers’ privacy is, in fact, Apple’s responsibility — and one of their most important responsibilities at that. It’s illegal to steal cars, but every carmaker still puts locks on the doors and requires a key to start the engine. In numerous ways, Apple sees the DMA as mandating, privacy-wise, that they create something akin to cars that don’t require keys, trusting EU law to keep them from being stolen. The European Commission only sees Apple’s protections as blocking would-be competitors, not would-be privacy thieves. ↩︎︎

  6. In the old days, of course, with devices designed before the iPhone, this wasn’t weird. All software, whether first- or third-party, could do whatever it wanted to. Anyone could write a kernel extension. In the classic Mac OS days there was no “kernel” and we just had “extensions” and you could just drop one in your Extensions folder, restart, and boom, whatever system extension you just installed was now effectively part of the operating system. Any app could read and write anything on disk, including into the operating system. Go back far enough and apps could read and write (deliberately or accidentally) inside the memory of another running application. To split personal computing — not just PCs but all personal computing devices, in the plain sense of the words — into three eras, there was (1) the early era when all software was effectively “root”; (2) the middle era, still exemplified today by MacOS and Windows, when there were user-controlled protections on what could run as root; and (3) the modern era, as exemplified by iOS and stock Android, where the vendor controls what can run as root.

    You can reasonably make the case — and expert-level users (read: nerds) often do — that the user should always be in control. I bought the device, I should be able to run whatever software, with whatever privileges, I want. That perspective is valid, but it also describes a class of devices — PCs — that privilege the autonomy of third-party developers over the vendor-controlled stability of the OS. The PC model, where accessory makers can offer software that runs with root (or root-like) escalated privileges, offers significantly greater opportunities for third-party accessory makers than the mobile model, where accessories are limited to whatever public APIs are provided by the device vendor for integration. But with the PC model, users can “mess up” their system by installing software they shouldn’t have, or that they regret having installed but don’t know how to remove. With the mobile model, users are technically prevented from installing anything that could “mess up” their system. It’s always about trade-offs. And with this particular trade-off, it’s very clear which model is more successful in the market. It’s not feasible to make computers intended for use by anyone and everyone which require any degree of technical knowledge or expertise to manage. ↩︎︎

Saturday, 22 November 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Lincoln Bio Services’ 

For your weekend listening enjoyment: a new episode of America’s favorite 3-star podcast, with special guest Stephen Robles. Topics include indie media and YouTube, Shortcuts and automation, and the state of podcasting.

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Friday, 21 November 2025

Jmail 

Luke Igel and Riley Walz made a phony Gmail interface that, rather than showing you your email, shows you Jeffrey Epstein’s emails:

You’re logged in as Jeffrey Epstein. We compiled these Epstein estate emails from the House Oversight release by converting the PDFs to structured text with an LLM.

Brilliant.

Another Limited Edition Accessory From Apple: Hikawa Phone Grip and Stand 

Apple Store:

The Hikawa Phone Grip & Stand is a MagSafe compatible adaptive accessory for iPhone designed by Bailey Hikawa to celebrate the 40th anniversary of accessibility at Apple. Designed with direct input from individuals with disabilities affecting muscle strength, dexterity, and hand control, this ergonomic grip was designed with accessibility in mind from the ground up. The grip uses magnets to securely snap onto any iPhone with MagSafe, can be removed with ease, and doubles as a stand to support iPhone at two different viewing angles, both vertically and horizontally. Inspired by modern sculpture, each Hikawa product is an art object unto itself. The limited edition Hikawa Phone Grip & Stand is available in two colors, a bold, high-visibility Chartreuse and recycled Crater, exclusive to Apple.

Looks like a perfectly cromulent accessory, but Chartreuse and Crater are both a bit out there — in different ways — to be the only two color options. Or, I should say, were a bit out there. Both are already sold out from Apple.

I’m not quite sure what’s limited about the Chartreuse, given that Hikawa’s website still lists it as “ready to ship” along with pre-orders for Cobalt and Blurple Swirl (whose URL seems a bit rushed).

Amusing to see Apple partner with a company whose main products alongside iPhone cases are fanciful toilet seats.

‘Grok’s Elon Musk Worship Is Getting Weird’ 

Adi Robertson, The Verge:

As a number of people have pointed out on social media over the past day, Grok’s public-facing chatbot is currently prone to insisting on Musk’s prowess at absolutely anything, no matter how unlikely — or conversely, embarrassing — a given feat is.

Grok claims Musk is fitter than LeBron James, funnier than Jerry Seinfeld, and would likely figure out a way to resurrect himself from the dead faster than Jesus.

But it’s a trustworthy source to author an encyclopedia, sure.

Group Chats in ChatGPT Now Available Worldwide 

OpenAI:

Early feedback from the pilot has been positive, so we’re expanding group chats to all logged-in users on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans globally over the coming days. We will continue refining the experience as more people start using it.

That didn’t take long — the initial rollout limited to Japan, New Zealand, Korea, and Taiwan started just three days ago.

Fun Stunt to Promote ‘Pluribus’: An Ask Me Anything on Reddit With Carol Sturka 

“Carol Sturka”, actress Rhea Seehorn’s fictional protagonist of the new Apple TV series Pluribus, is on Reddit right now — at 12n ET / 9am PT — doing an AMA in character. Sturka is a fantasy novelist, and Apple Books has an 11-page excerpt of her “new” novel Bloodsong of Wycaro. Unclear whether it’s Seehorn writing the in-character responses, but it’s definitely Seehorn in the confirmation photo. Reminiscent of some of the promotional fun Apple has had for Severance.

Both my wife and I are loving Pluribus so far. I highly recommend watching the first episode without even knowing the premise, if you can.

Thursday, 20 November 2025

‘Pixar: The Early Days’ — Never-Before-Seen 1996 Interview With Steve Jobs 

The Steve Jobs Archive:

To mark Toy Story’s 30th anniversary, we’re sharing a never-before-seen interview with Steve from November 22, 1996 — exactly one year after the film debuted in theaters.

Toy Story was the world’s first entirely computer-animated feature-length film. An instant hit with audiences and critics, it also transformed Pixar, which went public the week after its premiere. Buoyed by Toy Story ’s success, Pixar’s stock price closed at nearly double its initial offering, giving it a market valuation of approximately $1.5 billion and marking the largest IPO of 1995. The following year, Toy Story was nominated for three Academy Awards en route to winning a Special Achievement Oscar in March. In July, Pixar announced that it would close its television-commercial unit to focus primarily on feature films. By the time of the interview, the team had grown by 70 percent in less than a year; A Bug’s Life was in production; and behind the scenes, Steve was using his new leverage to renegotiate Pixar’s partnership with Disney.

Kind of a weird interview. The video quality is poor, and whoever was running the camera zoomed in and out awkwardly. It’s like ... just a VHS tape? But it’s also weird in a cool way to get a “new” Steve Jobs interview in 2025, and Jobs, as ever, is thoughtful and insightful. Well worth 23 minutes of your time.

There’s a particularly interesting bit at the end when Jobs discusses how Pixar was half a computer company (with extraordinary technology) and half a movie studio (with extraordinary filmmaking talent), but eventually they had to choose between the two industries for how to pay their employees to motivate them to remain at Pixar. The Hollywood way would be with contracts; the Silicon Valley way would be with stock options. Jobs chose the Silicon Valley path for Pixar.

Wednesday, 19 November 2025

Contrary to Rumors, Apple Will Continue Broadcasting ‘Friday Night Baseball’ 

Anthony Castrovince, reporting for MLB.com on the new broadcast rights agreement that will cover the next three seasons of baseball:

Sunday Night Baseball will shift from ESPN, where it aired since 1990, to NBCUniversal, which also secured the rights to Sunday Leadoff and the Wild Card Series in the postseason for NBC and Peacock.

Netflix will now air the T-Mobile Home Run Derby, an Opening Night exclusive and special event games set to include the 2026 MLB at Field of Dreams Game and the World Baseball Classic in Japan.

And ESPN will receive a national midweek game package throughout the season while also acquiring the rights to sell MLB.TV, the league’s out-of-market streaming service that set a record with 19.4 billion minutes watched in 2025. [...]

FOX/FS1 will continue to be the home of the All-Star Game and regular season games, as well as the World Series, League Championship Series, and Division Series presented by Booking.com. TBS will continue to house LCS and Division Series telecasts, plus regular season games on Tuesday nights. Apple TV will continue to stream “Friday Night Baseball” doubleheaders throughout the regular season.

Back in August, Kendall Baker of Yahoo Sports reported:

  • Apple is fully out. RIP Friday Night Baseball
  • NBC/Peacock is in, for Friday and Sunday exclusive and Wild Card
  • MLB TV being sold to ESPN (for a boatload of $$$)
  • Netflix gets HR Derby

He batted .750 on that tweet.

Cloudflare’s Uptime and Scale 

Miguel Arroz, on Mastodon:

Unpopular opinion, apparently: companies like Cloudflare and Amazon provide very high quality services people and enterprises actually need, with a level of uptime and security vastly superior to what most of their customers would achieve on their own or using traditional providers. Their downtimes being so visible is a consequence of their success.

A few readers have (very politely!) asked me whether yesterday’s outage (which made DF unreachable for, I think, about 90 minutes) made me rethink relying on a centralized provider like Cloudflare. My answer is no.

Until I started using Cloudflare in 2018, Daring Fireball relied on no upstream service. I paid for a server from a web hosting provider (those providers changed a few times over the years), and when you, a reader, requested a page on this site, your browser communicated directly with my server via HTTP requests and my server responded directly back. The basic architecture of the World Wide Web is beautifully simple, and I embraced that simplicity with the way I hosted and served Daring Fireball.

But the move away from HTTP to HTTPS added a lot of complexity. That complexity is probably worth it, overall, but it came at the price of simplicity. I originally made the switch to using Cloudflare as a caching front-end for Daring Fireball as a solution to an SSL-related slowdown that affected only some visitors in 2018. But I’d started using Cloudflare to handle my DNS the year before.

Daring Fireball has always been a fast website and has always had very good uptime. That’s not because the back end is cleverly architected, but rather because it’s so simply architected. But DF’s overall uptime and the frequency of any sort of performance problems went from good to great when I started relying on Cloudflare as a proxy. Also, in recent years, bot traffic has exploded. (Thanks, AI.) I’m pretty sure my server could handle those bursts of traffic on its own, but I sleep better not having to worry about it, because Cloudflare handles mind-boggling amounts of traffic.

Apple Announces Finalists for the 2025 App Store Awards 

Apple Newsroom:

Finalists in the Mac App of the Year category provided users with powerful tools to confidently take on new projects:

  • Acorn, for being the go-to tool for pro-level photo edits.
  • Essayist, for taking the stress out of sourcing and formatting academic papers.
  • Under My Roof, for keeping homeowners organized and prepared.

Nice to see Flying Meat’s Acorn — one of my own favorite and most-used apps since 2007, before it even shipped — getting this sort of recognition from Apple. Back in June, Apple featured Acorn in the WWDC keynote, during the preview of Liquid Glass.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince Explains, in Detail, and Apologizes for Yesterday’s Global Outage 

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince:

The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.

The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.

After we initially wrongly suspected the symptoms we were seeing were caused by a hyper-scale DDoS attack, we correctly identified the core issue and were able to stop the propagation of the larger-than-expected feature file and replace it with an earlier version of the file. Core traffic was largely flowing as normal by 14:30. We worked over the next few hours to mitigate increased load on various parts of our network as traffic rushed back online. As of 17:06 all systems at Cloudflare were functioning as normal.

We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general. Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable. That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team. We know we let you down today.

This post is an in-depth recount of exactly what happened and what systems and processes failed. It is also the beginning, though not the end, of what we plan to do in order to make sure an outage like this will not happen again.

Everything about this incident exemplifies why Cloudflare is one of my favorite companies in the world. Ideally, it wouldn’t have happened, but shit does happen. Among the things to note about Cloudflare’s response:

  • They identified and fixed the issue quickly.
  • They issued frequent updates to their status site while the incident remained ongoing.
  • They published this postmortem within 24 hours. (That’s remarkable, given the technical breadth of the postmortem. Publishing this tomorrow, within 48 hours of the incident, would have been a praise-worthy accomplishment.) Update: Actually, according to Prince, commenting on Hacker News, the postmortem was published less than 12 hours after the incident began. Amazing.
  • The postmortem starts with a cogent, well-written layperson’s explanation of what happened and why.
  • The postmortem expands to include very specific technical details, including source code.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that Prince put his own name on the postmortem (and wrote much of it himself, using BBEdit), and closed with this apology, taking personal responsibility:

An outage like today is unacceptable. We’ve architected our systems to be highly resilient to failure to ensure traffic will always continue to flow. When we’ve had outages in the past it’s always led to us building new, more resilient systems.

On behalf of the entire team at Cloudflare, I would like to apologize for the pain we caused the Internet today.

This is how it’s done.

Tim Cook Among Attendees of Last Night’s Black-Tie White House Dinner Honoring Journalist-Murdering Tyrant Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia 

The New York Times:

The world’s richest man. One of the world’s most famous soccer players. The president of soccer’s governing body. Dozens of executives from the finance, tech and energy sectors. These are some of the guests who attended President Trump’s black-tie dinner for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia at the White House on Tuesday evening.

The red carpet welcome for Prince Mohammed is an extraordinary moment in diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. It is his first visit to the United States since the 2018 killing of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which U.S. intelligence determined the prince ordered. Prince Mohammed has denied involvement.

Yours truly, back in August, after Tim Cook’s Oval Office gift of gold to Trump:

It is disturbing to think that the leader of a beloved, trusted, and widely believed-to-be-ethical company like Apple has succumbed to avarice. That Tim Cook feels no qualms about — or perhaps even delights in — participating in a quid-pro-quo-driven corrupt administration in which flattery, fealty, gifts, and barely-concealed bribes are rewarded. That the United States devolving into kleptocracy suits Tim Cook just fine, because Apple’s pockets are deep enough to pay the vig.

But the alternative is more disturbing.

What if Tim Cook is, in fact, strong, proud, and driven by a keen sense of moral and ethical clarity? Perhaps Cook declined Trump’s invitation to join his Middle East entourage in May only because he was otherwise busy. But I believe there are bridges he will not cross — and that trip, especially its implicit and explicit praise and sanctification of the Saudi regime in general, and MBS in particular, was one of them. The whole trip was grotesque, and made a mockery of traditional American values.

MBS being feted in the White House is even more grotesque.

See also: Karen Attiah, who in her previous job as editor of The Washington Post’s global opinion section hired Jamal Khashoggi after he was exiled from Saudi Arabia, in The Guardian: “The Saudification of America Is Under Way”.

Tuesday, 18 November 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Knee-Jerk Contrarian’ 

Special guest Dan Frommer returns to the show. Topics include the indie media business, the iPhone Pocket, the iPhone Air (including rumors about the second generation model), AI “personalities”, and five years of Apple Silicon Macs. Also, six years of Dan’s site, The New Consumer.

Sponsored by:

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Sir, This Is a McDonald’s 

Jonathan V. Last, writing for The Bulwark:

The president of the United States gave a speech yesterday before a group of McDonald’s corporate workers and franchise owners. I’m going to quote a few sections of his remarks at great length, because if you have not listened to Trump speaking recently, the decline in his cognitive abilities is a bit shocking.

The point of this exercise is not to clown on Trump, but to give everyone a baseline understanding of where he is, with the mentals, as we try to understand how he will respond to increasing pressures in the coming months.

The video of his remarks is here and I’ll include timestamps for each section, in case you want to see what he looks and sounds like.

Bottom line: This is a man in noticeable mental decline.

The whole world is inured to listening to Trump speak like this — it sounds normal even to those of us who see that Trump is spiraling into dementia. Ah, that’s just Trump being Trump. But it’s not normal. Reading the transcript is jarring. Also jarring: listening to Juliet Jeske’s performative reading of a particularly nonsensical portion of Trump’s McDonald’s speech. It’s just gibberish.

When You Give a Bully Your Lunch Money 

President Donald Trump, today in the Oval Office alongside his “very good friend” Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, after ABC News reporter Mary Bruce had the temerity to pose a question regarding Mohammed having ordered the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018:

People are wise to your hoax. ABC, your company, your crappy company, is one of the perpetrators. And I’ll tell you something, I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake, and it’s so wrong. And we have a great commissioner, a chairman, who should look at that.

Also from Trump, regarding Khashoggi’s murder:

A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.

Things happen, indeed.

Disney (ABC’s owner), a year ago settled a lawsuit Trump filed against ABC News — a lawsuit most experts agreed ABC would have won — for $16 million, in what clearly amounted to a bribe.

Yours truly, last month, in a post on Apple’s capitulation to Trump regarding the ICEBlock app for iOS:

When you give a bully your lunch money, they always come back for more.

I think Bob Iger gets that now. “Fuck you, make me” remains the correct response to these threats.

Gurman Says Apple Has No Plans to Update the Mac Pro 

Mark Gurman, in his (paywalled, alas) Power On column for Bloomberg over the weekend:

The next major update didn’t arrive until 2023, when Apple finally transitioned the desktop to in-house chips with the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. Two years later, that model remains largely unchanged. And it’s been overshadowed by the Mac Studio, which received the M3 Ultra chip earlier this year while the Mac Pro stayed put.

Now here’s the bad news: That doesn’t look set to change anytime soon. There’s no longer an M4 Ultra in the works (a Mac Pro to support it was also nixed), and the next high-end desktop chip will be the M5 Ultra. So far, Apple is only focused on a new Mac Studio for the processor. That suggests the Mac Pro won’t be updated in 2026 in a significant way.

From what I’ve heard inside the company, Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro. The sentiment internally is that the Mac Studio now represents both the present and future of Apple’s professional desktop strategy.

Here’s a comparison of the now-two-year-old M2 Ultra Mac Pro with the M3 Ultra and M4 Max Mac Studios. I’d love to see Apple pursue some sort of M# Extreme chip that goes above and beyond the M# Ultra variants, but unless they do, there’s not much point to a 32-pound suitcase-sized enclosure that offers little more than the Studio’s small 8-pound enclosure. The difference mostly comes down to the Pro’s internal PCI Express expansion slots, but those slots don’t support third-party GPUs from Nvidia or AMD — and likely never will.

See also: Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica.