By John Gruber
WorkOS Radar:
Protect your app against AI bots, free-tier abuse, and brute-force attacks.
Dave Nanian, last week at the Shirt Pocket blog:
Just a quick post: macOS 15.3 is now out, and with it, a fix for the broken replicator. As such, macOS copying will work again with Erase, Then Copy backups. No update to SuperDuper is necessary (but feel free to install our v3.10 Beta 2, below). [...]
Thanks for your patience as we waited for the fix from Apple. I know I’m relieved that I (hopefully) will no longer be bombarded with support because of it!
You may recall that this was a bug introduced in MacOS 15.2, which prevented Shirt Pocket’s excellent long-standing utility SuperDuper from making a bootable clone of your startup drive. Great news, bug fixed, hurrah.
Back in December, though, when the bug had just started circulating, Mike Bombich, developer of Carbon Copy Cloner (the long-standing also-excellent archrival to SuperDuper), wrote a post that I took to suggest that he thought the bug was not a bug, “Bootable Backups Have Been Deprecated for Several Years”:
While some developers seem surprised by a change in macOS 15.2, we’ve known for several years that making bootable backups would eventually become impossible. We shifted CCC’s strategy away from relying on External Boot so our users wouldn’t be affected by this inevitable result.
I took a few days off last week to help a family member, and returned to find the Mac community all aflutter with comments about bootable backups not working after the 15.2 update and comparisons of Apple to The Grinch. After reviewing a lot of comments on this subject, I felt it was time to weigh in. Apple is taking a lot of heat for this “bug” in 15.2, but if there is any finger-pointing here, I think it should be directed towards any developers that have misled their users into believing that ASR and “bootable backups” had any place in a backup/recovery strategy post-Big Sur.
That feels like some shade thrown toward Nanian and Shirt Pocket, but here we are with MacOS 15.3, and bootable startup drive clones are back, so I have to question who needs to don sunglasses here.
I don’t think anyone would dispute that “creating a bootable startup drive clone” has gotten complicated in the Apple Silicon era, which began with MacOS 11 Big Sur in late 2020. Not to mention the complications that were introduced with the switch from HFS+ to APFS with MacOS 10.13 High Sierra in 2017, and the read-only boot volume and SIP with MacOS 10.15 Catalina in 2019. M-series Macs boot weirder than Intel-based Macs. Not bad weird. I think it’s all justified in the pursuit of security (SIP stands for System Integrity Protection, and is aptly named) and elegant system architecture. But booting is now makes-things-much-more-difficult-than-before weird for tools like SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner.
It’s also true that from the perspective of most Mac users, all of these things have been unambiguously changes for the better. Catastrophic boot drive errors seem to occur with less frequency than ever. Part of that is simply because SSDs are far more reliable than spinning hard disks, but part of it too is that APFS seems more reliable than HFS+ ever was. HFS+ wasn’t unreliable — and its reliability levelled up with the addition of journaling back in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther1 — but APFS seems more reliable. When catastrophe does strike, the path to recovery is better than ever. In the old days, you’d need to find a bootable system software DVD (or, going back in time, a CD, or a floppy...) or a bootable USB drive, and reinstall the OS from disk. In recent years, however, that’s been replaced by the built-in MacOS Recovery system that lets you do things like run Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, reinstall the entire OS from scratch, and more. No hunting around for a special CD/DVD or thumb drive (that Murphy’s Law suggests you won’t have handy when you suddenly find yourself needing one). Just long-press the power button on your Mac and boom — you’re in Recovery mode.
I have no data to prove that APFS is more reliable than HFS+ was, so to check my gut feeling, I asked both John Siracusa (filesystem aficionado2) and Nanian (who works in the trenches of SuperDuper customer support). Both agreed that APFS is more reliable. Nanian further observed, though, that when things do go catastrophically wrong with an APFS disk now, it tends to be at a very low level — corruption at the container or volume level. And if Apple’s own Disk Utility can’t fix it, there aren’t any third-party tools that can.3 That’s the bad news. The good news is, if the problem really is just with uncorrectable corruption (and not a hardware failure with the device), you can use Recovery to fully erase the drive and container, clean install the OS, and restore your data from your backup drive using Migration Assistant — and that will almost certainly work.
So in some sense, the argument goes, there’s no need for bootable clones of a startup drive any more. Just clone your data, not your whole drive, to an external drive for backup purposes, and if something goes wrong with your startup volume:
The backup you use in step #3 above does not need to have MacOS installed on it, or, if it does have a bootable copy of MacOS, that version doesn’t need to be the same version of MacOS that Recovery clean installed on the internal drive. In SuperDuper, you can just use “Backup - all files” with Smart Update, which clones everything in the writeable “Data” volume, but doesn’t copy the OS from the read-only “System” (OS) volume (because it can’t, for technical reasons you and I need not worry about — seriously, this stuff will take you deep into the weeds).
But let me try to speedrun through what I, as a SuperDuper user, want to know and understand. To make a clone of your internal startup drive to an external drive, you want to use “Backup - all files”. (SuperDuper’s “Backup - user files” will only back up what’s in user account home folders inside /Users/
. That will include most of your personal files, but it won’t include system-wide data that’s shared between all users, such as applications you’ve installed in the top-level /Applications/
folder, or everything in /Library/
. I’m sure some people have a need for “Backup - user files”, but I don’t. And it’s worth pointing out that an external drive that contains cloned data from “Backup - user files” cannot serve as the source for Migration Assistant. That’s a dealbreaker for me. The primary purpose of a SuperDuper backup, for me, is its ability to serve as the source for Migration Assistant, which, as I’ve written previously, is an astonishingly good and useful tool.)
When you run “Backup - all files”, you have the following options:4
So if you always use “Erase, then copy”, your SuperDuper external backups will always be bootable clones of your startup drive, with the same version of MacOS installed as your internal disk. The only downside to doing it this way is that backups take longer, because you’re erasing the external drive and copying everything every time. (You don’t have to supervise SuperDuper backups in any way, so how long they take doesn’t really matter much.)
If you start with “Smart Update”, you won’t have a bootable external drive (because the read-only System volume is never copied over), but you will have all your own files, and the external drive will work as a source for Migration Assistant.
If you start with “Erase, then copy” to create the initial backup clone, but subsequently use “Smart Update” for incremental backups, all of your data and installed apps will be updated on the external drive each time you back up. And the drive should remain a bootable backup — but the version of MacOS installed on the external drive will remain unchanged from the initial “Erase, then copy” backup. This is how I’ve been running SuperDuper.
In the course of writing this article — which I’ve been thinking about, and researching, on and off since December, when the MacOS 15.2 replicator bug broke SuperDuper’s ability to create bootable backups — I’ve shaken some of my own longstanding assumptions about my backup needs. I’ve been making bootable clones with SuperDuper since whenever I started using it, which was over two decades ago. The earliest of mention of SuperDuper on Daring Fireball is this post, explaining how I installed OS updates at the time, from December 2004:
I use SuperDuper for cloning my entire startup drive. I highly recommend it.
Still true! I have no intention to stop making regular backups of my entire startup drive using SuperDuper. But: do I care anymore whether they’re bootable? If you’d asked me before December, I would have said yes, definitely. Why? Because, my thinking went, if something catastrophic happened to my internal startup drive, and I was working on something urgent, I’d want to get back up and working again as soon as possible. Rather than wait for MacOS Recovery to reinstall the OS on the internal drive and then wait for Migration Assistant to copy my data from my external drive to the clean install of MacOS on the internal drive, I could just boot from the external backup drive and get back to work immediately.
I’ve been lucky enough over my now many years as a Mac user to have suffered very few disk calamities like that. But I’ve encountered them. And there have been situations when having an up-to-date bootable backup drive has been useful, if not crucial. But, upon reflection, I realize now that it’s been many many years since the last time I even thought to boot from my backup drive. I used to even periodically test that the backup drive was, in fact, bootable, as a precaution. I haven’t done that in years.
I mentioned above that for my regular backup cloning, I use SuperDuper’s Smart Update, which leaves the read-only installation of MacOS on the backup drive unchanged. I just checked today and while my MacBook Pro is running the current version of MacOS (15.3 Sequoia), the version on my cloned backup drive was 12.6.1 Monterey, which was released in October 2022. (That’s the last time I did a full “Erase, then copy” backup in SuperDuper.) That effectively means my backup drive hasn’t been bootable, or at least not usefully bootable. For example, all my email files are in the mailbox format expected by Apple Mail in MacOS 15.3; I doubt that Apple Mail from MacOS 12.6 can read those mailbox files. The same is probably true for just about every app — or at least every system app from Apple — that I use. Surely some software from MacOS 12.6 can’t read the files or settings from the software from MacOS 15.3, and I’ll bet a lot of it can’t. New software can often recognize old file formats generated by older versions of the software; old software can’t recognize new file formats that were introduced after the old software was written.
What you should do, if you really want bootable startup drive backups via SuperDuper, is use “Erase, then copy” after every MacOS software update. Or just use “Erase, then copy” every time. But the fact that I wasn’t doing this for the last two years doesn’t mean my cloned backup drive has been useless. It just means it’s only been useful for restoring backed-up data, not for booting my Mac. Which, when I think about it, is how I would have used it if I had needed to. I don’t work in a fast-paced production environment with tight deadlines. I think MacBooks really only run properly when booting from their internal drives, anyway. If something ever goes wrong with mine, I’ll try using Disk Utility to repair it, and if that fails, I’ll turn to MacOS Recovery to clean install the OS and then use Migration Assistant to copy my data back from my external backup drive.
Thinking about it, booting from an old version of MacOS on an external backup drive containing data from the current version of MacOS sounds like a good way to corrupt some of the files on that disk — subverting the entire purpose of a backup. (Most likely, if you try this, the Mac will simply fail to boot.) It’s reckless to boot from and “use” a backup drive for production when the source drive that it’s a clone of has failed — at that point, your backup drive is your only local copy of the data from that failed drive. It really only ought to be treated as a read-only source for restoration. And the way Macs are designed to work today, with MacOS Recovery and Migration Assistant, makes that pretty easy.
The last time I had a catastrophic problem with my startup drive was in 2010, and I wrote about how I recovered, gracefully and with no drama (nor, seemingly, an iota of lost data), in a piece I titled “An Ode to DiskWarrior, SuperDuper, and Dropbox”. More of my digital life is in the cloud — and thus replicated in at least one place other than my Mac’s startup drive — now than then. Off the top of my head, I’m hard pressed to think of anything I do on my Mac that isn’t synced to cloud storage via Dropbox, iCloud, or IMAP. Starting in 2014 I’ve also been a customer of Backblaze, a set-it-and-forget-it online backup service (that, for many years, has been a regular sponsor of this site and The Talk Show, but I recommend it because it’s good, not because they have been and might someday again be a sponsor). That’s another copy of all my personal data backed up somewhere.5
Having my SuperDuper-cloned backup drive be bootable is nice to have, but I really can’t say I need it any more. 20, 15, even just 10 years ago, that wasn’t true — I really did want the ability to boot from my backup drive at a moment’s notice. But that’s really not true any more for me. It probably isn’t for you, either. It definitely isn’t true for most Mac users.
But it remains true for some people, who are using (or responsible for) Macs in high-pressure tight-deadline production environments. Live broadcast studios. Magazines or newspapers with a deadline for the printer that’s just hours (or minutes) away. Places with strict security/privacy rules that forbid cloud storage of certain critical files. If the startup drive on a production machine fails, they need to get up and running now. Plug in a backup drive, restart, and go. Anything longer than that is unacceptable.
That’s not me. That’s probably not you. But there are a lot of people whose work environment that describes. For as much as Apple Silicon Macs have become iOS-like devices in many ways, they’re still Macs at heart: workstations. There remain people inside Apple who know that, too. ★
Fun fact gleaned from the Wikipedia entry for HFS Plus: “Codenamed Sequoia in development, HFS+ was introduced with the January 19, 1998, release of Mac OS 8.1.” I don’t know if that’s further proof that Apple has a penchant for reusing old code names, or if code-name reuse is simply inevitable for a nearly 49-year-old company that’s always been chockablock with secret projects. ↩︎
Ding. ↩︎︎
One of the ways that APFS is very “modern Apple” is that it’s largely a black box. In the HFS+ days, there was Alsoft’s DiskWarrior — which has always been able to perform seeming miracles, outright repairing (or at least restoring temporary access to) the contents of disks that Apple’s own Disk Utility couldn’t fix. DiskWarrior is still available but it only works on HFS+ volumes. I don’t think any third-party developers would have ever described HFS+ as “well” documented, but it was documented, with APIs, in low-level ways that APFS isn’t and almost certainly never will be. ↩︎︎
SuperDuper also has options to just copy newer files, or just copy different files, but I never want to use these. ↩︎︎
It’s terrifying in hindsight just how much of my data existed only as a single copy on a single disk back in my youth. It’s surprising that any of it survived. As a kid/teen in the ’80s, everything of mine existed only on floppy disks. Even the smallest-capacity hard drives were exorbitantly expensive. Apple’s Hard Disk 20 was a 20 megabyte external drive that cost $1,500 when it debuted in 1985, which is about $4,400 in today’s dollars. That was a ton of money. But the floppy disks of the time were just 400 KB — a Hard Disk 20 gave you the storage of 50 of them. But even floppy disks were expensive, to a kid. We’d fill them up faster than we could buy them, and we’d re-use the same floppies over and over when we need a “new” one. That was not great for data integrity on a storage medium so primitive that it was exposed to the air. In the ’90s we all had hard drives, but those hard drives were always almost full. We were constantly copying files off our hard drives to floppies for “storage”, to create a little free space. It felt like remarkable progress when Zip disks appeared, which were like “super floppies”, each containing 100 MB. We lived our digital lives one catastrophic hard drive failure away from losing almost all of our files, and the hard drives of that era were, by today’s standards, flaky as hell. (If you heard your hard drive start to click, you panicked, and immediately began copying your most important files to another disk or disks.)
My grandparents’ generation lived through the Great Depression, and they wound up with, to my generation’s eyes, very odd ideas about the availability and abundance of food. Many of the people who grew up in an era when food was profoundly scarce, wound up treating food as a scarcity for the remainder of their lives. They ate whatever was on their plate, whether they enjoyed it or not, and they were offended by anyone who didn’t.
It’s clear to me that I came of age in era of computing when storage was both scarce and unreliable. I like to think that I’ve adapted with the times, especially given what I do for a living. I know how different storage is today — abundant, cheap, reliable — but I still have feelings about my data that are rooted in the distant past. ↩︎︎
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, on X:
Apple is being extremely disingenuous in attacking the European Union here. The iOS App Store hosts the Reddit app, which provides access to massive amounts of porn. Apple knows this, permits it, and gave Reddit a 17+ (!!!) rating and Editors Choice award. [...]
As a recently deleted (by who?) post on the r/iOS subreddit explains, Apple’s iOS App Store welcomes apps that host tons of porn, as Reddit does, as long as the majority of the content isn’t porn, and the app has controls to hide the porn.
Sweeney has a real point here, and it really is a bit of a conundrum. I’m not sure what he’s alluding to with the “by who?” parenthetical, but I don’t think one deleted Reddit thread on the topic was the result of Apple dispatching some Men in Black agents to knock on Reddit’s door. Reddit is full of non-deleted threads from people asking variations of the same question. And the press has been covering the saga for a decade.
But how is it possible that these super popular platforms have apps in the no-porn App Store while hosting tons of porn? It’s an issue with Reddit, with Tumblr (multiple times), and apparently especially so with X (fka Twitter). (I’m not trying to feign prudishness here, but I’ve heard, several times, that you really don’t want to go looking for NSFW content on X because what you’ll find is ... something.)
I think Sweeney’s synopsis captures Apple’s de facto policy accurately, with the exception that they don’t welcome apps that host porn (so long as the app has controls to hide it, and if the adult content is effectively a side hustle in the overall context of the app), but tolerate it. It’s a de facto policy of tolerating unadvertised pornographic content on platforms that are too big to ban from the App Store without generating far more of an outcry than any controversy over the side-hustle porn will.
Some banks are too big to fail. Some platforms are too big to ban. Apple won’t say that, but that’s clearly the tacit policy. It’s not confusing that the exceptions are super popular apps — they are exceptions because they’re super popular. And it’s absolutely not a policy of looking the other way — Apple’s policing of the situation is an enormous never-ending pain in the ass for the platforms involved. To see NSFW content in the iOS Reddit app, for example, you need to be signed in, and enable an off-by-default setting. Tumblr does similar. You can’t just download the Reddit or Tumblr apps from the App Store and innocuously find yourself viewing pornography.
Apple, in its media statement re: Hot Tub (the you-have-to-admit-it’s-a-fun-name hardcore porn app now available in the AltStore PAL alternative app marketplace in the EU), closed its statement with the following: “The truth is that we are required by the European Commission to allow it to be distributed by marketplace operators like AltStore and Epic who may not share our concerns for user safety.”
On X, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney wrote:
Contrary to Apple’s false statement, the Epic Games Store doesn’t carry this app, doesn’t carry any porn apps, and has never carried porn apps.
Epic Games does run an alternative app marketplace for iOS in the EU, and Sweeney is correct that neither Hot Tub, nor any other porno apps, are in it. But what Apple is alluding to here is Epic’s financial backing of AltStore by way of an “Epic MegaGrant”. AltStore announced the grant back in August:
GOOD NEWS EU 🇪🇺 For innovation in app distribution, Epic Games has granted us a MegaGrant grant that we plan to use to cover Apple’s Core Technology Fee going forward — and we won’t take it for granted!
What does this mean? AltStore PAL is now FREE — no subscription necessary 🎉
Prior to the grant, AltStore PAL charged €1.50 per installation to cover Apple’s Core Technology Fee, the rules for which have gotten more complicated since originally announced, but for app marketplaces themselves (like AltStore PAL) costs €0.50 per-user per-first-installation per-year. After the grant from Epic, AltStore PAL became a free download.
Is it fair for Apple to lay AltStore PAL’s content decisions at Epic’s feet? I’d say it’s more fair than describing Hot Tub as “approved” by Apple for having been notarized.
From an AltStore announcement yesterday:
iPhone turns 18 this year, which means it’s finally old enough for some more ~mature~ apps…
Introducing Hot Tub by c1d3r, the world’s 1st Apple-approved porn app!
The screenshots and video previews are blurred-for-obfuscation by default, but Hot Tub’s website makes pretty clear that the content it aggregates is serious porn. Figuratively speaking, they’re not fucking around. Literally speaking, that’s exactly what they’re aggregating — including an in-app “teens” channel.
Describing Hot Tub as “Apple-approved” is cheeky, if we’re being generous, and downright misleading if we’re not. What they mean is that Hot Tub was duly notarized by Apple — an ostensibly technical, not editorial, review that encompasses (using terms from Apple’s own documentation) accuracy, functionality, safety, security, and privacy. I say “ostensibly” there because Apple has, controversially, refused to notarize apps for other reasons, including in November when it rejected for notarization the classic Mac emulator Mini vMac, on the grounds that Mini vMac both violated Apple’s software licensing terms and misused Apple’s trademarks.
But pornography has pretty much always been Apple’s canonical example for the sort of content they do not want in the App Store, and thus — because Apple’s stance is that the App Store ought to be the sole source for consumer software for iOS — the sort of content they do not consider appropriate for native apps. You’ve been able to watch porno on your iPhone since the first day it shipped — a full year ahead of the App Store — by using the web. Apple’s line has always been clear: native apps = Apple-approved; the web = anything goes. (That same line goes for payment processing for digital goods and services as well.)
Back in 2010, MG Siegler (then at TechCrunch) reported on an email exchange between Steve Jobs and customer Matthew Browing. Browing wrote to Jobs:
It appears that more and more Apple is determining for its consumers what content they should be able to receive. For instance, the blocking of Mark Fiore’s comic app (due to being political satire) or blocking of what Apple considers to be porn.
I’m all for keeping porn out of kids hands. Heck — I’m all for ensuring that I don’t have to see it unless I want to. But… that’s what parental controls are for. Put these types of apps into categories and allow them to be blocked by their parents should they want to.
Apple’s role isn’t moral police — Apple’s role is to design and produce really cool gadgets that do what the consumer wants them to do.
Jobs responded:
Fiore’s app will be in the store shortly. That was a mistake. However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone.
(The man knew how to write an email.)
Fast-forward to the present, and Apple has been citing pornography as one of its reasons for adamantly opposing the EU’s DMA from the very beginning. Last year, after the DMA went into effect, FastCompany’s Michael Grothaus interviewed App Store chief Phil Schiller:
Schiller is quick to point out that despite these new security measures, there are limits to the protections that Apple can provide to users who allow alternative app marketplaces to operate on their iPhones. The company has virtually no control over the content of apps from those marketplaces — even if that content is objectionable or harmful.
“Ultimately, there are things that we have not allowed on our App Store — things that we didn’t think would be safe or appropriate,” Schiller says. “It will not be our decision whether those other marketplaces have the same terms and limitations.”
So yes, for the first time, apps dedicated to pornography can be run on the iPhone. This should be something parents are aware of, because the DMA does not give Apple the legal right to forbid certain types of app stores from operating on its platform, nor does Apple have the ability to prevent a child from downloading such an app store onto their iPhone.
And, lastly, with regard to Hot Tub and AltStore in particular, Apple issued this statement to media outlets, including Daring Fireball, yesterday:
We are deeply concerned about the safety risks that hardcore porn apps of this type create for EU users, especially kids. This app and others like it will undermine consumer trust and confidence in our ecosystem that we have worked for more than a decade to make the best in the world. Contrary to the false statements made by the marketplace developer, we certainly do not approve of this app and would never offer it in our App Store. The truth is that we are required by the European Commission to allow it to be distributed by marketplace operators like AltStore and Epic who may not share our concerns for user safety.
So, no, Apple neither approves of Hot Tub in particular, nor the ability to distribute native porn apps in general. Everyone involved with both AltStore and Hot Tub knows this, but they also know that framing it this way — the announcement came with this banner graphic promoting Hot Tub as “The First Apple-Approved Porn App” — is a good way to get headlines. (The Verge: “The First ‘Approved’ iPhone Porn App Is Coming to Europe” — which aside from the mild clickbait slant, misleadingly conflates “Europe” with “the EU”.) But there’s some undeniable schadenfreude seeing Apple on the wrong end of notarization being used as a tool to convey subject-matter approval. [Update: And now it’s become a thing, where AltStore is sticking to their guns that Hot Tub, having been notarized, is thus “approved” by Apple. C’mon.]
If we want to get nitty-gritty over verbs, I’d argue that Apple accepts apps — like Hot Tub — for notarization, not approves. Begrudging acceptance is more of a thing than begrudging approval.
But, as Apple itself emphasizes in its statement, the DMA requires them to allow it. I’ve seen no celebratory tweets or announcements from European Commission officials celebrating the availability of Hot Tub. Just crickets chirping. When it comes to native iOS porn apps, the EU now has an unequivocal advantage over not just the United States but the rest of the world. You’d think they’d want to celebrate the achievement. ★
If you enjoy podcasts, you should subscribe to Dithering, the twice-weekly 15-minutes-on-the-button podcast I do with Ben Thompson. Dithering as a standalone subscription costs just $7/month or $70/year. (It’s also included in Ben’s excellent Stratechery Plus bundle.) People who try Dithering seem to love it, too — we have remarkably little churn.
If you’re on the fence, subscribe for a month and you’re only out $7 — but I bet you’ll stick around. Trust me. And thanks to everyone who’s already subscribed.
The LBJ Presidential Library, regarding a largely ad-libbed address Lyndon Johnson gave to a group of 150 non-incumbent Democratic candidates for Congress in 1966:
He talked about the difference between Republicans and Democrats: “We’re for something, and they are against everything. Mr. Rayburn was asked one time, ‘What do you think — after 50 years — is the primary difference between the Republican and Democratic parties? Is it the tariff?’
“‘No.’
“‘Well, what is the difference?’
“Mr. Rayburn replied, ‘I’ll tell you the easiest and best explanation — one that I have observed, and I came here during Woodrow Wilson’s administration. They hate all of our Presidents.’
“He said, ‘I didn’t hate Harding. I felt sorry for him, but I didn’t hate him.’ He said, ‘I didn’t hate Coolidge. I thought he was totally inadequate to the responsibility, but I used to go down and eat scrambled eggs and just watch him. He never said anything. You couldn’t tell what he thought of anything.’
“He said, ‘I didn’t get angry with Hoover. Everything in the country folded up and we had bread lines all over the country and everybody in the Southwest was chasing rabbits in order to eat. But I didn’t hate him. We tried to help him. But look what they did to Roosevelt when he came in. They were after his wife. They were after his daughter. And they finally got down after his dog.’”
And LBJ pointed toward the South Lawn where his beagles were kept and said: “And I’ve got three of them out there to jump on if they want to.”
He talked about the difference between constructive action and obstructive action: “Any jackass can kick a barn down. But it takes a carpenter to build one.”
Much has changed in the last 60 years. Much has not.
Speaking of books, Simon & Schuster announced a new one:
Apple isn’t just a brand; it’s the world’s most valuable company and creator of the twenty-first century’s defining product. The iPhone has revolutionized the way we live, work and connect. But Apple is now a victim of its own success, caught in the middle of a new Cold War between two superpowers.
On the brink of bankruptcy in 1996, Apple launched a new strategy to outsource its manufacturing. After experimenting in eight countries, nearly all of its operations were lured to China by the promises of affordable, ubiquitous labour. As the iPod and iPhone transformed Apple’s fortunes, their sophisticated production played a seminal role financing, training, supervising, and supplying Chinese manufacturers — skills Beijing is now weaponizing against the West.
Apple in China is the sometimes disturbing and always revelatory story of how an outspoken, proud company that once praised “rebels” and “troublemakers” — the company that encouraged us all to “Think Different” — devolved into a silent, passive partner to a belligerent regime that increasingly controls its fate.
I’ve long been a fan of McGee’s work as the Financial Times’s Silicon Valley correspondent. Two years ago, the Financial Times ran a good two-part series by McGee that seemingly started him down the path to this book: “How Apple Tied Its Fortunes to China”, and “What It Would Take for Apple to Disentangle Itself From China”. Both are worth reading. This chart from the first report shows just how reliant Apple remains on Chinese manufacturing, and this one from the second shows just how remarkably profitable the iPhone is.
Speaking of cheating, my favorite book from Trump’s first term was Rick Reilly’s Commander in Cheat, which I linked to, with an excerpt still available at The Guardian, when it came out in 2019. I’ve been a fan of Reilly’s writing since I was a teenager and he was the back-page columnist for Sports Illustrated; this is the book Reilly was born to write. I just picked my copy off my shelf and started to re-read it, and got sucked right back in. Posting this link is my way of forcing myself to put it down until tonight.
(Main link here is an Amazon affiliate one, which will make me rich if you purchase through it. If you prefer not to buy books from Amazon, here’s a link to Bookshop.org.)
Drew Harwell, at The Washington Post (gift link, via Harwell himself on Bluesky — which seemingly uses a ludicrously long 397-character token in the URL):
But after poring over his live-streamed gameplay, online sleuths recently made a shocking accusation: Musk had cheated. They suspected that he had pursued a widely mocked tactic known as “boosting,” paying strangers to play his character and rake in loot so that, when he logged in, he could face challenges with the most powerful gear.
Musk fought the allegations before ultimately confessing in messages this month. “It’s impossible to beat players in Asia if you don’t,” he wrote. A few days later, his character could be seen chasing treasure through the game’s sulfuric caverns while Musk was in the Capitol Rotunda, attending President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Every cheater’s story is the same: “I’m not cheating, and I’m offended you’d accuse me.” Then, presented with incontrovertible proof, “I had to cheat because everyone else is cheating so it’s the only way to win, and anyone who isn’t doing it is a simp.” But the simple truth is that cheaters are rotten people, and most people naturally despise cheating.
But watching Musk’s streams, Jake began to suspect foul play. The billionaire did amateurish things, such as failing to drink mana flasks when he needed them and trying to pick up items when his inventory was full. And he made comments that struck devoted players as clueless, saying, for instance, that his character’s “Hand of Wisdom and Action” gloves, which rank among the game’s most valuable items, “could be better.” A normal gamer could write these off as simple flubs in the heat of battle, Jake said. But Musk was supposedly a global grand master, and gamers at that level don’t make these kinds of mistakes.
“It’s like if you said you’re the number two truck driver in the world … and when you try to get the truck to turn on, the windshield wipers start going,” Jake said. “It just felt like there was no way this guy did this.”
When Jake posted a thread on Reddit documenting Musk’s “suspicious” gameplay, the accusations kicked up a firestorm, with “Path of Exile 2” fans scraping through the streams Musk had posted to X for clues of what some were calling his “stolen valor.” [...]
By paying someone else to earn him his high-level gear, they said, he had removed most of the challenge — only to boast how quickly he had beaten others who played fair and square. One poster on a Diablo subreddit called it “unbelievably pathetic” that the world’s richest man would feel “the need to cheat” in a video game to “claim he is good at something” most people “couldn’t care less about.”
It’s the boasting that’s most revealing.
It’s a trope as old as fiction itself that villains cheat at everything. Auric Goldfinger cheated at golf, famously. And in Ian Fleming’s Moonraker (but not the movie), the whole plot was driven by M’s suspicion that mysterious millionaire (the billionaire of the 1950s) industrialist Hugo Drax was cheating at cards at their gentlemen’s club. He assigned Bond to figure out how he was cheating, and Bond stumbled into Drax’s plot to annihilate London. Drax, you see, is in fact a Nazi. And his industry: rocketry.
Ezra Klein in an audio essay/transcribed column at The New York Times:
That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him. [...]
What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.
It is easy and quick, often instantaneous, to destroy things. It is hard and slow work to build new things, and often even harder and slower work to improve existing ones.
I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.
That’s the optimistic take — Trump and his new administration are trying to manically (or is it maniacally?) punch their way to a first-round knockout. They’re utterly unprepared for a 15-round grueling slog. The pessimistic take is that the first-round knockout might happen.
The ultimate power in America isn’t our political or legal systems. It’s our culture. Our collective attitudes. We, collectively, are quite obviously very bad at history, because we, collectively, clearly forgot how chaotic a Trump presidency is after just four years, and we forgot how much we dislike chaotic leadership. But we know what we don’t like and we’re vocal about it. He’s not doing anything to increase his slim margin of popularity, and is already doing a lot of things to lose it. He was never once popular during his first term — not at the start, not in the middle, and definitely not at the end. Right now is the most popular he’s ever been, with a net approval of around zero. That’s the high water mark for Trump — just ever so barely popular enough to win an election.
A delight, as usual.
(My one suggestion for 2025’s list: My Dad’s Chips. Holy hell are these good potato chips. I’ve got a particular weakness for the French Onion ones. Chef’s kiss. Distribution seems mostly limited to the northeast for now.)
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bots attacks and brute force attempts?
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Interesting detail with the latest update to Apple’s app for learning and tinkering with Swift: it’s now named Playground, singular, not Playgrounds, plural. I’m not going to argue that much should be made of the name change, but I like it. The app is the playground — a place for playing with Swift — not a factory for making playgrounds.
Parker Ortolani:
Mastodon clients have become the new UI playground in the same way that Twitter clients used to be. But what I can’t wrap my head around is the business decision of developers to lean into Mastodon clients versus Bluesky ones. Fortunately some progress seems to be starting to be made with apps like PinkSky that replicate the Instagram experience but using Bluesky as the backend. There are also a handful of clients like Skeets and GraySky, but nothing that approaches the quality of some Mastodon clients or the legendary Twitter clients of old. They’re okay, but they’re not worth dropping the official client. Other apps like OpenVibe and Reeder are designed to combine feeds from multiple services and they do work with Bluesky. But they’re not dedicated clients. I want Tweetbot or Twitterrific, but for Bluesky. I’m not seeing that yet. The opportunity is clearly there, it has tens of millions of users making it three times the size of Mastodon.
One thing all the existing nascent Bluesky clients lack is timeline position saving/sync — so when you leave the app and come back later (with sync, even on a different device) you can pick up reading exactly where you left off. I find it hard to imagine paying for a Bluesky client that didn’t do this.
Update: About a month ago, Skeets developer Sebastian Vogelsang posted a thread about running into API limitations trying to implement position-saving, a feature that’s in beta, and available to Skeets Pro users. I’m giving it a shot.
Editors note from The New Republic:
As The New Republic reported on Friday, The Los Angeles Times — currently in a race to the bottom with The Washington Post to determine which of the two venerable institutions can sell out to Donald Trump the hardest — found itself in a fresh controversy after contributor Eric Reinhart accused the paper of making significant edits to a piece of his that was largely critical of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. into one that depicted the president’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services with an “optimistic tone,” largely “suggesting that the virulent conspiracy theorist could be an answer and solution to the American public’s bubbling resentment toward the health care industry.”
Reinhart exposed the shady goings-on on X (fka Twitter). “Editing out the most urgent point of an OpEd in the minutes before sending to press while then also assigning a title and image that suggest an argument entirely opposite to the author’s clear intent is pretty shitty,” he wrote. In light of this lamentable journalistic malpractice, The New Republic has agreed to run Reinhart’s piece as he intended it to be read.
Reinhart’s headline at TNR, encapsulating the intended thrust of his piece: “RFK Jr’s Wrecking Ball Won’t Fix Public Health”, and the closing paragraph of the column:
Although RFK, Jr., and Luigi Mangione are both responses to the same underlying problem of US healthcare corruption, there is a major difference between them: one allegedly operated outside the law to kill one person in defense of millions, whereas the other — via his egomaniacal disregard for scientific evidence — seeks to use law itself to inflict preventable death on those millions.
The headline the LA Times ran his piece under, after their editing: “Trump’s Healthcare Disruption Could Pay Off — if He Pushes Real Reform”, and its closing paragraphs:
Such an approach would shift us away from overreliance on expensive medical treatments and toward public health as it should be: a project by and for the people that makes full use of government resources to empower communities.
We should demand fundamental transformations in how we approach health in America, but a wrecking ball alone won’t deliver what we need.
After all the shenanigans Soon-Shiong began pulling pre- and post-election, my only question here is whether Reinhart really believed the LA Times op-ed page was going to run his piece as written.
My original intention for this post ended above. I wanted to quote the TNR editors note that explained the situation, quote Reinhart’s intended headline and closing paragraph, and contrast those with the benign gibberish headline and closing that the LA Times actually published. Done. But I’ve got more. Turns out, the LA Times itself effectively published proof of its “editing” that completely perverted Reinhart’s intended thrust.
I have a small arsenal of homegrown tools I use to automate the work of writing DF. Markdown itself is the crown jewel of them. But over the now many years I’ve been doing this I’ve created a whole toolbox of scripts and macros that help me do what I do faster and with fewer errors. (And I still commit plenty of errors.) One of the smaller ones that I’ve never shared publicly (but probably should) is a Keyboard Maestro macro that lets me select a range of text in Safari and copy that selection as Markdown-formatted text. It picks up spans of italics and boldfacing, but most importantly, it picks up hyperlinks in the original text and converts them to the Markdown link style I prefer (defined reference links).
You will note in my blockquote above of Reinhart’s intended closing paragraph, as published at The New Republic, he linked the word “disregard” to this January 28 report from The Washington Post: “RFK Jr. Disparaged Vaccines Dozens of Times in Recent Years and Made Baseless Claims on Race”. No link to that Washington Post report appears, visually, in the butchered version of Reinhart’s piece that ran in the LA Times.
But, my “Copy Markdown Blockquote” macro picked up an effectively invisible-to-the-user link to that article, in the HTML markup between their closing paragraph and Reinhart’s author bio beneath it. You can view source at the LA Times website and see for yourself, but here’s a screenshot:
You can’t see the link or click on it as rendered in a browser, because there’s no content between the opening <a …>
and closing </a>
tags, but whoever at the LA Times edited Reinhart’s column to pervert its meaning, did so sloppily, leaving behind at least this one acerbic vestigial link from his originally-submitted prose. ★
Alex Heath, writing at The Verge:
Moments after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s all-hands comments to employees were widely leaked, a company executive warned in an internal memo that leakers will be fired.
“We take leaks seriously and will take action,” Meta’s chief information security officer, Guy Rosen, said in an internal memo I’ve seen. [...] Rosen goes on to say that Meta “will take appropriate action, including termination” if it identifies leakers and that “we recently terminated relationships with employees who leaked confidential company information inappropriately and exfiltrated sensitive documents.”
During today’s all-hands meeting, Zuckerberg told employees he would no longer be as transparent due to leaks. “We try to be really open and then everything I say leaks,” he said. “It sucks.”
Just about every well-run and successful company I’m aware of fires leakers. Or really it’s the opposite: it’s difficult to succeed as a company with no institutional trust between employees. But company cultures are infused by the personalities of their founders. Meta employees have no scruples surrounding the privacy of internal communications because, by definition, they’re the sort of people who never saw any problem with Meta’s complete lack of regard for such things. So they don’t hesitate to leak what they don’t like. Zuck gets no loyalty because he hired an entire company of people with no convictions other than “winning” or whatever it really is that Meta sees as its central tenet.
It’s not fear of getting fired that keeps employees at most companies from leaking. It’s that they find themselves aligned with the company’s mission. They feel like part of a team that they want to see succeed, and they naturally adopt an attitude of being a team player. Team players don’t leak the playbook because they don’t like the coach’s play-calling or how much playing time they’re getting. I’ve never gotten the sense that that sort of attitude exists at Meta.
This is a company that bought a popular VPN app (Onavo) and then used it to snoop on users’ encrypted SnapChat traffic. They used it to snoop on users to determine the popularity of WhatsApp before purchasing it. This wasn’t some rogue operation in a corner of the company — it was a core strategic asset that led directly to a $20 billion acquisition. Onavo was just flat-out spyware and Apple kicked it out of the App Store in 2018. For years — years — Meta paid users aged 13–35 up to $20 a month to install a “Facebook Research” app that let Meta study every single thing they did on their phones. An app like that couldn’t be distributed through the App Store, of course, so Meta distributed it by abusing the iOS “enterprise” developer program; when Apple pulled Meta’s enterprise certificate over the fiasco, its employees couldn’t use their own internal apps to buy food or take a company shuttle bus.
It would be a wonder if the sort of people who would do stuff like that — or go to work at a company that does things like that — were not incorrigible leakers of embarrassing information and communications. Zuck’s exasperation over the disloyalty of his own employees is like hiring a team of pickpockets and then complaining that sandwiches keep going missing from the gang’s hangout fridge.
Annie Linskey and Rebecca Ballhaus, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
“It looks like a bribe and a signal to every company that corruption is the name of the game,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said in a statement. “After Meta pays to play, what does Mark Zuckerberg expect as a return on this investment?”
Serious talks about the suit, which had seen little activity since fall 2023, began after Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida to dine with him in November, according to the people familiar with the discussions. The dinner was one of several efforts by Zuckerberg and Meta to soften the relationship with Trump and the incoming administration. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Last year, Trump warned that Zuckerberg could go to prison if he tried to rig the election against him.
Toward the end of the November dinner, Trump raised the matter of the lawsuit, the people said. The president signaled that the litigation had to be resolved before Zuckerberg could be “brought into the tent,” one of the people said.
A good reminder that self respect has no price tag.
Weeks later, in early January, Zuckerberg returned to Mar-a-Lago for a full day of mediation. Trump was present for part of the session, though he stepped out at one point to be sentenced — appearing virtually — for covering up hush money paid to a porn star, one of the people said. He also golfed, reappearing in golf clothes and talking about the round he had just played, the person said.
Even when you own the golf course and drive your cart right onto the green like a jackass, an 18-hole round of golf still takes like three hours. I just love the idea of him leaving Zuckerberg sitting around for half a fucking day while he played a round of golf after his felony sentencing, before getting back to negotiating the price of the bribe to get “into the tent”.
NBC News, “Meta Agrees to Pay $25 Million to Settle Trump Lawsuit”:
Meta said Wednesday it would pay $25 million to settle a four-year-old lawsuit from President Donald Trump over the social media company’s decision to suspend Trump’s accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, filed a notice of the settlement in federal court in San Francisco, where the lawsuit was pending. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone separately confirmed the terms: a $25 million payment from the company, with $22 million going toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library and the balance dedicated to legal fees and other plaintiffs in the case.
I really can’t wait to see that Trump Presidential Library.
Via David Smith on Mastodon, who writes:
The recent work I’ve been doing has required a lot of sharing files between testing devices (and my Mac). AirDrop should be the ideal tool for this but I’ve recently found it to be unreliable.
Instead I’ve been using LocalSend which is an open-source AirDrop alternative and it’s been working fantastically. The only real downside is that you have to open the app on both sides for the share to complete, but it has been 100% reliable so that’s a tradeoff I’ll happily make.
Somehow I’d never heard of LocalSend before, but I just gave it a quick test drive and it works like a charm. It’s got clients for Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, and Windows — and the Mac client is available both in the App Store and via the web. No middleman in the cloud — transfers are peer-to-peer, and the whole project is open source with an active community on GitHub.
When I dick around with my Android burner phone, I often find myself sorely missing AirDrop and Continuity. Sometimes I just want to move the contents of my clipboard from one device to the other — LocalSend makes that easier than anything else I’ve seen.
I’m not even sure Smith’s “downside” is really a downside. I understand why AirDrop works the way it does (always-on in the background), but I wouldn’t want LocalSend to work that way. I like the explicitness of opening it on both devices.
Just an outstanding project from developer Tien Do Nam. Free of charge, open source, and no ads — the only funding is via an in-app tip jar, which I just gladly dropped some bills in.
Apple:
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2025 first quarter ended December 28, 2024. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $124.3 billion, up 4 percent year over year, and quarterly diluted earnings per share of $2.40, up 10 percent year over year.
Jason Snell (with his usual assortment of charts):
Probably most notable is that iPhone revenue was down 1% from the year-ago quarter, which will certainly upset some analysts and investors, given that the iPhone is more than half of Apple’s total revenue. But the Mac jumped 16%, the iPad was up 15%, and services was up 14%. The recently sluggish Wearables, Home, and Accessories category was down 2%.
Sales were down 11 percent in China companywide, which is surely what pulled the iPhone down. Outside China iPhone 16 sales must be very strong. But Apple’s overall sales in China have been trending down for 3 years now. It looks to me like Apple might have peaked there around 2021 or 2022.
A Monday report from Reuters, syndicated at The Guardian, “Microsoft Is in Talks to Acquire TikTok, Trump Claims”:
Donald Trump has suggested that Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok and that he would like to see a bidding war over the app. When asked if Microsoft was in talks to buy the app, the US president said “I would say yes”, adding “A lot of interest in TikTok. There’s great interest in TikTok.”
Microsoft, TikTok and ByteDance did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for a comment outside regular business hours, after the US president’s comments to reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday.
The reported talks mark the second time that Microsoft has been in the frame to acquire TikTok. During his first term, Trump ordered TikTok to separate its US version from ByteDance citing national security concerns. Microsoft emerged as a top bidder in 2020, but the talks soon collapsed, and Trump’s divestment push ended a few months later when he left office.
Is it really true that Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok from ByteDance? Or did Donald Trump just bullshit his “I would say yes”? This report, based on nothing more than an off-the-cuff verbal answer from Trump Monday, has had absolutely zero follow-up since. Microsoft reported its quarterly earnings yesterday and there was not a word about a TikTok acquisition. And in the years since 2020, Microsoft has invested a staggering amount of capital into data centers for AI and cloud computing — their $22 billion spend last quarter and estimated $80 billion spend for the upcoming year dominated news coverage and analysis of their results yesterday. They also acquired Activision Blizzard for about $70 billion. I’m not saying Microsoft couldn’t afford to acquire TikTok — they could, I’m sure — but it’d raise a genuine question about focus. But there’s nothing in the coverage of yesterday’s results or the analyst call they held that suggests they’re in the hunt for TikTok.
Whether you love Trump or hate him (or, bizarrely, somehow fall in-between — please see me after class if you’re of that mind) we all know he’s a bullshitter. He makes shit up. Either (a) there are secret talks between Microsoft and ByteDance, and Trump is privy to those talks, and he decided to blab about them, but only when asked; or (b) he just said “I would say yes” when asked because he thought it would sound good and reinforce his self image as the world’s most juiced-in dealmaker. I know which seems more likely.
And even if it’s not bullshit, if all a news report has to go on is Donald Trump saying “I would say yes”, that has to be filed under “Maybe this is true” at best. So the headline, at its most generous, should put that first: “Trump Claims Microsoft Is in Talks to Acquire TikTok”, not “Microsoft Is in Talks to Acquire TikTok, Trump Claims”.
Here’s the kicker: Reuters’s original headline, on reuters.com, actually got this right: “Trump Says Microsoft Is in Talks to Acquire TikTok”. It was someone at The Guardian who turned up the clickbait dial a tad on this.
Fascinating thread — and an almost entirely civil discussion of what has become, for obvious reasons, an inflammatory topic. These are mapping and metadata nerds approaching the dilemma in the very nerdiest of ways. I found it rather soothing, and also quite informative — particularly the posts from Minh Nguyễn, who seems to be an OpenStreetMap super user. First:
So it turns out the UNGEGN is not actually a decision-making authority on individual toponyms. Their role is to encourage and facilitate standardization. They literally issue guidelines about guidelines. The closest thing to an authority on the gulf’s name in international law would be the International Hydrographic Organization. The IHO’s Limits of Oceans and Seas has been frozen in time without any updates since 1953, apparently because Japan and South Korea can’t agree on a name for the sea separating them. Maybe a certain dealmaker can get them to the bargaining table…
My kneejerk reaction to Trump’s “Gulf of America” executive order was that mapmakers should just roll their eyes, make the jerk-off motion, and ignore it. But that’s not practical. Mapmakers seek to appeal to authority on names. What’s the alternative? That Google and Apple (and OpenStreetMaps) serve as their own authorities on the names of topographical features and geographical points of interest? That’s not right. So you might think, well, the Gulf of Mexico is an international body of water, so the mapmakers should appeal to an international authority. The UN! But as Nguyễn cites, that’s not what the UN’s Group of Experts on Geographical Names does.
Another post in the thread from Nguyễn:
Ironically, Spanish-language media keeps having to explain why Gulf of America is problematic in English. In Spanish, América refers to the Americas as a whole, not the U.S. specifically. If one didn’t know any better, one would think it’s a gift to Cuba! Of course, this doesn’t justify the attempt to rename the gulf, since the intention is abundantly clear, but it does leave the name vulnerable to others reclaiming it for themselves. A more erudite politician might’ve chosen Gulf of Florida, which at least has a historical basis, dating to around the same time as Gulf of Mexico. But here we are.
And from yet another post by Nguyễn, a link to this new report on the order’s implications for the entire federal government from the Congressional Research Service (a nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress). Now we’ve gotten more good nerds involved: librarians. And whatever the answer is, it’s complicated.
I don’t like this ostensible renaming (rebranding?) of the Gulf of Mexico any more than you do. It’s petty and pointless, except for the trolling spite, which, of course, is the point. I don’t know what Apple is going to do, but I suspect, ultimately, if the Department of the Interior really does make this official, Apple Maps will follow suit, but perhaps with something like “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” for users in the US.
Google should have simply done what Apple is doing, though, and remained utterly silent on the issue until and if it’s actually made official. Best thing we can hope for is that the Department of the Interior stalls on making the change in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) and that Trump forgets about it by then.
David Pierce, writing at The Verge, “The Pebble Smartwatch Is Making a Comeback”:
Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be easier to do the same thing again a second time. “But then I was like, what if I just asked Google to open-source the operating system?” he says. It felt like a long shot, but he knew the code was just sitting dormant inside Mountain View somewhere. So he asked. A few times.
To Migicovsky’s surprise, Google agreed to release Pebble OS to the public. As of Monday, all the Pebble firmware is available on GitHub, and Migicovsky is starting a company to pick up where he left off.
The company — which can’t be named Pebble because Google still owns that — doesn’t have a name yet.
My first idea for a new name: Rebble — a rebellious return of Pebble. My second idea: Quixote — because this isn’t going to be a hit this time either. (Quixote also would have been a good name for Beeper Mini’s attempt to backwards engineer access as an unsanctioned iMessage client for Android.) But, thankfully, it doesn’t sound to me like Migicovsky’s goal is to boil the ocean. (Update: Turns out, Rebble is the name of a community project to write new firmware to keep old Pebble watches running.)
You’d imagine that smartwatches have evolved considerably since 2012. I’ve tried every single smart watch out there, but none do it for me. No one makes a smartwatch with the core set of features I want:
- Always-on e-paper screen (it’s reflective rather than emissive. Sunlight readable. Glanceable. Not distracting to others like a bright wrist)
- Long battery life (one less thing to charge. It’s annoying to need extra cables when traveling)
- Simple and beautiful user experience around a core set of features I use regularly (telling time, notifications, music control, alarms, weather, calendar, sleep/step tracking)
- Buttons! (to play/pause/skip music on my phone without looking at the screen)
- Hackable (apparently you can’t even write your own watchfaces for Apple Watch? That is wild. There were >16k watchfaces on the Pebble appstore!)
If their goal is to be to smartwatches what Playdate is to handheld gaming, that’s definitely achievable, and if they succeed, will by definition be a lot of fun.
The whole tech world needs more projects that aren’t trying to become billion- (let alone trillion‑) dollar ideas, but are happily shooting for success as million-dollar ideas (or less!). Many of the best and most beloved movies ever made weren’t big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. If your list of all-time favorite movies doesn’t include a bunch that were made on shoestring budgets, your whole list probably sucks, because you have no taste. The same is of course true for music, games, and everything else. Indie art is often great art, imbued by the souls and obsessions of its creators, and blockbuster art is often garbage art, imbued only by soulless corporate bureaucracies.
Computer hardware and software can be — ought to be — attempts at creating art. ★
Here’s an addendum to my post yesterday on the recent shake-up atop the generally stable “top free downloads” list in the App Store. Some of the shake-up is from new entrants, like the much-ballyhooed AI chatbot DeepSeek. But a lot of it is the direct result of the sudden absence of ByteDance’s entire lineup of apps: TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and Marvel Snap. Alternatives are vying to fill those voids. [Update, one day later: Marvel Snap is back in the App Store, because it now has a new publisher.]
TikTok returning to operational service in the U.S. after an outage of just one day has squelched the outrage surrounding its ban. The app stopped working; TikTok users, unprepared for its ban, freaked out; the app started working again the next day; and TikTok fans more or less went back to scrolling their feeds and shut up. Controversy over.
But the controversy shouldn’t be over. And unless something changes, it’s going to slowly simmer back to an eventual boil.
Nobody is really talking about the fact that ByteDance apps remain banned, legally speaking, in the U.S. right now, and already-installed copies of their apps are only continuing to function because TikTok’s U.S. cloud providers, Oracle and Akamai, restored service on the word of President Trump that they won’t be held accountable for doing so, despite being in clear violation of the PAFACA Act. But neither Apple nor Google has restored any of ByteDance’s apps to the App Store or Play Store. That hasn’t interfered with TikTok going back to operational via copies of the app already installed on users’ phones, but it’s an insurmountable — although incremental — problem in the long run.
The conventional wisdom is that Oracle and Akamai are being a bit reckless (“If Trump says we’re good, we’re good — what could go wrong, it’s not like Trump has ever changed his mind...”) and Apple and Google are prudent, more staid (“We’re following the letter of the law and will continue to follow the letter of the law”). And perhaps that’s all there is to this. But now that we’re over a week into this post-ban period, I’m starting to wonder if it’s purely a coincidence that these four companies split along these lines. The two cloud providers required for TikTok to function on one side, the two app store providers on the other.
With TikTok’s cloud provider access shut off, it was like a guillotine. TikTok was working for everyone in the U.S., then boom, it was shut down for everyone. Then, just as suddenly, it was back.
Being locked out of the App Store and Play Store, on the other hand, is a slow squeeze. The first thing that comes to mind, obviously, is no new users. No growth. TikTok already has a mind-boggling number of users in the US (estimates seem to range from 120 to 170 million), but no growth is no growth.
The second thing that comes to mind is no app updates for US users. No new features. No bug fixes. No security patches. TikTok, like most popular apps, typically pushes updates to the App Store and Play Store every two or three weeks. What happens now that that’s stopped for US users? Is ByteDance still going to push app updates to users in the rest of the world? TikTok obviously has a lot of American users but most of its users live elsewhere.
But the third factor is the most insidious: even if the build of TikTok already installed on an American user’s phone continues to function, that user can’t reinstall TikTok (or any of ByteDance’s other apps) on a new or restored phone until those apps are back in the app stores. Wipe and restore your phone from backup? No more TikTok. Buy a new phone? No TikTok on the new phone.
Trump’s reprieve was a declaration that the Justice Department wouldn’t enforce the law for 75 days. If ByteDance doesn’t sell TikTok — and it sure doesn’t seem like they have any more intention to sell it now than they did before the ban took effect — what happens? Another (even more shambolically illegal) Trump extension that only keeps TikTok functioning, but not available in the app stores? Because the other side isn’t budging either: China hawks like Senator Tom Cotton have not shifted an inch. They’re tolerating Trump’s 75-day reprieve but not budging from their overall “sell or you’re banned” stance.
I’m not saying this is a backroom plot between the administration and these companies, but I’m not saying it isn’t a backroom agreement either. Trump isn’t complaining about Apple and Google not getting on board. And neither Apple nor Google seems worried about Trump’s wrath for not following Oracle and Akamai’s leads. The goal of the legislation isn’t to pull the plug on TikTok for Americans — it’s to pressure ByteDance (and really, their bosses in the Chinese Communist Party) into selling the app. Instantly banning TikTok’s US operations resulted in instant and vociferous outrage from TikTok users — the pressure turned out not to be on ByteDance and the CCP, it was on the US government to give people back their beloved TikTok. So I think everyone on the US side is looking at the current detente — TikTok being available to existing users through existing copies of the app, but not being available in app stores — as a way to turn the pressure up only on ByteDance. Slowly strangle TikTok over a period of months, rather than behead it overnight.
But what happens if the CCP stands pat? If they just wait it out? If ByteDance were a normal company they’d face financial pressure to capitulate and sell. But the CCP isn’t under any financial pressure to allow ByteDance to sell. Say what you will about the Chinese government, but they do not lack for patience. What happens then, when word starts spreading amongst TikTok fans not to upgrade their phones, lest they lose access to the app? Apple’s going to have some strong feelings about that. ★
Google, in an announcement on X:
We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.
For geographic features in the U.S., this is when Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is updated. When that happens, we will update Google Maps in the U.S. quickly to show Mount McKinley and Gulf of America.
Also longstanding practice: When official names vary between countries, Maps users see their official local name. Everyone in the rest of the world sees both names. That applies here too.
Jennifer Elias, reporting for CNBC:
Google’s maps division on Monday reclassified the U.S. as a “sensitive country,” a designation it reserves for states with strict governments and border disputes, CNBC has learned. [...]
Some team members within the maps division were ordered to urgently make changes to the location name and recategorize the U.S. from “non-sensitive” to “sensitive,” according to the internal correspondence. The changes were given a rare “P0” order, meaning it had the highest priority level and employees were immediately notified and instructed to drop what they were doing to work on it.
Google’s order states that the Gulf of America title change should be treated similar to the Persian Gulf, which in Arab countries is displayed on Google Maps as Arabian Gulf.
No word from Apple on how Apple Maps will handle this. (I’ve asked for comment; will update if I get an answer.) Re-renaming Denali back to Mount McKinley seems like a no-brainer for the maps to comply with. A country names its own mountains. If Obama could rename it, Trump can re-rename it.
The Gulf of Mexico, though, is an international body of water, and its name wasn’t even debated until Trump started talking about it a few weeks ago. Google (and perhaps Apple) having a policy where they simply follow the naming conventions of the GNIS seems not merely sensible but utterly uncontroversial ... until now.
There are three countries in the world that don’t use the metric system as their official units of measure: the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar. I expect there will be fewer — namely, one — who go along with calling it the “Gulf of America”.
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch “Automattic and Others Back Openvibe, an App That’s Unifying the Open Social Web”:
Launched in 2024, Openvibe initially supported three of the more prominent open social networks, all of which operate using different protocols: Mastodon uses ActivityPub, Bluesky runs on AT Protocol, and Nostr powers a number of third-party apps. Openvibe later added support for Instagram Threads, as that app became further integrated with ActivityPub and opened itself up to the developer community.
As CEO Matej Svancer explained at the time, the idea behind his app was to offer users a more friendly and “easy-to-use gateway” to the open social web. Because of the different protocols these networks utilize, it can be difficult for newcomers who end up having to switch apps or limit their engagement to just their preferred platform.
But Openvibe doesn’t just let people stay connected with friends across all these services in a combined timeline, it also allows cross-posting to multiple networks at once.
I just gave it a try, and my take is that Openvibe is definitely interesting, but it’s not for me, and I’m not really sure who it is for. I signed into all three of my personal accounts that Openvibe supposedly supports: Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. I got a home timeline that mashes together all the posts from my Bluesky and Mastodon accounts. I don’t see any errors related to Threads, but I don’t see any posts from Threads. That kind of makes sense because Threads doesn’t offer an API that allows for full third-party clients. Threads does have an API for posting, so I presume my Threads account in Openvibe is write-only. Openvibe’s website and the app itself make it seem like I should see content from my Threads timeline, though. (Perhaps I don’t because I turned off “fediverse sharing” with my Threads account a few weeks ago — because I prefer keeping these networks separate. But if that’s the problem, Openvibe doesn’t explain that I need to re-enable it.)
I really don’t see the point of mashing the tweets from two (or more!) different social networks into one unified timeline. To me it’s just confusing. I don’t love the current situation where three entirely separate, thriving social networks each merit some portion of my attention (not to mention that a fourth, X, still kinda does too). But when I use each of these platforms, I want to use a client that is dedicated to each platform. These platforms all have different features, to varying degrees, and they definitely have different vibes and cultural norms. Pretending that they all form one big (lowercase-m) meta platform doesn’t make that pretense cohesive. Mashing them all together in one timeline isn’t simpler. It sounds simpler but in practice it’s more cacophonous.
The idea that this might in any way appeal to “newcomers” is bananas to me. The concept of streaming multiple accounts from multiple networks into one timeline is by definition a bit advanced. In my experience, for very obvious reasons, casual social network users only use the first-party client. They’re confused even by the idea of using, say, an app named Ivory to access a social network called Mastodon. The idea of explaining to them why they might want to use an app named Openvibe to access Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads (and the weirdo blockchain network Nostr) is like trying to explain to your dog why they should stay out of the trash. There’s a market for third-party clients (or at least I hope there is), but that market is not made up of “newcomers”.
Also, Openvibe is not a good app. It doesn’t look great, the custom font is somewhat cartoon-y (which I find both unattractive and off-putting), there’s a lot of gray-on-white low-contrast iconography and text, and, worst of all, it seems to update your feeds periodically and when it does, it refreshes and scrolls the timeline while you’re looking at it. It’s like having a book turn the page automatically while you’re reading in the middle of a page. When you leave and come back to the app a few minutes later, the timeline needs to reload, which contributes to the app feeling pretty slow. The overall look, feel, and layout says “generic Twitter-style social network”.
I do use and very much see the point of Croissant, a multi-network app for cross-posting to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Croissant isn’t a client for consuming content from those platforms; it’s just a tool for sending new posts to those platforms.
And I’d love it if Tapbots’s aforementioned Ivory added support for Bluesky accounts. But when I use Ivory (as when I used Tweetbot, for years, before it), I don’t see — and wouldn’t want to see — a single timeline from all configured accounts. I want to switch between multiple accounts, each with their own discrete timelines. Openvibe is in many ways the opposite of Ivory, starting right from its slogan: “All decentralised social networks, single timeline”.
Addendum, 30 January 2025: I never got far enough with Openvibe to grant it permission to send me notifications, but Kim Slawson did, and Openvibe’s notifications are borderline useless. Rather than tell you anything useful about the posts you’re being notified about — you know, like what they say, or who posted them — they all just say “🔔 New notification is waiting for you!” So useless it’s amazing. ★
Chance Miller at 9to5Mac has a good rundown of everything new in iOS 18.3, and his colleague Ryan Christoffel has a similar rundown for MacOS 15.3 all-five-vowels Sequoia. (See also: Michael Tsai.)
Jim Acosta, signing off from CNN for the final time:
It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. I believe it is the job of the press to hold power to account — I’ve always tried to do that here at CNN, and I plan on doing all of that again in the future.
One final message: Don’t give in to the lies. Don’t give in to the fear. Hold on to the truth, and hope.
President Trump, gloating on his very popular social network, Truth Social (current ranking in the App Store: not in the top 200 free downloads, #20 in Social Networking):
Wow, really good news! Jim Acosta, one of the worst and most dishonest reporters in journalistic history, a major sleazebag, has been relegated by CNN Fake News to the Midnight hour, “Death Valley,” because of extraordinarily BAD RATINGS (and no talent!). Word is that he wants to QUIT, and that would be even better. Jim is a major loser who will fail no matter where he ends up. Good luck Jim!
Here’s a recent example of Acosta’s exemplary work on CNN, interviewing Representative Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee:
ACOSTA: Do you agree with Trump’s decision to pardon violent people?
REP. BURCHETT: If they were truly violent, no. But I don’t know that?
ACOSTA: What do you mean you don’t know? We’re showing the footage right now.
Oliver Darcy, the former CNN media reporter now working under his own umbrella at Status, has been all over the abject cowardice of CNN’s current chief executive, Mark Thompson:
The anchor, I’m told, signaled to associates in private conversations over the weekend that he intends to depart the network after its chief executive, Mark Thompson, booted him from the morning programming lineup — a move that conspicuously coincided with Donald Trump’s return to power.
CNN brass, as we first reported earlier this month, decided to strip Acosta of his 10am show, which he has anchored to great ratings success over the last 11 months, at times even seeing higher viewership than programs in the channel’s prime time bloc.
Acosta was instead offered the less-than-desirable option of anchoring a show from midnight until 2am ET.
CNN pitched the gig to Acosta as anchoring during prime time on the West Coast and said he could move to Los Angeles to host the program. But the reality is the program would have aired at a time in which cable news viewership is at its lowest levels.
Acosta’s morning ratings were high, not low. There’s no explanation for CNN forcing him to midnight other than appeasement of a president who spends his days obsessing over cable news.
MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:
Anyway, this matters because it doesn’t mean that DeepSeek, an app based off of the Chinese-developed AI model of the same name, is the most popular app ever despite its current place atop the charts. Your mom probably isn’t downloading it. Just as last week, your mom probably wasn’t downloading Xiaohongshu (‘Little Red Book’), incidentally another Chinese app that rose to the top of the charts. But it is still interesting because again, the mainstays have in recent years dominated these charts. Sure, new entrants would rise (and fall) from time-to-time but it was almost always some order of: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, TikTok, CapCut, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, etc. Right now, there is only a single app from Meta (Threads) and one from Google (Google) in the top 10.
Instead, we have the aforementioned DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Paramount+, Temu, Fox Sports, Bluesky, ReelShort, and VPN rounding out the top 10. It’s pretty easy to see why each of these has risen: interest in AI, interest in sports around the NFL playoffs, interest in Twitter-like social networks given the Xitter situation, and yes, the TikTok ban.
The specific reasons are varied, but altogether it really is true that, for the moment at least, there’s a serious shakeup atop the App Store top free downloads list. That’s interesting for several reasons.
DeepSeek is at #1 and ChatGPT #2. That’s great for “AI” but a bad look for OpenAI at the moment. I can’t help but think that DeepSeek having rocketed to the top spot, seemingly (but not actually) out of nowhere helped drive today’s stock market reaction. (Google Gemini is down at #14.)
Secondarily, and perhaps counterintuitively, it showcases Apple’s strength in AI. Sure, Apple’s own Apple Intelligence is years behind and pretty embarrassing right now, even with its much ballyhooed partnership with ChatGPT. But the iPhone is where people actually use AI and the App Store is how they get the apps they use. To borrow Ben Thompson’s framing, the hype over DeepSeek taking the top spot in the App Store reinforces Apple’s role as an aggregator of AI. The measuring stick for consumer AI products and public social media networks is where they’re listed on the App Store. Not app stores, lowercase. The App Store. Apple’s. That’s The Show, the Major Leagues. So sure, it’d be better for Apple users and Apple shareholders, and thus better for Apple itself, if Apple’s own AI was at least sort of kind of competitive, rather than the butt of jokes. Aside from the easily forgotten iTunes Ping 15 years ago, Apple hasn’t even tried to offer its own public broadcast-style social media platform. But the iPhone is the place where social media networks are used and ranked. The App Store today is like the cable company of yore. It didn’t matter if Comcast’s own channels were the most popular — so long as everyone was watching channels through TVs connected to Comcast TV service, Comcast was getting their cut.
Lastly, when it comes to Meta: Threads is #3 (the people arguing that Threads is a bust sure are quiet lately), Instagram is down to #16 (not great if they were hoping for a bounce from TikTok’s questionable future), WhatsApp #17 (not bad on iOS in the US, where iMessage is strongest) and Facebook is ... scroll, scroll, scroll ... #32, just behind Walmart and Microsoft Teams. 32 isn’t that far ahead of X, which clocks in at #41. Facebook might never die, but we seem to be watching it fade away.
Jenni Reid and Alex Harring, reporting for CNBC:
Nvidia and other U.S. technology firms plunged on Monday, part of a global sell-off as Chinese startup DeepSeek sparked concerns over competitiveness in artificial intelligence and America’s leadership in the sector.
Nvidia, the chip designer who has been a major beneficiary of the AI hype, last slid 17.3%. With that, the megacap tech stock was on track to notch its worst day since March 2020.
To make a long story short, it’s been broadly assumed that leading-edge model training and inference requires the highest of high-end hardware — which hardware, especially for training, pretty much exclusively comes from Nvidia. The assumption was that any company trying to compete in this fiercely competitive field — a field with massive implications for industry, culture, and national security — must get in line to buy (or rent) enormous amounts of computational power exclusively available on the very best systems from Nvidia. That hardware isn’t available (at least legally) to Chinese companies, because of the Biden administration’s export bans. DeepSeek engineers found and implemented multiple massive efficiency improvements that allowed the company to train its latest models at far lower prices using far-less-capable hardware, and perform inference under heretofore unprecedented memory constraints. DeepSeek’s achievements render obsolete several prior planks of conventional wisdom regarding the state of AI. My link a few sentences prior in this paragraph is to a WSJ report from 14 days ago that now feels like it dates from at least 14 months ago.
The most shocking result has been a 17 percent hit to Nvidia’s stock price today, knocking somewhere around $350 billion off their market cap. Google is down about 4 percent, and Microsoft down 2 percent — but Meta is up 1 percent and Apple is up a little over 3 percent. I think the market is reacting pretty sensibly:
Nvidia has taken an unprecedented beating. $350 billion is more than the combined market caps of Verizon and AT&T (each worth roughly $170 billion). But Nvidia has been — and even with these breakthroughs from DeepSeek, remains — in an unprecedented position. Nvidia’s high-flying valuation reflects its unprecedented position as the essential hardware company for AI. Nvidia’s position, post-R1, remains essential — just not as essential as everyone thought. Hence the haircut. But Nvidia remains the third-most-valuable company in the world — it took a massive plunge today but in no way collapsed.
TSMC and Broadcom both took big hits today too (-13% and -17%, respectively). Being a “chip company” doesn’t look as sweet today as it did last week.
If OpenAI were publicly traded, I suspect it might have collapsed — the sell-off it would have faced today might have triggered emergency measures that halted trading.
Microsoft has been distancing itself from OpenAI, but is still intertwined with them like no other company. (Recall that Apple walked away from a big investment in OpenAI just four months ago.) A -2% hit feels about right.
The broadest implication of DeepSeek’s achievements is that really good AI is going to be even cheaper and more openly available than expected — sooner than expected. That’s bad news for Google, whose entire enterprise value is based around their having an unassailable and sustainable lead in these areas. Google doesn’t have to worry about a competitor coming along to rival them in search. They have to worry that the entire field of “search” is on the cusp of being commoditized. Thus the -4% hit.
Meta, the thinking goes, benefits as generative AI becomes cheaper. That’s why Meta’s own AI efforts are sorta-kinda open source. Meta has nothing to do with DeepSeek, but DeepSeek’s achievements seem perfectly aligned with Meta’s own interests in AI.
Apple benefits, indirectly, in at least two ways from DeepSeek’s breakthroughs. First, a vast increase in the inference capabilities of RAM-constrained hardware strongly suggests that Apple’s consumer devices will soon be able to perform far more AI computation locally. Apple Silicon’s shared memory architecture is perfect for this — and still un-replicated by anyone else in the industry. Second, Apple’s decades-long standoffish relationship with Nvidia suddenly looks like less of a problem.
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek made waves last week when they dropped their new “open reasoning” LLM named R1. But over the weekend the full repercussions of their achievements (plural) began to sink in across the industry. My partner-in-Dithering Ben Thompson has written an extraordinarily helpful FAQ-style explanation at Stratechery today. If you, like me, were looking at the news today and thinking “Jeebus what the hell is going on with this DeepSeek thing?”, read Thompson’s piece first. Two choice excerpts, first regarding OpenAI:
R1 is notable, however, because o1 stood alone as the only reasoning model on the market, and the clearest sign that OpenAI was the market leader.
R1 undoes the o1 mythology in a couple of important ways. First, there is the fact that it exists. OpenAI does not have some sort of special sauce that can’t be replicated. Second, R1 — like all of DeepSeek’s models — has open weights (the problem with saying “open source” is that we don’t have the data that went into creating it). This means that instead of paying OpenAI to get reasoning, you can run R1 on the server of your choice, or even locally, at dramatically lower cost.
Second, regarding DeepSeek’s use of distillation (using existing LLMs to train new smaller ones):
Here again it seems plausible that DeepSeek benefited from distillation, particularly in terms of training R1. That, though, is itself an important takeaway: we have a situation where AI models are teaching AI models, and where AI models are teaching themselves. We are watching the assembly of an AI takeoff scenario in realtime.
Joe Rossignol, writing at MacRumors on Thursday:
Apple’s website said the first vehicle models with support for next-generation CarPlay would “arrive in 2024,” but that did not happen. A little more than three weeks into 2025, Apple has now updated its website in the U.S. to remove that 2024 timeframe from the next-generation CarPlay section of its overall CarPlay page.
It’s good that they updated this page last week, because it really was starting to look unlikely they’d hit their 2024 ship date.
10 years ago I ran a sponsorship from Meh, a then-new daily deals site from the founders of Woot (the OG daily deals site). In my thank-you post to Meh a decade ago, “I’ve been selling weekly DF RSS feed sponsorships since 2007 — just a hair under 400 consecutive weeks. I’ve never had one quite like this week’s.” I’m now up to 17 years of weekly DF sponsors, 887 weeks and counting, and while Meh has sponsored multiple times in the ensuing years, it remains true that there’s never been another DF sponsor quite like (or maybe even at all like) Meh.
For their sponsored entry in last week’s feed, Meh co-founder Dave Rutledge decided to re-run the exact same post they ran the first time 10 years ago. Here it is:
Fucking Amazon
I sold Woot to Amazon and they made it shitty. So I quit. Then I got bored.
I started A Mediocre Corporation with a few others from Woot. We just launched a classic daily deal site — only one thing for sale each day. Meh.
Oh, and since you seem to be into RSS, we put one together just for you, at meh.com/deals.rss. Of course you can also just go to meh.com.
When this ran 10 years ago, the headline — “Fucking Amazon” was so unusual that a bunch of readers were concerned that my site had been hacked. Nope, not hacked, just sponsored by Meh. I thank Meh for sponsoring DF last week, thank them for a decade of ongoing support, and I thank them for making me laugh.
Also: the daily deals at Meh really are fun. I follow on RSS — you’ll be amused every morning, and you’ll find a surprising number of things you want to buy.
Ben Stiller, on X, posted a short video with Tim Cook as a severed employee at Lumon Industries. Very fun, and it’s really the only thing on people’s minds about Tim Cook lately — that he’s a fun guy. Definitely the only thing people are thinking about him lately.
Sebastiaan de With, on Threads:
The Tim Cook Severance promo is wild because I always felt like the show could be about Apple - a company with such a deep, crazy culture of secrecy that they’d be the first to opt for severed employees in the workforce.
Also, my work there was always mysterious and important.
Update: Also, pitch-perfect aesthetic and tone on this video Lumon Industries posted to LinkedIn. LinkedIn is definitely the Lumon-iest social network.
Jessica Lessin, writing for The Information back in 2014:
Ms. Vorrath, who has worked on all seven iOS releases, generally operates by asking lots of questions of engineers, sticking to the facts and getting them to explain in plain English why a particular feature should be included in the operating system. She’s easy to get along with, say former colleagues, who recall playfully mocking her 1990s feathered hairstyle and late 1980s fashion sense. But she isn’t known for chitchat and has been known to “blow up” on occasion when people miss deadlines or make excuses, colleagues say.
During a tense time before the first release of iOS software in 2007, Ms. Vorrath grew irate when a colleague was heading home early before another marathon weekend meeting. She slammed her office door so hard that the door knob broke, and she locked herself in. Mr. Forstall grabbed a baseball bat to try to break her out, people who worked at Apple at the time recall. Mr. Forstall didn’t respond to requests for comment.
My understanding — from someone on the team — is that Forstall did bust her out, smashing the doorknob off with the bat. Every good software team needs a baseball bat.
Mark Gurman has an interesting scoop at Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. executive Kim Vorrath, a company veteran known for fixing troubled products and bringing major projects to market, has a new job: whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape.
Vorrath, a vice president in charge of program management, was moved to Apple’s artificial intelligence and machine learning division this week, according to people with knowledge of the matter. She’ll be a top deputy to AI chief John Giannandrea, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the change hasn’t been announced publicly. [...]
Over the years, Vorrath has had a hand in several of Apple’s biggest endeavors. In the mid-2000s, she was chosen to lead project management for the original iPhone software group and get the iconic device ready for consumers. Until 2019, she oversaw project management for the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems, before taking on the Vision Pro software.
Somehow Vorrath’s name has never before appeared on Daring Fireball, but she’s renowned within Apple, legendary even, for her leadership role in managing the creation and development of the software for the original iPhone, effectively serving as Scott Forstall’s chief of staff. Her reputation is that she’s a great manager — she gets shit done, knows how to ship, and talented people enjoy and thrive working for her. But outside Apple she’s largely flown under the radar — which only emphasizes how much of an Apple person’s Apple person she is.
I checked with a source who’s worked with Vorrath for years, and their comment says it all: “She kicks all the asses.”
The move signals that AI is now more important than the Vision Pro, which launched in February 2024, and is seen as the biggest challenge within the company, according to a longtime Apple executive who asked not to be identified. Vorrath has a knack for organizing engineering groups and creating an effective workflow with new processes, the executive said.
My sense is that it’s less about Siri and Apple Intelligence being more important than VisionOS, and more about Siri being a mess. More about urgency than importance. But perhaps it’s both more urgent and more important long-term. Either way, assigning Vorrath — perhaps Apple’s best fixer — makes sense. As my piece yesterday illustrated, something is rotten in the state of SiriLand.
Also very interesting: Gurman citing “a longtime Apple executive” as his source. Not “a source familiar with the matter”, but “a longtime Apple executive”. No “former” in there either. Apple generally doesn’t want personnel changes made public, but this one, I think is an exception. Siri is terrible, far behind the competition, and everyone from Cupertino to Wall Street knows it.
Apple sending in Kim Vorrath is like Marsellus Wallace sending in Winston Wolfe.
Apple:
Click the amount you wish to contribute, then click Donate and Apple will transfer 100% of your contribution to the American Red Cross in support of people impacted by the 2025 Southern California wildfires.
Apple has prominent links to its Red Cross donation form on the web and in the App Store. They’ve been doing this after catastrophes and disasters around the world for a long time. On the surface, it’s great because it’s so easy. Apple already has your saved credentials so it takes just a few taps or clicks to donate. You can measure the time to donate in seconds, not minutes.
But an under-appreciated aspect of Apple acting as a front-end to the Red Cross is that your donation remains completely private. There’s quite a lot of small print on the donation screen, which starts:
Because Apple is not sharing your personal information with the American Red Cross, the American Red Cross is unable to further acknowledge your donation. You will receive an email receipt from Apple, which will serve as the only record of your donation. The donation will also appear on your credit card statement as a transaction with Apple. You do not purchase any goods or receive any services from Apple by making a donation. Any donation collected by Apple is collected in the name, and on behalf, of the American Red Cross. This donation may not qualify for any tax deduction or other tax benefits. By donating through Apple, you acknowledge that any tax consequences to you in making the donation (including, but not limited to, ensuring you have sufficient documentation to claim any applicable tax deduction) shall be your responsibility. Apple Account credit cannot be used to make a donation. Apple will transfer 100% of your contribution to the American Red Cross in support of people impacted by the 2025 Southern California wildfires (including Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, Kern, Santa Barbara, Ventura, San Bernardino, Orange, Riverside, San Diego and Imperial Counties).
This sounds like a bunch of ignorable legalese but what it really means is quite interesting. You’re not giving to the Red Cross through this. You’re giving money to Apple, and Apple will then transfer 100 percent of it to the Red Cross. I’m almost certain, for example, that Apple is covering the cost of the card transaction fees.
By donating this way, you will never get junk mail, email, or text messages from the Red Cross, or from any “partner” of the Red Cross, soliciting additional donations, because the Red Cross will never get your name, address, or number. All they get is your money.
Back in August I wrote about how my political solicitations via SMS had gotten so out of control, so downright annoying, that my wife and I had scaled back our donations to political campaigns, because it was obvious that previous campaigns we had donated to had shared or sold our information. We’d been put on a Suckers List.
The same thing, sadly, happens with charities. People generally don’t want to admit to selfishness, but I will. When I give money to a charitable cause, I always look for the checkboxes to opt out of being contacted by them in the future. When it happens anyway, I get annoyed, and I become reluctant to give to that charity again. And because it has happened repeatedly, it’s made me at least somewhat more reluctant to give to any charitable cause in the first place. I know I’m not alone in feeling that way.
When you donate to the Red Cross via Apple, that concern is off the table. Apple won’t emphasize that aspect of this, because they don’t want to throw the Red Cross under the proverbial bus, but I will. An underrated aspect of privacy is the desire simply not to be annoyed.
From a multi-byline profile of Stephen Miller in The New York Times last week:
Mr. Miller told Mr. Zuckerberg that he had an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s terms. He made clear that Mr. Trump would crack down on immigration and go to war against the diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., culture that had been embraced by Meta and much of corporate America in recent years.
Mr. Zuckerberg was amenable. He signaled to Mr. Miller and his colleagues, including other senior Trump advisers, that he would do nothing to obstruct the Trump agenda, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would instead focus solely on building tech products.
Mr. Zuckerberg blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for an inclusivity initiative at Facebook that encouraged employees’ self-expression in the workplace, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meeting. He said new guidelines and a series of layoffs amounted to a reset and that more changes were coming.
This account of the meeting clearly leaked from Trump’s side, not Meta’s side. The tone of it is that Miller told Zuckerberg to jump, and that Zuck obsequiously and gladly responded “How high?”
Zuckerberg scrambled for cover, posting a “Sheryl did amazing work at Meta and will forever be a legend in the industry [...]” tweet to Threads, followed by a coordinated “Thank you, @zuck. I will always be grateful for the many years we spent building a great business together [...]” reply from Sandberg. (Sandberg, who left Meta in 2022, only posted once to Threads in all of 2024. There’s a good chance this will be her only post in 2025.)
Zuckerberg, politically, seems in way over his head. The first Trump administration was infamous for its leaks. They barely hid it. The whole Trump brand is about brazenness. For decades, Trump was known to call reporters in New York under the guise of “John Miller” or “John Barron”, who were ostensibly public relations spokesmen representing Trump. But it was just him — and he didn’t even disguise his voice. He just did it.
So of course Stephen Miller (or Miller’s equivalent of John Barron) leaked the confidential nature of his discussion with Zuckerberg to The New York Times, because it made Miller look dominating and Zuckerberg look dominated. Even though it’s painfully obvious to anyone who sees this story that anything confidential they tell Stephen Miller might get leaked if it makes Miller look good. It’s like a perversion of your Miranda rights, a Miranda wrongs if you will: Anything you say to anyone in the Trump administration can and will be used against you in leaks to the media.
You don’t see stories like this about Cook or Nadella or Bezos, because I think those guys have the good sense to keep their mouths shut and just nod their heads. (Not Musk, though. When Trump and Musk eventually divorce in a spectacular flame-out, we’ll be deluged with stories about what Musk said in supposed confidence.)
Alan Rozenshtein, writing for Lawfare:
While Apple and Google maintained their compliance, Oracle and Akamai made the remarkable decision to resume services, despite facing potentially catastrophic liability rates. Shortly after his inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump followed through by issuing an executive order that suspended PAFACAA enforcement for 75 days and attempted to provide retroactive protection for any violations before and during the nonenforcement period.
TikTok’s tech partners face a key executive power question: Can they rely on Trump’s promises not to enforce PAFACAA? If companies continue providing services to TikTok, can Trump later change his mind and pursue enforcement actions against them for all accumulated violations? Could a future administration enforce these violations regardless of Trump’s current promises? The stakes are enormous — nearly a trillion dollars in potential liability. Unfortunately for the companies, established legal doctrine suggests that they are making a remarkably risky bet on both the scope and durability of executive non-enforcement promises.
Here we are on Wednesday and ByteDance apps remain out of both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.
From Apple’s developer release notes for iOS 18.3, now at release candidate (RC) status:
For users new or upgrading to iOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during iPhone onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting up their devices. To disable Apple Intelligence, users will need to navigate to the Apple Intelligence & Siri Settings pane and turn off the Apple Intelligence toggle. This will disable Apple Intelligence features on their device.
Same for MacOS 15.3 Sequoia, which is also at RC status and expected next week.
I have mixed feelings about this decision. It’s pretty obvious that Apple Intelligence has a slew of shortcomings. It’s the nature of the beast, though, that it’s always going to have some shortcomings. Human intelligence, which to date remains the gold standard for intelligence in general, has some pretty glaring shortcomings, so it’s unsurprising that all artificial intelligence systems still do too. (Perhaps that’s a good metric for defining the next inflection point, now that the Turing Test has been passed: When humans need to ask AI systems to explain their own shortcomings, because we’re no longer smart enough to detect them ourselves.)
So the bar shouldn’t be “has obvious shortcomings”. It’s whether Apple Intelligence is good enough. Compared to other systems, like ChatGPT, no, it’s not good enough. But Apple has been enabling Siri by default since 2011. And Siri, today, is arguably worse than it’s ever been when compared to the state of the art. A friend just sent me this screenshot after asking Siri “Who won Super Bowl 13?” and getting this answer: “Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl Lii • Winner”. In addition to wrongly casing the Roman numerals, LII is 52, not 13. The only way Siri could have been more wrong would be if the Eagles hadn’t even won Super Bowl 52. I just tried the same question — “Who won Super Bowl 13?” — on both my iPhone running iOS 18.3 RC1 and my Mac running MacOS 15.1.1, and Siri gave me the same wrong answer, on both devices, both when the question was spoken aloud and when it was typed: “Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl Lii • Winner”. Siri, today, is an unfunny joke.
But so I think it’s reasonable to ask whether Apple Intelligence is as good as Siri. I’d say yes, that’s about how good Apple Intelligence is. In fact, I’d say several of the Apple Intelligence features — Clean Up in Photos, and notification summaries — are better than Siri. So if Siri has been on by default for over a decade, sure, Apple should go ahead and turn Apple Intelligence on by default too.
I think there could be significant benefit to turning it on by default, sort of in the spirit of dogfooding. Enabling Apple Intelligence features by default will increase the pressure on Apple to keep improving it at a fast clip. It’s also the case that none of Apple Intelligence’s features, with the possible exception of notification summaries, are in the user’s face at all. You have to invoke them to use them. If you don’t want them — or don’t even know about them — you won’t notice anything different once they’re enabled by default. Apple may or may not be over-indexing on Apple Intelligence, but, thankfully, they’re not shoving it in users’ faces.
But, as I wrote two weeks ago, enabling it by default for all users really puts the lie to their claim that all of Apple Intelligence is “beta”. If it’s not just merely shipping to all users, but now enabled by default, that’s not beta. That’s just buggy.
Apple Support document, which is linked from the App Store if you search for any of the apps from ByteDance:
Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates. Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, apps developed by ByteDance Ltd. and its subsidiaries — including TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and others — will no longer be available for download or updates on the App Store for users in the United States starting January 19, 2025. [...]
If you already have these apps installed on your device, they will remain on your device. But they can’t be redownloaded if deleted or restored if you move to a new device. In-app purchases and new subscriptions are no longer possible.
Users in the United States won’t receive updates for these apps, which could potentially impact performance, security, and compatibility with future versions of iOS and iPadOS, and some app functions might become limited or stop working since the app can’t receive updates.
My take from Sunday on Trump’s reprieve-by-executive-fiat seems correct: it has no bearing on the law. Really, all his executive order does is instruct the Justice Department (or as he would call it, his Justice Department) not to enforce the law for 75 days, and to promise any company that violates the PAFACA law that they won’t be prosecuted for it. There’s really no question about it: Oracle and Akamai are violating the law by providing services to TikTok users in the United States. They’re simply taking Trump at his word that the law will not be enforced and they will not face penalties for violating it during Trump’s completely arbitrary 75-day grace period.
That’s not like a pardon. Trump’s executive order yesterday carries no more legal weight than a Monopoly “Get Out of Jail Free” card. I don’t think it will happen but there’s nothing that would stop the Trump Justice Department from changing its mind and prosecuting Oracle and Akamai for these violations. It’s up to Trump. There’s also nothing that would stop a future Justice Department under a post-Trump administration from holding them accountable for this.
Apple and Google are both sticking with the actual law.
Good takes on some unpleasant current events, and one of the best brief eulogies for Jimmy Carter I’ve heard.
Wesley Hilliard, writing for AppleInsider regarding Edits, Meta’s pre-announced mobile-first video editing app:
Despite that, many apps and features on iPhone toe the line between fun tool and social platform. One of those tools was Clips, which arrived in 2017 to little fanfare and has been forgotten since.
Meta and ByteDance have a reason to push their respective video editing apps — brand synergy. More users mean more data, more content, and more ad revenue. Apple, however, doesn’t have the same motivation.
While Apple would likely love to see users flock to Clips, it would mean entering a race to satisfy a wave of several million customers in an app and interface that was never really more than a proof of concept. It would be a money pit with very little reward as Apple doesn’t have a social platform to drive users to or a way to monetize the app.
I completely agree with Hilliard that the announcement of Edits is the perfect time to mention Clips. I completely disagree with him that Apple has no motivation to dedicate itself to the task of making Clips incredible.
A mobile-first video editor isn’t a “money pit”. It’s an app. Apple makes a lot of apps, and they could easily afford to assign a team to make Clips truly great. It’s no different than 20–25 years ago, when Apple dedicated itself to making iMovie and Final Cut both great apps. It’s no different than the motivation to create GarageBand. The monetization wouldn’t be direct; it would be downstream of the general idea that if you’re editing videos for social media on your phone, the best app to do it with is from Apple and it’s exclusively available on iPhone. The idea is that Apple doesn’t just make the best computing devices for artists, writers, and creators, but they also make some of the best apps for those fields too.
There are actually a lot of interesting UI ideas in Clips. But if Apple isn’t interested in making Clips truly great for people who actually love editing videos using their phones, they should just abandon it. Make it great or give up. Keeping it around as an also-ran that no one uses is a bad look. This is the sort of thing Apple should pride itself on: best-of-breed creative tools.
I don’t know if Edits is a rip-off of CapCut or not, but it’s definitely not a rip-off of Clips. It’s a good rule of thumb that when Apple succeeds at something, it gets ripped off. The better the Apple product, the more shamelessly it gets copied. Apple should make Clips into an iOS video editing app that everyone rips off shamelessly.
Wes Davis, writing at The Verge, under the headline “Instagram Announces a Blatant CapCut Clone”:
Instagram head Adam Mosseri just announced a video editing app called Edits. Mosseri said the app is meant to rival CapCut, a video editing app that went offline along with TikTok. Edits is available for preorder on the iOS App Store.
I don’t use CapCut (and can’t download it now), so I can’t judge whether the screenshots of Edits indicate that it’s a copycat of CapCut (say that five times fast), which would be pretty funny coming so closely on the heels of Zuckerberg’s claim on Joe Rogan’s show that Apple hasn’t invented anything new since the iPhone, or if it’s just a different take on a video editing app for phones. Adobe InDesign was absolutely designed to make QuarkXPress users feel at home, but it wasn’t a rip-off or clone. It was (and remains) an Adobe take on Quark-style page layout. I’m curious what those familiar with CapCut think.
Glad to see The Verge warming up to calling blatant clones “blatant clones”, though, rather than “not exactly hiding where it got its inspiration from” and “that’s not necessarily a bad thing!”
Interesting selection of Martin Luther King Jr. quotes they’ve chosen for the homepage (PDF archive for posterity):
- “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.”
- “You must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.”
- “We cannot preserve self without being concerned about preserving other selves.”
Read into those quotes what you will, given today’s other national significance. I think there’s an implied message here, but it’s subtle. I’ll pick a different quote from King, one that I believe better speaks to the current moment:
“The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.”
Tim Cook on X:
Dr. King once said, “Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.” True greatness lies in lifting others, making a difference, and serving with purpose. Let’s honor his legacy by finding ways to serve and create a better world together.
Curious to see if that’s Cook’s only tweet of the day, or if a congratulatory one is forthcoming, after Trump’s oath of office at noon. Update: Here’s the congratulatory tweet, posted at 2:40pm. No exclamation marks this time.
Apple has been dedicating its homepage to MLK on his holiday for at least 10 years, so today isn’t some exception just because it’s also Inauguration Day. But it’s perhaps worth pointing out that few among Apple’s corporate peers are doing this. The homepages of (in market cap order), Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla make no mention of either MLK or Trump’s inauguration. Just another day on the calendar for all of them. But I’m not sure any of those companies ever tend to celebrate holidays on their company homepages.
But the one company that is famous for its holiday “doodles” is Google. And Google’s homepage today makes no mention today of MLK, but does direct visitors’ attention to their hosted livestream of Trump’s inauguration. Not a doodle, just “🇺🇸 Live! Watch President Trump’s Inauguration”, and nothing about MLK. [Update, 2:15 pm: Google.com now has a nice MLK doodle. Perhaps it was a pre- and post-inauguration distinction? Others report seeing the MLK hopscotch doodle all day.]
If you want to argue that all of these companies, and each of their CEOs, suck, today’s your day. But there are degrees of sucking, and one two of these companies are, still, to some degree, not quite like the others.