By John Gruber
Clerk’s iOS SDK: Authentication and user management for Apple applications.
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
Apple this month started advertising on X for the first time in more than a year. The company had stopped advertising on the social media platform in November 2023 following controversial remarks made by its owner Elon Musk.
For example, the @Apple account is running an ad promoting Safari’s privacy features. The ad was spotted by MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris. The @AppleTV account has also been running ads for the Apple TV+ show Severance.
The November 2023 outrage was in response to, among other things, Musk replying “You have said the actual truth” to a tweet that stated “I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much. You want truth said to your face, there it is.”
Musk clearly learned his lesson. Since then, he’s been lying low, out of the public eye, and refraining from any sort of controversial statements or actions. He barely even tweets anymore. The one and only time I can recall him even being in the news in the last 18 months was this year-ago profile in the Wall Street Journal documenting Musk’s health and nutrition regimen. So it’s all cool now and Apple feels comfortable advertising on the social network Musk wholly owns.
Apple Newsroom:
The Apple TV app is now available to download from Google Play on Android mobile devices — including phones, tablets, and foldables — offering Android users access to hit, award-winning Apple Original series and films on Apple TV+, along with MLS Season Pass, the home of Major League Soccer.
Available around the world, the Apple TV app for Android was built from the ground up to deliver Android users a familiar and intuitive interface. Android users can subscribe to Apple TV+ and MLS Season Pass using their Google Play account on Android mobile and Google TV devices. Apple TV+ also offers a seven-day free trial.
The Apple TV app on Android includes key features like Continue Watching to pick up where a user left off across all their devices, and Watchlist to keep track of everything they want to watch in the future. The app streams seamlessly over Wi-Fi or a cellular connection, and includes the ability to download to watch offline.
One thing that’s funny about this press release is that no one from Apple is quoted in it. Not just not Eddy Cue, but no one, not even a lieutenant under Cue. The second-paragraph quote from executives are where these press releases contain their superlatives proclaiming how awesome the news is. E.g. last week’s announcement for the new Apple Invites app — the second paragraph is a quote from Brent Chiu-Watson, a senior director of product marketing. They didn’t want to include one of those sugary quotes saying how frigging awesome it is that there’s now an Apple TV app for Android, and that it works great and if you use an Android device you can still have a great Apple TV experience.
But the Apple TV app does seems frigging awesome, and it does seem like if you use an Android device you can now have a great Apple TV experience. Here’s Dan Seifert, longtime writer and editor for The Verge, who left for a position at Google as “product critic” a year ago:
thrilled to see Apple TV land on Android devices today!
it’s an excellent Android citizen too:
themeable app icon: ✅
PIP support: ✅
offline downloads: ✅
foldable posture support: ✅
(Also perhaps ever so slightly interesting that in its announcement, Apple positioned “foldables” as an entirely separate third category from phones and tablets. I wouldn’t make a big deal of that — I’m not sure how else they could mention that the app supports “foldable posture”.)
I’m most curious about why it took so long for this to happen. Apple Music launched (albeit as a beta) for Android almost 10 years ago. (Eddy Cue then: “The menus will look like Android, you know the little hamburger they use on the top. It’ll definitely feel very much like an Android app.”) And, what I think is a related question as to why this took so long: Is Google taking its usual Play Store cut from subscriptions to TV+ made in the app?
Benj Edwards, writing at Ars Technica:
The original idea for WikiTok originated from developer Tyler Angert on Monday evening when he tweeted, “insane project idea: all of wikipedia on a single, scrollable page.” Bloomberg Beta VC James Cham replied, “Even better, an infinitely scrolling Wikipedia page based on whatever you are interested in next?” and Angert coined “WikiTok” in a follow-up post.
Early the next morning, at 12:28 am, writer Grant Slatton quote-tweeted the WikiTok discussion, and that’s where Gemal came in. “I saw it from [Slatton’s] quote retweet,” he told Ars. “I immediately thought, ‘Wow I can build an MVP [minimum viable product] and this could take off.’”
Gemal started his project at 12:30 am, and with help from AI coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude and Cursor, he finished a prototype by 2 am and posted the results on X. Someone later announced WikiTok on Y Combinator’s Hacker News, where it topped the site’s list of daily news items.
“The entire thing is only several hundred lines of code, and Claude wrote the vast majority of it,” Gemal told Ars. “AI helped me ship really really fast and just capitalize on the initial viral tweet asking for Wikipedia with scrolling.”
At first I read that as the project taking from noon until 2am to launch, and I was impressed. Then I re-read that and realized it was just 90 minutes. Jiminy. Programming with AI assistance is just gobsmacking.
WikiTok is the creation of Isaac Gemal. The premise is that it’s a TikTok-style interface for random articles from Wikipedia. One thing at a time on screen, swipe up to scroll down to the next item whenever you’re ready, and you can keep going forever if you want. But instead of videos that tend toward mindless media-diet calories, these are facts. WikiTok has no videos at all — each item is just a full-bleed image and a summary factoid. (And, of course, a “Read More” link to open the full Wikipedia entry in a new browser tab.) It’s not going to beat the actual TikTok on engagement, but TikTok can’t beat WikiTok for mental nourishment. It’s like choosing to snack on something that isn’t junk.
WikiTok works on any size device, but like TikTok, it’s clearly meant to be used on a phone. Save it to your home screen, and it’s like having an app. During this interim between the NFL season and March Madness (and after that, baseball) I’ve freed up a space on my first home screen from Apple Sports, and for the moment, I’ve put WikiTok there. I don’t know how long it’ll last. The “hit rate” for things that actually interest me is kind of low — but maybe that’s what TikTok itself is like? And, every time I launch it, I learn something interesting within a few swipes. There’s no algorithm powering what it shows, but I wish there were — I’d switch in a heartbeat to a fork of WikiTok that learns, even just a little, what sort of stuff actually interests me. Give it a try. WikiTok’s debut seems especially well-timed at the moment, given the alternative experience of checking the news.
If I could bend Gemal’s ear for just one moment, I’d beg him to consider changing the name from WikiTok to WikTok. That needless middle i syllable strikes a discordant note. Say what you want about TikTok, but it’s a great fucking name. Verbally, WikiTok sounds like WikiTalk, which sounds like what Wikipedia editors might call the meta-discussion “Talk” pages for each entry. WikTok, on the other hand, works well both visually and verbally as a parallel to TikTok.
Allison Johnson, writing at The Verge:
Samsung’s Galaxy S-series is in its software era. Maybe the whole smartphone industry is, too, save for a few phones with hinges (Samsung’s included). But overall, we have exited the hardware-driven innovation cycle and are firmly in the midst of a software-based one. If you want proof, the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus are a good place to start. [...]
This was all true of the S24 and S24 Plus and the S23 and S23 Plus. I couldn’t give you a good reason why the S25 stands out compared to Samsung’s last three generations of S-series phones. I don’t think Samsung can, either, because its entire sales pitch for the S25 revolves around software and AI capabilities — much of which will almost certainly be ported to previous S-series phones in short order.
When an innovative device form factor settles into maturity, the shift from groundbreaking new hardware dropping every few years to iterative evolution stands out. The heady, go-go years of iPhone-derived touchscreen smartphones (including iPhones themselves) weren’t that long ago. Iterative evolution is, let’s face it, more boring. Or at least it’s not exciting. But it’s inevitable.
The laptops that established the form factor were the PowerBook 100 series, which Apple shipped at the end of 1991. (Before the PowerBooks, laptops generally lacked built-in pointing devices, and were more like briefcases. Apple’s own 1989 Macintosh Portable was more like a suitcase.) Steve Jobs pulled the original MacBook Air out of its manila envelope in January 2008. Everything since then, for laptops, has been iterative.
The stretch from PowerBook 100 series to MacBook Air was about 15 years, give or take. The “smartphones are boring now” complaints really started to hit a few years ago — about 15 years after the 2007 original iPhone. Somewhere in the second decade is when year-over-year changes start to become more and more iterative. But compound interest generates tremendous wealth over time. People wrongly think Apple’s success is forged mostly by spectacular groundbreaking products, but the true key to their success is nonstop iterative improvement. That, as I wrote in 2010, is how Apple actually rolls. You wouldn’t want to use a 2010 MacBook Pro today. There will be small generational leaps and innovations to come (including, perhaps, an “iPhone Air” this year — and future leaps like 2020’s debut of Apple Silicon), but the wheels of technological progress are mostly done wowing us with one-, two-, and maybe even three-year improvements to phones. But trading in a phone older than that should continue to pack a significant amount of wow. So it goes.
Johnson:
Maybe this says more about what passes for a “small” phone in 2025, but the Galaxy S25 is secretly the best small Android phone you can buy in the US. That’s probably not intentional — more like a victory in a war of attrition. Google’s phones since the Pixel 5 only come in big and bigger, and niche small phone options like the Asus Zenfone have dropped out of the race. By merely continuing to exist with a 6.2-inch screen, the smaller S-series model has become the default option if you don’t want a huge Android phone.
Google’s Pixel 9 and 9 Pro have 6.3-inch displays, not too much bigger than the S25, but the trend is clear. All phones are getting bigger. Everyone knows the 5.4-inch iPhone 12 and 13 Minis weren’t hits, sales-wise, but the people who preferred them absolutely loved them. I’ll bet some of you are reading this, nodding your heads, with your aging 12/13 Minis still in your pockets, dreading the day you upgrade — knowing that the longer you wait, the ever-larger the “smallest” new iPhone will be. Maybe this year’s much-rumored thin-is-in “iPhone Air” will take some of the sting out of that.
Qianer Liu and Jing Yang, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas — MacRumors summary):
Apple has recently started working with Chinese internet and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group to roll out artificial intelligence features in China, according to one person with direct knowledge of the decision. The move is part of Apple’s strategy to offer more compelling software features to counter declining sales in the country, where it faces increasing competition from domestic brands like Huawei and Vivo.
Apple and Alibaba have submitted the Chinese AI features they co-developed for approval by China’s cyberspace regulator, the person added, indicating that the partnership has gained significant progress. [...]
The iPhone maker began testing different AI models from prominent Chinese AI developers beginning in 2023 and last year selected Baidu as the primary partner, said two of the people. But the collaboration ran into snags because Baidu’s progress in developing its models for Apple Intelligence fell short of Apple standards.
As a result, Apple in recent months started to consider other options, assessing models developed by Tencent, ByteDance, Alibaba, as well as Deepseek, said two people with direct knowledge of the matter. Apple eventually passed over Deepseek’s models because the Deepseek team lacked the manpower and experience required to support a large customer like Apple, said one of the people.
From the Apple Newsroom archive, dateline “Macworld Expo, San Francisco — January 5, 2000”:
Apple today took the wraps off its highly anticipated Internet strategy, introducing a new category of Internet services called iTools; a completely redesigned Apple.com web site featuring iReview and iCards; and a multi-year partnership and investment with Earthlink for Internet access (see related release).
iTools is a revolutionary new category of Internet services that takes advantage of Apple’s unique technology on both ends of the Internet — the operating system on the client side (Mac OS 9) and the services software running on Apple’s Internet servers (iTools). Providing the software on both ends of the Internet offers Apple the unprecedented ability to offer services impossible to implement solely on Internet servers.
“Our new iReviews, iCards and the revolutionary iTools offer amazing new ways for Mac users to take full advantage of the Internet,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s iCEO. “Mac users can now do things on the Internet that Wintel users can only dream of.”
It’s striking in hindsight how much Apple, circa 2000, was unabashedly the scrappy underdog. If an announcement is truly highly anticipated you don’t have to describe it as “highly anticipated”. And that Jobs quote, including the colloquial “Wintel”.
And from the feature list:
Mac.com, an email service run by Apple. Mac.com gives users an exclusive address on the Internet and works with standard POP email clients, such as Outlook Express, Eudora and Netscape Communicator. Mac.com users can easily set up automatic replies and forwarding of their email to other email addresses, and configure Outlook Express for their Mac.com mailbox from a simple web page.
So I misremembered the timeline of how I got into my bifurcated Apple Account situation earlier today (but I was correct in that post to be uncertain of the timeline). My @mac.com address did predate the debut of the iTunes Music Store, but I’ve had it since iTools was announced in January 2000, not when .Mac (worst Apple name ever?) was announced in July 2002. (Thanks to Thomas Brand for reminding me.) The branding evolution is:
iTools (2000) → .Mac (2002) → MobileMe (2008) → iCloud (2011)
It took Apple a decade to get from iTools to iCloud, but iCloud has proven to be a winner. It’s interesting to think of the “internet moment” circa 2000 with the “AI moment” today. Circa 2000, the hot new companies didn’t make computers or devices, and they didn’t make software that ran on consumer devices. They made websites and web apps that ran in browsers on devices.
The bear case against Apple then was that they’d missed the boat on the big new thing, and their core strengths were no longer relevant. Pretty much the same bear case now re: AI. The difference is that Apple today is not only not a “scrappy underdog” — they’re the most valuable company in the world.
Juli Clover, reporting for MacRumors:
Pixelmator last year announced that it was being acquired by Apple, and today the company confirmed that the acquisition has been completed after Apple received regulatory approval. The Pixelmator for iOS, Pixelmator Pro, and Photomator apps were today updated with a new splash screen announcing the deal.
Previously: “Pixelmator Acquired by Apple; Future of Their Apps Uncertain”. Apple being Apple, they still haven’t dropped a clue what they’re going to do with Pixelmator (the namesake app) or Photomator.
New Apple support document dropped today:
You can choose to migrate apps, music, and other content you’ve purchased from Apple on a secondary Apple Account to a primary Apple Account. The secondary Apple Account might be an account that’s used only for purchases. You’ll need access to the primary email address or phone number and password for both accounts, and neither account should be shared with anyone else. Learn more about how to migrate purchases.
At the time of migration, the Apple Account signed in for use with iCloud and most features on your iPhone or iPad will be referred to as the primary Apple Account.
At the time of migration, the Apple Account signed in just for use with Media & Purchases will be referred to as the secondary Apple Account.
This might be the “finally” to end all finallys. I really never thought I’d see this day where Apple finally made this possible. This document presents a solution to a situation I’ve been in (and with each subsequent media purchase, digging deeper into) for over 20 years.
This whole thing started so long ago that I can’t even recall exactly how I got into this. As best I can recall it went something like this. When Apple launched the iTunes Music Store in April 2003, I created my store account using an @daringfireball.net email address. In some sense that seems like an odd choice in hindsight, insofar as that’s my “work” address, but at the time (even though Daring Fireball was less than a year old) it felt like my best “forever” email address. I felt very certain from the start I’d be doing this forever.
I chose to use my DF email address for the iTunes Store in 2003 despite the fact that I had created my @mac.com email address in the summer of 2002 when Apple launched .Mac — a few weeks before I launched Daring Fireball. I signed up for .Mac to get a good username, “just in case” (although I didn’t score “gruber” — someone beat me to it, despite the fact that I signed up during or soon after the end of the keynote in which .Mac was announced), but I never anticipated using it much. But .Mac became MobileMe, MobileMe became iCloud, and iCloud now is one’s primary Apple Account. 20 years ago it just wasn’t clear at all that the .Mac account I created would be so central to being an Apple platform user for decades to come.
So fast forward to today, and I’ve had two Apple Accounts on every device I use for the last 20-or-so years. One for “Media and Purchases” (my original iTunes account, using the @daringfireball.net address), and my primary Apple ID (the @mac.com address). All my purchases — all the music, books, apps, subscriptions, and thousands of dollars in movies that I’ve purchased with that iTunes account over the years — are using an Apple Account that’s not my iCloud account.
Apple has made this bifurcation work pretty well over the years, seemingly not just because many longstanding customers are in the same boat as me, but many Apple employees are themselves passengers on that boat. “Just make it so you can transfer purchases from a secondary old account to your primary one” sounds easy, conceptually, but apparently it was devilishly tricky under the hood.
But it seems Apple has figured it out and implemented a solution. I’ll wait and let others try this before I do (if it ain’t broke don’t fix it), but if any of you try this, I’m curious how it goes — especially if you’re part of a family sharing group.
(Via Chris Espinosa, who I suppose counts as both a longstanding employee and customer.)
Angela Watercutter, with a great behind-the-scenes look at the Apple-Music-sponsored halftime show by Kendrick Lamar:
While “making it work” means one thing when you’re putting on a Madonna concert or the Democratic National Convention, it means something different when you’re trying to squeeze it into a national title match between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. For one, you have to get all of the staging, lights, dancers, and the artist themselves onto the field in 7.5 minutes and then get them off 6 minutes after the final note. For another, you have to do all of this on a field where the biggest NFL game of the year is being played — without screwing up the turf.
It seems like a great ongoing relationship for Apple Music to sponsor these halftime shows. Amazon Prime has Thursday Night Football, and Google’s YouTube TV has the NFL Sunday Ticket package (which Apple seriously bid for, but didn’t get). That leaves Apple TV+ as the biggest streaming platform from a big tech company that doesn’t have any NFL games. Sponsoring the Super Bowl halftime show gives the NFL a relationship with Apple.
And Apple seems happy to let the shows themselves be artist-centric. This was Kendrick Lamar’s show, presented by Apple Music — not Apple Music’s show featuring Kendrick Lamar. I could be wrong, but I think the old Pepsi halftime shows were more Pepsi-centric, more focused on spectacle than showmanship. There were some small lyrical adjustments, but those might have been at the NFL’s behest more than Apple’s. Apple let Lamar do his thing, despite the fact that the target of his enmity, Drake, was literally the artist who Apple invited on stage at WWDC 2015 to introduce Apple Music.
A scorebug is industry jargon for the sub-genre of chyron (itself jargon) that shows ever-present information about a televised sporting event while you’re watching. These graphics display the teams, the score, the time remaining, and other metadata pertaining to the current situation. The current ball/strike count in baseball. The down and yards-to-go in football. The shot clock in basketball. That sort of thing.1
Fox was the broadcast network for Super Bowl 59 yesterday, in which the Philadelphia Eagles utterly embarrassed the Kansas City Chiefs 40-22 (but which felt like a score of 114-0). The NFL rotates the Super Bowl annually between the networks that broadcast games. Fox has a tradition of unveiling updated on-screen graphics packages when it has the Super Bowl. This year, they didn’t just tweak the design, they completely re-thought it and redesigned it.
First, here’s Fox’s familiar old scorebug, as captured from their broadcast of Super Bowl 57, a game that also pitted the Eagles against the Chiefs two years ago.2
Here’s the new scorebug they debuted last night, in front of the biggest sports audience of the year:
I noticed the change immediately (of course), and my knee-jerk instant reaction was negative. Too big, too bold, too different. Don’t like. That’s natural. Human beings evolved to be alarmed by change. If everything looks the same as usual, everything is probably as safe as usual. If something looks jarringly different, it might be a sign that you’re about to be killed. (Evolutionarily speaking.)
So I started studying and considering the changes to Fox’s scorebug. I quickly not only warmed up to the new scorebug, I decided I really like it. It’s better than Fox’s old one, and better than every other network’s (which all largely look the same), in almost every single regard.
I like the new scorebug so much I (cross-)posted about it to social media during the game. My posts, in order of engagement: Threads (~6,600 likes, ~700 replies and reposts), Bluesky (~3,900 likes, ~600 replies and reposts), and Mastodon (179 likes, 53 replies and reposts).
No change an app developer can make will generate more commentary and emotional feedback from users than changing the app’s icon. Everyone sees an app’s icon, and has an opinion about them. That opinion, after a change, is usually “I like the old icon and hate the new one.” Likewise with a game broadcast’s scorebug — everyone sees them, and everyone has an opinion when they change. Most reactions to Fox’s new scorebug were negative, and many of those were really negative. Yahoo Sports ran a story under the headline “Super Bowl: Fox Sports Debuts New Scorebug, to Universally Negative Reaction”. The sports media-focused site Awful Announcing ran a take by Drew Lerner under the headline “Please Stop Debuting New Scorebugs During the Super Bowl” (subhead: “Can’t I just watch one Super Bowl without having to learn a new graphic?”). I have not even come close to reading all the replies to my social media take (well, except on Mastodon — it was quick to catch up there), but if you peruse them, you’ll be quick to see that most replies are from people who despise the change. A representative tasting:
“It looks as if they just let an intern knock something up in PowerPoint and didn’t bother having someone check it first. Awful. 👎”
“Lol. Muted for being a dumbass.”
“It’s hideous, and its overbearing size distracts from the actual content of the game.”
“The scorebug is absolutely horrible! I really hope they don’t adopt this for the 2025 season, or I will riot. Horrible design and very distracting especially the score, this looks like something out of Fortnite.”
“Looks like something out of Fortnite” isn’t the dis the last commenter thinks it is. A lot of people play and love Fortnite.
Here’s an expanded (from what I posted to social media) version of why I like, perhaps even love, the new scorebug. First, the primary items: who’s playing and what’s the score:
Every team in the league is known by fans by a 2- or 3-letter abbreviation of its home location, sort of like airport codes or stock tickers. They’re all obvious (unlike many airport codes). The Dallas Cowboys are DAL. The New England Patriots are NE. For the two cities which have two teams, New York and Los Angeles, the cities conveniently abbreviate to two letters and a third letter is drawn from the team nicknames: the Giants and Jets are NYG and NYJ; the Rams and Chargers are LAR and LAC.
Team logos are not as instantly identifiable, especially at small sizes. A bunch of teams have angry bird mascots: Eagles, Seahawks, Falcons, and Cardinals. Do you remember the Tennessee Titans’ logo? Or the Houston Texans’? The Cleveland Browns don’t even have a logo to speak of. (And they’re also not brown.) But I guarantee you know which teams are TEN, HOU, and CLE.3
And, importantly, these team initialisms are not represented by typography alone: they are in a box with the team’s primary color. That use of color does all the branding work necessary, and does it more effectively, at small sizes or viewed from far distances, than the team logos. (One small niggle I have is that the team initialisms are big white letters but are outlined by the team’s secondary color. If you look closely at my screen capture from yesterday’s Super Bowl above, you’ll see that “KC” is outlined in yellow and “PHI” in silver. This has the effect, at a normal viewing distance, of making the initialisms look a little fuzzy. The secondary color outlines are too subtle to have their intended effect of further branding the teams, and instead have the unintended effect of making the text look poorly rendered on screen. I bet Fox tweaks this by next year.)
The elimination of all needless chrome is arguably the most striking change of all, because Fox’s old scorebug had the most chrome with the most superfluous “3D” styling and textures. This isn’t minimalism, per se, but it’s a strike against needless decoration — reminiscent to my mind of Jony Ive’s radical redesign of iOS 7 a decade ago. Elements that can be conveyed by type and color alone are expressed by type and color alone.
Other noteworthy features:
Timeouts remaining: Prominent but not distracting. Seeing how many timeouts a team has remaining was a huge problem with Fox’s old scorebug, and with most other networks’ current scorebugs. (Remaining timeouts are very important in close football games.)
Current down and yards to go indicator (e.g. “1st & 10”): Placement atop the team initialism conveys which team has the ball. Fox’s old scorebug did have a “possession” indicator, but scroll back up to look at it, and see how long it takes you to figure out what it is. I’ll put the answer in a footnote.4
Typography: Classic, legible, bold, timeless. It is also very “Fox” — the C in “KC” looks like the O in the classic “FOX” wordmark, and the zero (a digit Chiefs fans became very familiar with until the final seconds of the third quarter, because that’s how many points they’d scored until then — the Eagles cycled through a bunch of different digits en route to taking a 34-0 lead) looks pretty much exactly like the uppercase o in “FOX”.
Bigger and bolder typography adds clarity. But removing the background chrome lets viewers “see through” to any game action that happens at the bottom of the screen. To me, after just one game, the old Fox scorebug looks hopelessly dated; old-fashioned without any nostalgic charm. If anything, the new typography-first design is the one that looks timeless, evocative of the graphics from classic NFL Films productions.
Here’s the thing. NFL broadcasts didn’t always have scorebugs. I don’t mean that they had smaller score indicators on screen. I mean they had none at all. This was true for all major sports on TV, not just football (e.g. the premise of this gag from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Until 1994, the networks would show the score and time remaining when they cut to a commercial break, and then show it again when they came back from commercials. But while the game played, there was no score on screen. Part of that is technology: game telecasts were low-fidelity over-the-air transmissions to relatively small TV screens that were viewed from across the room. Go back far enough and there wasn’t even color. But a bigger aspect is inertia. Not showing the score at all times was the way games were always broadcast, so it was the way they were still broadcast.
Then came Fox.
For decades, there were three major TV networks in the US: ABC, NBC, and CBS. CBS had the Sunday game rights to the superior National Football Conference. “Superior” for the related reasons of team popularity and team market size, which matters for ratings. Chicago, Philly, Washington, Dallas, Frisco. NBC had the Sunday game rights for the American Football Conference with teams from generally smaller cities. Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Miami. Good teams, but smaller cities. (In 1993, though, NFC teams had won 9 consecutive Super Bowls.)
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network was an attempt — soon enough proven successful — to establish a fourth US network. At the time of their debut in 1987, Fox only had prime time programming on one night a week (Sundays, conveniently). In 1993 Murdoch and Fox upended the world of sports broadcasting by outbidding (stupid, tightfisted, hubristic) CBS for the rights to broadcast the NFC games on Sundays.
In 2018, Bryan Curtis published at The Ringer a comprehensive oral history of the deal and its consequences: “The Great NFL Heist: How Fox Paid for and Changed Football Forever”. If this sort of thing interests you at all, read that. It’s a great story, well told.
But so in 1994 Fox took over the NFC broadcasts. They poached from CBS all the announcers, cameramen, directors, and producers. (CBS didn’t need them anymore, because they had no football games to broadcast.) But while the voices announcing the game were familiar (including the best duo ever to do it: John Madden and Pat Summerall), the look and feel of the broadcasts was intentionally new and fresh and, well, because it was Fox, brash. This included an innovation they called the “Fox Box”. Quoting from Curtis’s oral history at The Ringer:
David Hill’s most controversial idea about the NFL was his simplest: He thought the score and clock should have a permanent home on the screen — a feature that became known as the “Fox Box.” A noisy group of critics and rival executives thought the Fox Box was a terrible idea. It would clutter the screen and drive people away from blowouts. But Hill was convinced, because he’d created a proto–Fox Box after a frustrating afternoon watching soccer in the U.K.
Hill: We’d been out walking our dogs. We’d come in, got a cup of tea, and switched the BBC on. I watched the game for a good 15 minutes. I don’t know what the score is. I’m thinking to myself, “Shit, I’d really like to know what the score is.” So I thought, “That’s easy. On a chyron, I’ll just put it up in the corner.” So I did it.
Madden: Instead of saying, “No, that’s a stupid idea, we got other things we have to do,” he said, “If the score and the time is the most important thing, why don’t we just put it up and leave it there?” That’s where the Fox Box came from. That was David Hill.
Dolgin: All the networks told us, “You’re screwing this up. You’re idiots to do this.”
Albert: The thought was, some networks won’t leave the time and score up because it’s a blowout and they didn’t want you to know it’s a blowout.
The “Fox Box” idea wasn’t just controversial, it was widely panned as stupid. The networks literally thought it would be better if many viewers didn’t know the score. And when the Fox Box appeared, many critics agreed. Here’s Dan Cox’s review of Fox’s opening week broadcast for Variety, in September 1994:
The network also still insists on that annoying see-through clock and score graphic in the upper-left corner of the screen throughout nearly the entire game. Fox Sports prexy David Hill has said it’s important to know the score and how much time is left when you sit down and the game is already on.
Well, yes. But how about those who actually watched the beginning of the game and would rather have their screen clear of graphics.
Who seems stupid now? Imagine the outcry if Fox had broadcast yesterday’s Super Bowl without any scorebug at all — you know, for those who would rather have their screen clear of graphics.
Change of any sort is always going to raise alarm, whether it’s actually better or not. When smoking bans started going into effect in cities 30 years ago, people loudly claimed that it would put restaurants and especially bars out of business. Smokers want to smoke and would stay home if they couldn’t, the argument went. Turns out, if you force smokers to go outside in the cold or even rain to smoke, they’ll do it. And a lot of other people — who had been staying home because they despised the stench of cigarettes — started going out more often. In hindsight banning cigarettes from shared public spaces (airplanes, for chrissake!) was obviously the correct decision. But change is hard to accept, no matter how obviously for the better.
I say Fox’s new scorebug is better, and raised a ruckus only because it’s so much better that what most viewers noticed is only that it’s so different. When you get used to it, you’ll see. This new design, with bigger bolder type but less needless chrome, pulls off the remarkable feat of conveying key information with more clarity both on the biggest of big screens — TVs in public spaces like bars and restaurants, which are viewed from a distance — and the smallest of small screens, our phones.
Different doesn’t always mean better. But better necessarily implies different. ★
You know how when you’re watching most TV channels — not just sports, but any sort of show at all — they keep a logo for the channel in one of the corners of the screen? Those omnipresent logos are called bugs (perhaps because everyone knows they’re slightly annoying?). Hence: scorebug for an always-present score indicator. ↩︎︎
The DF Style Guide has no entry for “Roman numerals” because no obscenities or expletives are strong enough to convey the policy. ↩︎︎
The one matchup this design might not work great for would be a Rams-Chargers game, because in addition to sharing a city (and stadium), they even share the same team colors: blue and yellow. LAR and LAC in two same-colored boxes doesn’t give much clarity. I’m curious how Fox will handle this if they ever broadcast that matchup. It’s solvable — here are some examples with different color treatments from a similar scorebug for the English Premier League. Maybe one of the teams would get yellow letters, the other white. Or even a yellow background with blue letters. ↩︎︎
It’s the thin white bar above the offensive team’s score. In the screen capture above from the 2023 Super Bowl, that’s the Eagles. This is so visually subtle and unintuitive that it’s inarguably a bad design. ↩︎︎
Well, the Philadelphia Eagles, of course, won the actual Super Bowl, winning in a romp so one-sided that they would have embarrassed the Chiefs less if they had pantsed Patrick Mahomes at the 50-yard line. But the second contest is for best commercial. And my vote goes to Nike.
The problem with modern Super Bowl commercials is they’re bland. Offensively bland. It really makes no sense to me. The commercial time is famously expensive — Fox was supposedly selling 30-second spots for last night’s game for $8 million — but the sponsors who buy that time tend to squander it with absolute mindless pap.
Fewer and fewer sponsors each year, it seems, attempt to bring something actually interesting. Something different. Something with some punch. Something that’s actually funny. Something that makes you actually feel. You don’t have to make a genuinely artistic short film, like Apple’s Ridley-Scott-directed 1984 spot heralding the introduction of the Macintosh — the ad that is justifiably regarded as the best commercial ever made. Some of what I’d list among the best Super Bowl ads ever were silly gimmicks that revelled in their abject silliness, like the “Bud Bowl” commercials (featuring anthropomorphic bottles of Budweiser and Bud Light playing football) — very far from “high art” but very fun, and created specifically to be shown once and only once, in the context of the Super Bowl. One simple measure is whether the ads are memorable. Most of the ads in last night’s game I forgot by the time the game resumed after the break.
I don’t know why anyone would book and commission a Super Bowl commercial if they weren’t trying to do something or say something memorable with the spot. Still, though, there are always at least a handful of standouts.
My favorite yesterday was Nike’s “So Win” spot, a heralding of its own — not for a new Nike product, but for the explosion in interest in women’s sports, featuring WNBA phenom Caitlin Clark and a few other top women’s athletes. Gorgeous black and white cinematography. Led Zeppelin’s rollicking “Whole Lotta Love” as the soundtrack. And a righteous manifesto of a message, delivered with pitch-perfect gusto by narrator Doechii. Nike, it turns out, hadn’t run a Super Bowl ad since 1998, and they came back with a banger that to me reinvigorated the Nike brand. They’ve been in a bit of a free fall and I think this ad was intended as much to inspire Nike employees as it was to female athletes and sports fans. (Shades of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign.) I’ve re-watched this spot a few times while writing this post and I like it more each time.
Honorable mentions:
Dishonorable mention: ★
Looks like more of an Eddy scene than a Tim scene, but everyone’s having fun. There’s a reason this is the 11th Super Bowl held in New Orleans.
Should be a good football game, too. The Chiefs and Eagles are both very good teams (and both very well-run franchises). There’s a strong case to be made that these are the two best teams in the NFL this season. And without question they’re two of the top four (I’d add the Bills and Ravens). If you’re only a casual fan, you might think that happens every year. A championship game, ideally, would always feature two of the very best teams. But that’s often not the way it works out. This year it did. What’s similar about both the Chiefs and Eagles is that both teams are full of surprises and tricks — they often do things no one would expect. But even more often, they do exactly what everyone expects them to do, the most predictable thing possible, and it just can’t be stopped even when the other team knows it’s coming. Anyway, I’m picking the Birds.
Zara Stone, reporting for The Standard:
“There’s a renaissance happening now in Aaron Swartz-land,” said Lisa Rein, the co-founder of Creative Commons, a nonprofit devoted to expanding public access to information. She founded Aaron Swartz Day in 2013, an annual hackathon and tribute held on his birthday. There’s now an Aaron Swartz Institute in Brazil, a documentary, multiple books and podcasts — even an Aaron Swartz memecoin (“Do not buy,” she warned).
Aaron, I know, would have laughed at that.
Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch and a partner at Y Combinator, was one of the few people who knew Swartz personally. “I’m glad he’s become a symbol, he would approve of that,” he shared, his voice slightly breaking. “I really miss him.”
I miss him too. Man. But I find it weird that there were only “few people who knew him” at the event. So many people knew him. That’s part of what made Aaron Aaron — he knew everyone interesting on the internet.
I’m not so sure, either, that he’d approve of all this, his status as a symbol to a generation who never knew him, only of him. I don’t think he’d disapprove, either, because the folks holding him up as an icon — internet freedom and preservationist zealots — are, thankfully, aligned with Aaron’s own righteous obsessions. But I think he’d be a little weirded out. He wasn’t a “I hope they erect a larger-than-life statue of me” sort of guy. And if he had been, we wouldn’t have loved him like we did. It’s just a terrible thing that we lost him so young.
TikTok, on X:
We’re enhancing ways for our community to continue using TikTok by making Android Package Kits available at http://TikTok.com/download so that our U.S. Android users can download our app and create, discover, and connect on TikTok.
Tens of millions of users installing a binary straight from the Chinese Communist Party right to their phones — what could go wrong?
They also link to this support document on their website, which includes these instructions for iOS:
To access TikTok on iOS devices:
- Go to www.tiktok.com/download.
- Tap Add TikTok to Home Screen and follow the steps to create a shortcut to TikTok.com to the home screen on your device.
Which is another way of saying “Use the web app”, which is actually safe. I don’t know if they’ve always had this web app version of the app or if they scrambled to put it together during this standoff, but it’s not bad. But it’s got some very obvious layout glitches. (If you’re a regular TikTok user, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this mobile web app compares to the actual native iOS app. Let me know.)
I suspect something is going to give on this standoff. Either (a) China relents and actually sells to a U.S. company, and TikTok comes back to the App Store and Play Store; or (b) Trump’s extralegal extension expires with no sale and Oracle and Akamai are forced to pull the plug on ByteDance’s cloud services in the US. Another extension is another possibility, of course, but I think Republican China hawks like Tom Cotton only have one grace period in them. We’ll see.
If I’m wrong and TikTok remains in this half-zombie state in the US — unavailable in the App Store or Play Store, but operational if you have the app installed on your phone — it’ll be interesting if TikTok is the app that makes the mass market actually care about the lack of sideloading on iOS. It’ll be interesting too if sideloading on Android goes mainstream because of this. This could be a fascinating experiment. Proponents of Apple permitting Mac-style software distribution on iOS often argue that normal people, who aren’t technically adept or savvy — simply won’t do it, because they don’t care enough to jump through the hoops and click through the warnings about the risks of sideloading. But maybe TikTok is so popular it could break through. Not to mention the fact that ByteDance can use TikTok itself to algorithmically boost pro-sideloading videos, and perhaps even push a trend that if you care about TikTok, you should switch to Android.
Jason Snell, in a column for Macworld back in November (same column at Six Colors, for members):
This is an important moment. Apple has built two separate models for running software on our devices. In one, there’s a gradient of trustworthiness that strongly encourages users to stick to the safe, well-lit paths–but allows competitors to go their own way and users to make different decisions than Apple would prefer they make. And, yes, at the extremes, users can behave in ways that might open them up to danger, but only after many warnings. It’s a very good system. Apple built it that way because it cares about the Mac, the Mac ecosystem, and Mac users.
Of course, the other model is the one we’re familiar with from iOS: There’s only one layer and Apple entirely controls it. Even though we’re spending thousands of dollars to own devices that can run software developed by clever people from all over the world, Apple believes that only it should be able to determine what kinds of apps are allowed, that it should always be cut in on the revenue of every financial transaction inside those apps, and that if it doesn’t like anything about a developer’s app, it can demand it be changed or the app made to disappear into oblivion.
That both of these approaches come from the same company is… kind of staggering, to be honest. [...] I know which Apple-built approach should be the model for the future of software on computing devices. The good news is that Apple has already built it. The era of top-down control of our devices needs to end. The Mac is the model.
I’ve been itching to link to this since he wrote it, but I was torn between the urge to write something long, or just link to it and keep my commentary short. Short it is, for now. I don’t think Snell is wrong. I know many — perhaps most? — of you reading this agree with him. I’m quite certain that if iOS shifted to Mac-style rules for software distribution, I personally would enjoy it with zero downsides — I’d gain access to software previously unavailable from the App Store (we could make Kotoba a simple download, for example), new software that never existed in the first place due to App Store rules would spring into existence, and I’m quite confident I’d personally never once be tricked or fooled into installing even a single piece of software I’d later come to regret. So if Apple were ever to follow Snell’s advice — whether by a change of mind in Cupertino, or begrudgingly at the figurative gunpoint of government regulation — I would personally come out happier for it. So too, probably would you.
But I don’t think Apple should do this, because I think there are tens of millions — maybe hundreds of millions — of iPhone users who would wind up installing apps they’d come to regret having installed. An updated, longer take from me on this will have to wait, but for now, I direct your attention to these previous takes on at least some aspects of this:
Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica on new details from an authors group lawsuit alleging Meta trained its AI models on a trove of pirated books:
Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books. But details around the torrenting were murky until yesterday, when Meta’s unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence showed that Meta torrented “at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen,” the authors’ court filing said. And “Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen.”
Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to “avoid” the “risk” of anyone “tracing back the seeder/downloader” from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as being in “stealth mode.” Meta also allegedly modified settings “so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,” a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.
Now that new information has come to light, authors claim that Meta staff involved in the decision to torrent LibGen must be deposed again because the new facts allegedly “contradict prior deposition testimony.” Mark Zuckerberg, for example, claimed to have no involvement in decisions to use LibGen to train AI models. But unredacted messages show the “decision to use LibGen occurred” after “a prior escalation to MZ,” authors alleged.
Regardless of how you feel about AI training on public data, you have to be a zealot not to acknowledge that a lot of stuff falls into a gray zone. Torrenting 81 terabytes of pirated books is not in the gray zone. It’s hilarious to imagine Zuckerberg giving the OK to pirate all these books, just not from the office.
This week Jason Snell published his annual Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2024. As I’ve done in the past — 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 — I’m publishing my full remarks and grades here. On Snell’s report card, voters give per-category scores ranging from 5 to 1; I’ve translated these to letter grades, A to F, which is how I consider them.1
Most of my grades are unchanged from a year ago. For those that have changed, I’ve noted last year’s grade in parentheses. I didn’t realize this as I was writing my report card, but each of my grades that changed from last year was lower. Not one grade went up. Thinking about that as I write this preamble today, it feels correct: there are several areas where Apple maintained consistent excellence in 2024, but I can’t think of a single area where Apple levelled up. Not one. That feels like a problem.2
It’s also worth noting that “Siri” is not a standalone category in the report card. We graders simply comment on it as one aspect within other categories and products, like HomePod or Apple Music. Historically that made sense — when it started, Siri was just a flashy new feature of iOS 5. At this point, though, I think “Siri/Apple Intelligence” clearly deserves to be considered as a category unto itself. One way to think about it: anything that comprises the entire domain of a senior Apple executive probably ought to be its own category on the report card. For Siri and Apple Intelligence, that’s John Giannandrea. For another: Apple’s own heavy marketing of Apple Intelligence suggests they themselves consider it a category-level aspect of the company. I’ve suggested this to Snell, and he’s considering adding it as a proper category next year. (And, unsurprisingly, given his own sharp writing on the subject, he was already thinking about it before I pinged him.)
If “Siri/Apple Intelligence” were a category for this report card, I’d have graded it a D — and much closer to an F than a C. Longstanding Siri features have not only not gotten better, they’ve seemingly gotten worse. Apple is simply not a relevant player in the explosively popular LLM game. The features under the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella mostly feel like Apple shipped them a full year ahead of readiness simply because the rest of the industry — and Wall Street — is way ahead of them, and they felt the need to ship what they had, ready or not. There are a lot of obviously useful potential AI-powered features — ones that integrate between apps, and/or use your personal data on-device — that, thanks to the tightly restricted sandboxing system Apple itself designed for iOS, only Apple itself can provide via AI. It doesn’t matter that Apple doesn’t offer, say, its own web search engine, because Safari can use whatever search engine you want. It does matter that Siri sucks because only Siri can tightly integrate at the system level with your device, and with your private cross-application data. The saving grace — what kept me from giving this if-it-were-a-category category an F — is that a few of Apple’s ML/AI features are actually pretty great. Image search in Photos is excellent, downright amazing at times. The new Clean Up generative AI object/person removal tool in Photos is very good — both technically, and in terms of striking an opinionated balance regarding the nature of photography itself. Private Cloud Compute is a tremendously ambitious initiative — but we haven’t seen much fruit from it yet.
The Macs that Apple is shipping are better than ever. The most popular Mac models, by far, are the laptops, and both the MacBook Pro and Air lineups had good years. Even better, both now seem to be on regular annual upgrade schedules: MacBook Pros in the fall, MacBook Airs in the spring. Personally I am especially pleased, borderline ecstatic, regarding the new nano-texture (matte) display option now available on MacBook Pros for $150 extra. (They don’t even charge more for the option on the 16-models than 14-inch.)
The only hitch in the lineup are the Macs Apple hasn’t been shipping: the Mac Studio and Mac Pro remain unchanged since 2023, when the M2 models debuted. My presumption/hunch is they skipped the M3 generation for engineering reasons pertaining to TSMC’s first-generation 3nm process, and will be back on track in 2025 with new M4-generation models around WWDC.
MacOS 15 Sequoia, like 14 Sonoma and 13 Ventura before it, is a fine release. Reliable and familiar. Apple Intelligence features that I largely don’t use (or at least don’t use much yet) are easily ignored and do not get in the way of what is tried and true about, by far, the greatest computing platform the world has ever seen.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Nothing has been broke regarding the iPhone lineup, and Apple hasn’t tried to fix anything. This is good. Changes for the sake of change are the surest sign of a company in decline. Stagnation and hubris are concerns for any wildly successful product, but it takes confidence to let great design speak for itself without making facile unnecessary changes.
Camera Control is the big new hardware change in the iPhone 16 generation, and while I’d like to see the actual button improve (I think it’s too hard to press), in practice I make frequent use of it. I spent some time back on an iPhone 15 over the holidays and I instantly missed having a Camera Control button to launch the Camera app. Also: kudos to Apple for bringing Camera Control to the entire iPhone 16 lineup, not just the Pro models.
iOS 18 is refined, mature, and familiar.
The iPad hardware story is excellent. iPad Pros got the M4 chips months ahead of the Mac, and now have an excellent nano-texture display option. (Please, Apple: bring nano-texture to the iPhone. Take my money.) The iPad Air got a fine update to the M2 chip in May. And the iPad Mini got its first update since 2021, and thus continues to be a product in Apple’s lineup.
But iPadOS still strikes me like the no-man’s-land platform: nowhere near as capable productivity-wise as a Mac; nowhere near as portable or as conceptually simple as an iPhone. I made a concerted effort not to use my iPad for anything but long-form reading in recent months. I find myself noticeably more productive for it. Trying to work on an iPad, for me, continues to feel like trying to perform surgery while wearing mittens.
AirPods 4 with ANC are a terrific update. AirPods Pro 2, though years-old hardware, saw significant software improvements this year — most notably, widely acclaimed support for use as certified hearing aids. AirPods continue to exemplify Apple at its best.
Series 10 watches feature a new display that supports once-per-second updates while in energy-saving always-on mode. So the seconds hand on an analog face can “tick” once per second even when the display isn’t fully on. But Apple only enabled this ticking seconds indicator on two watch faces, both new to WatchOS 11: Flux and Reflections. Setting aside the fact that I personally don’t like either of those faces (Flux in particular seems deliberately obtuse), this is ridiculous. WatchOS 11 offers, by my quick count, at least 33 different watch faces that offer a non-digital seconds hand or indicator. And only 2 of them support the new 1Hz refresh rate? That’s bullshit. And it wasn’t just a launch thing, because here we are in February, with WatchOS 11.3, and zero additional watch faces have been updated to support it. This is not how a serious watchmaker treats its watches. I will admit to caring far more about always-on seconds hands than most people, but this isn’t how a serious watchmaker deals with technical breakthroughs like this new display with a 1Hz refresh rate. Not just most, but every single watch face should have been updated to support ticking seconds. Apple Watch is turning more into a fitness tracker that happens to show the time, and away from serving as a proper watch.
Also: no Ultra 3 this year. The year-old Ultra 2 did gain a very nice black titanium color option, but that’s it. Kind of weird for a watch that starts at $800 — and that seems quite popular — to skip a year of silicon improvements.
Is it a hit? No, far from it. But I remain unconvinced that Apple ever had much hope that this first Vision device would sell in much higher quantities than it has. The narrative that it’s a laughably overpriced bust reminds me of the original Macintosh in 1984, whose $2,500 price tag, adjusted for inflation, works out to over $7,500 in today’s dollars. After an initial wave of publicity on launch, the original Macintosh sold so poorly that it was arguably the primary impetus for John Sculley and Apple’s board to fire Steve Jobs and exile him from the company. Many pundits of the era confidently proclaimed that the entire concept of a GUI was a gimmick with no future.
Am I predicting that the Vision platform will have as bright and essential a future ahead of it as the Macintosh did in 1984? No. But I suspect it has a bright and essential future ahead of it. The entire concept and paradigm is so new and different that, like the Macintosh 40 years prior, the product had to ship years before a version will be made at a price that appeals to the mass market, and years before there’s all that much to do using it.
But, as it stands, Vision Pro today offers an incredible experience for watching traditional movies and shows, and a breakthrough experience for watching spatial content. If Bang & Olufsen sold this product in a form that only played movies — no “spatial computing” — it would cost $10,000 and some people would consider it well worth the price. Spatial computing feels fun to me, but not very productive. That could change, and I suspect “fun but not productive” is how I would have described trying to work on a Macintosh in 1984 vs. an Apple II. And Vision Pro’s remarkable (and with VisionOS 2, much improved) Mac Virtual Display feature is a highly-productive environment for work.
I can’t give Vision Pro an A for 2024, but I foresee A’s in future years.
I can’t name one improvement to HomeKit or anything Home-related in 2024, and this is a platform sorely in need of many improvements. Fingers crossed for 2025, though. I know there are talented people on that team, and they have to be up to something.
I’m a very happy daily (well, nightly) Apple TV user. But what exactly improved or changed in 2024? Anything? It may well be fair to say the current hardware — Apple TV 4K 3rd-gen, which shipped in November 2022 — is fine, and this is a hardware platform that only needs updates every 3 or 4 years, but we’re grading what happened in 2024.
Also: I feel like Apple has never yet made a truly great remote control for this platform. The current one is their best yet, but it has obvious flaws.
TV+ is far from the biggest streaming service, but I’d argue adamantly that it has by far the highest batting average for quality content. Movies are still a weakness: Wolfs should have been great but was mediocre and forgettable. And that was TV+’s best movie of the year. But TV+ series continue to excel: Slow Horses had another crackerjack season, For All Mankind finished a good fourth season, and new shows like Dark Matter, Bad Monkey, and Presumed Innocent were all strong. TV+ is also a great streaming platform for young kids.
iCloud, especially with iCloud Plus, remains secure, fast, and reliable. It enables so much seamless continuity (hence Apple’s “Continuity” umbrella brand for those features) across devices.
But here we are again, with me repeating the same gripe from previous years: it’s miserly that Apple is still offering a mere 5 GB of storage at the free tier, and have left the paid-tier storage allotments unchanged since like forever. I crap bigger than 5 GB. I wonder how many zillions of iPhone users out there don’t have device backups because they only have a free iCloud account with 5 GB? The Apple One bundle is a good deal, but the free iCloud tier should be genuinely useful for backing up a modern iPhone. And paid Plus tiers should now offer more storage than they do.
No news remains great news in this category.
Unchanged comment, and grade, from a year ago: I have concerns and complaints about aspects of the direction Apple’s software design is headed (or in some ways, has been now for years), but their software reliability has been very good for me.
One odd trend: several of Apple’s newest apps, like Journal and Sports (and now, though outside the temporal boundary for a 2024 report card, Invites) are only available for iPhone. Not even iOS, including iPhone and iPad. Just iPhone. Journal in particular belongs on iPadOS and MacOS, too, where people have hardware keyboards for writing.
Fourth year in a row with basically the same comment: Resentment over App Store policies continues to build. Frustrations with the App Store review process seem unresolved. Apple’s goal should be for developer relations to be so good that developers look for excuses to create software exclusively for Apple’s platforms. The opposite is happening.
The big change globally this year is the Digital Markets Act going into effect in the EU. I stand apart from many in the Cupertino punditry racket in applauding Apple for their compliance efforts. I think they’ve complied with a terrible law as best they can while protecting their own vision for how their platforms should be designed and work. (And, of course, protecting their own vision for how Apple should be able to monetize those platforms.) But even I — a guy who thinks Apple has done a remarkable job shipping an enormous amount of work in order to comply with the DMA — can’t and won’t argue that any of Apple’s efforts on the DMA front have repaired or improved its relationship with third-party developers.
Despite the situation being largely unchanged, I’ve adjusted my grade on this subject from C to D this year, because stagnation is catching up to Apple. More of the same is making matters worse. And I think we saw that with the relative dearth of native app support for Vision Pro. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem with a new platform like VisionOS. The best way to generate developer interest in a new platform is to sell a lot of units to a lot of users who are looking for apps to use and games to play. But the best way to sell a lot of hardware units to a lot of users is to have a deep exclusive-to-the-platform ecosystem of both first- and third-party apps and games.
With previous new developer platforms, like iOS and Mac OS X, Apple powered through this initial conundrum by attracting developers who just wanted to create awesome new software for an awesome new platform. That enthusiasm was tempered greatly last year for VisionOS, and I think it was a lot more about how developers feel about Apple and the App Store than how they feel about Vision Pro itself.
Snell’s prompt for this category states, “Consider anything you deem appropriate, including education and environmental initiatives, commitment to accessibility and diversity, treatment of Apple’s work force, and other political and policy stances.” Apple’s efforts on the environmental front continue to strike me as extraordinary. Their accessibility features are so far ahead of the rest of the industry that I don’t even know who’s in second place. On social issues, by staying true to its longstanding, humane, common sense values, Apple’s culture has seemingly remained utterly consistent through a series of tumultuous years in our society at large, during which other companies have ping-ponged first sharply left, and now sharply right.
If I stopped there, that would make for an obvious A grade. But: politics. I understand (I think) Tim Cook’s thinking and approach. I wouldn’t want his job, and genuinely wonder at times who would. Sing-song congratulatory tweets leave a bitter taste, but I’m amenable to the argument that CEOs must play the cards they’ve been dealt, not the cards they’d hoped for. If you have to serve shit sandwiches, serve shit sandwiches — but don’t tell us they taste like pumpkin pie. Tim Cook can’t donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration slush fund when Apple donated a mere $43,200 to Biden’s and expect us to do anything but laugh at the supposed justification that Cook “believes the inauguration is a great American tradition, and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity.” That’s Tim Cook’s hoagie-sized shit sandwich to eat, and it’s disrespectful to pitch us on taking a few bites ourselves to help him get through it.
I genuinely believe Cook is doing what’s best for Apple, and that’s quite literally his job. But it was true during the first Trump administration, and already is again in the second, that what’s best for Apple politically is in conflict with what’s best for the country and for the world. ★
In my previous report cards I’ve described my scale as A to E (A = 5 ... E = 1), but here in the US, schools traditionally (but not always) omit E as a letter grade and use F as the grade below D, as the obvious shorthand for fail — and, apparently, to disambiguate from some weirdo schools that use a system in which E stands for excellent. (I give that grading system an F.) I never had to give the E vs. F thing much thought before, because I never thought it appropriate to give a failing grade in any category before. But pondering a hypothetical “Siri/Apple Intelligence” category this year got me thinking long and hard about a failing grade. And I realized that should be an F, not an E. ↩︎︎
If you said to me, “Come on Grubes, you can’t think of a single area where Apple did better in 2024 than 2023? Not one? There has to be something...” I would offer as a response, without hesitation, Apple TV original content. As I wrote just over a month ago, in my final post of the year, I would argue with anyone that the average quality of an Apple TV+ original show is higher than that for any other streaming platform. It really is the new HBO — not the most content, but the best content. That’s very Apple.
But that’s not a separate category on the Six Colors Report Card. Apple TV+ falls under “Services” (under which category I call it out for praise in this very report card), and my very high esteem for Apple TV+’s original content doesn’t justify bumping up my grade for “Services” as a whole — a sprawling category that, financially, a decade ago become Apple’s second-biggest and is seemingly on a trajectory to eventually surpass even the iPhone — from a B to an A.
I don’t see Apple’s foray into entertainment production as a distraction. The people at Apple working on computer hardware, software, and services, whether they be engineers, designers, managers, or even senior executives, aren’t involved in any way with TV+. And it’s not like Apple is cash-starved and diverting limited resources to entertainment production budgets at the expense of product development or R&D. Apple, the most valuable and profitable company in the world, can act a bit like a conglomerate without losing focus on its core business of making the world’s best computers, on which customers enjoy the world’s best computing experiences. TV+ is an important leg on the stool of reasons for people to subscribe to an Apple One services bundle. But, still, it’s at least a little worrisome that the area where I feel Apple most improved last year is one that is utterly unrelated to that core business.
Excellence, no matter how long sustained, is always precarious — delicate and fragile — and on the verge of succumbing to hubris and Father Time. ↩︎︎
Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors:
Last year, we reported that Apple sued its former software engineer Andrew Aude for providing journalists with confidential information about the company’s future plans, including details about the Journal app, Vision Pro headset, and more.
As reported by 9to5Mac, the Superior Court of Santa Clara County on Thursday dismissed the lawsuit after Apple and Aude reached an agreement to resolve this matter. The court document for the case’s dismissal does not provide any specific details about the agreement, but Aude issued a public apology on the same day.
I spent nearly eight years as a software engineer at Apple. During that time, I was given access to sensitive internal Apple information, including what were then unreleased products and features. But instead of keeping this information secret, I made the mistake of sharing this information with journalists who covered the company. I did not realize it at the time, but this turned out to be a profound and expensive mistake. Hundreds of professional relationships I had spent years building were ruined. And my otherwise successful career as a software engineer was derailed, and it will likely be very difficult to rebuild it. Leaking was not worth it. I sincerely apologize to my former colleagues who not only worked tirelessly on projects for Apple, but work hard to keep them secret. They deserved better.
We don’t know the terms of Aude’s agreement with Apple that ended the lawsuit, but it’s good to see he and the company remain on close enough terms for Apple to have helped him craft that apology. (Either that, or Aude should have worked in Apple’s comms department, not engineering.)
Here’s my post from last March when the lawsuit was filed, which includes a few of the juiciest nuggets, including this, from Apple’s filing:
Apple learned of Mr. Aude’s misconduct in the fall of 2023. When Apple met with him to discuss his improper disclosures, Mr. Aude promptly confirmed his guilt through his actions, if not his words. At the start of his November 7, 2023 interview, Mr. Aude repeatedly denied that he had leaked any information to anyone. He also claimed that he did not have his Apple-issued work iPhone with him. Feigning the need to visit the bathroom mid-interview, Mr. Aude then extracted his iPhone from his pocket during the break and permanently deleted significant amounts of evidence from his device. This included the Signal app, which memorialized his history of leaking information to “Homeboy” (and likely others) via encrypted communications. [...]
In Mr. Aude’s screenshot below memorializing his exchange with the WSJ journalist, Mr. Aude exclaimed that he could not “wait for chaos to break out” in reaction to a forthcoming article reflecting his leaked information.
End-to-end encrypted comms don’t help much when you save screenshots of those chats to your work-issued company-controlled device.
And my own closing:
Worth noting that Aaron “Homeboy” Tilley was a reporter for The Information until September 2019, when he left to join the WSJ. Anyway, I’m sure the WSJ will help Aude out with his legal bills.
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 changes 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. But: Alsoft does claim to be working on a major new version that will support rebuilding APFS disks, so my fingers are crossed. ↩︎︎
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 needed a “new” one — often begrudgingly erasing whatever was previously on the old 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 during an 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?
WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. Their simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior.
Your users trust you. Keep it that way. Check out WorkOS Radar today.
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.
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”.
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.