Linked List: March 2025

Saturday, 8 March 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Putting a Stink on the Letter X’ 

Craig Hockenberry returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s new hardware this week — M3 iPad Airs, A16 regular iPads, M4 MacBook Airs, and the M4 Max and surprising M3 Ultra Mac Studios. And we go deep on The Iconfactory’s years-in-the-making new app, Tapestry — a universal timeline for the Internet.

Exclusively sponsored by:

Broccoli, the Man – and Vegetable – Behind the Bond Franchise 

This whole 1989 profile of Albert “Cubby” Broccoli by John Culhane for the LA Times is full of enjoyable nuggets, but this fact blew my mind:

Giovanni Broccoli and his brother emigrated to Long Island from Calabria at the turn of the century. According to research done in Florence by Broccoli’s wife of 30 years, Dana, the brothers were descended from the Broccolis of Carrera, who first crossed two Italian vegetables, cauliflower and rabe, to produce the dark green, thick-stalked vegetable that took their name and eventually supported them in the United States.

Giovanni’s brother started a broccoli farm on Long Island, and soon all of Giovanni’s family worked for him. “Myself, my brother, my mother, my father — all working on our hands and knees,” said Broccoli, who picked up the nickname Cubby (after a round-faced comic strip character) at about that time. “Later on, we had our own farm.”

Two weeks ago on The Talk Show, I even joked with Paul Kafasis about the fact that in over 30,000 posts in Daring Fireball’s history, the only ones that contain the string “broccoli” are ones about the Bond movies, not the vegetable. Until now I guess.

(Via Dave Rutledge.)

Yours Truly on The Vergecast, on the Cinematic Future of James Bond Under Amazon’s Stewardship 

Pierce, David Pierce:

On this episode of The Vergecast , we talk about the future of Bond. (James Bond.) John Gruber, the author of Daring Fireball and a preeminent Bond expert, joins the show to talk about Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, its struggles with the Broccoli family over what to do with the Bond franchise, and why so many fans of the series are worried about what might happen when a company like Amazon takes over a beloved name. Will Bond turn out like Marvel, or Star Wars? Or something else entirely? We’ll see — but history suggests we shouldn’t be too optimistic.

I’m deeply pessimistic about the future of the Bond franchise, but I do love talking and thinking about it. Really enjoyed this chat.

Simon Willison on the Privacy/Security Risks of Personalized Siri, vis-à-vis Prompt Injection 

Simon Willison:

These new Apple Intelligence features involve Siri responding to requests to access information in applications and then performing actions on the user’s behalf.

This is the worst possible combination for prompt injection attacks! Any time an LLM-based system has access to private data, tools it can call and exposure to potentially malicious instructions (like emails and text messages from untrusted strangers) there’s a significant risk that an attacker might subvert those tools and use them to damage or exfiltrate a user’s data.

I published this piece about the risk of prompt injection to personal digital assistants back in November 2023, and nothing has changed since then to make me think this is any less of an open problem.

Prompt injection seems to be a problem that LLM providers can mitigate, but cannot completely solve. They can tighten the lid, but they can’t completely seal it. But with your private information, the lid needs to be provably sealed — an airtight seal, not a “well, don’t turn it upside down or shake it” seal. So a pessimistic way to look at this personalized Siri imbroglio is that Apple cannot afford to get this wrong, but the nature of LLMs’ susceptibility to prompt injection might mean it’s impossible to ever get right. And if it is possible, it will require groundbreaking achievements. It’s not enough for Apple to “catch up”. They have to solve a vexing problem — as yet unsolved by OpenAI, Google, or any other leading AI lab — to deliver what they’ve already promised.

So Apple had promised for this year — and oft promoted — an entire set of features that they not only have now acknowledged will not ship this year, but which they might, in fact, never be able to ship. Makes me wonder how many people inside Apple were voicing these concerns a year ago, and why they lost the debate to start promising these features last June and advertising them in September.

Apple Pulls Bella Ramsey Ad That Promoted Vaporware Personalized Siri Feature 

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Since last fall, Apple has been marketing the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence with an unreleased Siri feature. After confirming today that the more personal version of Siri isn’t coming anytime soon, Apple has pulled the ad in question.

The commercial starred Bella Ramsey who should probably win an award for acting like Siri worked.

In the ad spot, Ramsey sees someone familiar approaching and asks Siri the name of the person they had a meeting with the previous month at a specific restaurant.

Siri immediately responded with the name presumably based on a calendar event, email, or message on Ramsey’s iPhone.

I think that was the only TV commercial Apple ran showing the “personalized Siri through App Intents” feature that Apple has now admitted won’t ship in iOS 18, but I saw that commercial a lot during the baseball playoffs and NFL season. (I tend only to see TV commercials while watching sports.) The other Bella-Ramsey–starring Apple Intelligence ads all showcase Apple Intelligence features that are now shipping. But did Apple run other ads (TV, print, billboard) promoting this non-existent feature? I’m wondering what else they might send down the memory hole now that they’re facing reality on these personalized Siri features.

Apple’s product pages for Apple Intelligence, iOS 18, and MacOS 15 Sequoia are lousy with references to these “new era for Siri” features that we now know aren’t going to ship this year. This is a marketing fiasco.

Friday, 7 March 2025

Reuters on Apple’s Personalized Siri Apple Intelligence Delay 

Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters:

Some artificial intelligence improvements to Apple’s voice assistant Siri will be delayed until 2026, the company said on Friday.

In a statement, Apple said it has “been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”

I really don’t mean to be overly pedantic (so I’ve edited this post since original publication), but Apple’s statement reads “in the coming year”, so I think it’s possible we could see those features in iOS 19.0, 19.1, or 19.2 before the end of 2025. Would I want to bet on that? No. This feels like something of a reset, not just a “we need a few months” type thing.

Apple did not give a reason for the delays. The iPhone maker had previously indicated the features would come in 2025.

Again, hairsplitting, but I actually think “It’s going to take us longer than we thought” is a pretty good explanation.

Thursday, 6 March 2025

Nate Silver on the Demise of FiveThirtyEight 

Nate Silver, writing at his Silver Bulletin:

Last night, as President Trump delivered his State of the Union address, the Wall Street Journal reported that ABC News would lay off the remaining staff at 538 as part of broader cuts within corporate parent Disney. Having been through several rounds of this before, including two years ago when the staff was cut by more than half and my tenure expired too, I know it’s a brutal process for everyone involved. It’s also tough being in a business while having a constant anvil over your head, as we had in pretty much every odd-numbered (non-election) year from 2017 onward at 538/FiveThirtyEight. I don’t know all of the staffers from the most recent iteration of the site, but the ones I have met or who I overlapped with are all extremely conscientious and hard-working people and were often forced to work double-duty as jobs were cut but frequently not replaced. My heart goes out to them, and I’m happy to provide recommendations for people I worked with there.

Beyond that, I wasn’t inclined to say too much more, but it felt weirder not to say anything at all. And it’s easier to say something here than filter it through a reporter or something.

Wednesday, 5 March 2025

Apple Announces, With Much Surprise, Mac Studios With M4 Max and M3 Ultra (!) Chips 

Jason Snell, at Six Colors:

With the M4 Mac mini being powerfully tempting for desktop Mac users who crave power, Apple has upgraded the Mac Studio to blast past the mini in terms of performance. The base model, still starting at $1999, is powered by the M4 Max chip previously available only in the M4 MacBook Pro. And the new high-end Mac Studio, starting at the same $3999 price tag, is powered by a monstrous chip with 32 CPU cores (including 24 performance cores) and up to 80 GPU cores. It’s a chip never seen before anywhere — the M3 Ultra.

You heard me. For Apple’s fastest Mac ever — and it’s clear that it will be — Apple’s shipping a chip based on two high-end chips (fused together with Apple’s UltraFusion technology) from Apple’s previous processor generation. Weird, right? It seems like a few things are going on here: first, that the development of the Ultra chip takes longer and that Apple won’t commit to shipping an Ultra chip in every chip generation. Second, that the first-generation three-nanometer chip process of Apple’s chipmaking partner, TSMC, isn’t as dead and buried as generally thought. Just this week Apple also introduced an iPad Air with an M3 processor, and of course the new iPad mini shipped with an A17 Pro processor based on the same process.

This M3/M4 generational fork — the M3 Ultra chip debuting in new Mac Studio models alongside the M4 Max — was so unexpected that, during my embargoed press briefing about the news yesterday, I thought the Apple rep misspoke when he said M3, not M4, for the Ultra models. But no, the Ultra chip really is a generation behind. When asked the obvious question — why — Apple’s answer was straightforward: the Ultra chips take a lot longer to engineer.

The M4 Max Studio models are, computationally, equivalent (exactly, I think) with the M4 Max MacBook Pros that debuted October 30, maxing out (no pun intended) at 16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, 8 TB of storage, and 128 GB of RAM. The M4 Max Studio models start at $2,000, but that starting price only gets you a 14-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 512 GB of storage, and a measly 36 GB of RAM.

The intriguing M3 Ultra models start at $4,000, which gets you a 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 1 TB of storage, and a healthy 96 GB of RAM. Available upgrades to, uh, ultra out the Ultra models:

  • 32-core CPU + 80-core GPU: +$1,500
  • 256 GB of RAM: +$1,600
  • 512 GB of RAM: +$4,000 (only available with the 32-core CPU/80-core GPU)

SSD storage options for the Ultra models go up to 16 TB (a cool $4,600 over the base storage).

Apple Announces, With Little Surprise, M4 MacBook Airs 

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Let’s start with the surprises. Both M4 MacBook Air models are priced $100 less than their predecessors: $1199 for the 15-inch model and $999 for the 13-incher. If I’m not mistaken, this is the first time that the new-generation design of MacBook Air introduced with the M2 chip has been available at the classic $999 price at launch. (The M1 Air, based on the Intel-era visual design, debuted at $999, but the M2 Air debuted at $1199 and only reached $999 when it was offered as an older model alongside the M3 Air.) As of now, the M4 Air can hold down the sub-$1000 price point all on its own, and previous models are mostly discontinued.

Another surprise is the the new color option: Space Gray is out. The ultra-dark-blue Midnight remains, as do the classic Silver and hint-of-champagne Starlight. The new color is Sky Blue, which apparently is a metallic light blue that really shows itself as a color gradient when viewed at various angles.

Very cool that the new M4 starts at $999. Each successive generation of Apple Silicon, at least in laptops, is getting more and more predictably regular.

Who Cares About Getting News That’s True When You’re Getting It Fast With a $32,000/Year Bloomberg Terminal Subscription? 

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg on 6 December 2024, regarding Apple’s first in-house cellular modem, “Apple Plans Three-Year Modem Rollout in Bid to Top Qualcomm”:

For now, the modem won’t be used in Apple’s higher-end products. It’s set to come to a new mid-tier iPhone later next year, code-named D23, that features a far-thinner design than current models. The chip will also start rolling out as early as 2025 in Apple’s lower-end iPads.

We now know the name of that modem, the C1, from its debut in the iPhone 16e last month. Then, also on December 6, in a separate report headlined “Apple Explores Macs, Headsets With Built-In Cellular Data”:

The first modem will also appear in low-end iPads next year, with the 2026 update coming to Pro versions of the iPhone and iPad.

The cellular models of the new 11th generation iPads announced yesterday do not, it turns out, use the C1. The specs don’t match those of the iPhone 16e, and when I asked an Apple representative, they confirmed that none of the new iPads (including the Airs) use the C1 modem. (But, Apple reassured me, they all offer terrific cellular networking.)

I’m not saying Gurman was wrong, because there are nine full months left in 2025 for Apple to release a 12th-generation low-end iPad with the C1. The previous (10th) generation came out in October 2022, but the 9th generation came in September 2021, just 13 months prior. And this week’s new M3 iPad Airs replaced M2 models that arrived just 10 months ago. But, you know, it sure seems doubtful Apple is going to rev this hardware in 2025, so I’ll place my bet that he was wrong about this too.

(And yes, a Bloomberg Terminal subscription really does start at $32,000/year per seat.)

Mark Gurman, Ace Reporter, on the New Regular iPads 

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg, on January 12:

The new entry-level iPads — J481 and J482 — will get faster processors and Apple Intelligence. The current models have the A14 chip and 4 gigabytes of memory. Look for the new versions to have the A17 Pro chip, matching the iPad mini, and a bump to 8 gigabytes of memory. That’s the minimum needed to support the new AI platform.

The new iPads sport the A16 chip and thus do not support Apple Intelligence. But who cares about little details like that when you know the codenames, which is what really matters.

I’ll bet what happened is that Gurman was right, and the new iPads were set to use the A17 Pro chip and support Apple Intelligence. But after Gurman spoiled it seven weeks ago, Apple scrapped those plans and changed the chips to the A16 just to spite him.

Tapbots Releases Ivory 2.3 – and Announces That Phoenix, a Bluesky Client, Is Coming 

Tapbots:

v2.3 is now available on the App Store for Mac and iOS/iPadOS! What’s new?

  • Grouped Notifications (Mention and Notification tabs are now merged)
  • Support for AlphaNumeric Post IDs (Can now log into more services like GoToSocial)
  • Accessibility Improvements
  • Bug Fixes

I don’t like grouped notifications, but I’ve got nothing to complain about, because there’s a simple toggle at the top to just show mentions. Perfect.

The big news from Tapbots, though, is the announcement of Phoenix, a dedicated client for Bluesky:

Why two different clients? Why not one that supports both?

While there may be some conveniences of an app that supports multiple social media protocols, we believe the experience will be much better overall if we keep them separate. We do plan to provide a way to cross-post between them so you don’t have to write duplicate posts.

Hear hear to that.

Your Source for Scoops Half a Day Before They’re Announced Publicly 

Mark Gurman, yesterday at noon ET:

It’s not an “Air” — but the new Mac Studio, codenamed J575, appears to be imminent. It could be announced as early as this week along with the new MacBook Airs. There are signs these will come with an M4 Max but that its new Ultra chip will actually be an M3 Ultra.

Quite the scoop breaking this news after Apple started briefing media about it under NDA yesterday.

He’s not fooling anyone by dropping the J575 codename (which Apple would never include in a media briefing). That’s a bit of ham-fisted misdirection to make it seem like his source for this came from a product-aware source inside Apple, when in fact he almost certainly got it from someone in the media yesterday. (Codenames in and of themselves aren’t much of a secret inside Apple. That’s one reason they keep them so boring: letter-digit-digit-digit, usually.)

Apple conducted virtual media briefings yesterday for the iPad (M3 iPad Airs and A16 regular iPads) and Mac (M4 MacBook Airs and M4 Max/M3 Ultra Mac Studios). Apple announced the new iPads on Apple Newsroom yesterday morning at 9:00am ET, before those media briefings took place — the briefings were a recap of the announced news. Apple announced the new Macs today at 9:00am ET, after yesterday’s media briefings, which were under embargo until this morning. If you think it’s a coincidence that Gurman dropped zero last-minute tidbits about the new iPads (which were not briefed to the press ahead of time), but did drop the surprise M3 Ultra Mac Studio news (which was briefed, under embargo, ahead of time), I have a bridge to sell you.

He did the same thing with the VisionOS 2.4 news (Apple Intelligence, the new Spatial Gallery app, guest mode improvements). Apple held media briefings to share this news on Friday 14 February, under the condition that it was embargoed until the VisionOS 2.4 beta dropped the next week. But Gurman ran a report at Bloomberg with the embargoed info on Saturday 15 February. The only stuff he’s right about lately is what he gets from someone (or someones?) in the media leaking him embargoed info. It’s not going to take Sherlock Holmes for Apple to figure this out, especially when most of the Mac briefings yesterday were later in the day, after Gurman’s tweets. I’d put even money on him burning his source yesterday.

Tuesday, 4 March 2025

Trump 2.0 Is More Idiocracy Than Kakistocracy 

Ron Filipkowski:

Trump’s Sec of Agriculture Brooke Rollins says the solution to high egg prices for Americans is to get some chickens and raise them in your backyard.

No exaggeration. She’s selling the idea of everyone raising chickens in their back yards as “awesome”, with a laugh and a smile. And then the Fox News host (Rachel Campos-Duffy — wife of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — this whole world is comprised of socially-inbred reality-TV has-beens), smiling and laughing, concludes with “I think everyone who isn’t a farmer right now wants to be, so you’re in the right department, Brooke!”

This is a cult. No sense of “Hey, maybe this egg situation wasn’t so simple. Maybe this blowhard president isn’t going to solve the bird flu and halt inflation on day one...” — as they check their calendar and see that we’re already up to day 43 and their supermarket hasn’t had any eggs, at any price, in a week. No, instead, they’ve decided the answer is that all good-thinking Americans now happily want to be chicken farmers.

Next month: the fun of home dentistry.

Taska Is Now Part of Leitmotif (Developers of Kaleidoscope) 

Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac:

Leitmotif, the team behind the awesome diff and merge Mac app Kaleidoscope, is expanding its portfolio of native Mac apps for developers. The company has acquired Taska, a native Mac app that serves as a frontend for web services like GitHub and GitLab. [...] To celebrate its release of Taska 1.3, Leitmotif is discounting its apps by 50% for a limited time.

When Taska debuted last year, its original developers (Made by Windmill) sponsored DF for the week to promote it (the app was briefly named Sonar, before some sort of legal contretemps prompted a change), and thanking them, I wrote:

Taska combines the lightweight UI of a to-do app with the power of enterprise-level issue tracking, all in a native app built by long-time Mac nerds. The interface is deceptively simple, and very intuitive. Fast and fluid too. Everything that’s great about native Mac apps is exemplified by Taska. If you’ve ever thought, “Man, if only Apple made a native GitHub client...”, you should run, not walk, to download it.

Taska saves all your changes directly to GitHub/GitLab using their official APIs, so your data remains secure on GitHub’s servers — not Taska’s. Do you have team members not using Taska? No problem. Changes you make in Taska are 100% compatible with the web UI.

Leitmotif’s Kaleidoscope is a longtime stalwart in any Mac nerd’s toolbox. I can’t think of a better sibling to an app like Taska. (A few weeks ago I ran into a gnarly syncing glitch with a long log file, where there wasn’t just an old version and new one, but two different “new” versions from two different machines. Kaleidoscope got me out of that jam, no sweat.)

‘When Your Last Name Is Null, Nothing Works’ 

Funny piece — if your surname isn’t “Null” — by Oyin Adedoyin for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it, he joked to himself.

In 2018 he paid a $35 parking ticket. Soon afterward, he said, his mailbox was flooded with hundreds of traffic tickets for incidents he hadn’t been involved in. Tickets were from other counties and cities for vehicles of different colors, makes and models. A database had associated the word “null” with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles.

Brings to mind the classic “Little Bobby Tables” from XKCD.

‘Money Job’ 

Ben Stiller, in a delightful piece for The New York Times on working up the gumption to tell Gene Hackman — with whom he was working in Wes Anderson’s excellent The Royal Tenenbaums, his favorite Hackman movie:

“ … but I have to say for me, there is one movie you made that means so much to me. It might sound crazy, but I think it’s the reason I wanted to make movies. It’s ‘The Poseidon Adventure.’ It literally was my favorite movie when it came out. I think I was 7 or something and I went to see it in the theater about 10 times, then watched it repeatedly whenever it was on TV. It was so formative, and you were so good in it, and it just for me was my favorite movie for so long because of the excitement of that incredible score and those actors and the action and just all of it. It really changed my life and just … made me want to make movies.”

He smiled a little. He looked forward, thinking, perhaps about the movie, as if it hadn’t crossed his mind for a long time. Then he grinned and said:

“Money job.”

I can hear those words in Hackman’s voice. And I can see the grin.

Apple Updates iPad Air (M2→M3) and Regular iPad (A14→A16), and Revamps Magic Keyboard for iPad Air 

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

The most consequential part of the Air’s update — perhaps the only real update — is the M3 processor, which brings with it GPU-based capabilities like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and video encoding and decoding for ProRes and ProRes RAW.

Otherwise, the Air is basically unchanged: it comes in 11-inch and 13-inch versions, features the same cameras, battery life, the exact same dimensions, and the same accessory compatibility as its M2-based predecessor. It even comes in the same colors — Space Gray, Blue, Purple, and Starlight — at the same prices starting at $599.

A true speed-bump update — no big whoop, but it’s good for the platform for devices to get regular speed-bump updates in between major new revisions. The previous M2 iPad Air models only came out in May of last year, alongside the M4 iPad Pro models. Just like those M2 iPad Air models, these new M3 iPad Airs have 9-core GPUs. The current (not for long?) M3 MacBook Airs are offered with 8- and 10-core GPUs. I presume these 9-core M3 chips used for the iPad Air are binned chips that didn’t have 10 good GPU cores?

The new Magic Keyboard for Air is interesting in that it seems to meld parts of the older Magic Keyboard with the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro last May. While the new Magic Keyboard includes a function row and a larger trackpad like its Pro compatriot, it lacks haptics in the trackpad and backlit keys, and it seems to be built on the same design of the original silicone exterior instead of the new aluminum-based model. But you get some cost savings for that: it’s just $269 instead of $299. Also, it only comes in white — black keyboards are for pros, I guess.

$269 feels like a crummy deal. The new-from-last-year $299 Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, with an aluminum top, feels way more than $30 better than the old-style silicone-covered ones like this new Magic Keyboard for iPad Air. It kind of feels like a design failure of some sort that these new iPad Airs can’t use the same Magic Keyboards as the iPad Pros of the same size.

The base iPad’s update is perhaps somewhat more disappointing, as that model was introduced in 2022 and its A16 processor will make it one of the few current main-line Apple devices — perhaps only — not to support Apple Intelligence.

The recently updated iPad Mini (October) has an A17 Pro chip, and thus supports Apple Intelligence. But the iPad Mini starts at $500, and the regular iPad still starts at just $350. The just-plain iPad is really the only “budget” device that Apple makes. There are no iPhone or Mac models in that price range.

Apple Hasn’t Updated Its US Government Transparency Report Since June 2023, 20 Months Ago 

Apple:

Apple is committed to being transparent about government requests for customer data and how we respond. We publish a Transparency Report twice a year disclosing the number of government requests for customer data Apple receives globally.

Apple’s most recent report for the United States covers January to June 2023. They didn’t always lag this far behind. In November 2021 they issued the report for the second half of 2020, so that report came out 11 months after the period it covered. In September 2023 they issued the report covering January to June 2022, 15 months after the period covered. For all I know, they’ll come out with the report for the second half of 2023 sometime this month, continuing to lag 15 months behind the reporting periods. But if that’s the standard schedule for publishing these reports, they should say so. We should know when to expect them.

I don’t think there’s anything worrisome or fishy going on here, but given the recent brouhaha over the UK’s secret gag order demand for Apple to build a backdoor into iCloud Advanced Data Protection, along with the Biden administration’s shameful downplaying of that demand, it has me looking as much at what Apple doesn’t say about government data demands as what Apple does say about them.

iFixit’s iPhone 16e Teardown 

Elizabeth Chamberlain, writing for iFixit:

But it’s still missing MagSafe, for no obvious reason other than making the phone less appealing to consumers than the rest of the 16 lineup. Wireless charging without the perfect alignment that MagSafe allows is troubling.

I’ve been waiting for iFixit’s teardown to see if removing MagSafe components might help explain the 16e’s physically larger battery. It doesn’t seem to. The 16e battery seems taller, not thicker, and the MagSafe components in an iPhone 15 don’t seem thick or space consuming. But there remains a very obvious reason for its exclusion: cost. The 16e is priced $200 less than a comparable regular 16, so something has to give, and MagSafe, alas, is one of those things.

The 16e did garner a 7/10 repairability score — very high for an Apple product from iFixit. But their party line is that you still shouldn’t buy one, opting instead for a refurbished older iPhone 14. Refurb iPhones are great, and they’re popular for a reason, but it feels like recommending refurb over new is dogma for iFixit at this point. When’s the last time they recommended any new product? For $600 I think it’s hard to beat a new iPhone 16e for current value and future-proofing.

The Free Speech Will Continue Until Trump’s Morale Improves 

President Donald Trump, on his very popular bespoke social network (random capitalization and various typos sic):

All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

  • Trump, both he and his supporters keep claiming, represents the party of free speech. Got it.
  • There are going to be widespread protests against Trump and his policies. Large protests were rampant in his 1.0 administration; they seem almost guaranteed in 2.0. Trump and his cronies feel entitled to act lawlessly and chaotically, with little regard for the law and no regard whatsoever for traditions and norms, while expecting those who disagree with them to keep quiet and, I don’t know, just watch? It doesn’t work that way. Chaos begets chaos. Orderly citizenship stems from orderly leadership.
  • Trump, embarrassed by raucous protests in 2020, asked his defense secretary and military leaders, “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?” Those men said no. Trump doesn’t seem to have any no-men around him this time.
  • Trump is the sort of angry old kook who thinks Norman Fell’s Mr. McCleery was the hero, not the butt of jokes, in The Graduate.
Claim Chowder: October 2022 Rumors Regarding the iPhone 16e (a.k.a. ‘SE 4’) 

Hartley Charlton, writing for MacRumors in October 2022:

The fourth-generation iPhone SE will feature a 6.1-inch LCD display and a “notch” cutout at the top of the display, according to Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) analyst Ross Young.

Good call on the size and notch, but the 16e display is OLED, not LCD. Overall, though, I’ll award Young a Being Right Point for this call from 2022.

Moving to an all-screen design, there will no longer be space for a capacitive Touch ID Home button in the device’s bottom bezel. Multiple reports, including information from MyDrivers and Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggest that Apple is planning to add a Touch ID Side button to the iPhone SE, much like the iPad Air and iPad mini.

Real shocker there that Kuo and the fabulists at “MyDrivers” were wrong on that. If you follow Charlton’s link on Kuo’s name above, it points to this 2019 report wherein Kuo reported that Apple was planning a 2021 iPhone that would have neither a Lightning nor USB-C port “and provide the completely wireless experience”.

Monday, 3 March 2025

Framous 1.0 

Chance Miller, writing last week at 9to5Mac:

Dark Noise developer Charlie Chapman is out with a new Mac utility called “Framous.” The app aims to be the best way to add device frames to screenshots. [...]

Here are the ways Framous aims to streamline this process:

  • Auto-detect your device based on your screenshot to pick the right frame from a growing library of devices
  • Combine multiple devices into a single image, or bulk export multiple separate images at once
  • Quick customization options to change frame colors and more
  • Automate your screenshot framing with Shortcuts support for even more efficient workflows

There are a bunch of ways you can add device frames to screenshots like this, but none as clever, fast, and easy as Framous. I love it. So many little details. You can just drop a screenshot in and copy a framed version out with zero fuss, but there are also all sorts of tweaks and adjustments you can make, right down to choosing which shade of titanium to color your specific iPhone Pro model. Chapman has a great 20-minute walkthrough video showing all of Framous’s features, and he posted a bunch of shorter videos showcasing specific features to Mastodon. I was sold after watching just one of these.

Framous is completely free to use with nice-looking generic device frames, and a $20 one-time purchase to unlock the exquisitely-detailed “real” frames covering all devices through the end of 2025. Or, a $10/year subscription to keep up to date with future device frames. Available at the Mac App Store.

Another Tim Cook Product Announcement Teaser on X: ‘There’s Something in the Air’ 

Basic Apple Guy (with screenshot):

The same tagline from Apple’s 2008 announcement for the original MacBook Air.

On the cusp of that announcement at Macworld Expo, AppleInsider photographed a bunch of banners with that slogan Apple had hung inside Moscone West. I swear I’m not making this up, but a bunch of people were speculating that the big announcement would be a deal with Adobe to bring Adobe Air (their still-in-progress next-gen Flash platform) to the iPhone (which was just over six months old).

Fond memories. Here are my initial thoughts and observations on the MacBook Air, post-keynote, and here’s the January 2008 archive of Linked List posts at DF. There were a lot of bad early takes on the Air.

Apple Details Upcoming Changes and Improvements to Child Accounts, App Store Age Restrictions, and More 

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

In a whitepaper posted to Apple’s developer site entitled “Helping Protect Kids Online”, the company details several improvements it’s rolling out in upcoming software updates, including making it easier to set up child accounts, providing age ranges to developers, and filtering content on the App Store. [...]

It’s also worth noting that these announcements are happening against the backdrop of more stringent age-verification laws enacted in U.S. states like Texas and Oklahoma. Critics of those laws contend that they unfairly target LGBTQ+ communities. Apple, for its part, says that it holds to a standard of data minimization, not sharing any more information than is necessary. So, for example, offering developers access to the age range of a user — with the consent of a parent — rather than providing a birthdate.

From Apple’s whitepaper (PDF):

At Apple, we believe in data minimization — collecting and using only the minimum amount of data required to deliver what you need. This is especially important for the issue of “age assurance,” which covers a variety of methods that establish a user’s age with some level of confidence. Some apps may find it appropriate or even legally required to use age verification, which confirms user age with a high level of certainty — often through collecting a user’s sensitive personal information (like a government- issued ID) — to keep kids away from inappropriate content. But most apps don’t. That’s why the right place to address the dangers of age- restricted content online is the limited set of websites and apps that host that kind of content. After all, we ask merchants who sell alcohol in a mall to verify a buyer’s age by checking IDs — we don’t ask everyone to turn their date of birth over to the mall if they just want to go to the food court.

Meta has been vocally backing the various state initiatives that Moren referenced, that would require app stores to verify the exact age of children. To use Apple’s apt metaphor, Meta wants the mall owner to require checking ID for everyone who enters the mall, not just those who purchase alcohol. Meta also, of course, wants itself to then have access to those exact ages verified by the app store — it wants to know the exact age of every child using its platforms, and wants the App Store and Play Store to do the dirty work of verifying those ages and providing them via APIs to developers.

There are a lot of parents who supervise their kids’ online activities and simply don’t permit them to use platforms — like, oh, say, Meta’s — where age restrictions are necessary for some content. So why should those parents be required to provide privacy-intrusive verification of their kids’ birthdates just to let the kids play and use innocent G-rated games and apps?

Meta is clearly in the wrong here, and they’re using culture-war fear-mongering to try to get what they want through misdirection.

Jeremy Keith on the Web on Mobile 

Jeremy Keith, writing at Adactio:

Ask anyone about their experience of using websites on their mobile device. They’ll tell you plenty of stories of how badly it sucks.

It doesn’t matter that the web is the perfect medium for just-in-time delivery of information. It doesn’t matter that web browsers can now do just about everything that native apps can do.

In many ways, I wish this were a technical problem. At least then we could lobby for some technical advancement that would fix this situation.

But this is not a technical problem. This is a people problem. Specifically, the people who make websites.

There are mobile web proponents who are in denial about this state of affairs, who seek to place the blame at Apple’s feet for the fact that WebKit is the only rendering engine available on iOS. But WebKit’s limitations have nothing to do with the reasons so many websites suck when experienced on mobile devices. The mobile web sucks just as bad on Android. Apple’s WebKit-only rule on iOS is just a useful scapegoat for the fact that most websites, as experienced on phones, are designed and engineered to suck. It’s not whatever features WebKit lacks that Chrome-myopic web developers want. It’s all the crap that web developers add — tens of megabytes of JavaScript libraries and frameworks; pop-ups and pop-overs all over the screen; scrolljacking and other deliberate breakage of built-in UI behavior — that makes the experience suck. We should be so lucky if the biggest problems facing the web experience on iPhones were the technical limitations of WebKit.

And the app experiences from the same companies (whose websites suck on mobile) are much better. Not a little better, but a lot better — as I wrote in a piece in January. The truth hurts, just like the experience of using most websites on mobile.

The Size of the US Federal Workforce Has Not Grown in the Last 50 Years 

John Cassidy, writing for The New Yorker (requires a free account to read, annoyingly):

Of course, these calculations can’t be taken literally. Even Musk has said that he wants to protect essential workers. If the entire federal workforce were eliminated, there’d be no one to make sure that federal benefits got paid or that federal taxes were collected. The spending and revenue figures would crater; essential services like veterans’ hospitals, air-traffic-control systems, and border-crossing stations would be completely abandoned. But this thought experiment does illustrate the point that “bloated” payrolls aren’t what is driving federal spending and deficits. Since the nineteen-seventies, as the accompanying chart shows, the total number of federal employees has remained fairly steady.

Here’s a copy of the chart. Cassidy continues:

Unlike the figures from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the chart, which comes from the Federal Reserve Economic Database, counts members of the U.S. Postal Service as federal employees. It does show that the federal workforce has grown in recent years, but it’s still no larger than it was thirty or forty years ago. During the interim, total employment elsewhere in the economy has grown steadily alongside population growth. Consequently, the size of the federal workforce relative to the workforce at large has fallen considerably, as the following chart shows.

Here’s a copy of that second chart.

I knew the supposed justifications for the whole DOGE endeavor were a sham, but until this piece I was under the incorrect assumption that the federal government workforce has been growing steadily for decades, at least keeping pace with its percentage of the overall US workforce. The opposite is true — because the federal workforce size has remained steady while the population has continued to grow, its share of the overall workforce has in fact shrunk considerably.

Jason Snell, writing last week at Six Colors:

While a lot of us have gotten excited about the potential of Apple’s immersive video format, the truth is that the Vision Pro is also a great viewer of more traditional 3-D video content. And Apple has built a new visionOS app to highlight great spatial content: Spatial Gallery.

Think of Spatial Gallery as something sort of like the TV app, but for spatial videos, photos, and panoramas. The content comes from Apple as well as third-party content sources, and Apple is curating it all itself. The company says the content will be updated on a regular basis, and among the demo content I saw featured was some of 3-D (not immersive) behind-the-scenes content from various Apple TV+ productions such as “Severance” and “Shrinking.”

Just as the Apple Watch has its own app on iOS, so too will the Vision Pro. The new Vision Pro iOS app will be available with iOS 18.4, and will automatically appear on the iPhones of people who have Vision Pros. Of course the app will show off new content and offer tips, but it’s also functional: If you add highlighted media content via the app, it’ll be set to download on the Vision Pro. Similarly, you can use the Vision Pro app to remotely download apps to your Vision Pro, so they’re ready for you when you put the headset on.

VisionOS 2.4 is also making some big improvements to guest mode, making it much easier to let someone else use your Vision Pro. It remains to be seen if Vision is ever going to be a successful platform, but the potential is clearly there, and Apple is definitely rolling on it.

Mike Myers’s Skewering Portrayal of Elon Musk on SNL 

Like any great caricature, Myers’s Elon Musk conveys a better sense of Musk than watching Musk himself does. A cruel and infinitely self-satisfied know-it-all, whose utter self-confidence runs counter to the fact that he’s unfathomably awkward, as uncoordinated socially as he is physically. Just an utter and total spaz, who believes no one’s jokes are funnier than his own. The sort of person no one likes but who has nevertheless parlayed tremendous wealth into great power, forcing his influence upon the world.

Sunday, 2 March 2025

Claim Chowder: Ming-Chi Kuo on Demand for the iPhone 16 Lineup 

Ming-Chi Kuo, back on Sunday September 15:

Based on my latest supply chain survey and pre-order results from Apple’s official websites, I’ve compiled key data on iPhone 16’s first-weekend pre-orders for each model, including pre-order sales, average delivery times, and shipments before pre-order. [...]

Analysis and Conclusions:

iPhone 16 series first-weekend pre-order sales are estimated at about 37 million units, down about 12.7% YoY from last year’s iPhone 15 series first-weekend sales. The key factor is the lower-than-expected demand for the iPhone 16 Pro series.

Note that pre-orders for the iPhone 16 lineup only started two days prior, on Friday September 13. Here were Kuo’s estimates for first-weekend pre-order sales, compared year-over-year to the equivalent iPhone 15 models:

iPhone 16 Pro Max-16%
iPhone 16 Pro-27%
iPhone 16 Plus+48%
iPhone 16+10%

These numbers bear no resemblance to Apple’s actual financial results for the October-December quarter. There was no marked downswing in demand for the 16 Pro and Pro Max, and there was no wild upswing in demand for the 16 Plus. Just one month after posting the above opening-weekend nonsense, Kuo himself reported, “iPhone 16 orders were cut by around 10M units for 4Q24–1H25, with most of the cuts affecting non-Pro models.” So in September Kuo claimed Pro sales were alarmingly down and regular iPhone 16 and 16 Plus sales were surprisingly strong, but in October he said Apple cut orders mostly with the “non-Pro models”. So why was any of this reported as news?

My thesis has long been that while Kuo clearly has some insight into some of Apple’s suppliers in Asia, he has no insight whatsoever into Apple’s sales. How could he? “Apple’s official websites” don’t publish sales numbers. I think he just pulls this stuff right out of his ass and hand waves that it has something to do with the estimated ship dates for new iPhone models. Further, I think Kuo picks these numbers not at random, and not based on an honest attempt to even guess the actual sales, but rather to create headlines and inject his name into the news. Has he ever once issued a “survey” that reported that iPhone demand was pretty much in line with expectations? If all you did was follow Ming-Chi Kuo’s reporting, you’d think Jeff Williams is incompetent and should have been fired years ago, because he has no ability to accurately forecast demand for Apple’s most important product. Clickbait in its purest form, detached completely from any factual reality.

WorkOS Radar 

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bots attacks and brute force attempts?

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Elon Musk, Weirdo Extraordinaire 

TMZ:

Seems Elon Musk is truly going to colonize Mars ... even if he has to do it himself, ’cause the tech mogul just welcomed his 14 child! Elon helped break the news Friday along with Shivon Zilis, with whom the billionaire already had three children.

You know what you call a man who has 14 children with four different mothers and has little interest or involvement in most of their lives? You call him a weirdo. This isn’t some quirk or fluke. He’s obviously some sort of eugenics freak who isn’t interested in family or fatherhood, but in spreading his seed like he’s some sort of prized racehorse. How is this any different than polygamy or assembling some sort of harem, other than that polygamists might live with and take an active role in raising their various children?

Think too about how conservative news outlets would portray any woman who had children with four different fathers (and counting). Or if Musk were a black man working for a Democratic president. (Imagine the Fox News take if Barack Obama had five children from three different mothers, like Donald Trump does.)

Saturday, 1 March 2025

Matthew Green: ‘Dear Apple: Add “Disappearing Messages” to iMessage Right Now’ 

Matthew Green:

If you install WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Snap or even Telegram(please don’t!) you’ll encounter a simple feature that addresses this problem. It’s usually called “disappearing messages”, but sometimes goes by other names.

I’m almost embarrassed to explain what this feature does, since it’s like explaining how a steering wheel works. Nevertheless. When you start a chat, you can decide how long the messages should stick around for. If your answer is forever, you don’t need to do anything. However, if it’s a sensitive conversation and you want it to be ephemeral in the same way that a phone call is, you can pick a time, typically ranging from 5 minutes to 90 days. When that time expires, your messages just get erased — on both your phone and the phones of the people you’re talking to.

A separate feature of disappearing messages is that some platforms will omit these conversations from device backups, or at least they’ll make sure expired messages can’t be restored. This makes sense because those conversations are supposed to be ephemeral: people are clearly not expecting those text messages to be around in the future, so they’re not as angry if they lose them a few days early. [...]

To recap, nearly every single other messaging product that people use in large numbers (at least here in the US) has some kind of disappearing messages feature. Apple’s omission is starting to be very unique.

I do have some friends who work for Apple Security and I’ve tried to talk to them about this. [...] When I ask about disappearing messages, I get embarrassed sighs and crickets. Nobody can explain why Apple is so far behind on this basic feature even as an option, long after it became standard in every other messenger.

I can only speculate why iMessage doesn’t offer this feature. Perhaps Apple doesn’t want to imply that “disappearing messages” are in any way guaranteed to be ephemeral, which would be impossible. Who’s to say the recipient hasn’t screenshotted them? And if Messages were to impose a software block against capturing a screenshot of a “disappearing message” (like the way you can’t capture screenshots of DRM-protected video), who’s to say the recipient hasn’t used another device to take a photograph of the display showing the ostensibly-ephemeral message? E2EE is a mathematical guarantee. There’s no way to offer such a guarantee regarding ephemerality, and perhaps that gives Apple pause.

But I think that would be letting a desire for perfection get in the way of offering a feature that’s useful and good enough. People who use disappearing messages on other platforms — and as Green points out, all of iMessage’s rivals offer the feature — understand the risks. Vanishingly few people understand the difference between “encrypted in transit” and “end-to-end encrypted”. But just about everyone intuitively understands that even a “disappearing message” might be screenshotted, photographed, or otherwise recorded. There’s an implicit trust between sender and recipient.

The other angle I can think of is complexity. Messages is one of Apple’s most-used apps, and in many ways it exemplifies Apple’s approach to software design and computing in general. Where critics see an app that is popular despite offering fewer features than its rivals, Apple (and I) see an app that is popular and beloved to some degree because it offers fewer features. All new features necessarily add some complexity, and disappearing messages would add quite a bit. Can you have two chats with the same person/group, one standard and one ephemeral? If so, now you’ve raised the specter of accidentally sending what’s intended to be a disappearing message to the non-ephemeral chat with that person or group. If not, how do you send a brief disappearing-message exchange with someone with whom you have a long archive of messages you want to keep forever? (Perhaps the idea of private browsing in Safari could serve as an inspiration for disappearing messages in Messages — an entirely separate mode with a distinct visual state.)

The basic idea of disappearing messages is pretty trivial and easily understood. A good design for implementing them in Messages is not trivial. Solving these hard design problems is what makes Apple Apple, though. They’ve added some rather superficial features to Messages (Genmoji and message effects for example), so I agree with Green that they ought to tackle disappearing messages and that surely they can find a way to do it where the added complexity doesn’t create confusion. It’s a hard challenge, to be sure, but a worthy one. Apple’s designers could really have some fun with this too, with novel ways to present “disappearingness” visually.