My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money; we make money to make more movies.” To me, that’s it. That’s the thing.

Merlin and I were talking about independent writers and podcasters, because that’s what we were (and remain), but the concept applies just as perfectly to independent developers. This came to my mind after reading (and linking to) David Smith’s description of the new Pedometer++ today. Not just what it does, but why he spent six years making it. That’s the sort of productive obsession that fascinates me.

Ice water is always refreshing, but it tastes better when you’re on a road trip to hell. It feels like the world of software is bifurcating quality-wise. This whole thing about Adobe’s new craptacular “modern” UI language (a.k.a. “Spectrum”) exemplifies one side of that bifurcation — the bad-and-getting-worse side. Software that is the product not just of an ignorance of long-established principles of interaction design, but of a willful disdain for those principles. What Adobe is now shipping is just inexplicably bad UI, ignoring literally decades of great work and long-mastered concepts — a lot of which work was pioneered by Adobe itself!

The whole thing with MacOS 26 Tahoe is similar. To be clear, the UI crimes in Tahoe are deeply worrisome, but they are nowhere near as severe as those in Adobe’s Spectrum. But the problems with Tahoe are steps down the same fork in the road that Adobe took years ago. Spectrum is where Tahoe suggests that MacOS was headed under Alan Dye’s leadership: cross-platform sameness for the sake of sameness, with a complete disregard for longstanding platform nuances and idioms. In Spectrum’s case those platforms are MacOS and Windows and the web. In Tahoe’s case it’s MacOS and iOS.¹

The other side of the software fork is not deserted. It’s just populated, more than ever, by the products of small independent developers who obsess, first and foremost, over quality and artistic vision. Remarkable new software gems exhibiting spectacular UI design appear all the time. They’re just not coming from the biggest companies, the ones whose apps, alas, dominate not just our desktops and pockets but our entire culture today.²

There’s always been software with poorly designed user interfaces. Much of it has been successful financially, sometimes spectacularly so. I’d argue, in all seriousness, that that’s the story of Microsoft in a nutshell. What’s new today is poorly designed software from developers from whom we expect better. In the old days there were people who would argue that prioritizing good user interface design was a waste of time — like spending hours decorating cupcakes destined for kindergarteners who are simply going to mash them into their mouths. (Again: cf. Microsoft’s undeniable market success.) What’s new today is people holding up objectively bad interaction design and proclaiming it to be good, and the product of teams that purportedly prioritize “design”, when it’s clear they have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s one thing to make something poorly designed and shrug on the grounds that it doesn’t matter. It’s another thing to make something poorly designed and hold it up as good design.

We are justified to expect nothing short of insane greatness from Apple, and solidly good design from Adobe. In principle, all software ought to have well-designed user interfaces. That’s never going to be the case. But software for designers — Adobe’s raison d’être — absolutely demands to be well-designed itself, like how a book on writing must itself be well-written.

Perhaps I was wrong, though, to describe Adobe’s new UI as inexplicable. It’s just indefensible. The explanation for so much software going so rotten from a UI-design perspective is, the more I think about it, related to Nilay Patel’s “Software Brain” theory, which I’ve commented on both directly and indirectly. Here’s Patel’s definition of “software brain”:

The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code. Like I said, this is a powerful way of seeing things. So much of our lives run through databases, and a bunch of important companies have been built around maintaining those databases and providing access to them.

Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and riders. YouTube is a database of videos. The Verge’s website is a database of stories. You can go on and on and on. Once you start seeing the world as a bunch of databases, it’s a small jump to feeling like you can control everything if you can just control the data.

But that doesn’t always work.

You might think it counterintuitive that a movement obsessed with software would be spearheading a severe decline in the design quality of software, but in Patel’s definition, there’s no concept of software as art, as a practice, as a craft. Software brain is purely an obsession with software as a medium in and of itself. A means with no consideration for the end.

Framed in Walt Disney’s adage, software brain makes software only to make more money. The idea of making money in order to make more software — to afford the time and talent to craft it — does not compute. Framed in the metaphor that Steve Jobs used to close his introduction of the original iPad, and returned to again to close his final keynote at WWDC 2011, software brain is nowhere near the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. Software brain is so far down Technology Street that it’s no longer in the same zip code as Liberal Arts Avenue. Another way, perhaps, to define software brain is that it’s the utter rejection of Jobs’s maxim that “technology is not enough”. With software brain, technology is all there is.

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Sam Altman was the president of Y Combinator for several years, and left to become the full-time CEO of OpenAI. The New Yorker quotes Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham multiple times, in the context of Altman’s trustworthiness. (Some of those quotes are firsthand, others secondhand.) Graham’s role in the story — particularly his public remarks after publication — comprised an entire section in my own take on the New Yorker piece, wherein I concluded:

I would characterize Graham’s tweets re: Altman this week as emphasizing only that Altman was not fired or otherwise forced from YC, and could have stayed as CEO at YC if he’d found another CEO for OpenAI. But for all of Graham’s elucidating engagement on Twitter/X this week regarding this story, he’s dancing around the core question of the Farrow/Marantz investigation, the one right there in The New Yorker’s headline: Can Sam Altman be trusted? “We didn’t ‘remove’ Sam Altman” and “We didn’t want him to leave” are not the same things as saying, say, “I think Sam Altman is honest and trustworthy” or “Sam Altman is a man of integrity”. If Paul Graham were to say such things, clearly and unambiguously, those remarks would carry tremendous weight. But — rather conspicuously to my eyes — he’s not saying such things.

The thing that stuck in my craw is this: Does Y Combinator own a stake in OpenAI? And if they do, given OpenAI’s sky-high valuation, isn’t that stake worth billions of dollars?

OpenAI was seeded by an offshoot of Y Combinator called YC Research in 2016 — when Altman was running YC. In December 2023, the well-known AI expert (and AI-hype skeptic) Gary Marcus wrote the following, in a piece on Altman’s trustworthiness in the wake of the OpenAI board saga that saw Altman fired, re-hired, and the board purged in the course of a tumultuous week:

After poking around, I found out that “I have no equity in OpenAI” was only half the truth; while Altman to my knowledge holds no direct equity in OpenAI, he does have an indirect stake in OpenAI, and that fact should have been disclosed.

In particular, he owns a stake of Y Combinator, and Y Combinator owns a stake in OpenAI. It may well be worth tens of millions of dollars; even for Altman, that’s not trivial. Since he was President of Y Combinator, and CEO of OpenAI; he surely was aware of this.

So it’s well known that Y Combinator owns some stake in OpenAI. But how big is that stake? This seems like devilishly difficult information to obtain. I asked around and a little birdie who knows several OpenAI investors came back with an answer: Y Combinator owns about 0.6 percent of OpenAI. At OpenAI’s current $852 billion valuation, that’s worth over $5 billion.

Graham and his wife Jessica Livingston are two of Y Combinator’s four founding partners. The fact that Paul Graham personally has billions of dollars at stake with OpenAI doesn’t mean that his public opinion on Sam Altman’s trustworthiness and leadership is invalid. But it certainly seems like the sort of thing that ought to be disclosed when quoting Graham as an Altman character reference. A billion dollars here, a billion there — that adds up to the sort of money that might skew a fellow’s opinion.

There is no point getting any more outraged or disgusted at Meta for firing these contractors than you already were in the first place. They had to fire them. The moment this investigative report was published in late February, the fate of Sama’s Kenyan operation was sealed. They were toast. The key to understanding this is that Meta runs a criminal enterprise. Most of the organized crimes Meta commits aren’t crimes against the legal code (although some are), but rather crimes against public perception and human decency. Remember what they did with Onavo, their VPN product? Was that illegal? Dunno. Was it outrageous? Hell yes.

Let’s just concede for the sake of argument that there’s nothing illegal about the way Meta was sending video footage from users’ AI Glasses to contractors in Kenya to review. I presume they’re still doing it today, just with different contractors, in a different computer cubicle sweatshop, perhaps in a different country. Nothing to cover up legally. But just the plain description of what they’re doing fills people with a visceral repulsion. However, people only have that visceral reaction if they know what’s going on. Part of the whole premise is that the whole thing has to be kept on the q.t.

If it said right on the box that when you use Meta AI Glasses, the footage might be reviewed by third-party contractors, and when that footage is reviewed, you — the user whose footage is being reviewed — won’t know it’s happening and won’t get prompted first for permission (because you’ve actually OK’d it in advance just by hitting the “Accept” button on the long dense terms of service that literally almost no one reads because such terms are written in impenetrable legalese), almost no one would buy them. And if it were more widely known that this is how these glasses work, there’d be more of a social stigma surrounding those who wear them.¹

That, I think, is the primary reason why the contractors were in Kenya in the first place, and their replacements (now that Meta has terminated its contract with Sama) are surely still in some third-world country. It’s not about the lower wages (but that doesn’t hurt). It’s about the fact that the entire existence of the operation is easier to keep quiet when it’s literally on the other side of the planet. It’s a goddamn marvel that the investigative reporters from those two Swedish newspapers found them.

Most illegal acts are scandalous, but many scandalous acts are perfectly legal. But all scandalous acts need to be covered up. The operation has to be kept quiet, has to be covered up, because it’s unacceptable. It’s outrageous. If this were more widely publicized, Meta would suffer on two fronts. First, it would become better known that there’s nothing artificial about some of what they call “AI” — it’s in fact powered by human intelligence, just in another hemisphere. Second, and related to the first, some of the interactions you have with Meta AI — including images and video you send it, and images and video captured by Meta AI Glasses — are reviewed by human contractors. People write things and show things to AI, thinking it’s kept private between them and a computer program, that they would never share if they knew it might be seen by human beings paid by the AI provider to refine the training and correct its mistakes. A lot of people only use these “AI” products because they have no idea what’s actually going on.

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
—Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

Anyway, enjoy the Meta AI built into WhatsApp and Instagram. And maybe keep a link to that report on Meta’s contractors in Kenya handy for anyone you meet who wears AI Glasses.

Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple updated the Vision Pro with a faster M5 chip and a more comfortable band in October 2025, but there were no other hardware changes, and consumers still weren’t interested. [...]

The Vision Pro has been unpopular since it first launched, and Apple only sold around 600,000 units in total. Insider sources told MacRumors that Apple has received an unusually high percentage of returns, far exceeding any other modern Apple product.

Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple. Some former Vision Pro team members are working on Siri, which is not a surprise as Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell has been leading the Siri team since March 2025.

This report comes as news to everyone at Apple working in the Vision Product Group (VPG). Nothing about the future of the platform has changed recently. When it was a secret project, prior to unveiling, it was called the Technology Development Group (TDG) inside Apple. Then, when Vision Pro was unveiled, it became VPG. And then at some point the hardware went under Apple’s hardware group (led by John Ternus) and the software under the software group (led by Craig Federighi). So there have been changes, yes, but only the sort of changes that are natural when a product shifts from being a secret to being one of Apple’s regular non-secret platforms.

As for poor sales, I think it’s unquestionable that Vision Pro sales — and general enthusiasm — have been a disappointment. What momentum they had out of the gate has seemingly petered out. But the optimistic scenario inside Apple was not all that high. The best-case scenario was surely a bigger number of units than they’ve actually sold, but not that much more. There’s no realistic scenario where Vision Pro was an out-of-the-gate hit like, say, the iPad was. It’s an all-new device in an all-new product category that starts at $3,500 and costs more like $4,000 if you need corrective lenses. Before it debuted, there were multiple reports from multiple sources that suggested (a) that Sony could only manufacture a maximum of 900,000 displays per year, capping dual-display Vision Pro headsets at 450,000 per year; and (b) that Apple itself “expected to ship fewer than half a million headsets in the first year of its release, according to people involved in its supply chain” (per Wayne Ma at The Information).

Look at how Apple unveiled the second-gen Vision Pro with M5 — it was the definition of “low key”. I don’t think there was a single person in Cupertino — not one — who looked at first-generation Vision Pro sales and thought, “I know what will turn this around in a big way: a second-generation speed bump where the M2 chip is upgraded to an M5!” That speed bump in October was not intended to make a huge difference. It was just a signal that they’re still at it. Speed bumps are good. (And it probably helps, not hurts, margins because the M5 is used on Macs and iPads too, and no other product still in production uses the M2.) Rather than anyone — literally anyone — at Apple being surprised that the October second-gen M5 update did not meaningfully change the sales trajectory, I think the entire company would have been flabbergasted (and caught flat-footed on supply) if it had.

This sentence from Clover’s report is doing a lot of work:

Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple.

There’s only one Vision hardware product to date, and that product, through two generations, is named Vision Pro. If Clover is saying that no one is working on a third-generation revision of the Vision Pro product we know today, maybe that’s correct. I don’t know. I certainly hope it’s correct. I think it was fine for Apple to do one new-generation speed bump of the original hardware. But going forward, they clearly need to do something significant for the next hardware. Ideally, two things: a much more appealing “Vision Pro” and a lower-priced “Vision Air” or just plain “Vision” or, hell, a “Vision Neo”. Take a new crack at the high end with a lighter-weight higher-resolution Vision Pro and open up new markets with something starting at under $2,000.

But I don’t think anyone is reading that sentence from Clover’s report that way. It implies — along with the headline — that Apple is just giving up on the whole platform. That’s how everyone is reading it, and it’s clearly what the article, and especially headline, implies.

I don’t think that’s true, at all. There’s a VisionOS 27 update coming at WWDC and new hardware in the works. Not just AR glasses, but immersive Vision headsets. There are, I believe, as many people at Apple working on VisionOS software and immersive content today as there ever have been. It’s full steam ahead. The pressure is on, I’m sure, but there’s no doom and gloom. The Apple folks in the Vision group aren’t oblivious.¹ They actually know the roadmap, and they know just how much work is between where the platform is today and where it needs to be for it to be a meaningful contributor to Apple’s bottom line. But they’re there, working on it. I don’t know who told MacRumors what (and their sourcing is just “MacRumors has learned”), but I know for a fact that it is not true that the teams working on the Vision platform have “been redistributed to other teams within Apple.”

It’s a strange thing for MacRumors to state so categorically something I believe has no truth to it whatsoever. And if there is some truth to it, it’s not what the article implies, which is that the whole thing has been shut down, somehow without the world knowing until now. Just two weeks ago John Ternus and Greg Joswiak were interviewed by Mark Spoonauer at Tom’s Guide, and both spoke of a bright future for spatial computing. Joz describing Vision Pro as a product pulled into the present from the future is a good way of emphasizing the yet regarding a product — and category — that’s not there yet. Apple executives know how to give a non-answer answer to a question they don’t want to answer honestly. (Exhibit A: Tim Cook “squashing” rumors that he was about to retire ... one month before he announced he was stepping aside as CEO.) The way Ternus and Joz were talking about the platform, and immersive content, this month was not lacking in enthusiasm. It was asking for patience.

It’s certainly possible that this Vision thing ultimately isn’t going to work out and Apple will throw in the towel on it. But that hasn’t happened, and if it does, it’s not going to come out of nowhere as a story on MacRumors for the people in VPG working on it. When Apple threw in the towel on Project Titan (the car project) in February 2024, an all-hands was held to break the news, led by then-COO Jeff Williams and Titan project lead Kevin Lynch. The team didn’t learn it from a fucking leak.

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Sunday’s crossword puzzle in the print edition of The New York Times Magazine contains a grid that does not match the clues. The correct version of the puzzle can be found in the news section of Sunday’s print edition of The Times. The puzzle on our app is correct.

Maggie Duffy, writing for Vulture:

Some solvers who, like Wegener’s wife, complete the Sunday puzzle in the print magazine (often with pen) complained on crossword forums and social media, saying they were “nearly in tears,” some with fears of “sudden onset dementia” or, worse yet, ineptitude.

For Irene Papoulis, a former writing instructor at Trinity College, the puzzle is typically a source of pride. “It didn’t even occur to me that it could be their mistake,” she told me. “I just blamed myself.” When Mike McFadden, in New Jersey, couldn’t crack it, he had a similar reaction. “I thought something was wrong with me,” he told me. “I didn’t think that they would have an error.” It nagged at him all day. At a function on Saturday, he couldn’t bring himself to mention it to his brother-in-law, a fellow solver; he was still too upset.

Some had such trust in the crossword that they believed the erroneous grid was purposeful. “I’m saying to myself, ‘Okay, maybe there’s some sort of scientific or mathematical trick,’” McFadden said. When I spoke with Will Shortz, the Times’ crossword editor, he said the Times does “so many tricks with the puzzles” that he could see how someone’s first thought would be “I wonder what they’re up to now?”

This is the first such mistake the Times has made in the 84 years that they’ve been printing a crossword puzzle. I came of age doing work in print — writing and editing The Triangle, the student newspaper at Drexel, and then spending a few years as a working graphic designer, at a time when print still ruled. There’s an inherent stress about going to press. Mistakes are forever. We once ran a headline at The Triangle that read “Headline Goes Here”. Once. Going to press is stressful but exhilarating. There’s an adrenaline rush that comes with giving the go-ahead to start a very expensive large-scale full-color press run. The stress focuses the mind.

Print, effectively, is hardware. Atoms, not bits. The web is literally software. If you make a mistake in software that results in incorrect mathematical results, you ship an update. If you make a mistake in a CPU such that it results in incorrect floating-point math, perhaps only in 1 out of every 9 billion calculations, people will remember the mistake 30 years later.

If The New York Times had run the wrong crossword grid on the web or in their app, they would have corrected the error quickly, few people would have encountered it, and fewer still would remember it. But by printing the wrong grid in the Sunday magazine last week, they made a mistake that some people will never forget (and some will never forgive).

Hardware brain is different from software brain. Software brain says Go faster; do more; the only mistake you can’t fix is having gone too slow. Hardware brain says Slow down; do less; focus; strive for perfection and never settle for less than excellence; mistakes are forever.

If his background in hardware means that incoming Apple CEO John Ternus has hardware brain, and will lead Apple accordingly, that suggests Apple will double down on zigging in the midst of a still-escalating AI hype cycle that has the rest of the industry zagging ever more frenetically. That feels right to me.

There’s no reason to assume that a change at the helm is imminent. Cook may be older than the CEOs of the other tech companies at the top of the S&P 500, but he’s hardly the oldest person running a major corporation. “If Trump or Biden can be president at 80, Tim Cook can be CEO of Apple for many more years. It used to be automatic that CEOs are moved out at 65,” says someone who knows him. “The world has changed.”

While Cook hasn’t given any indication how long he’ll remain in charge — other than telling Dua Lipa it would be “a while” — people close to him believe he’ll be CEO at least another three years. After that, they say, he’ll start a charitable foundation to donate the wealth he accumulated at Apple.

If Cook were to stay that long, people within Apple say, the most likely successor would be John Ternus, the hardware engineering chief. In a company whose success has always come from building category-defining gadgets, the ascension of a hardware engineering expert to the CEO job would seem logical. Ternus, who’s not yet 50, would also be more likely than other members of the executive team to stick around for a long time, potentially providing another decade or more of Cook-esque stability.

Ternus is well-liked inside Apple, and he’s earned the respect of Cook, Williams and other leaders. “Tim likes him a lot, because he can give a good presentation, he’s very mild-mannered, never puts anything into an email that is controversial and is a very reticent decision-maker,” says one person close to Apple’s executive team. “He has a lot of managerial characteristics like Tim.” Christopher Stringer, a former top Apple hardware designer, called Ternus a “trustworthy hand” who’s “never failed with any role he’s been elevated to.” Eddy Cue, the Apple executive known as Cook’s closest confidant, has privately told colleagues that Ternus should be the next CEO, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Linking to Gurman’s report, I wrote:

I wouldn’t have linked to this if not for the above line about Eddy Cue. If Cue is telling people that, that means a lot. No executive at Apple is more juiced-in company-wide than Cue. Cook’s first action as CEO was to promote Cue, and Cue was arguably just as tight with and trusted by Steve Jobs.

It was two more years, not three, but Gurman was the first to report that Ternus was the guy at the top of the list.

There was no significant additional reporting between Gurman’s May 2024 Bloomberg report until November 15 last year, when the Financial Times published a blockbuster story under the headline “Apple Intensifies Succession Planning for CEO Tim Cook”, with four bylines: “Tim Bradshaw, Stephen Morris and Michael Acton in San Francisco and Daniel Thomas in London”. Bradshaw is the FT’s lead Apple reporter, and it’s no coincidence his name was first among the four. The article gets right to the point at the start:

Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as next year. Several people familiar with discussions inside the tech group told the Financial Times that its board and senior executives have recently intensified preparations for Cook to hand over the reins at the $4tn company after more than 14 years.

John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice-president of hardware engineering, is widely seen as Cook’s most likely successor, although no final decisions have been made, these people said.

People close to Apple say the long-planned transition is not related to the company’s current performance, ahead of what is expected to be a blockbuster end-of-year sales period for the iPhone. [...]

The company is unlikely to name a new CEO before its next earnings report in late January, which covers the critical holiday period. An announcement early in the year would give its new leadership team time to settle in ahead of its big annual keynote events, its developer conference in June and its iPhone launch in September, the people said. These people said that although preparations have intensified, the timing of any announcement could change.

So, per the FT in November, Apple’s plan was to name Ternus as the company’s next CEO “early in the year”, after their Q1 results (January 29) but ahead of WWDC (June 8). The halfway point between those dates was April 4; Apple announced Ternus as the company’s next CEO on April 20. Every single word of the FT report, in hindsight, was exactly correct. I can’t think of a way that their November story could have been more prescient. It was a home run. A report for the ages, like when CNet and The Wall Street Journal scooped the Mac’s transition to Intel processors on the eve of WWDC 2005.

My own take, back in November when the FT report dropped, was that it had the distinct aroma of a deliberate expectations-setting leak, and was almost certainly accurate:

That “several people” spoke to the FT about this says to me that those sources (members of the board?) did so with Cook’s blessing, and they want this announcement to be no more than a little surprising. [...]

I would also bet that Cook moves into the role of executive chairman, and will still play a significant, if not leading, role for the company when it comes to domestic and international politics. Especially with regard to Trump.

Cook moving into the position of executive chairman and continuing to play a leading role as the company’s political ambassador was my own speculation, and that proved out. Easy money, making that prediction.

One week after the FT’s report, in his Bloomberg “Power On” newsletter on November 23, Gurman wrote:

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

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

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

Gurman must be well and truly “shocked” by this week’s announcements, because as it turns out, Cook is stepping aside exactly “in the time frame outlined by the FT”. The FT’s report was not “simply false”. It was, in fact, completely true. The Financial Times, which truly is a respected publication (with no black marks on its record, like, say, Bloomberg’s to-this-day-still-uncorrected “The Big Hack” fiasco), obviously did have a high level of confidence in Apple’s plans, because they were, in fact, briefed by people “legitimately in the know”. Gurman’s reading comprehension is questionable as well, because the FT did not report that Cook would “step down” between January and June. The FT report spoke only of “naming a new CEO” and making an “announcement” between January and June. That’s exactly what happened. Nor is anyone “departing” — but a change in leadership will occur in the middle of the year.

In January, Gurman reiterated his stance that the FT was wrong:

It’s just a question of timing. The Financial Times reported last year that the change would happen as early as the beginning of 2026. But let me be clear: This seems unlikely.

By pooh-poohing the FT’s completely accurate reporting as “simply false”, Gurman wound up poo-pooing the bed. Calibrate the grains of salt with which you take his other reporting on Apple executive goings-on accordingly. A humble correction and sincere apology to the Financial Times — and Tim Bradshaw personally — are surely forthcoming in this weekend’s edition of Power On.¹