Linked List: February 24, 2025

Monday, 24 February 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Nothing Is Possible’ ★

Special guest: Paul Kafasis. Special topics: Siri/Super Bowl nonsense, “Gulf of Mexico/America” nonsense, the iPhone 16e gets announced, and a veritable Bond villain buys the rights to the James Bond movie franchise.

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Mission Accomplished: Trump Likes Apple’s Plan, Especially the Part About Mexico That I Don’t Think Was Real ★

Mike Allen, writing for Axios, under the headline “Trump Manufacturing Win: Apple to Spend $500 Billion in U.S., Hire 20,000”:

Trump met with Cook on Thursday in the Oval Office. Then Trump got so excited that he revealed the plans prematurely, saying on-camera while meeting with governors that Cook is “investing hundreds of billions of dollars. I hope he’s announced it — I hope I didn’t announce it, but what the hell? All I do is tell the truth — that’s what he told me. Now he has to do it, right?”

“He is investing hundreds of billions of dollars and others, too,” Trump continued. “We will have a lot of chipmakers coming in, a lot of automakers coming in. They stopped two plants in Mexico that were ... starting construction. They just stopped them — they’re going to build them here instead, because they don’t want to pay the tariffs. Tariffs are amazing.”

Apple and Tim Cook, I’m sure, are pleased as pie to have today’s announcement portrayed this way, as a “Trump manufacturing win”, despite the fact that it’s seemingly exactly in line with the trajectory Apple’s been on for US job creation since 2018, including a nearly identical announcement in 2021 (that they largely, but not entirely, followed through on).

The Mexico angle rings weird to my ears, though. Bloomberg picked up on that too, running a headline over the weekend that read “Trump Says Cook Shifting Apple Manufacturing From Mexico to US”.

The last thing I remember Apple having assembled in Mexico were a small number of late model Apple Extended Keyboard II’s in 1995 (which were inferior to their American-made models, like the one I’m using to write this). It’s quite possible I’m overlooking some Mexican-made Apple products in the intervening decades, but if there are any, they’re not recent. So I suspect Tim Cook, in his meeting with Trump last week, sold him a bill of goods, and more or less convinced Trump that Apple had been planning to commission some new plants in Mexico (a country so loathsome Trump confiscated their gulf) but, thanks to President Trump’s inspiring leadership, Apple would instead be building those plants right here in the US, in the big old red state of Texas — when in fact all of this is pretty much exactly what Apple had been planning to do all along.

Apple Announces Plan to Spend More Than $500 Billion in the U.S. Over the Next Four Years (Which Is Probably Exactly What They’ve Been Planning to Do) ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced its largest-ever spend commitment, with plans to spend and invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years.

The context of making a big deal over this announcement, of course, is that Apple is seeking exemptions from the Trump administration’s tariffs. $500 billion is a lot of money, even for Apple, and 20,000 new jobs over the next four years is a lot of jobs, especially at a time when many big tech companies are laying off, not hiring. (The federal government is trying to lay off a lot of employees too, if you haven’t heard.) But as the WSJ notes in their story on this announcement, those 20,000 new jobs are a continuation of their existing hiring growth: “The company, which had 164,000 full-time equivalent employees as of September, has added an average of 5,400 annually over the past five years.”

Apple announced a similar plan four years ago — $430 billion and 20,000 jobs. In the announcement of that 2021 plan, Apple said, “Over the past three years, Apple’s contributions in the US have significantly outpaced the company’s original five-year goal of $350 billion set in 2018.”

So I don’t think this announcement is bullshit, at all. But I also don’t think what Apple has announced today is much, if any, different from what they’d be doing if Kamala Harris had gotten 1–2 percent more of the vote in a handful of states in November. The difference is that everyone is looking for quid pro quo with President Transactional back in office.

Apple again:

As part of its new U.S. investments, Apple will work with manufacturing partners to begin production of servers in Houston later this year. A 250,000-square-foot server manufacturing facility, slated to open in 2026, will create thousands of jobs.

Previously manufactured outside the U.S., the servers that will soon be assembled in Houston play a key role in powering Apple Intelligence, and are the foundation of Private Cloud Compute, which combines powerful AI processing with the most advanced security architecture ever deployed at scale for AI cloud computing. The servers bring together years of R&D by Apple engineers, and deliver the industry-leading security and performance of Apple silicon to the data center.

Kind of interesting that the big manufacturing news is a product that Apple doesn’t even sell, but produces only for its own use. I don’t think this is a hint that they might begin selling servers (again), but who knows? I also wonder whether there’s a corporate-espionage security angle to assembling these servers here, rather than in China.

HP Added a 15-Minute Waiting Time for Telephone Support Calls ★

Paul Kunert, reporting for The Register last week:

HP Inc is trying to force consumer PC and print customers to use online and other digital support channels by setting a minimum 15-minute wait time for anyone that phones the call center to get answers to troublesome queries. The wait time was added on Tuesday, February 18, according to internal communications seen by The Register, and impacts retail patrons in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Italy, though we anticipate more countries could be added.

On the fifth, tenth, and thirteenth minute, the recorded message will tell HP customers it is “experiencing longer waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience,” and again remind them they may switch to alternatives.

Three days later, HP reversed the new policy, issuing this bullshit statement:

We’re always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience. This support offering was intended to provide more digital options with the goal of reducing time to resolve inquiries.

We have found that many of our customers were not aware of the digital support options we provide. Based on initial feedback, we know the importance of speaking to live customer service agents in a timely fashion is paramount. As a result, we will continue to prioritize timely access to live phone support to ensure we are delivering an exceptional customer experience.

There’s spin, and then there’s just bald-faced lying. This clearly had nothing to do with improving customer support and was simply about cost. HP so wanted to discourage customers from using phone support to reach a real person for help that they instituted a 15-minute penalty timeout to discourage people from waiting.

There’s some kind of joke to be made here about this literally inhumane approach to customer support being unveiled in the same week HP announced its acquisition of Humane — the company that turned its $1,000 AI Pins into bricks.

Sigma BF ★

Absolutely beautiful new camera from Sigma. Full-size sensor, interchangeable lens system, but it’s the camera design that jumps out:

The Sigma BF represents a new, more intuitive way to use a camera. It is streamlined to make the act of photography as effortless as possible. We have replaced the shooting mode dial — itself a holdover from the days of film photography — with direct access to the five elements that decide the photograph. Shutter speed, aperture, ISO, EV compensation and color mode are all immediately available at the touch of a finger. The new Status Monitor displays the currently active setting, so the screen provides an unobstructed view of the subject.

The BF’s high-resolution screen provides a distraction-free view of all necessary information — and nothing more. With one simple setting, it shows only the live view image, with the five key elements — shutter speed, aperture, ISO, EV compensation and color mode — displayed when you are ready to press the shutter button. All other options and settings are accessed via just three simple menu screens.

This camera immediately struck lust in my heart. So many fewer dials and buttons, it’s striking. They even got rid of storage cards — 230 GB of internal storage instead. $2000 (sans any lenses).