Terry Godier:
\n\n\n\n\nFor example, if you have a 4.1 star rating in the App Store, any 4\nstar review is going to decrease that average. In other words,\nleaving a 4 star review is essentially leaving a negative\nreview. [...]
\n\nYou will see a lot of 4 star reviews that say things like, “This\nis my favorite app!” or “Gamechanger!” The apps that tend to\nhave these types of reviews are often over a 4.0 in the store and\nare being actively harmed average-wise by having them, even though\nthe intent was clearly not to do so.
\n
Problem #1 is that star-rating systems absolutely suck for aggregation. If you’re going to collect and average ratings from users, the system that works best is binary: thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Netflix switched from stars to thumbs in 2017, and YouTube switched all the way back in 2009. The App Store should switch to thumbs.
\n\n\n\n\nThe logical endpoint of apps optimizing for a 5 star review\ninvalidates the system as meaningful on the store. The system\nbecomes a better representation of the sophistication at review\nprompt execution than it does an accurate reflection of app\nproduct quality. The incentive isn’t to create an actual 5 star\napp, but rather to create a robust system that transmits only 5\nstar reviews.
\n
Problem #2 is that even if the App Store switched from stars to thumbs, the system would still be gamified by developers, rewarding, as Godier aptly puts it, not the best apps but instead the apps that are best at “review prompt execution”. Apple should remove the APIs that allow apps to prompt for reviews, and forbid the practice of prompting for them. Nothing good, and much bad, comes from these prompts. Imagine being in a restaurant, and in the middle of your entree, the server comes to your table and hands you an iPad and asks you to rate the joint on Yelp. That’s what using most apps is like. And the apps that do the right thing — like Godier’s Current — and never solicit a review like a needy hustler are penalized.
\n\nEvery time I see one of these prompts it’s like getting hit up by a panhandler — and some of the prompts come from Apple’s own apps. It’s all so greasy. One of the advantages of a walled garden ought to be keeping panhandlers and solicitors out.
\n\nLink: blog.terrygodier.com/2026/04/13/app-store-reviews-are…
\n" }, { "title" : "Freecash Was More Like Scamcash", "date_published" : "2026-04-17T00:10:09Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-17T14:01:05Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/freecash-was-more-like-scamcash", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/freecash-was-more-like-scamcash", "external_url" : "https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/14/how-the-rewards-app-freecash-scammed-its-way-to-the-top-of-the-app-stores/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nSarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:
\n\n\n\n\nIf you’ve been on TikTok this year, you’ve more than likely\nencountered ads for Freecash. The app has been marketed as\na way to make money just by scrolling TikTok — and jumped to the\ntop of the app stores in recent months, peaking at the No. 2\nposition in the U.S. App Store.
\n\nIn truth, Freecash pays users to play mobile games — all the\nwhile collecting a heaping amount of sensitive data, according to\ncybersecurity company Malwarebytes. [...]
\n\nOn Monday, after being contacted by TechCrunch for comment, Apple\npulled Freecash from its App Store. As of Monday afternoon, the\napp was still listed in the Google Play store. (It has since been\nremoved).
\n
As I have repeatedly written, it boggles my mind why Apple doesn’t have an App Store “bunco squad” that targets scam and fraud apps that are popular and/or high-grossing.\nIt’s folly to think that the App Store could ever be completely free of scam apps. But it’s absurd that this app Freecash rose to #2 in the App Store, with millions of downloads, and Apple only took a look at and removed it after TechCrunch asked about the app.
\n\nPieter Arntz, writing at Malwarebytes:
\n\n\n\n\nThe landing pages featured TikTok and Freecash logos and invited\nusers to “get paid to scroll” and “cash out instantly,” implying a\nsimple exchange of time for money. Those claims were misleading\nenough that TikTok said the ads violated its rules on financial\nmisrepresentation and removed some of them.
\n\nOnce you install the app, the promised TikTok paycheck vanishes.\nInstead, Freecash routes you to a rotating roster of mobile games — titles like Monopoly Go and Disney Solitaire — and offers\ncash rewards for completing time‑limited in‑game challenges.\nPayouts range from a single cent for a few minutes of daily play\nup to triple‑digit amounts if you reach high levels within a\nfixed period.
\n\nThe whole setup is designed not to reward scrolling, as it claims,\nbut to funnel you into games where you are likely to spend money\nor watch paid advertisements.
\n
Dystopian. And it’s gross that the follow-the-money chain here ultimately leads to pay-to-win games from established brands like Hasbro (Monopoly Go) and, of all companies, Disney (Disney Solitaire). Look at these games’ App Store listings, and you’ll see: (a) their in-app purchases are clearly meant to capitalize on addicts, and (b) their privacy report cards are appalling. And Apple is taking 30 percent of all this. Honest to god, how would it be any worse if Apple started selling cigarettes in its retail stores? Because there’d be butts to clean up outside the glass doors?
\n\nLink: techcrunch.com/2026/04/14/how-the-rewards-app-freecash…
\n" }, { "title" : "Colliding With Reality, Indeed", "date_published" : "2026-04-16T20:39:05Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-17T00:34:02Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/colliding-with-reality-indeed", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/colliding-with-reality-indeed", "external_url" : "https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/us/politics/trump-iran-war.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bVA.EB30.mygpleorcQhg&smid=url-share", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nAnton Troianovski, reporting for The New York Times under the headline “Trump’s Portrayal of the War in Iran Collides With Reality”:
\n\n\n\n\nPresident Trump is trying to cast his Iran war as all but over, a\ndone-and-dusted success.
\n\nBut after years of trying to impose his own reality on the world,\nhe has now run into a crisis that is not bending to his narrative.
\n
On the one hand, I’m loath to complain about the Times finally stating the obvious and treating Trump like they would any other official. Same goes for a Peter-Baker-bylined piece this week, “Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate”. Finally. It was good that the Times’s reporting on Biden’s mental acuity two years ago was sharp enough to draw the ire of the Biden administration. But Biden never once said anything crazy. Forgetful? Slightly confused? Sure. But Trump is saying and tweeting crazy-ass stuff every day now. A steady stream of abject unhinged nuttiness. For chrissake he badgered kindergarteners at the White House Easter egg roll about Biden’s use of an autopen.
\n\nBut on the other hand, when exactly has Trump “run into a crisis” that did “bend to his narrative”? He’s a bullshitter, and so good at bullshitting that his bullshit often flies. That’s very different from reality bending to meet the bullshit.
\n\nThe difference with Iran is that war is about as close as anything gets to being bullshit-proof. Trump created a crisis that can’t be bullshitted.
\n\n(Also, take it easy on the Oompa-Loompa makeup, sir.)
\n\nLink: nytimes.com/2026/04/15/us/politics/trump-iran-war.html…
\n" }, { "title" : "How to Format 10-Digit Phone Numbers", "date_published" : "2026-04-16T20:09:07Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-16T21:08:46Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/how-to-format-10-digit-phone-numbers", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/how-to-format-10-digit-phone-numbers", "external_url" : "https://www.threads.com/@apstylebook/post/DXKtXVXEh7T", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nThe Associated Press Stylebook, on Threads:
\n\n\n\n\nWe updated our style for telephone numbers in 2024 to drop\nparentheses. We now recommend the form: 212-621-1500.
\n\nFor international numbers use 011 (from the United States), the\ncountry code, the city code and the telephone number:\n011-44-20-7535-1515.
\n\nUse hyphens, not periods. No parentheses. The form for toll-free\nnumbers: 800-111-1000. If extension numbers are needed, use a\ncomma to separate the main number from the extension:\n212-621-1500, Ext. 2.
\n
I have long been annoyed that U.S. phone numbers are so often formatted in the outdated (123) 555-1234 format. The use of parentheses for the area code dates back to the old days, when you only needed to dial the area code to call a number outside your own area code. (The same era whence comes the verb dial.) Until 10-digit dialing with mandatory area codes started to become standard in the late 1990s, you only needed to dial seven digits to call a local number.
\n\nApple’s Contacts app (and I think the system-wide Contacts framework, used by third-party apps like Flexibits’s excellent Cardhop), will go so far as to reformat numbers entered in 123-555-1234 format as (123) 555-1234. Apple should update the formatting to go the other way, and turn phone numbers with the area code in parentheses into the 123-555-1234 format. It’s only because area codes used to be optional that they were put in parentheses. Given that 7-digit dialing is never going to return, we should abolish the parentheses too.
\n\nLink: threads.com/@apstylebook/post/DXKtXVXEh7T
\n" }, { "title" : "Chance Miller: ‘Netflix Ruined Its Apple TV App by Switching to a Custom Video Player’", "date_published" : "2026-04-16T19:27:00Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-16T19:27:00Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/miller-netflix-tvos", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/miller-netflix-tvos", "external_url" : "https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/15/netflix-ruined-its-apple-tv-app-by-switching-to-a-custom-video-player/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nChance Miller, 9to5Mac:
\n\n\n\n\nThe change began rolling out a few weeks ago, and user frustration\nis mounting. On Reddit, there’s a growing thread of Netflix\nsubscribers saying they are canceling their subscription\nbecause of this change to the Apple TV app. [...]
\n\nThe change also means you lose access to full payback\ncontrols using the Apple TV Remote app on your iPhone. You\ncan’t enable Enhance Dialogue from the video player. That\nclever Apple TV feature that automatically enables subtitles\nwhen you rewind? Gone.
\n\nOne of my most-used tvOS video player features is the ability to\ntap the Siri Remote to see when what I’m currently\nwatching will end. It’s great for trying to decide whether you\nhave time for one more episode before bed. That feature is gone in\nNetflix as part of this change.
\n\nFlatpanelsHD has a great roundup of all the features on\nApple TV that rely on an app using the native video player.
\n
Someone tried to argue with me when I complained about this horrendous regression that Netflix users somehow want consistency across different platforms — that users want the same Netflix player on Apple TV as on Roku, Amazon Fire, Google TV, and whatever crap is built into their “smart” TV. Nonsense. Why would users of one platform care what the Netflix player is like on other platforms? Apple TV users buy Apple TV boxes because they want the Apple TV experience. Maybe Netflix wants to present the same experience everywhere. Maybe Netflix wants to save on engineering costs by having a write-once-run-like-shit-everywhere video player. That’s a Netflix concern, not a user concern.
\n\nFrom the perspective of users, this change to the tvOS Netflix app just sucks. There’s no upside at all. Nothing is better, much is worse, and a slew of cool platform features are now gone.
\n\nLink: 9to5mac.com/2026/04/15/netflix-ruined-its-apple-tv-app-by…
\n" }, { "title" : "Apple Pay Express Transit Mode, When Used With a Visa Card, Is Vulnerable to Scam Tap-to-Pay Readers", "date_published" : "2026-04-16T18:43:44Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-16T18:46:46Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/express-transit-visa-exploit", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/express-transit-visa-exploit", "external_url" : "https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/15/apple-pay-visa-transit-exploit/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJuli Clover, MacRumors:
\n\n\n\n\nThe process requires the victim to have Express Transit Mode\nenabled for payments, and a Visa card linked for those payments,\namong other steps. As it turns out, it’s a Visa-related security\nloophole rather than an iPhone issue, and it doesn’t work with a\nMastercard or an American Express card because other cards use\ndifferent security methods. It also doesn’t work with Samsung\nPay on Samsung devices, and it requires the specific combination\nof a Visa card and an iPhone. Apple told Veritasium that it’s an\nissue with the Visa system, but something unlikely to occur in\nthe real world.
\n
The video, hosted by the Veritasium YouTube channel, but starring Marques Brownlee as the victim, takes over 15 minutes before clarifying that the exploit only works with Visa cards, and only when a Visa card is set as your card for Express Transit Mode. Until then, the video implies that the exploit can work against any iPhone that has Apple Pay configured, with any sort of credit card. The technical explanation of how the hack works is pretty good though.
\n\nAs I wrote a year ago (when Apple was looking for a new partner to replace Goldman Sachs as the bank for Apple Card), Visa is the most popular credit and debit card in the U.S., by a significant margin. If you don’t use Express Transit Mode, you’re safe. If you do use Express Transit Mode, I suggest any card other than a Visa.
\n\nLink: macrumors.com/2026/04/15/apple-pay-visa-transit-exploit/
\n" }, { "title" : "Bonus Thought Regarding the Name ‘iPhone Ultra’", "date_published" : "2026-04-16T15:26:03Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-16T18:17:00Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/bonus-thought-regarding-the-name-iphone-ultra", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/bonus-thought-regarding-the-name-iphone-ultra", "external_url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/name-of-foldable-iphone", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nOne more thought re: the item I posted this week speculating on what Apple will name their much-rumored two-screen folding iPhone this year. If they do name it “iPhone Ultra”, I think Apple using that name for the folding iPhone will imply that they have no plans whatsoever to ever make a “rugged” iPhone — a model akin to Apple Watch Ultra.
\n\nI suspect Apple has no plans for a dedicated rugged iPhone. People who want that just buy extra-thick cases for regular iPhones. A watch is different. I know some people put their Apple Watches in ungainly protective “cases”, but they look hideous, which is why you see so few people using them. For aesthetically pleasing ruggedness, the watch case itself needs to be designed for it. But maybe there is a large enough potential market for such an iPhone — especially if such a device had significantly longer battery life than any regular iPhone, as an Apple Watch Ultra does relative to a regular Apple Watch.
\n\nBut if Apple calls the folding iPhone “Ultra”, stop holding your breath for such an Apple-Watch-Ultra-style iPhone. In the same way that “Air” means very different things on Mac, iPad, and iPhone, so too might “Ultra”.
\n\nLink: daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/name-of-foldable…
\n" }, { "title" : "Rory Goss’s Accessibility Story", "date_published" : "2026-04-16T15:00:49Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-16T15:00:49Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/goss-apple-accessibility", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/16/goss-apple-accessibility", "external_url" : "https://www.apple.com/education/college-students/success-stories/goss/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nFeature story and short film, well worth watching, from Apple:
\n\n\n\n\nOne winter day in January 2024, 16‑year‑old Rory Goss experienced\nsomething jarring while in construction class at Abbey Christian\nBrothers’ Grammar School in Newry, Northern Ireland. He could no\nlonger see the whiteboard at the front of the room.
\n\nAs a straight‑A student in 11th grade, Rory was in the midst of\nstudying for his A‑levels and was about to start applying to\nuniversity. Passionate about golf and cars, and eager to start\ndriving lessons, he had no idea what was happening to his\neyesight.
\n\nWithin weeks, he was diagnosed with Leber’s Hereditary Optic\nNeuropathy, a rare genetic condition that damages the optic nerve\nand can lead to sudden, severe vision loss. Over the next six\nmonths, his vision deteriorated by 95%, meaning he was legally\nblind as he began his 12th grade exams.
\n
Apple just posted this feature this week, but it’s serendipitously aligned with my recent (and not-so-recent) posts about the screen zooming features in MacOS and iOS. Goss zooms in and out with extraordinary dexterity and fleetness. It’s quite extraordinary. Particularly moving for me is his illustration — created on an iPad, using Apple Pencil — where he attempts to illustrate what his vision now looks like.
\n\nLink: apple.com/education/college-students/success-stories/goss/
\n" }, { "title" : "So Close to Getting It", "date_published" : "2026-04-16T01:00:35Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-16T15:37:24Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/15/so-close-to-getting-it", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/15/so-close-to-getting-it", "external_url" : "https://www.theverge.com/tech/906873/sofa-app-track-tv-movies-installer", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nDavid Pierce, last week in his Installer column/newsletter for The Verge, singing the praises of the version 5.0 update to Sofa (the praises of which I just sang):
\n\n\n\n\nSofa 5. A huge update to an Installerverse favorite, this app is\nnow a great way to manage everything you want to watch, read,\nplay, and even do IRL. I never quite made it stick when it was\nmostly just movies and shows, but now I think of it as like a\nNotion for my personal life. Apple devices only, alas, but boy do\nI love this app.
\n
Pierce, I just noted today, also just wrote a feature story at The Verge about his decision to buy a new iPhone — after trying an array of new Android phones and admitting to a (questionable, IMO) personal preference for Android over iOS — because there are so many better apps on iOS that don’t have equivalent-quality counterparts on Android. In that earlier piece, Pierce wrote:
\n\n\n\n\nLots of the apps I use every day — apps like Puzzmo,\nNotePlan, Mimestream, and Unread — either\ndon’t exist on Android at all or only exist as web apps. Most of\nthe ones that do work on both platforms are better on iOS. And\nforget about the kind of handcrafted, small-developer stuff — apps like Acme Weather, Current, and\nQuiche, just to name a few recent favorites — that’s all\nover the App Store and absolutely nowhere to be found on Android.
\n
These apps don’t just happen to be both exquisitely crafted and exclusive to iOS (and in some cases, MacOS). They’re exquisitely crafted because they are idiomatic native apps designed to adhere to Apple’s platforms. Not all native apps are great, of course, but most great apps are native — and most great native apps are native to iOS or MacOS.
\n\nSo there ought be no “alas” to describe Sofa being exclusive to Apple devices, but instead a “thank you” to developer Shawn Hickman for keeping it exclusive, and thus keeping it great.
\n\nLink: theverge.com/tech/906873/sofa-app-track-tv-movies-installer
\n" }, { "title" : "Sofa 5.0", "date_published" : "2026-04-16T00:36:05Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-16T13:39:18Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/15/sofa-5", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/15/sofa-5", "external_url" : "https://www.sofahq.com/5", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nShawn Hickman:
\n\n\n\n\nA show you started last month. A book on your nightstand. A game\nyou keep meaning to get back to. Finding something new is easy.\nRemembering where you left off is the hard part.
\n\nSofa 5 helps you keep track of this stuff. Progress rings show up\non covers throughout the app so you can see where you stand at a\nglance. Your home screen shows what’s next with one-tap checkboxes\nto keep things moving.
\n\nFive ways to track, depending on what fits: just enjoy with zero\nsetup, tap to log, count pages, check off episodes, or keep a\njournal as you go. Pick one and switch anytime.
\n
It’s a well-established cliché that no one ever finds the perfect to-do app or “task management system” unless they create it themselves. That’s certainly true for me (and resulted in my co-creating Vesper). Keeping track of things you want or need to do is too close to codifying how you think and remember things in your own mind, and we all think and remember in unique ways. We thus crave unique apps or systems to manage our tasks, ones that fit our minds just right. That’s why there are a zillion to-do apps, including a bunch that are actually good. And, these days, that’s why there are so many people creating their own personal to-do apps using AI coding systems.
\n\nBecause media-tracking apps are just a subset of to-do apps, all the same things hold true for them. So, just like how I occasionally flit back and forth between general-purpose to-do apps, or become enamored with a new one, I’ve switched between several media-tracking apps over the years. These are apps where you keep lists of movies and shows you want to watch, books you want to read, and then log them, perhaps with notes or ratings, as you watch them.
\n\nIt’s an endlessly fascinating app genre. Sofa is a really good example, one that I’ve used on and off for years. (Disclaimer: I started using Sofa when it was the weekly sponsor on DF back in 2022, but I’ve kept using it since then because it’s so good.) I’ve been using Sofa v5 for months now, including while it was in beta, and it is a big improvement to an already very good, very thoughtful app. A lot of people use general-purpose to-do apps to track movies and shows to watch, books to read, and games to play. Sofa 5 goes the other way, and expands what started as a dedicated media tracker into something you can use to track, well, anything you want to do.
\n\nSofa is quite useful for free, and super useful with a paid subscription. If you’re even vaguely unsatisfied with your current app or system for tracking media to watch / read / play, you should check it out.
\n\nLink: sofahq.com/5
\n" }, { "title" : "Lisa Melton: ‘Memories of Steve’ (and Memories of Safari’s Unique Page-Loading Indicator in Particular)", "date_published" : "2026-04-15T19:54:17Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-15T20:14:12Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/15/melton-jobs", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/15/melton-jobs", "external_url" : "https://lisamelton.net/2023/10/05/memories-of-steve/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nLisa Melton, who ran the team that created Safari, regarding her interactions with Steve Jobs:
\n\n\n\n\nWhen Steve asked you a question? You didn’t ramble and, whatever\nyou did, you didn’t make up an answer. If you didn’t know, you\njust said that you didn’t know. But then you told him when you’d\nhave an answer. Again, this was just good advice to anyone\n“managing up,” as they say.
\n
This is A+ advice for dealing with anyone, period. If you don’t know, say “I don’t know.” So many people have a deep aversion to saying that. And if you can say “I don’t know, but I’ll find out in «some short amount of time here»”, say that.
\n\nHere’s the bit that’s relevant this week:
\n\n\n\n\nSteve didn’t like the status bar and didn’t see the need for it.\n“Who looks at URLs when you hover your mouse over a link?” He\nthought it was just too geeky.
\n\nFortunately, Scott and I convinced Steve to keep the status bar as\nan option, not visible by default. But that meant we had a new\nproblem. Where should we put the progress bar to indicate how much\nof the page was left to load?
\n\nBefore, the progress bar lived inside the status bar. So we needed\nto find it a new home. We discussed all sorts of silly ideas\nincluding making it vertical along the edge of the window.
\n\nRemember, this was back in the day before the spinning gear or\nother smaller affordances were widely used to indicate progress.\nIn the age of barber-pole blue Aqua, it had to be a bar.
\n\nThe room got quiet. Steve and I sat side-by-side in front of the\ndemo machine staring at Safari. Suddenly we turned to each other\nand said at the same time, “In the page address field!”
\n\nSmiles all around. Which I followed with, “I’ll have a working\nversion of that for you by the end of the week.” Over-committing\nmy engineering team, of course.
\n\nBut I didn’t care. I had just invented something with the Big Guy.\nTrue, it was a trifle, but there’s no feeling like sharing even a\ntiny byline with Steve.
\n
This of course, is contra John Calhoun’s offhand recollection (in a Hacker News thread last month) that Steve Lemay “also invented the early Safari URL text field that also doubled as a progress bar”. Melton is a direct source, so there’s no reason to doubt her recollection of having conceived of the idea alongside Steve Jobs. These recollections are not, of course, mutually exclusive — perhaps Lemay was a designer assigned to flesh out the idea, and Calhoun remembers him as a proponent of the idea.
\n\nAnyway, this whole essay from Melton just goes down like butter. So good.
\n\nLink: lisamelton.net/2023/10/05/memories-of-steve/
\n" }, { "title" : "★ David Pierce Tried a Bunch of Android Phones and Then Bought an iPhone Again", "date_published" : "2026-04-15T15:40:02Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-15T15:49:17Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/piece_android_iphone_apps", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/piece_android_iphone_apps", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nDavid Pierce, writing at The Verge (gift link):
\n\n\n\n\nThe Pixel 10 Pro solidified a feeling I’d been having through all\nof my tests: Android is a better operating system than iOS. [...]
\n\nIf all you got from your phone was the out-of-the-box experience,\nI’d have picked the Pixel. But unfortunately for Android, app\nstores exist. And the App Store absolutely wipes the floor with\nthe Play Store. Lots of the apps I use every day — apps like\nPuzzmo, NotePlan, Mimestream, and\nUnread — either don’t exist on Android at all or only\nexist as web apps. Most of the ones that do work on both platforms\nare better on iOS. And forget about the kind of handcrafted,\nsmall-developer stuff — apps like Acme Weather,\nCurrent, and Quiche, just to name a few recent\nfavorites — that’s all over the App Store and absolutely nowhere\nto be found on Android.
\n
Put aside your feelings on whether you agree “Android is a better operating system than iOS”. What’s interesting here is that Pierce, who thinks that’s true, still prefers the overall experience of iOS because the apps are so much better. I first wrote about this in 2010, in “Where Are the Android Killer Apps?”:
\n\n\n\n\nBut, the thing I’ve noticed, eight months after returning a Nexus\nOne I borrowed for six weeks from a friend, is that, well, I don’t\nseem to be missing much.
\n\nI’ve complained, numerous times, about the “how many total apps\nare in your store?” metric — the idea that Apple is “winning”\nbecause there are more iOS apps than there are apps for any other\nmobile platform. If quantity of app titles were all that mattered,\nwe’d all be using Windows, not Mac OS X, right? Having the most\napps matters, but having the best apps matters too. The sweet\nspot for a platform is to do well in both regards.
\n
And then, more recently, in 2023, “Making Our Hearts Sing”:
\n\n\n\n\nI will offer another quote from Kubrick: “The test of a work of\nart is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to\nexplain why it is good.”
\n\nArt is the operative word. Either you know that software can be\nart, and often should be, or you think what I’m talking about here\nis akin to astrology. One thing I learned long ago is that people\nwho prioritize design, UI, and UX in the software they prefer can\nempathize with and understand the choices made by people who\nprioritize other factors (e.g. raw feature count, or the ability\nto tinker with their software at the system level, or software\nbeing free-of-charge). But it doesn’t work the other way: most\npeople who prioritize other things can’t fathom why anyone cares\ndeeply about design/UI/UX because they don’t perceive it. Thus\nthey chalk up iOS and native Mac-app enthusiasm to being\nhypnotized by marketing, Pied Piper style.
\n\nWhat’s happened over the last decade or so, I think, is that\nrather than the two platforms reaching any sort of equilibrium,\nthe cultural differences have instead grown because both users and\ndevelopers have self-sorted. Those who see and appreciate the\nartistic value in software and interface design have\noverwhelmingly wound up on iOS; those who don’t have wound up on\nAndroid.
\n
Apple would be wise to cultivate a further widening of this third-party software-quality gulf through radically improved developer relations, rather than attempting to squeeze additional rent from this advantage — which, while penny-wise in terms of juicing its App Store revenue in the near term, is ultimately pound-foolish in the way that it is souring developer sentiment.
\n\nThe real goldmine isn’t that Apple gets a cut of every App Store transaction. It’s that Apple’s platforms have the best apps, and users who are drawn to the best apps are thus drawn to the iPhone, Mac, and iPad. That edge is waning. Not because software on other platforms is getting better, but because third-party software on iPhone, Mac, and iPad is regressing to the mean, to some extent, because fewer developers feel motivated — artistically, financially, or both — to create well-crafted idiomatic native apps exclusively for Apple’s platforms.
\n\nApple should focus its developer relations on cultivating that motivation, and trust that in the end that will continue to prove lucrative for Apple itself. They should do whatever it takes to make their cut of App Store transactions feel like a beneficial bargain to developers, not an oppressive tax.
\n\n\n\n " }, { "title" : "Screen Zooming on iOS and iPadOS", "date_published" : "2026-04-15T14:34:44Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-15T20:57:18Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/15/screen-zooming-on-ios", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/15/screen-zooming-on-ios", "external_url" : "https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/116404958539831051", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nSteven Troughton-Smith:
\n\n\n\n\nIf you want to pixel-peep on iOS or iPadOS, it also has the Zoom\naccessibility setting, and can be controlled via touch, keyboard,\nor trackpad. It works for display mirroring too, and has other\noptions like a minimap and HUD (‘Zoom Controller’).
\n
These settings are in Settings → Accessibility → Zoom. I prefer switching the Zoom Region from the default Window Zoom (which gives you large magnifier glass window to drag around the screen) to Full Screen Zoom, which is more like how zooming works on the Mac.
\n\nOn iPadOS, you should go into the Keyboard Shortcuts panel (inside Accessibility → Zoom) and turn on Zoom with Scroll Wheel. This lets you zoom Mac-style, using the Control key, when you have a keyboard and trackpad/mouse connected.
\n\n(You can, of course, zoom on VisionOS too.)
\n\nLink: mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/116404958539831051
\n" }, { "title" : "Fraudulent Cryptocurrency App in Mac App Store Stole $9.5 Million From 50-Some Users", "date_published" : "2026-04-14T22:06:18Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-14T22:06:27Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/fraudulent-cryptocurrency-app-in-mac-app-store", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/fraudulent-cryptocurrency-app-in-mac-app-store", "external_url" : "https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=fake-ledger-app", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nMolly White, at Web3 Is Going Just Great:
\n\n\n\n\nAfter a fake version of the Ledger cryptocurrency wallet app made\nit onto the normally highly curated Apple App store, customers\nlost $9.5 million dollars to the malicious product. Believing it\nwas a genuine Ledger product, people entered their seed phrases\ninto the app, then discovered their wallets were immediately\ndrained.
\n\nOne victim, a musician who goes by G. Love, wrote: “I lost my\nretirement fund in a hack/Scam when I switched my Ledger over to\nmy new computer and by accident downloaded a malicious ledger app\nfrom the Apple store. All my BTC gone in an instant.” According to\nhim, he lost 5.9 BTC (~$445,000).
\n
The legit (if that adjective can be used for cryptocurrency apps) Ledger Live Mac app is only available as a direct download from Ledger’s website. They also do have an app in the App Store, but it’s iPhone-only.
\n\nLink: web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=fake-ledger-app
\n" }, { "title" : "On the Name of Apple’s Foldable iPhone", "date_published" : "2026-04-14T21:46:17Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-14T21:46:17Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/name-of-foldable-iphone", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/name-of-foldable-iphone", "external_url" : "https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/07/foldable-iphone-fold-iphone-ultra/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nTim Hardwick, last week at MacRumors:
\n\n\n\n\nApple’s first foldable iPhone may not carry the speculative\nmedia-derived “Fold” branding after all, according to Chinese\nleaker Digital Chat Station. In a new post on Weibo, the\noft-accurate leaker claimed that Apple’s book-style foldable could\nlaunch as the “iPhone Ultra.” Meanwhile, domestic Chinese\nmanufacturers are allegedly deciding whether to follow Apple’s\nlead by tentatively branding their own upcoming foldables as\n“Ultra” models, but likely with a lighter price tag — Apple’s\nversion is expected to cost between $2,000 and $2,500.
\n
I have no inside knowledge about what Apple plans to name this device, but I’ll eat my proverbial hat if they name it “iPhone Fold”. That name is so dumb it’s what Samsung calls their foldables. You don’t name a device for what it does, you name it for what it connotes. A good name conveys feeling, not just function. “iPhone Ultra” or “iPhone Max” would both work, and Ultra sounds more luxe. So while unsurprising, that’s probably the best bet, even without the reliable word of Mr. Digital Chat Station.
\n\nBut if you want my take on a wildcard name, one with some history, how about “iPhone Duo”?
\n\nLink: macrumors.com/2026/04/07/foldable-iphone-fold-iphone-ultra/
\n" }, { "title" : "Speaking of Tips", "date_published" : "2026-04-14T21:19:29Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-14T21:19:56Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/speaking-of-tips", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/speaking-of-tips", "external_url" : "https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/kristin-tips-out-texas-funeral-22206178.php", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nThe Houston Chronicle:
\n\n\n\n\nKristin Tips, the longtime presiding officer of the embattled\nTexas Funeral Service Commission, is no longer on the board.\n“Governor Abbott appreciates Kristin Tips’ service,” Andrew\nMahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, said in an email Tuesday. “An\nannouncement on a replacement will be made at a later date.” [...]
\n\nTips, who has run San Antonio’s prestigious Mission Park Funeral\nChapels, Cemeteries & Crematories with her husband, Dick Tips, was\nappointed to the board by the governor in 2017 and made the\npresiding officer in May 2024. Tips did not respond to a request\nfor comment.
\n
I don’t have any questions for her, but I have at least one for her husband.
\n\nLink: houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/kristin-tips…
\n" }, { "title" : "Apple Has Hidden the Pre-Creator-Studio Versions of Keynote, Numbers, and Pages in the Mac App Store", "date_published" : "2026-04-14T21:07:35Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-14T21:10:52Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/pages-numbers-keynote-old-versions-mac-app-store", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/pages-numbers-keynote-old-versions-mac-app-store", "external_url" : "https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/13/apple-removes-old-pages-keynote-numbers-apps-for-macos/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nRyan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:
\n\n\n\n\nOn the iPhone and iPad, Apple made the new Creator Studio features\navailable as updates to the existing App Store releases.
\n\nOn the Mac though, the rollout was a lot more confusing.\nApple kept the old iWork apps for Mac available on the App Store\nand launched entirely separate iWork versions with the Creator\nStudio features. Starting today, though, that oddity is no more.\nPer Aaron Perris, Apple has officially removed the old Pages,\nKeynote, and Numbers apps from the App Store.
\n\nIf you’ve previously downloaded these apps, you’ll still find them\nin your download history and can re-download from there. But new\nusers will only see one option on the App Store: the Creator\nStudio-compatible apps.
\n
One reason — perhaps the reason? — this was necessarily more complex on MacOS is that the iWork apps used to have different bundle identifiers on iOS and Mac. On the Mac, the old (classic?) version of Keynote has the bundle identifier com.apple.iWork.Keynote. On iOS, it was always just com.apple.Keynote, without the iWork part. To make the single-subscription bundle work across both platforms, Apple seemingly needed to unify the bundle IDs, and they unified them using the iOS versions, sans the iWork part. The new Creator Studio versions of the Mac apps now have the same bundle IDs as the iOS versions. You can see this using Terminal, if, like me, you currently have both versions of these apps installed side-by-side:
![take it easy on the Oompa-Loompa makeup](\"https://daringfireball.net/misc/2026/04/oompa-loompa-trumpa.jpeg\"){kind=link}
% mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r \\\n /Applications/Numbers.app \nResult: com.apple.iWork.Numbers
% mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r \\\n /Applications/Numbers\\ Creator\\ Studio.app\nResult: com.apple.Numbers
You can also see from the above that while the display names for the new versions remain just “Keynote”, “Numbers”, and “Pages”, the actual names of the .app bundles in the file system are now “Keynote Creator Studio.app”, “Numbers Creator Studio.app”, and “Pages Creator Studio.app”. That’s how two apps that both appear to have the same name can exist next to each other in the same Applications folder.
\n\nI’ll leave the final word to Basic Apple Guy:
\n\n\n\n\nGoodbye Keynote, Numbers, and Pages, and long live Keynote: Design Presentations, Numbers: Make Spreadsheets, and Pages: Create Documents
\n
Link: 9to5mac.com/2026/04/13/apple-removes-old-pages-keynote…
\n" }, { "title" : "Google Will Finally Begin Punishing Sites for Back-Button Hijacking in June", "date_published" : "2026-04-14T20:25:18Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-14T20:25:18Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/google-penalizing-back-button-hijacking", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/google-penalizing-back-button-hijacking", "external_url" : "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/04/back-button-hijacking", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nGoogle, on their Search Central Blog:
\n\n\n\n\nToday, we are expanding our spam policies to address a\ndeceptive practice known as “back button hijacking”, which will\nbecome an explicit violation of the “malicious practices” of\nspam policies, leading to potential spam actions.
\n\nWhat is back button hijacking?
\n\n
\nWhen a user clicks the “back” button in the browser, they have a\nclear expectation: they want to return to the previous page. Back\nbutton hijacking breaks this fundamental expectation. It occurs\nwhen a site interferes with a user’s browser navigation and\nprevents them from using their back button to immediately get back\nto the page they came from. Instead, users might be sent to pages\nthey never visited before, be presented with unsolicited\nrecommendations or ads, or are otherwise just prevented from\nnormally browsing the web.Why are we taking action?
\n
\nWe believe that the user experience comes first. Back button\nhijacking interferes with the browser’s functionality, breaks the\nexpected user journey, and results in user frustration.
Good for Google to penalize sites playing such dirty tricks, but, if they believe the user experience comes first, why are they only addressing this now in 2026? Here’s a Reddit thread from 15 years ago: “Why the fuck do websites hijack the back button? Its fucking annoying”. And why are they waiting until June to enforce it? Penalize these dickheads now.
\n\nI don’t see much back-button hijacking personally, perhaps because I don’t visit sketchy websites, but this entire issue only exists because of JavaScript. If web pages were documents, this wouldn’t even be possible.
\n\nLink: developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/04/back-button…
\n" }, { "title" : "Amazon to Acquire Globalstar, Announces Agreement With Apple to Continue Service for iPhone and Apple Watch", "date_published" : "2026-04-14T19:34:29Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-14T19:42:55Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/amazon-apple-globalstar", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/amazon-apple-globalstar", "external_url" : "https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-globalstar-apple", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nAmazon:
\n\n\n\n\nToday Amazon.com, Inc. and Globalstar, Inc. announced that they\nhave entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon\nwill acquire Globalstar, enabling Amazon Leo to add\ndirect-to-device (D2D) services to its low Earth orbit satellite\nnetwork and extend cellular coverage to customers beyond the reach\nof terrestrial networks. In addition, Amazon and Apple announced\nan agreement for Amazon Leo to power satellite services for iPhone\nand Apple Watch, including Emergency SOS via satellite. [...]
\n
Greg Joswiak, quoted in Amazon’s press release:
\n\n\n\n\n“Apple and Amazon have a long and proven track record of working\ntogether through Amazon’s core infrastructure services, and we\nlook forward to building on that collaboration with Amazon Leo.\nThis ensures our users will continue to have access to the vital\nsatellite features they have come to rely on, including Emergency\nSOS, Messages, Find My, and Roadside Assistance via satellite, so\nthey can stay safe and connected while off the grid.”
\n
The Verge’s headline catches my initial reaction: “Apple and Amazon Are Teaming Up to Challenge Starlink’s Smartphone Ambitions”. Apple owned a 20 percent stake in Globalstar, so they were more than a bystander. But I think the deal speaks to the fact that amongst the tech titans, Apple and Amazon are more allies than rivals.
\n\nLink: aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-globalstar-apple
\n" }, { "title" : "John Calhoun on Steve Lemay", "date_published" : "2026-04-14T19:26:25Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-14T19:26:54Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/calhoun-lemay", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/calhoun-lemay", "external_url" : "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47297653", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nSpeaking of John Calhoun, he chimed in on a Hacker News thread last month regarding his experience working with Steve Lemay at Apple:
\n\n\n\n\nI think Steve Lemay is a good guy. I kind of fought with him when\nI was an engineer, he was a young, new designer (at Apple). But I\nalways respected his point of view — even when we argued.
\n\nWhen Jobs came back to Apple in the latter 1990’s “Design” slowly\ncame to have an outsized role. I was one half of the engineering\nteam that owned Preview (the application) when Steve Lemay became\na seemingly regular presence in the hallway. As the new “Aqua” UI\nelements arrived in the OS like the “drawer” and toolbar, Steve\nand his boss (forgetting his name right now — Greg Somebody?)\nwere often making calls about our UI implementation.
\n
I guarantee that was Greg Christie, who is in my opinion the least-known-but-most-missed person at Apple.
\n\n\n\n\nSteve Lemay insisted the drawer live on the right side of the\nwindow. This was inexplicable to me. I saw the layout of Preview\nas hierarchical: the left side of the content driving the right\nside. You click a thumbnail on the left (in the drawer) the window\ncontent on the right changes to reflect the thumbnail clicked on.
\n\nSteve said, no, drawer on the right.
\n\n“Why? Why the hell would we do that?”
\n\nSteve was quick: “The Preview app is about the content. The\ncontent is king.”
\n\nI admit that I still disagreed with him after the exchange, but I\nhad a new respect for him as a designer because he was able to\narticulate a rationale for his decision. I suppose I was\nprejudiced to expect hand-waving from designers.
\n
It’s a good sign when you lose an argument but gain respect for those arguing the opposing side. (And, Calhoun notes, the Preview sidebar eventually did move to the left, after split views replaced drawers in AppKit.)
\n\n\n\n\n(Addendum: Steve also invented the early Safari URL text field\nthat also doubled as a progress bar. Instant hate from me when I\nsaw it: it was as if the text of the URL you entered was being\nselected as the page loaded. So I’m old-school and Steve had\nsome new ideas…)
\n
I had the same reaction as Calhoun when I first wrote about Safari, two days after it was announced and released as a public beta at Macworld Expo in January 2003. (That was a year before I created Markdown, so I had to edit raw HTML just now to update a few broken links to working versions at the Internet Archive.) I wrote then:
\n\n\n\n\nProgress Bar Behind Location Field
\n
\nHideous. It looks like partially-selected text. Please scrap it.
But by 2009, reviewing the public beta of Safari 4, I had changed my mind, and admitted I was wrong in my initial assessment of the progress-bar-in-location-field combo control:
\n\n\n\n\nBut I quickly grew accustomed to it, and soon grew to miss it when\nusing other browsers. It was, I soon decided, a damn clever way to\nshow progress in a way that was prominent while the page was\nactually loading, and without taking up any additional space on\nthe screen after loading was complete.
\n
That innovation is a nice feather in Lemay’s cap.
\n\nLink: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47297653
\n" }, { "title" : "Richard Moss’s 2010 Interview With John Calhoun on the Origins of Glider", "date_published" : "2026-04-14T16:20:23Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-14T16:20:24Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/moss-calhoun", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/moss-calhoun", "external_url" : "https://macscene.net/d/4678-interview-john-calhoun-on-the-origins-of-glider-part-1", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nRichard Moss, back in 2010:
\n\n\n\n\nJohn Calhoun’s Glider games hold a special place in the history of\nMac gaming, acting almost as an icon of the platform through much\nof the 1990s. They spawned a hugely dedicated fan base, which\nproduced a ridiculous amount of original content both for and\nabout Glider — especially Glider 4 and Glider PRO, the later\nversions.
\n\nI caught up with Calhoun over email recently, and quizzed him on\nthe origins and development of the series. This is the first part\nof that interview. Read on to discover where the idea for Glider\noriginated, how the game came to exist, and how it dramatically\naltered Calhoun’s future.
\n
Here’s the updated working link to part 2 of the interview, and to Moss’s feature story, “Dreaming of a Thousand-Room House: The History and Making of Glider”. The links to those pages in part 1 of the interview are both out of date and result in 404s.
\n\nMoss, of course, is the author of the excellent book The Secret History of Mac Gaming, which features an entire chapter on Calhoun and Glider, aptly titled “Quintessentially Mac”.
\n\nLink: macscene.net/d/4678-interview-john-calhoun-on-the-origins…
\n" }, { "title" : "Glider Is Back in the Mac App Store", "date_published" : "2026-04-14T14:03:44Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-14T15:17:30Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/glider-is-back", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/glider-is-back", "external_url" : "https://bsky.app/profile/engineersneedart.com/post/3mjf3ldjbp22k", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJohn Calhoun, on Bluesky (and also a new blog):
\n\n\n\n\nI re-made Glider some years back for MacOS/iOS. It broke at some\npoint (perhaps an Apple change for Retina displays?) so I pulled\nit from the App Store.
\n\n(Claude looked at the code — found some minor coordinate issues.\nThanks!) Glider Classic for MacOS is back on.
\n
11 years between version 1.0.4 and yesterday’s 1.1 looks like a long time. But when you consider that Calhoun shipped the original Glider back in 1988, that puts things in perspective. If you’ve never used Glider, it remains an all-time great procrastination utility. There aren’t many Mac apps still in development from that era.
\n\n(Calhoun, you will recall, in addition to making a slew of early Mac games, went on to a long career as an engineer at Apple, where, amongst other things, he worked on Preview for many years. He now makes cool personal projects like SystemSix and this excellent model of the Pan Am Orion that was in some old movie.)
\n\nLink: bsky.app/profile/engineersneedart.com/post/3mjf3ldjbp22k
\n" }, { "title" : "Steven Soderbergh Twice Pitched James Bond Projects", "date_published" : "2026-04-14T00:30:46Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-14T00:30:46Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/soderbergh-steven-soderbergh", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/soderbergh-steven-soderbergh", "external_url" : "https://theplaylist.net/steven-soderbergh-says-he-pitched-two-different-james-bond-plans-including-a-twofer-that-would-have-created-an-new-auteur-lane-for-the-franchise-20260409/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nThe Playlist:
\n\n\n\n\nThe first pitch, he said, goes back to 2008, and it was already\npretty radical by Bond standards. “I had pitched in 2008 the\nidea to Barbara Broccoli of a parallel franchise,” Soderbergh\nsaid. “Set in the ’60s, R-rated, violent, sexy. Fictional\nbackstory to real historical events, different actor, different\nuniverse.” [...]
\n\nThat version was designed to open up a different, more lo-fi,\nstripped-down, and cost-effective way of making Bond movies, but\nnot a replacement for them. “[It would be] cheaply made, where you\nget people like me, who are interested in that approach to do one\nof these things,” Soderbergh explained. “It’s just another lane\nthat exists totally separate from the normal Bond movies.”
\n\nBroccoli and company, he said, were at least open enough to hear\nit out. “They were intrigued,” Soderbergh said. “But didn’t move\nforward.”
\n
This hurts — it hurts to ponder what could have been.
\n\nLink: theplaylist.net/steven-soderbergh-says-he-pitched-two…
\n" }, { "title" : "Apple Frames 4", "date_published" : "2026-04-13T23:55:46Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-13T23:56:32Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/apple-frames-4", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/apple-frames-4", "external_url" : "https://www.macstories.net/stories/introducing-apple-frames-4-a-revamped-shortcut-support-for-frame-colors-proportional-scaling-and-the-apple-frames-cli-for-developers/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nFederico Viticci:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\nToday, I’m very happy to introduce Apple Frames 4, a major update\nto my shortcut for framing screenshots taken on Apple devices with\nofficial Apple product bezels. Apple Frames 4 is a complete\nrethinking of the shortcut that is noticeably faster, updated to\nsupport all the latest Apple devices, and designed to support even\nmore personalization options. For the first time ever, Apple\nFrames supports multiple colors for each device, allowing you to\nmix and match different colored bezels for each framed screenshot;\nit also supports proportional scaling when merging screenshots\nfrom different Apple devices.
\n\nBut that’s not all. In addition to an updated shortcut, I’m also\nreleasing the Apple Frames CLI, an open source\ncommand-line utility that lets developers and tinkerers automate\nthe process of framing screenshots directly from the Mac’s\nTerminal. And there’s more: the Apple Frames CLI is also\ndesigned to work with AI agents, and it comes with a Claude\nCode/Codex skill that lets coding agents take care of framing\ndozens or even hundreds of screenshots in just a few seconds, from\nany folder on your Mac.
\n
\n\n\nI’ve been using this recently and it is super helpful. I must\nframe dozens of screenshots a week and always looking for more\nefficient workflows for it.
\n
Link: macstories.net/stories/introducing-apple-frames-4-a…
\n" }, { "title" : "Memory, They Say, Is the First Thing to Go", "date_published" : "2026-04-13T23:46:10Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-13T23:46:11Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/memory-they-say", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/memory-they-say", "external_url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2006/09/zoom_using_scroll_wheel", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nWelp, turns out I wrote an entire post about the Control-scroll zoom-in-and-out feature all the way back in 2006, when it was a new feature in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Somehow, between 2006 and last year, I completely forgot about it. I don’t think it helps that the settings moved from the Mouse panel to the Zoom sub-section inside Accessibility. But I’ve used it so much in the last year, since rediscovering it, that I can’t believe I ever forgot it. Anyway, after I posted about it earlier today, a few people told me they could swear they learned about it here, long ago. They were right!
\n\nLink: daringfireball.net/2006/09/zoom_using_scroll_wheel
\n" }, { "title" : "[Sponsor] WorkOS FGA: The Authorization Layer for AI Agents", "date_published" : "2026-04-13T21:18:07Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-13T21:18:21Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/2026/04/workos_fga_the_authorization_l", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/2026/04/workos_fga_the_authorization_l", "external_url" : "https://workos.com/blog/agents-need-authorization-not-just-authentication?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q22026", "authors" : [ { "name" : "Daring Fireball Department of Commerce" } ], "content_html" : "\nEvery AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius.
\n\nThe winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features.They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions.
\n\n\n\nLink: workos.com/blog/agents-need-authorization-not-just…
\n" }, { "title" : "Tahoe Nitpick of the Day: ‘Reduce Transparency’ Makes Layers Harder to See, Not Easier", "date_published" : "2026-04-13T20:56:15Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-13T20:56:26Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/tahoe-reduce-transparency", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/tahoe-reduce-transparency", "external_url" : "https://mastodon.social/@tuomas_h/116397694769738857", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nTuomas Hämäläinen, on Mastodon:
\n\n\n\n\nWe’re at Mac OS 26.4 and seems like the accessibility toggles\nshould be way more considered than they are.
\n\nHere’s a comparison between “Reduce transparency” off and on. How\ndoes it make sense that turning this setting on actually\nreduces contrast between the background and the UI elements?\nButtons and sidebars get this grey cast, which makes them almost\nblend in with the drop shadows.
\n
Tahoe looks like Huawei’s rushed rip-off of what Tahoe should be.
\n\nLink: mastodon.social/@tuomas_h/116397694769738857
\n" }, { "title" : "John Martellaro, RIP", "date_published" : "2026-04-13T19:49:32Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-14T13:38:04Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/john-martellaro-rip", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/john-martellaro-rip", "external_url" : "https://geektells.com/john-martellaro-remembrance/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nBryan Chaffin, two weeks ago:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJohn Martellaro was good man. He was not only a better man than\nme, he was one of the best people I knew. It is with a heavy heart\nthat I tell you Mr. Martellaro passed away today.
\n\nHe rose to the rank of Captain in the U.S. Air Force, and he was a\nNASA scientist. He worked for years at Apple, and most importantly\nto me, he was a columnist and the voice of reason and humanity at\nThe Mac Observer. He wrote SciFi and a variety of tech columns for\nseveral other Mac sites, too.
\n
\n\n\nHe wrote for many Mac publications. Just his author page at\nTMO has 83 pages of article summaries.
\n
One of Martellaro’s columns I most remember was one I linked to in January 2010, “How Apple Does Controlled Leaks”:
\n\n\n\n\nOften Apple has a need to let information out, unofficially. The\ncompany has been doing that for years, and it helps preserve\nApple’s consistent, official reputation for never talking about\nunreleased products. I know, because when I was a Senior Marketing\nManager at Apple, I was instructed to do some controlled leaks.
\n\nThe way it works is that a senior exec will come in and say, “We\nneed to release this specific information. John, do you have a\ntrusted friend at a major outlet? If so, call him/her and have a\nconversation. Idly mention this information and suggest that if it\nwere published, that would be nice. No e-mails!”
\n
Inexplicably, the original piece is no longer hosted at The Mac Observer, but thankfully the Internet Archive has it. What’s interesting about this particular leak, to The Wall Street Journal, is that it came just three weeks before the introduction of the first iPad, and this was the story that pegged the price of the “new multimedia tablet device” at “about $1,000”.
\n\nThe actual starting price of the iPad was $500, which made the purpose of the leak — if indeed it was a deliberate strategy from Apple leadership — pretty obvious. A $500 price looks pretty good if everyone is expecting a $500 price. But a $500 price is cause for celebration if everyone is expecting it to cost $1,000. It’s a way of under-promising and over-delivering without ever having promised a damn thing.
\n\nAnother one worth revisiting is this post from December 2011, where I linked to a Martellaro column in which he declared that the success of the Amazon Kindle Fire necessitated that Apple build a 7-inch iPad. “Noted for future claim chowder,” I wrote. Well, Apple debuted the iPad Mini in October 2012.
\n\nI never did revisit Martellaro’s accurate prediction. Rest in peace, and enjoy the posthumous Being Right Point.
\n\nLink: geektells.com/john-martellaro-remembrance/
\n" }, { "title" : "Marcin Wichary Visits the Large Scale Systems Museum", "date_published" : "2026-04-13T19:09:13Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-13T19:10:05Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/wichary-large-scale-systems-museum", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/wichary-large-scale-systems-museum", "external_url" : "https://flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/72177720332956990/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nI’d never before heard of this museum, but now that I’ve seen Wichary’s photos, I want to go. Unsurprisingly, a lot of his shots are details of vintage keyboards. I keep pausing on this one, a “RE-START” key with the word broken across two lines. It’s clearly wrong but somehow feels right.
\n\nI’m linking to his album at Flickr, but he posted a long thread of images to Mastodon too.
\n\nLink: flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/72177720332956990/
\n" }, { "title" : "MacOS Tip: Enable the Zoom ‘Peek’ Gesture", "date_published" : "2026-04-13T17:43:16Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-13T23:51:05Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/macos-zoom-gesture", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/macos-zoom-gesture", "external_url" : "https://unsung.aresluna.org/testing-tip-enable-the-zoom-peek-gesture/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nMarcin Wichary, at Unsung:
\n\n\n\n\nGo to Settings > Accessibility > Zoom, and then turn on “Use\nscroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.”
\n\nThen, at any moment, you can hold Control and swipe with two\nfingers (or use a scroll wheel) up or down to zoom the\nentire screen.
\n\nI’d also recommend turning off “Smooth images” under “Advanced…”\nso you see individual pixels better.
\n
This is one of the very best MacOS tips. No third-party software. Built into MacOS for several (many?) years now. Incredibly useful.
\n\nBut I had no idea it existed until last June at WWDC. It was Monday, after the morning keynote and just before the afternoon State of the Union. Beautiful sunny day at Apple Park. I ran into my old friend Cabel Sasser, and, maniac that he is, he’d already installed the first Tahoe developer beta on his MacBook Pro. So I sat next to him and we started examining the UI changes in detail. And Cabel was zooming in and out instantaneously. I was like, “Whoa, how are you doing that?” And Cabel was like, “You don’t know about the Accessibility Zoom gesture? Here, let me show you!” And my mind was blown. Cabel emphasized the importance of going into the “Advanced…” dialog to turn off “Smooth images”, and I agree. This is a fantastic feature, but Apple has the default setting wrong for smoothing (a.k.a. blurring) the zoomed image. I honestly can’t imagine why anyone would want the zoomed image blurred.
\n\nAnyway, then we both laughed ourselves silly and made ourselves a little queasy examining, in detail, just how bad the Tahoe UI was. And I thought to myself, I need to post this as a tip on Daring Fireball.
\n\nWell, it took 10 months, but Wichary posting it on Unsung reminded me that I never posted about it here. [Update: Actually...] Turn this on, start using it, and you’ll find yourself using it every day if you care about design details.
\n\nBonus tip: Subscribe to Wichary’s Unsung in your RSS reader. He’s only been posting there since early December, and it quickly became one of my favorite blogs in the world. One of those blogs where I’m excited every time I see there’s a new post. I would read a post from Wichary describing what it’s like to watch paint dry, because I know he’d only write about it if he noticed something interesting and nuanced. Because he’s only been writing Unsung for a few months, you can catch up on the whole thing.
\n\nLink: unsung.aresluna.org/testing-tip-enable-the-zoom-peek…
\n" }, { "title" : "FT: ‘Meta Builds AI Version of Mark Zuckerberg to Interact With Staff’", "date_published" : "2026-04-13T16:56:46Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-13T20:18:01Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/ft-meta-zuckbot", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/13/ft-meta-zuckbot", "external_url" : "https://www.ft.com/content/02107c23-6c7a-4c19-b8e2-b45f4bb9ce5f", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nHannah Murphy, reporting for the Financial Times (paywalled, but Ars Technica has a no-paywall syndicated copy):
\n\n\n\n\nThe company recently began prioritising a Zuckerberg AI character,\nthree of the people said.
\n\nThe Meta chief is personally involved in training and testing his\nanimated AI, which could offer conversation and feedback to\nemployees, according to one person. They added that the character\nis being trained on the billionaire’s mannerisms, tone and\npublicly available statements, as well as his own recent thinking\non company strategies, so that employees might feel more connected\nto the founder through interactions with it.
\n
This is so straight out of every dystopian sci-fi film about an evil corporation that it’s hard to believe.
\n\nTop comment on Hacker News, from “flibbityflob”:
\n\n\n\n\nHow will a machine ever replace his famous warmth or empathy?
\n
Link: ft.com/content/02107c23-6c7a-4c19-b8e2-b45f4bb9ce5f
\n" }, { "title" : "Zed — A Font Superfamily", "date_published" : "2026-04-12T22:00:00Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-13T15:12:18Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/12/zed-font-superfamily", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/12/zed-font-superfamily", "external_url" : "https://www.typotheque.com/blog/zed-a-sans-for-the-needs-of-21century/?utm_source=df", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nMy thanks to Typotheque for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Zed, their incredible new font superfamily. Zed is a type system that was developed with one question in mind: what do readers actually need? Not what looks good in a type specimen, but what works for the widest possible range of readers. Typotheque tested Zed with visually impaired patients at a French ophthalmology hospital and found that Zed Text outperformed Helvetica in terms of reading speed across all patient groups. Designed from scratch to perform different functions, it comes in two optical versions — Text and Display — with four variable axes and support for 547 languages, including endangered ones.
\n\nZed is extremely practical, both in terms of its extraordinarily broad language support and the stylistic variations available via its adjustable width, weight, roundness, and slant. It even offers Braille characters and an icon font. But Zed is also simply beautiful. It’s a font family and type system that exemplifies the belief that rich accessibility and pure aesthetic appeal are not at odds.
\n\nWhen you purchase a license for Zed, you’re buying it directly from the designers. It’s just lovely, and you should check it out. (Don’t miss the short introductory video, either.)
\n\nLink: typotheque.com/blog/zed-a-sans-for-the-needs-of-21century/…
\n" }, { "title" : "Viktor Orban Loses Election in Hungary, Concedes Defeat, Congratulates Opposition Winners", "date_published" : "2026-04-12T21:59:00Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-12T22:57:31Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/12/orban-concedes", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/12/orban-concedes", "external_url" : "https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/world/europe/hungary-election-orban-magyar.html", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nThe New York Times:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn a surprisingly early and gracious concession speech in\nBudapest, Mr. Orban congratulated the opposition saying, “The\nresponsibility and opportunity to govern were not given to\nus.” But, he also made a vow: “We are not giving up. Never,\nnever, never.”
\n\nHis defeat paves the way for Peter Magyar, a former Orban loyalist\nand the leader of the main opposition party, to take over as\nHungary’s prime minister once the newly elected Parliament meets.
\n
\n\n\nOrban said the “election results, although not complete, are\nunderstandable and clear. They are painful for us but\nunequivocal.”
\n
There we have it: Viktor Orban — a MAGA star and general anti-democratic corrupt dirtbag — is a better and bigger man than Donald Trump, who still refuses to concede the 2020 election that he unequivocally lost to Joe Biden.
\n\nLink: nytimes.com/2026/04/12/world/europe/hungary-election-orban…
\n" }, { "title" : "Golden Tickets", "date_published" : "2026-04-12T17:39:26Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-12T17:41:05Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/12/golden-tickets", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/12/golden-tickets", "external_url" : "https://www.presentandcorrect.com/blogs/blog/golden-tickets", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nMore vintage graphic-design weekend fun — this time, a collection of Milwaukee bus tickets from the late 1940s to early 1950s, collected on the Present & Correct blog. So much variety in the colors and typography, but yet they all feel branded together. Think about the care and thought here. Whoever was making these was designing one for each week, every week — and it’s so clear they loved making them. Even something as mundane as weekly bus passes can be exuberant expressions of fun.
\n\n(Via Ian K. Rogers, who particularly notes the tickets’ integration of hand-lettering with typefaces.)
\n\nLink: presentandcorrect.com/blogs/blog/golden-tickets
\n" }, { "title" : "Pan American Luggage Labels", "date_published" : "2026-04-11T16:55:24Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-11T17:03:15Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/11/ella-freire-pan-am-tags", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/11/ella-freire-pan-am-tags", "external_url" : "https://ellafreire.com/collections/pan-american-luggage-labels", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nSome graphic design fun for the weekend: achingly gorgeous art pieces recreating vintage Pan Am luggage tags, by Ella Freire. I love them all. The colors, the type, the shapes — sublime.
\n\n(Via Dan Cederholm’s Studio Notes.)
\n\nLink: ellafreire.com/collections/pan-american-luggage-labels
\n" }, { "title" : "★ Let Us Learn to Show Our Friendship for a Man When He Is Alive and Not After He Is Dead", "date_published" : "2026-04-10T21:29:46Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-14T15:38:14Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/when_he_is_alive_and_not_after_he_is_dead", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/when_he_is_alive_and_not_after_he_is_dead", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nFor The New Yorker, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz go deep profiling Sam Altman under the mince-no-words headline “Sam Altman May Control Our Future — Can He Be Trusted?” 16,000+ words — roughly one-third the length of The Great Gatsby — very specifically investigating Altman’s trustworthiness, particularly the details surrounding his still-hard-to-believe ouster by the OpenAI board in late 2023, only to return within a week and purge the board. The piece is long, yes, but very much worth your attention — it is both meticulously researched and sourced, and simply enjoyable to read. Altman, to his credit, was a cooperative subject, offering Farrow and Marantz numerous interviews during an investigation that Farrow says took over a year and half.
\n\nA few excerpts and comments (not in the same order they appear in the story):
\n\n\n\n\nYet most of the people we spoke to shared the judgment of\nSutskever and Amodei: Altman has a relentless will to power that,\neven among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets\nhim apart. “He’s unconstrained by truth,” the board member told\nus. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same\nperson. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked\nin any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack\nof concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving\nsomeone.”
\n\nThe board member was not the only person who, unprompted, used the\nword “sociopathic.” One of Altman’s batch mates in the first Y\nCombinator cohort was Aaron Swartz, a brilliant but troubled coder\nwho died by suicide in 2013 and is now remembered in many tech\ncircles as something of a sage. Not long before his death, Swartz\nexpressed concerns about Altman to several friends. “You need to\nunderstand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one. “He is a\nsociopath. He would do anything.”
\n
A recurring theme in the piece is that colleagues who’ve worked with Altman the closest trust him the least. This bit about Aaron Swartz warning friends that Altman is a “sociopath” who “can never be trusted” is, to my knowledge, new reporting. Swartz’s opinion carries significant weight with me.1 Swartz is lionized (rightly) for his tremendous strengths, and the profoundly tragic circumstances of his martyrdom have resulted in less focus on his weaknesses. But I knew him fairly well and he led a very public life, and I’m unaware of anyone claiming he ever lied. Exaggerated? Sure. Lied? I think never.
\n\nAnother central premise of the story is that while it’s axiomatic that one should want honest, trustworthy, scrupulous people in positions of leadership at any company, the nature of frontier AI models demands that the organizations developing them be led by people of extraordinary integrity. The article, to my reading, draws no firm conclusion — produces no smoking gun, as it were — regarding whether Sam Altman is generally honest / trustworthy / scrupulous. But I think it’s unambiguous that he’s not a man of great integrity.
\n\nRegarding Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s other “CEO”:
\n\n\n\n\nSeveral executives connected to OpenAI have expressed ongoing\nreservations about Altman’s leadership and floated Fidji Simo, who\nwas formerly the C.E.O. of Instacart and now serves as OpenAI’s\nC.E.O. for AGI Deployment, as a successor. Simo herself has\nprivately said that she believes Altman may eventually step down,\na person briefed on a recent discussion told us. (Simo disputes\nthis. Instacart recently reached a settlement with the F.T.C., in\nwhich it admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to pay a\nsixty-million-dollar fine for alleged deceptive practices under\nSimo’s leadership.)
\n
This paragraph is juicy in and of itself, with its suggestions of palace intrigue. But it’s all the more interesting in light of the fact that, post-publication of the New Yorker piece, Fidji Simo has taken an open-ended medical leave from OpenAI. If we run with the theory that Altman is untrustworthy (the entire thesis of Farrow and Marantz’s story), and that Simo is also untrustworthy (based on the fraudulent scams she ran while CEO of Instacart, along with her running the Facebook app at Meta before that), we’d be foolish not to at least consider the possibility that her medical leave is a cover story for Altman squeezing Simo out after catching on to her angling to replace him atop OpenAI. The last thing OpenAI needs is more leadership dirty laundry aired in public, so, rather than fire her, maybe Altman let her leave gracefully under the guise of a relapse of her POTS symptoms?
\n\nSimo’s LinkedIn profile lists her in two active roles: CEO of “AGI deployment” at OpenAI, and co-founder of ChronicleBio (“building the largest biological data platform to power AI-driven therapies for complex chronic conditions”). If my spitball theory is right, she’ll announce in a few months that after recuperating from her POTS relapse, the experience has left her seeing the urgent need to direct her energy at ChronicleBio. Or perhaps my theory is all wet, and Simo and Altman have a sound partnership founded on genuine trust, and she’ll soon be back in the saddle at OpenAI overseeing the deployment of AGI (which, to be clear, doesn’t yet exist2). But regardless of whether the Altman-Simo relationship remains cemented or is in the midst of dissolving, it raises serious questions why — if Altman is a man of integrity who believes that OpenAI is a company whose nature demands leaders of especially high integrity — he would hire the Instacart CEO who spearheaded bait-and-switch consumer scams that all came right out of the playbook for unscrupulous car salesmen.
\n\nRegarding Altman’s stint as CEO at Y Combinator, and his eventual, somewhat ambiguous, departure, Farrow and Marantz write:
\n\n\n\n\nBy 2018, several Y.C. partners were so frustrated with Altman’s\nbehavior that they approached [Y Combinator founder Paul] Graham\nto complain. Graham and Jessica Livingston, his wife and a Y.C.\nfounder, apparently had a frank conversation with Altman.\nAfterward, Graham started telling people that although Altman had\nagreed to leave the company, he was resisting in practice. Altman\ntold some Y.C. partners that he would resign as president but\nbecome chairman instead. In May, 2019, a blog post announcing that\nY.C. had a new president came with an asterisk: “Sam is\ntransitioning to Chairman of YC.” A few months later, the post was\nedited to read “Sam Altman stepped away from any formal position\nat YC”; after that, the phrase was removed entirely. Nevertheless,\nas recently as 2021, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing\nlisted Altman as the chairman of Y Combinator. (Altman says that\nhe wasn’t aware of this until much later.)
\n\nAltman has maintained over the years, both in public and in recent\ndepositions, that he was never fired from Y.C., and he told us\nthat he did not resist leaving. Graham has tweeted that “we didn’t\nwant him to leave, just to choose” between Y.C. and OpenAI. In a\nstatement, Graham told us, “We didn’t have the legal power to fire\nanyone. All we could do was apply moral pressure.” In private,\nthough, he has been unambiguous that Altman was removed because of\nY.C. partners’ mistrust. This account of Altman’s time at Y\nCombinator is based on discussions with several Y.C. founders and\npartners, in addition to contemporaneous materials, all of which\nindicate that the parting was not entirely mutual. On one\noccasion, Graham told Y.C. colleagues that, prior to his removal,\n“Sam had been lying to us all the time.”
\n
Graham responded to this on Twitter/X thus:
\n\n\n\n\nSince there’s yet another article claiming that we “removed” Sam\nbecause partners distrusted him, no, we didn’t. It’s not because I\nwant to defend Sam that I keep insisting on this. It’s because\nit’s so annoying to read false accounts of my own actions.
\n
Which tweet includes a link to a 2024 tweet containing the full statement Farrow and Marantz reference, which reads:
\n\n\n\n\nPeople have been claiming YC fired Sam Altman. That’s not true.\nHere’s what actually happened. For several years he was running\nboth YC and OpenAI, but when OpenAI announced that it was going to\nhave a for-profit subsidiary and that Sam was going to be the CEO,\nwe (specifically Jessica) told him that if he was going to work\nfull-time on OpenAI, we should find someone else to run YC, and he\nagreed. If he’d said that he was going to find someone else to be\nCEO of OpenAI so that he could focus 100% on YC, we’d have been\nfine with that too. We didn’t want him to leave, just to choose\none or the other.
\n
Graham is standing behind Altman publicly, but I don’t think The New Yorker piece mischaracterized his 2024 statement about Altman’s departure from Y Combinator. Regarding the quote sourced to anonymous “Y.C. colleagues” that he told them “Sam had been lying to us all the time”, Graham tweeted:
\n\n\n\n\nI remember having a conversation after Sam resigned with a YC\npartner who said he and some other partners had been unhappy\nwith how Sam had been running YC. I told him Sam had told us\nthat all the partners were happy, so he was either out of touch\nor lying to us.
\n
And, emphasizing that this remark was specifically in the context of how happy Y Combinator’s partners were under Altman’s leadership of YC, Graham tweets:
\n\n\n\n\nEvery YC president tends to tell us the partners are happy. Sam’s\nsuccessor did too, and he was mistaken too. Saying the partners\nare unhappy amounts to saying you’re doing a bad job, and no one\nwants to admit or even see that.
\n\nSeems obvious in retrospect, but we’ve now learned we should ask\nthe partners themselves. (And they are indeed now happy.)
\n
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.
\n\nFrom the second half of the same paragraph quoted above, that started with Aaron Swartz’s warnings about Altman:
\n\n\n\n\nMultiple senior executives at Microsoft said that, despite\nNadella’s long-standing loyalty, the company’s relationship with\nAltman has become fraught. “He has misrepresented, distorted,\nrenegotiated, reneged on agreements,” one said. Earlier this year,\nOpenAI reaffirmed Microsoft as the exclusive cloud provider for\nits “stateless” — or memoryless — models. That day, it announced\na fifty-billion-dollar deal making Amazon the exclusive reseller\nof its enterprise platform for A.I. agents. While reselling is\npermitted, Microsoft executives argue OpenAI’s plan could collide\nwith Microsoft’s exclusivity. (OpenAI maintains that the Amazon\ndeal will not violate the earlier contract; a Microsoft\nrepresentative said the company is “confident that OpenAI\nunderstands and respects” its legal obligations.) The senior\nexecutive at Microsoft said, of Altman, “I think there’s a small\nbut real chance he’s eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or\nSam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”
\n
The most successful scams — the ones that last longest and grow largest — are ones with an actual product at the heart. Scams with no actual there there go bust quickly. The Bankman-Fried FTX scandal blew up quickly because FTX never offered anything of actual value. Bernie Madoff, though, had a long career, because much of his firm’s business was legitimate. It wasn’t only the Ponzi scheme, which is what enabled Madoff to keep the Ponzi scheme going for two decades.
\n\nBut the better comparison to OpenAI — if that “small but real chance” comes true — might be Enron. Enron was a real company that built and owned a very real pipeline and energy infrastructure business. ChatGPT and Codex are very real, very impressive technologies. Enron’s operations were real, but the story they told to investors was a sham. OpenAI’s technology is undeniably real and blazing the frontier of AI. It’s the financial story Altman has structured that seems alarmingly circular.
\n\nIn a 2005 Y Combinator “class photo”, Altman and Swartz are standing next to each other. Despite the fact that Altman was sporting a reasonable number of popped polo collars (zero), Swartz was clearly the better-dressed of the two.* ↩︎\n
\n* Aaron would’ve loved this footnote. Christ, I miss him.
With rare exceptions, I continue to think it’s a sign of deep C-suite dysfunction when a company has multiple “CEOs”. When it actually works — like at Netflix, with co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters (and previously, Sarandos and Reed Hastings before Hastings’s retirement in 2023) — the co-CEOs are genuine partners, and neither reports to the other. There is generally only one director of a movie, but there are exceptions, who are frequently siblings (e.g. the Coens, the Wachowskis, the Russos). A football team only has one head coach. The defensive coordinator is the “defensive coordinator”, not the “head coach of defense”. It’s obvious that Fidji Simo reports to Sam Altman, and thus isn’t the “CEO” of anything at OpenAI. But OpenAI does have applications, and surely is creating more of them, so being in charge of applications is being in charge of something real. By any reasonable definition, AGI has not yet been achieved, and many top AI experts continue to question whether LLM technology will ever result in AGI. So Simo changing her title to (or Altman changing her title to) “CEO of AGI deployment” is akin to changing her title to “CEO of ghost busting” in terms of its literal practical responsibility. ↩︎︎
\nThis new museum in Utrecht (about 30–40 minutes south of Amsterdam) seems just astonishing. The rainbow wall of iMacs alone is incredible.
\n\n\n\nLink: applemuseum.nl/
\n" }, { "title" : "MacOS Seemingly Crashes After 49 Days of Uptime — a ‘Feature’ Perhaps Exclusive to Tahoe", "date_published" : "2026-04-09T22:14:13Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-13T21:09:55Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/09/macos-crash-49-days", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/09/macos-crash-49-days", "external_url" : "https://sixcolors.com/link/2026/04/macs-crash-after-49-days-of-uptime/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nJason Snell, writing at Six Colors:
\n\n\n\n\nSoftware developer Photon, whose product requires running a bunch\nof Macs to connect to iMessage, discovered a pretty major\nbug:
\n\n\n\n\nEvery Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17\nhours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit\nunsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the\ninternal TCP timestamp clock… ICMP (ping) keeps working.\nEverything else dies. The only fix most people know is a reboot.
\nThe whole story is wild (albeit technical). Photon says they’re\nworking on a fix, but really, this is something Apple should be\nworking on.
\n
If you keep track of time using milliseconds, and store that in an unsigned 32-bit integer, it overflows after 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds. That’s the bug.
\n\nI think this bug is new to Tahoe. If you look at Apple’s open-source XNU kernel code — e.g. lines 3,732 to 3,745 in tcp_subr.c — you can see that the lines assigning the time in milliseconds to a uint32_t variable were checked in just six months ago, whereas most of the file is five years old. Also, I personally ran my MacBook Pro — at the time, running MacOS 15.7.2 Sequoia — up to 91 days of uptime in January. I even mentioned that remarkable uptime in my annual report card, in praise of Apple’s software reliability. Apple’s pre-Tahoe reliability, that is.
I was hesitant to link to this at all because the original (unbylined) report from Photon is so hard to follow. It’s downright manic — over 3,500 words with 33 section headings (<h2> and <h3> tags), with no cohesive narrative. The bug, seemingly, is not that complicated. The whole write-up from Photon just screams “AI-generated slop” to me, and I thus hesitate even to link to Snell’s piece linking to it. But I think the bug is real, and my sympathy for everyone afflicted with MacOS 26 Tahoe is sincere. (And if I’m wrong about the post being AI slop and a human at Photon actually wrote this, I would suggest taking it easy with the cocaine.)
Link: sixcolors.com/link/2026/04/macs-crash-after-49-days-of…
\n" }, { "title" : "Adobe Diddles With Your /etc/hosts File", "date_published" : "2026-04-09T20:35:30Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-10T02:48:09Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/09/adobe-etc-hosts-diddling", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/09/adobe-etc-hosts-diddling", "external_url" : "https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1sb6hzk/adobe_wrote_to_my_hosts_file_ive_never_had_an_app/oe1ap9h/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\n“thenickdude”, on Reddit:
\n\n\n\n\nThey’re using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already\ninstalled when you visit on their website.
\n\nWhen you visit https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image\nusing JavaScript:
\n\nhttps://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png
\n\nIf the DNS entry in your hosts file is present, your browser will\ntherefore connect to their server, so they know you have Creative\nCloud installed, otherwise the load fails, which they detect.
\n\nThey used to just hit http://localhost:<various ports>/cc.png\nwhich connected to your Creative Cloud app directly, but then\nChrome started blocking Local Network Access, so they had\nto do this hosts file hack instead.
\n
(Via Thom Holwerda at OSNews.)
\n\nThey didn’t have to do this, of course. In fact, quite obviously, they definitely should not be doing this. Adobe is just a third-party developer, no better, no more trusted, no more important than any other. Imagine if every piece of software on your computer added entries to your /etc/hosts file. Madness. Adobe should be ashamed of themselves. Adobe used to be a bastion of best practices for developers to follow. Now their installer/updater is indistinguishable from malware.
See also: Marc Edwards on Mastodon, and Michael Tsai.
\n\nLink: old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1sb6hzk/adobe_wrote_to_my…
\n" }, { "title" : "Lickspittle of the Week: Todd Blanche", "date_published" : "2026-04-09T17:10:48Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-09T17:11:06Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/09/blanche", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/09/blanche", "external_url" : "https://politicalwire.com/2026/04/09/extra-bonus-quote-of-the-day-1022/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nActing Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking of the president of the United States in a totally normal way:
\n\n\n\n\nI love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a\nlifetime. And if President Trump chooses to nominate somebody else\nand asks me to go do something else, I’ll say, “Thank you very\nmuch, I love you, sir.”
\n
The phrase Blanche was looking for is “Thank you sir, may I have another.”
\n\nLink: politicalwire.com/2026/04/09/extra-bonus-quote-of-the-day…
\n" }, { "title" : "Anthropic’s New Claude Mythos Is So Good at Finding and Exploiting Vulnerabilities That They’re Not Releasing It to the Public", "date_published" : "2026-04-08T15:49:15Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-09T01:25:37Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/08/claude-mythos-exploits", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/08/claude-mythos-exploits", "external_url" : "https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nAnthropic’s Frontier Red Team:
\n\n\n\n\nEarlier today we announced Claude Mythos Preview, a new\ngeneral-purpose language model. This model performs strongly\nacross the board, but it is strikingly capable at computer\nsecurity tasks. In response, we have launched Project Glasswing,\nan effort to use Mythos Preview to help secure the world’s most\ncritical software, and to prepare the industry for the practices\nwe all will need to adopt to keep ahead of cyberattackers.
\n\nThis blog post provides technical details for researchers and\npractitioners who want to understand exactly how we have been\ntesting this model, and what we have found over the past month. We\nhope this will show why we view this as a watershed moment for\nsecurity, and why we have chosen to begin a coordinated effort to\nreinforce the world’s cyber defenses.
\n
“Our new model is so good, it’s too dangerous to release to the public” is a message that sounds like it could be marketing hype. But it seems like it’s probably true. Examples cited by Anthropic include finding and exploiting a 27-year-old OpenBSD bug (that can crash any device running OpenBSD) and a 16-year-old bug in the widely used FFmpeg media processing library.
\n\nSee also: Techmeme’s extensive roundup.
\n\nLink: red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/
\n" }, { "title" : "Solar Eclipse From the Far Side of the Moon", "date_published" : "2026-04-07T22:23:27Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-16T16:36:25Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/07/solar-eclipse-from-the-far-side-of-the-moon", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/07/solar-eclipse-from-the-far-side-of-the-moon", "external_url" : "https://kottke.org/26/04/solar-eclipse-far-side-of-the-moon", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nKottke:
\n\n\n\n\nThis shot from Artemis II of the Moon eclipsing the Sun is one\nof the most breathtaking astronomical photos I’ve ever seen.\nHoly shit.
\n
Follow NASA on Flickr for more.
\n\nUpdate: In a follow-up post, Kottke has assembled a slew of great iPhone wallpapers from Artemis II photos, along with links to other collections, like Basic Apple Guy’s. Also, The Iconfactory has added a bunch of these images to their wonderful Wallaroo app (which is how I’ve switched to one on my own iPhone).
\n\nUpdate 2: Nils Streedain has made wallpapers for the Mac optimized for OLED displays (HEIC native format, pure #000 black background, etc.). Gorgeous.
Link: kottke.org/26/04/solar-eclipse-far-side-of-the-moon
\n" }, { "title" : "Sam Altman, in a Video Released by OpenAI, Apparently Thinks AGI Is Going to Hit Society Like a Once-a-Century Pandemic", "date_published" : "2026-04-07T22:23:07Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-07T22:23:08Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/07/altman-covid", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/07/altman-covid", "external_url" : "https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2041618671236469200?s=20", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nNot sure why they think this comparison is reassuring rather than terrifying.
\n\nI also have to say that Altman’s claims, today, that OpenAI employees were obsessed with COVID weeks ahead of the rest of the world feels more than a little like Donald Trump’s repeated false claim that he predicted, pre-9/11, that Osama bin Laden would attack the U.S.
\n\nLink: x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2041618671236469200?s=20
\n" }, { "title" : "★ OpenAI Announces $122 Billion Additional ‘Committed Capital’, and Announces Their ‘Superapp’ Plan for the Future", "date_published" : "2026-04-07T22:07:08Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-08T01:58:15Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/openai_future", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/openai_future", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nOpenAI, one week ago, in an unbylined post on the company blog:
\n\n\n\n\nToday, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in\ncommitted capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion.
\n
For comparison, here are the current market caps and 2025 annual profits for public companies in that valuation range:
\n\n| Market Cap | 2025 Net Income | \n\n\n|
|---|---|---|
| Berkshire Hathaway | $1,028 B | $67 B | \n
| Walmart | $980 B | $22 B | \n
| Samsung | $855 B | $29 B | \n
| Eli Lilly | $832 B | $21 B | \n
These four companies, as of today, rank 11–14th on the list of largest companies by market cap.
\n\nIn a post last week, I quoted a Deutsche Bank projection estimating that OpenAI is going to lose $143 billion between 2024 and 2029. OpenAI’s refutation of this estimate is that no, they’re merely going to lose $111 billion in that timeframe. Even in the company’s own optimistic scenario, they’re going to lose, on average, as much money per year as any of these companies earn. (Well, except for Berkshire, which earned significantly more than the others last year.)
\n\nI’m not trying to be thick here. Obviously the idea behind OpenAI’s astronomical valuation is that at some point they’ll stop losing money, and then, presumably starting at some point in the 2030s, they’re going to start generating mountains of profit. P/E ratios are not effective for evaluating a startup in hyper-growth phase, but the idea is that eventually a successful startup will achieve a balanced P/E ratio. That seems possible for OpenAI. It also seems far, if not very far, from certain. My gut feeling, now more than ever, is that it is unlikely to happen, and that the most likely scenario is that the entire company goes into history alongside companies like Enron. They’re generating steadily increasing revenue now, yes, but by selling dollars of compute for pennies. First CityWide Change Bank had a better business strategy than that — they gave you the correct change.1
\n\nI purposely stretched the valuation range in my table above into the $1T market cap range so I could include Berkshire Hathaway, a company I’ve always greatly admired. Warren Buffett has long promoted the idea of seeking to invest in companies not just with moats, but with defensible moats. I still haven’t seen a good refutation of the leaked internal Google white paper whose actual title was “We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI”. What Google does have are highly profitable existing products and services.
\n\nBack to OpenAI’s funding announcement, skipping over the next 1,111 words, all of which struck me as meaningless blather (and, if I had to bet, largely written by ChatGPT):
\n\n\n\n\nThat is why we are building a unified AI superapp. As models\nbecome more capable, the limiting factor shifts from intelligence\nto usability. Users do not want disconnected tools. They want a\nsingle system that can understand intent, take action, and operate\nacross applications, data, and workflows. Our superapp will bring\ntogether ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and our broader agentic\ncapabilities into one agent-first experience.
\n\nThis is not just product simplification. It is a distribution and\ndeployment strategy.
\n
This is not “product simplification” at all. This is product complication. Web browsers are incredibly complex apps. OpenAI’s web browser — Atlas — is a failure. No one uses it. And they think they’re going to simplify things by cramming Atlas — an unpopular web browser almost no one has heard of — together with their chatbot and developer tool? Would it strike you as a simplification, or a sign of product design depravity, if Apple announced that it was merging Safari and Messages into one “superapp”? Focused, discrete apps are the best proven way to manage complexity.
\n\nMaybe merging all their apps into one will work out for OpenAI. But even if it does, it won’t be simpler. Microsoft Outlook is an email client and calendar app crammed together, and it has tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of users. But no one calls it “product simplification”. OpenAI’s “superapp” strategy reads to me like a company that is in a panic. And in that panic, they might be poised to eradicate the product focus that their current users like about ChatGPT in the first place.
\n\nAnd that’s just my read from before their late-Friday news dump of executive leadership shuffling. Hayden Field at The Verge reports (gift link):
\n\n\n\n\nOpenAI is undergoing another round of C-suite changes, according\nto an internal memo viewed by The Verge.
\n\nFidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of AGI deployment — who was until\nrecently the company’s CEO of applications — says in the memo\nthat she will be stepping away on medical leave “for the next\nseveral weeks” due to a neuroimmune condition. While she’s out,\nOpenAI president Greg Brockman will be in charge of product,\nincluding leading OpenAI’s “superapp” efforts. On the business\nside, CSO Jason Kwon, CFO Sarah Friar, and CRO Denise Dresser will\ntake charge.
\n
The Verge runs Simo’s full memo at the bottom of their story, if you want to read it yourself. Simo’s title used to be CEO of applications, now it’s CEO of AGI deployment, but the last thing she oversaw before departing on an open-ended medical leave was ... checks notes ... negotiating the acquisition of a YouTube tech news show for “low hundreds of millions of dollars” (per the Financial Times). That’s the deployment of something, but not artificial general intelligence.
\n\nSimo, too, is credited with the “superapp” strategy (which I will not stop putting in dick quotes). It certainly sounds like something someone from Facebook would think up. But now she’s not going to be there to oversee it. I wish Simo well with her health issues, which seem significant, but none of this paints a picture of a well-run company with any sort of cohesive strategic vision.
\n\nUntil last week, I hadn’t seen Zoë Schiffer’s profile of Simo for Wired from November, soon after she joined OpenAI as a CEO, but not the CEO:
\n\n\n\n\nSimo hasn’t been seen much at OpenAI’s San Francisco office since\nshe began as CEO of Applications in August. But her presence is\nfelt at every level of the company — not least because she’s\nheading up ChatGPT and basically every function that might make\nOpenAI money. Simo is dealing with a relapse of postural\northostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) that makes her prone to\nfainting if she stands for long periods of time. So for now, she’s\nworking from home in Los Angeles, and she’s on Slack. A lot.
\n\n“Being present from 8 am to midnight every day, responding within\nfive minutes, people feel like I’m there and that they can reach\nme immediately, that I jump on the phone within five minutes,” she\ntells me. Employees confirm that this is true. OpenAI’s famously\nSlack-driven culture can be overwhelming for new hires. But not,\napparently, for Simo. Employees say she is often seen popping into\nchannels and threads, sharing thoughts and asking questions.
\n
OpenAI’s work environment seems not merely overwhelming, but torturous. I have no reason to believe Simo’s medical leave is anything but a legitimate medical leave, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she never comes back. (What’s the point of being CEO of AGI deployment when there is no AGI to deploy?)
\n\nI don’t see the path from here to there, where there is a justification for a trillion-dollar-ish valuation for this company.
\n\nThere’s a joke to be made here about this “$122 billion in committed capital” being called such because the investors throwing good money after bad into OpenAI ought to be committed. ↩︎
\nZed is a type system that was developed with one question in mind: what do readers actually need? Not what looks good in a type specimen, but what works for the widest possible range of readers. We tested Zed with visually impaired patients at a French ophthalmology hospital and found that Zed Text outperformed Helvetica in terms of reading speed across all patient groups. Designed from scratch to perform different functions, it comes in two optical versions — Text and Display — with four variable axes and support for 547 languages, including endangered ones. It is available directly from the designers.
\n\nLink: typotheque.com/blog/zed-a-sans-for-the-needs-of-21century/…
\n" }, { "title" : "★ David Pogue’s ‘Apple: The First 50 Years’", "date_published" : "2026-04-02T14:57:28Z", "date_modified" : "2026-04-02T19:08:01Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/pogue_apple_first_50_years", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/pogue_apple_first_50_years", "authors" : [ { "name" : "John Gruber" } ], "content_html" : "\nPogue was my guest on The Talk Show a few weeks ago to talk about his new book, Apple: The First 50 Years, and the show was a lot of fun. But the book is so good, so comprehensive, so fun that it feels essential to link to it whilst we celebrate Apple’s 50th year. I’m a print guy, generally, but the print edition of this book is especially good — it’s a gorgeous book printed in full color throughout (not just, say, 16 color pages in the middle). Apple’s history is both literally and figuratively colorful, and the photos and screenshots Pogue includes are terrific.
\n\nThe book is nothing short of an instant classic — simultaneously a very enjoyable read, and a meticulously-researched reference for the decades to come. Pogue both covers well-known ground and reports umpteen nuggets, anecdotes, and details that have never been told before. For example, we all know that Steve Jobs was resistant to opening the iPhone to third-party apps. But Pogue interviewed Scott Forstall and got this story, about just how far Steve Jobs thought Apple could go to expand the iPhone’s software library while not opening it to third-party developers:
\n\n\n\n\n“I want you to make a list of every app any customer would ever\nwant to use,” he told Forstall. “And then the two of us will\nprioritize that list. And then I’m going to write you a blank\ncheck, and you are going to build the largest development team in\nthe history of the world, to build as many apps as you can as\nquickly as possible.”
\n\nForstall, dubious, began composing a list. But on the side, he\ninstructed his engineers to build the security foundations of an\napp store into the iPhone’s software-“against Steve’s knowledge\nand wishes,” Forstall says. [...]
\n\nTwo weeks after the iPhone’s release, someone figured out how to\n“jailbreak” the iPhone: to hack it so that they could install\ncustom apps.
\n\nJobs burst into Forstall’s office. “You have to shut this down!”
\n\nBut Forstall didn’t see the harm of developers spending their\nefforts making the iPhone better. “If they add something\nmalicious, we’ll ship an update tomorrow to protect against that.\nBut if all they’re doing is adding apps that are useful, there’s\nno reason to break that.”
\n\nJobs, troubled, reluctantly agreed.
\n\nWeek by week, more cool apps arrived, available only to jailbroken\nphones. One day in October, Jobs read an article about some of the\ncoolest ones.
\n\n“You know what?” he said. “We should build an app store.”
\n\nForstall, delighted, revealed his secret plan. He had followed in\nthe footsteps of Burrell Smith (the Mac’s memory-expansion\ncircuit) and Bob Belleville (the Sony floppy-drive deal): He’d\ndisobeyed Jobs and wound up saving the project.
\n
The book is just under 600 pages, including a comprehensive index, and it isn’t padded. It is a veritable encyclopedia of Apple history. Just a remarkable, essential, and unique work. If you haven’t ordered a copy, you should, and if you do, here are some make-me-rich affiliate links:
\n\nJust this week I wrote about a hidden defaults preference you can set to turn off most of the insipid menu item icons in most of Apple’s first-party apps in MacOS 26 Tahoe. I bemoaned the fact that Safari — generally an exemplar of what makes a great Mac app a great Mac app — generally ignored this setting, leaving most of its menu item icons in place. I am delighted to report that that’s fixed in MacOS 26.4. With the preference set to hide these icons, Safari now only shows a handful.
Here’s a link to the screenshot of the old before/after, taken on MacOS 26.3.2. Boo hiss. Here’s the new before/after, taken on MacOS 26.4:
\n\n\n\nIn Tahoe 26.3 (and presumably, earlier versions of Tahoe), 16 of 19 menu items in Safari’s File menu still showed an icon with this setting enabled. In 26.4, only 5 of 19 do.1 The rest of Safari’s other menus have been updated similarly, and look so much better for it.
\n\nIt’s interesting to me that Safari was updated to support this hidden preference in 26.4. I take it as a sign that there’s a contingent within Apple (or at least within the Safari team) that dislikes these menu item icons enough to notice that Safari wasn’t previously recognizing this preference setting. (And I further take it as a sign that within Apple’s engineering ranks, the existence of this defaults setting is widely known.) Keep hope alive.
Another recent Tahoe-related tip I’ve been writing about was using a device management profile to block the prompts in System Settings → General → Software Update to “upgrade” from MacOS 15 Sequoia to 26 Tahoe. I first wrote about it a month ago, linking to a post from Rob Griffiths. I then wrote about it again, just this week, linking to a YouTube video from Mr. Macintosh.
\n\nEver since this technique started making the rounds, there was widespread commentary that it was taking advantage of a bug, not a feature, in MacOS 15 Sequoia. The 90-day “deferral” period to block the Tahoe update prompts was supposed to be from the date of the Tahoe major release (26.0), not from the most recent minor release. Welp, with this week’s release of MacOS 15.7.5, this bug is fixed, and Tahoe shows up in the Software Update panel in System Settings even if you have one of these device management profiles installed. Alas.
\n\nAll is not lost, however. The same video from Mr. Macintosh shows a second, slightly less elegant way to banish all signs of Tahoe in Software Update (just after the 9:00 mark). The trick is to register your Mac for the MacOS Sequoia Public Beta updates (or the developer betas). This blocks all signs of Tahoe. You don’t actually have to install any future betas of Sequoia (at the moment, there are none available). Just make sure you have Automatic Updates disabled too. I’d rather risk inadvertently installing a public beta of 15.8 Sequoia than inadvertently “upgrading” to Tahoe.
\n\nIn my article earlier this week, my screenshots showed only 18 menu items in Safari’s File menu, not 19. That’s because I took those screenshots on my review unit MacBook Neo, which I’m running in near-default state. Safari’s File → Import From Browser submenu appears in the File menu if and only if you have certain third-party web browsers installed on your system. On my MacBook Neo review unit, I don’t have any third-party browsers installed, so Safari omits this menu item. I snapped today’s screenshots from a different Tahoe machine that has Firefox installed. ↩︎
\nSteven Troughton-Smith, over the weekend:
\n\n\n\n\nHere’s one for the icons-in-menus haters on macOS Tahoe:
\n\n\n\ndefaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool NO\nIt even preserves the couple of instances you do want icons, like\nfor window zoom/resize.
\n
You do not need to restart or log out after applying this setting, but you will need to quit and relaunch any apps that are currently running for it to take effect.
\n\nIf this worked to hide all of these cursed little turds smeared across the menu bar items of Apple’s system apps in Tahoe, this hidden preference would be a proverbial pitcher of ice water in hell. As it stands, alas, it’s more like half a glass of tepid water. Still quite welcome when you’re thirsty in hell, though.
\n\nThe problem is that while some of Apple’s system apps obey this setting across the board, others obey it only scattershot, and others still ignore it completely. Apple’s AppKit apps — real Mac apps — are the most likely to obey it. In the Finder, Notes, Photos, Preview, and TextEdit, it pretty much kills all menu item icons, leaving behind only a few mostly useful ones. (Among the random inconsistencies: Preview still shows an icon for the File → Print command — a stupid printer icon, natch — but none of the other apps listed above show an icon for the Print command.)
\n\nMail and Calendar are more scattershot. Calendar hides most menu item icons, but keeps a few in the File menu. Mail is more like half-and-half, with no apparent rhyme or reason to which menu items still show icons. In the Mailbox menu, nearly all items have their icons removed; in the Messages menu, most keep their icons even with this setting set to hide them.
\n\nSafari is a heartbreak. It’s one of my favorite, most-used apps, and generally, one of Apple’s best exemplars of what makes a great Mac app a great Mac app. But with this setting enabled, only a handful of seemingly random menu items have their icons hidden. For example, here is the File menu in Safari v26.3.1, before and after applying this setting:
\n\n\n\nSo, after applying a setting that should hide almost all menu item icons, 15 out of 18 menu items still have icons in Safari’s File menu — with no rhyme or reason to the 3 that are omitted. Safari’s other menus are similarly noncompliant. Like I said, heartbreaking.
\n\n(All is not lost in Safari, however — the setting does remove the icons from Safari’s contextual menu.)
\n\nApple’s non-AppKit (Catalyst/UIKit/SwiftUI) Mac apps are mostly lost causes on this front. Messages, Maps, and Journal keep all their icons, except for the Window menu. The iPhone Mirroring app hides the icons from its Edit and Window menus, but keeps all of them in the View menu.
\n\nSo it’s a mixed bag. But even a mixed bag is better than seeing all of these insipid ugly distracting icons. Apple should fix these apps so they all fully support this global preference (that’s what the -g switch in Troughton-Smith’s command-line incantation means), and should expose this setting as a proper, visible toggle in the System Settings app. And of course, in MacOS 27, Apple should remove most of these icons from these apps, leaving behind only the handful that add actual clarity to their menu items. There’s an outcome just waiting to be had where the MacOS menu bar is better than it used to be, not worse, by carefully adding icons only next to commands where the icons add clarity.
My favorite example: commands to rotate images, like the Tools → Rotate Left and Rotate Right commands in Preview, and Image → Rotate Clockwise and Rotate Counterclockwise in Photos.1 The rule of thumb should be that menu items should have icons if the icon alone could provide enough of a clue to replace the command name. That’s very much true for these Rotate commands, and the icons help reduce the cognitive load of thinking about which way is clockwise.
\n\nAnd but so what about third-party Mac apps? I think the best solution is for third-party apps to ignore Apple’s lead, and omit menu item icons on apps that have been updated for the new appearance on MacOS 26 Tahoe. That’s what Brent Simmons has done with NetNewsWire 7, using code he published as open source. Rogue Amoeba Software has adopted the same technique to improve their suite of apps when running on Tahoe, and published this blog post, illustrated with before and after screenshots, to explain their thinking.
\n\nNo one is arguing that icons never improve the clarity of menu items. But for the most part, menu commands should be read. If a few special menu items are improved by including icons, include just those. They’ll stand out, further improving clarity. Part of the problem with Apple’s “almost every menu item has an icon” approach with their own apps on Mac OS 26 Tahoe is that — as copiously documented by Nikita Prokopov and Jim Nielsen — the overall effect is to add visual clutter, reducing clarity. But a side effect of that clutter is that it reduces the effectiveness of the menu items for which icons are actually useful (again, like Rotate commands, or the items in the Window → Move & Resize submenu). If every menu item has an icon, the presence of an icon is never special. If only special menu items have icons, the presence of an icon is always special.2
\n\nIt should go without saying that these commands in Preview and Photos should use the same terms. Either both should use Rotate Left/Right, or both should use Rotate Clockwise/Counterclockwise. I personally prefer Clockwise/Counterclockwise, but the inconsistency is what grates. In the heyday of consistency in Apple’s first-party Mac software, Apple’s apps were, effectively, a living HIG. If you were adding a Rotate command to your own application, and you were unsure whether to call it “Rotate Right” or “Rotate Clockwise”, you could just check what Apple did, in its own apps, and feel certain that you were doing the right thing, using the correct terms. ↩︎
\nBBEdit offers a great example. BBEdit can be used, free of charge, in perpetuity with a limited (but robust!) subset of its full feature set. Its full feature set is unlocked with a one-time purchase for each major release version. But the full feature set is available as a 30-day trial — which trial period is reset each time a major new version is released. During that trial period, menu commands that are paid features are available to use, but marked with a “★” icon. (A very fine choice of icon, if you ask me.) Here, for example, are screenshots of BBEdit’s Text and Go menus while in trial mode. When the trial period ends, those commands are disabled, but remain visible in the menus, still marked with those star icons. Thus, during the free trial period, users can see which commands they’re using that they’ll need to pay for when the trial ends, and after the trial ends, they can see which features are locked. (After you purchase a license, those star icons just go away.) ↩︎︎
\n![https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png](\"https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png\"){kind=link}
![the screenshot of the old before/after](\"https://daringfireball.net/misc/2026/03/safari-tahoe-file-menu-before-after.png\"){kind=link}
![\n](\"https://daringfireball.net/misc/2026/03/safari-tahoe-file-menu-before-after-26.4.png\"){kind=link}
![blocks all signs of Tahoe](\"https://daringfireball.net/misc/2026/03/sequoia-software-update-with-public-betas.png\"){kind=link}
![Text](\"https://daringfireball.net/misc/2026/03/bbedit-text-menu-icons.png\"){kind=link}
![Go](\"https://daringfireball.net/misc/2026/03/bbedit-go-menu-icons.png\"){kind=link}