Linked List: March 2025

Monday, 31 March 2025

Release Day for Apple’s .4 OS Versions ★

All out today:

iOS 18.4 (priority notifications, lots of new languages and EU support for Apple Intelligence).
MacOS 15.4 (AI message categorization in Apple Mail, Quick Start for setting up a new machine).
VisionOS 2.4 (Apple Intelligence, new Spatial Gallery app, new Vision Pro sibling app for iPhone).
WatchOS 11.4 (new Sleep Wake Up alarm option that will emit sound even when the watch is in silent mode).
tvOS 18.4 (UI tweaks to TV app).

And the big new feature across all OSes: eight new emoji. Also, lots of new WebKit features.

The White House Correspondents Association Speaks Cowardice to Power ★

Brian Steinberg and Pat Saperstein, reporting for Variety over the weekend:

The White House Correspondents’ Association has canceled plans to have comedian Amber Ruffin perform at its annual dinner on April 26, a new sign of the pressures being brought to bear on news organizations during President Donald Trump’s second term.

The journalism group, which has seen its control over interactions with Trump eroded in recent weeks, made the decision after Taylor Budowich, a White House deputy chief of staff, raised comments Ruffin has made in the past that are critical of Trump. Earlier this week, Ruffin told a podcast backed by The Daily Beast that she would not try to make sure her jokes targeted all sides of the political spectrum as the WHCA had requested, and likened the Trump administration to “kind of a bunch of murderers.” Playing to both sides “makes them feel like human beings,” she said, “cause they’re not.” [...]

“The WHCA board has unanimously decided we are no longer featuring a comedic performance this year. At this consequential moment for journalism, I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists,” WHCA president Eugene Daniels wrote to members in a statement.

“For the past couple of weeks, I have been planning a re-envisioning of our dinner tradition for this year,” he added. “As the date nears, I will share more details of the plans in place to honor journalistic excellence and a robust, independent media covering the most powerful office in the world.”

What an enormous mountain of obvious horseshit this explanation is. The WHCA only announced that Ruffin would be hosting this year’s show on February 4, at which point this lickspittle clown Eugene Daniels was quoted thus by The Hollywood Reporter:

“When I began to think about what entertainer would be a perfect fit for the dinner this year, Amber was immediately at the top of my list,” Eugene Daniels of Politico, president of the association, said in a statement on Tuesday. “She has the ability to walk the line between blistering commentary and humor all while provoking her audience to think about the important issues of the day. I’m thrilled and honored she said yes.”

So eight weeks ago this obsequious bootlicker Daniels thought Amber Ruffin “would be a perfect fit for the dinner this year” but now, four weeks before the show, he’s trying to claim with a straight face that “For the past couple of weeks, I have been planning a re-envisioning of our dinner tradition for this year”?

The kids magazine Highlights for Children has a long-running comic strip called “Goofus and Gallant”, the premise of which is that Goofus is a kid who always does the wrong thing, and Gallant always does the right thing. Goofus, especially in the older strips, is an absurd parody. This Eugene Daniels toady is the Goofus of journalism. The entire point of the WHCA is to assert the group’s collective independence as journalists — and the independence they assert is specifically from the White House. So of course they shouldn’t have responded to White House pressure to fire Ruffin as this year’s host. But it’s even worse for an ostensible journalist — the president of the WHCA for chrissakes — to try to get even a single person in the world to believe that this is anything other than caving to White House pressure, and that in fact (“Yeah, that’s the ticket!”) he’d been planning to cancel the entire concept of having a comedian host at all “for the past couple of weeks” when just eight weeks ago he described Ruffin as “a perfect fit for the dinner this year”.

This is Baghdad Bob level nonsense. I’m not one for performative resignations, but how does any news outlet or journalist agree to remain a member of the WHCA after this?

Sunday, 30 March 2025

Lex.Games ★

My thanks to Lex Friedman for sponsoring this past week at DF to promote Lex.Games, a collection of eight daily word games. Quoting from Friedman’s own description in the sponsored RSS entry at the start of the week:

I paid Gruber many thousands of dollars to run this ad for free games which themselves have no ads. Please keep reading.

The games:

Conlextions: Inspired by NYT’s Connections
Lexicogs: Solve crossword-style clues by assembling letter “cogs”
By a Vowel: A word jumble game with missing vowels
Six Appeal: Wordle with six-letter words

There’s also a daily Mini Crossword; a Full-Size Crossword; and Mind Control, which is a whole lot like Mastermind and not actually a word game at all; don’t sue me.

Oh, and if you only counted seven games here, the eighth is iOS-only. It’s called Letter Opener, and it’s my favorite.

I actually hate Letter Opener, because I’m terrible at games like that. Looking at the leaderboard, though, obviously some of you are really good at it. Six Appeal is more my speed (which is to say, like Wordle, it has no clock). But go ahead and download the iOS app and try Letter Opener. Maybe you’re a fast enough thinker for it.

So the basic pitch is that Lex.Games really is just a bunch of fun daily games that are free to play, without ads (let alone without annoying ads). But you can — and should! — pay a modest $20/year to subscribe to get access to extra games, leaderboards, and just to support a very fun and satisfying endeavor.

Vertu Is Still Selling Phones, Which Suggests Someone Is Still Buying Them ★

Calfskin for $1,500, flip-foldables for $5,000, and whatever these are for a lot more. Who needs any sense (or a spelling checker) when you’ve got “elesant charisma / heroic essence”?

Or as I cited Andy Warhol back in 2012:

A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

See Also: This 2023 investigation by Andrew Williams for Wired, that more or less uncovers that today’s Vertu is just a brand snapped onto white-label phones made by ZTE: “Never before have I used a phone where I felt so unsafe, one that feels like it could be used to scam me — though, to be clear, I have no evidence that it is.”

Keach Hagey Reports on the Backstory Behind Sam Altman’s Firing and Quick Rehiring at OpenAI in 2023 ★

Interesting excerpt at the WSJ from Keach Hagey’s upcoming book The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. (Main link is a gift link, but also here’s a News+ link.)

MacOS 15 Sequoia’s Annoying-as-Hell ‘Turn On Reactions’ Menu Bar Prompt ★

Matt Birchler:

I really thought that the screen recording notifications in macOS Sequoia would be the bane of my existence, but thankfully those have been changed quite a bit from the early betas last summer and they’re totally a non-issue in my book today. However, these god damned “turn on reactions” alerts have got to die in a fire, and they need to have done it yesterday.

I understand why Apple decided to show this once. Why though, is it seemingly designed to reappear every time I start a video call? Who is not annoyed by this?

Friday, 28 March 2025

ChatGPT 4o Adds Image Generation and It’s Fun as Hell ★

MG Siegler:

I’m not even talking about Apple and AI here. We’ve done that, a lot. Probably enough — for now (famous last words). I’m talking about Apple in general. Watching this OpenAI video — again, not an event, just a product walk-through with various team members (though this one happened to be “MC’d” by Sam Altman) — I had this old, familiar feeling as they walked through the new features: joy.

As ridiculous as it may sound, I was almost giddy around what I was seeing. It’s a feeling that I recall well from many an Apple event back in the day.

“Yes, this is exactly what I wanted! They did it!” That kind of thing.

This will sound unfair or harsh to Apple, but I really don’t think that it is. I can really only speak for myself here, and perhaps I’m alone — but I suspect that I’m not — it has been a while since I’ve gotten that feeling from an Apple announcement. That loving feeling.

I gave the updated ChatGPT the instruction “Create an image of the main characters from ‘Severance’ as Lego figures” and this is the first response it gave me:

I gave Apple’s Image Playground, running on MacOS 15.3.2 Sequoia, the equivalent prompt — “The main characters from ‘Severance’ as Lego figures” — and it gave me this as its first response:

One of the above images qualifies as “Hey, that could be better but it’s pretty good for the first crack from a simple prompt”, and the other qualifies as “This bears zero resemblance to anyone or anything from Severance”.

Guess which one of the two Apple is actively promoting to users as something they should try?

Thursday, 27 March 2025

Yours Truly on ‘Geared Up’ ★

You’ll never guess what cohosts Andru Edwards and Jon Rettinger talked to me about on their Geared Up podcast this week. OK, fine, you guessed it. But I bet you didn’t guess that Flash on iPhone came up. Very fun show — I think you’ll enjoy it.

You’ll Never Guess Which Recent DF Article Was ‘Flagged’ at Hacker News ★

“Flagging” isn’t what I was writing about yesterday, with regard to Daring Fireball’s unexplained ghosting at Hacker News in recent years. If you look at the list of recent DF articles at HN, only one is explicitly “flagged”. Whoops, now it’s two, but they’re both the same article.

Tim Bray:

I’m really glad @gruber posted this, because me too. Same timeframe, same behavior.

Oliver Reichenstein (from iA):

Same for content from iA. Again and again our posts get to the top page and then someone ghosts them. Ghosting started around the same time as DF ghosting, I think. My take: It looks like someone that has enough access just doesn’t like us. ¯\(ツ)/¯

I’ve heard privately from a few other bloggers that they’ve seen similar ghosting at HN in recent years.

Near the top of Hackers News’s FAQ:

How are stories ranked?

The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.

Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.

Hacker News presents itself as a forum that is primarily driven by the community, where ranking and moderation are mostly, perhaps even overwhelmingly, transparent. And that “moderator action” is only a secondary or even tertiary factor. The core HN audience buys into this — the HN audience is comprised of people who view themselves as independent thinkers. Part of why they like and trust HN as an aggregator is that they believe they’re driving it, and that they know how the whole thing works.

My thesis is that the above might once have been an accurate summary of how Hacker News functioned, but hasn’t been for years, and that there now exists a cabal of moderator/admins with their thumbs on the scale, and their personal predilections are the primary steering force behind what’s permitted to surface and what gets ghosted. This moderation cabal operates more or less in secret. Their actions, and thus even their usernames, are invisible — lest the HN community discover that it’s steering things about as much as Maggie Simpson is.

Read between the lines of the “Hey, why is this post flagged?” wonderment from genuinely openminded HN users in the comments on my now-flagged submission, and you’ll catch a strong whiff of “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

Wednesday, 26 March 2025

The Atlantic Has an Owner Committed to the Cause: Laurene Powell Jobs ★

Oliver Darcy, writing at Status (paywalled — great content, terrible CMS experience that keeps logging me out on all my devices and requires a stupid email magic link to get back in), in a brief interview with Atlantic editor-in-chief and man of the moment Jeffrey Goldberg:

It goes without saying that there are many ironies associated with this particular story. One of them is that Goldberg, a journalist who Donald Trump loathes for his past reporting (remember the “suckers and losers” piece), somehow became the unintended recipient of high-level, real-time military intelligence from inside his own inner circle. One wonders whether any heads will roll as a result of the whole matter. On Monday, Trump again made his disdain for Goldberg known, blasting him at a press conference and absurdly claiming The Atlantic is “a magazine that is going out of business.”

If anything, of course, publishing a story like the one Goldberg did on Monday proves how strong the outlet currently is. That type of muscular journalism requires skill, strong leadership, and the backing of a courageous publisher. I asked Goldberg about owner Laurene Powell Jobs’ role in the matter. He declined to comment specifically on this particular story, but offered words of praise: “Laurene Powell Jobs is a stalwart and brave publisher at a time when cowardice rules the day.”

If it had been a Washington Post reporter who was inadvertently included on the Trump national security team’s Signal group chat, would they have run the story? No fucking way with that abject lickspittle coward Jeff Bezos running the show.

Apple Now Selling PCs From Other Companies at Apple.com ★

The work remains mysterious and important.

2026 Porsches Still Won’t Have Next-Gen CarPlay, Which Was Announced in 2022 ★

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

Apple’s next-generation CarPlay experience is still nowhere to be seen following Porsche’s announcement of a major upgrade of its infotainment system for 2026.

The upcoming 2026 model year Porsche Taycan, 911, Panamera, and Cayenne feature an upgraded version of the Porsche Communication Management (PCM) system, making it more responsive, adding Dolby Atmos support, and integrating Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. The new system brings the Porsche App Center, a kind of app store for the vehicle, to all of the new models.

It continues to support the standard version of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Support for Apple’s next-generation CarPlay experience is again conspicuously missing from Porsche’s new lineup, and the automaker did not mention it at all during its latest announcement — another bleak sign for the delayed feature.

I’d crack a joke about it looking less and less likely that next-gen CarPlay was going to appear in 2024, but I already did that in January, when Apple itself took the date off its CarPlay page. That announcement came at WWDC 2022.

In this case (unlike the advanced personalized features of Apple Intelligence) it was actually sensible for Apple to pre-announce the existence of next-gen CarPlay, given the reliance on third parties. But it also should have been clear just how incredibly hard it would be to get third party carmakers up to snuff on being able to ship it, so Apple giving a date, any date, was always odd. Apple doesn’t make a car, and you can’t promise what you can’t control. They should have just said “soon”.

Calling the White House’s Bluff, The Atlantic Releases the ‘Houthi PC Small Group’ Signal Text Thread ★

Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris, reporting once again for The Atlantic:

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat — the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz — we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump — combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts — have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.

I linked yesterday to a quote from Hannah Arendt, whom Wikipedia aptly describes as “one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century”. The quote I linked to was her observation that the ranks of authoritarian governments inevitably wind up being filled with “crackpots and fools” because they’re the people whose loyalty is most assured. In some sense the Jedi mind trick is real — it works on the weak-minded. Regardless of one’s political beliefs, no intelligent person of integrity (as opposed to, say, a foreign mole) would participate in a discussion of obviously classified and highly sensitive war plans in a Signal chat. It’s jarring to see it so clearly but U.S. national security is now led entirely by morons.

Most of the quotes on the Goodreads page I linked to, culled from Arendt’s seminal The Origins of Totalitarianism, are related to truth, not idiocy. Here’s one:

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.

And:

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

And:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

When The Atlantic’s initial story hit, everyone responsible in the Trump administration, right up to the president himself, just immediately began telling bald-faced lies about what happened, despite the fact that they knew Jeffrey Goldberg literally had the receipts to prove otherwise. That works, until it doesn’t.

Tuesday, 25 March 2025

Of Course Trump Has Surrounded Himself With Idiots This Time Around ★

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Eight years of Trump was going to be eight years too many no matter how it worked out, but the four year Biden term between Trump terms makes the difference clear. Trump corrected what he perceived as a lack of loyalty/fealty in his first term by surrounding himself with nothing but morons this time.

Notification Summary Miscues ★

Paul Kafasis:

Since they were first enabled last year, I have frequently found Apple Intelligence’s notification summaries for emails to be something less than helpful. Here are some I spotted in just the past few days.

The first one of these is particularly interesting because it highlights a key area where LLMs are frustratingly stupid. Kafasis got a notification summary from Apple Intelligence claiming “Package shipped for $427 order” for a used book he’d purchased. The email from Amazon, from which Apple Intelligence gleaned the information, had the price formatted thus: $4²⁷ — omitting the decimal and putting the cents in superscript. That’s a centuries-old formatting idiom for prices that remains common — e.g. at Walmart — to this day. But Apple Intelligence just sees dollar-sign, four, two, seven, and thus $427.

That’s just stupid.

But where it really gets frustrating is that everyone has to learn this at some point. If you were at Walmart with a kid, and the kid asked why, say, dog food is so expensive, pointing to a sign that says it cost $9⁸⁷ per bag, you’d explain it, once, and the kid would never forget it. “Oh, that’s just another way of writing nine dollars and eighty-seven cents — they do it that way to emphasize the dollar amount and de-emphasize the cents, which really don’t matter.” This would make intuitive sense to the child as well, because they know dog food probably costs about $10 per bag, not $1,000 per bag.

There is no way to properly explain something like this to an LLM (yet?). You can’t teach it like we do with children. Or at least you can’t do it in a way that jibes with our human sense of “learning” — it’s more like how the Guy Pearce protagonist “learns” in Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Here, tattoo another thing to remember on your arm. But at least ChatGPT is trying to learn about us, albeit in its crude Memento-like way. With Apple Intelligence in particular, you can’t teach it at all. There’s no place in the system where you can correct the very simple, easily-explained mistake it made upon seeing $4²⁷ in an email. The next time an email from Amazon comes with a price formatted like that, Apple Intelligence is likely to summarize it the exact same wrong way — off by a factor of 100 — again. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

OPSEC Isn’t Even the Worst Part of ‘SignalGate’ ★

Josh Marshal, writing at Talking Points Memo:

Especially in the national security domain, many things the government does have to remain secret. Sometimes those things remain secret for years or decades. But they’re not secrets from the U.S. government. The U.S. government owns all those communications, all those facts of its own history. Using a Signal app like this is hiding what’s happening from the government itself. And that is almost certainly not an unintended byproduct but the very reason for the use. These are disappearing communications. They won’t be in the National Archives. Future administrations won’t know what happened. There also won’t be any records to determine whether crimes were committed.

This all goes to the fundamental point Trump has never been able to accept: that the U.S. government is the property of the American people and it persists over time with individual officeholders merely temporary occupants charged with administering an entity they don’t own or possess.

Think this is hyperbole? Remember that when Trump held his notorious meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2019 he confiscated his translator’s notes and ordered him not to divulge anything that had been discussed. Remember that Trump got impeached over an extortion plot recorded in the government record of his phone call with President Zelensky. An intelligence analyst discovered what had happened and decided he needed to report the conduct. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’ve already happened. And he’s even been caught. Which is probably one reason there’s so much use of Signal.

The Problem Is Far More Than Just Whether Signal Is ‘Secure’ ★

Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel, reporting for Politico:

The app’s security is viewed as fairly strong due to its robust privacy features and minimal data collection, as well as default end-to-end encryption of all messages and voice calls. The app also includes a function that deletes all messages from a conversation within a set time frame, adding an additional layer of data protection. But experts agree that it shouldn’t be used by government officials as an alternative to communicating through more secure, sanctioned government communications — which Signal is not.

“It’s so unbelievable,” a former White House official, granted anonymity to discuss The Atlantic’s report candidly, said Monday. “These guys all have traveling security details to set up secure comms for them, wherever they are.”

Signal’s encryption is more than just “fairly strong”. It’s very strong, arguably the gold standard in consumer-available communications. But that’s not the point. The point is it’s a consumer application. This whole fiasco happened because you can just mistakenly add the wrong person to a group conversation, which wouldn’t be possible if the Trump national security team were using appropriate channels.

And the disappearing messages thing doesn’t add security. It adds some level of privacy, but it’s an additional factor that makes all of this completely illegal. But avoiding any future scrutiny is almost certainly one reason Trump’s kakistocratic cabinet is using Signal in the first place.

The former White House official pointed out that members of Trump’s Cabinet — including the vice president, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, among others — were likely using personal devices, since in most cases, Signal cannot be downloaded onto official federal devices. This alone creates a host of cybersecurity issues.

Wrote one DF reader (who has professional experience in this area) to me today, “There is no legal way whatsoever that classified information can be communicated over the public Internet — private device, personally owned device, Chromebook, anything. It is all wildly illegal.”

Days After the Trump National Security Team’s Signal Leak, the Pentagon Warned That Russian Hackers Are Using Phishing Attacks to Abuse Signal’s ‘Linked Devices’ Feature ★

NPR:

Several days after top national security officials accidentally included a reporter in a Signal chat about bombing Houthi sites in Yemen, a Pentagon-wide advisory warned against using the messaging app, even for unclassified information.

“A vulnerability has been identified in the Signal messenger application,” begins the department-wide email, dated March 18, obtained by NPR. The memo continues, “Russian professional hacking groups are employing the ‘linked devices’ features to spy on encrypted conversations.” It notes that Google has identified Russian hacking groups who are “targeting Signal Messenger to spy on persons of interest.”

It’s not a weakness in Signal’s cryptography, it’s a hole in their device-mirroring setup. From that Google Threat Intelligence post, published last month:

The most novel and widely used technique underpinning Russian-aligned attempts to compromise Signal accounts is the abuse of the app’s legitimate “linked devices” feature that enables Signal to be used on multiple devices concurrently. Because linking an additional device typically requires scanning a quick-response (QR) code, threat actors have resorted to crafting malicious QR codes that, when scanned, will link a victim’s account to an actor-controlled Signal instance. If successful, future messages will be delivered synchronously to both the victim and the threat actor in real-time, providing a persistent means to eavesdrop on the victim’s secure conversations without the need for full-device compromise.

You’d have to be a bit of a doofus to fall for such a phishing attack if you were in a national security leadership position, but, well, our national security leadership positions are currently occupied by what the Russians call “useful idiots”.

New York Post: ‘European Union to Fine Meta Up to $1B or More for Breaching DMA’ ★

Thomas Barrabi, reporting for The New York Post:

The European Union is set to slap Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta with a fine that could stretch to $1 billion or more for allegedly violating its strict antitrust rules, The Post has learned — setting up a possible showdown with President Trump, who has compared the EU’s penalties to “overseas extortion.”

The European Commission, the EU’s antitrust watchdog, is expected to conclude that Meta is not in compliance with the Digital Markets Act, sources close to the situation told The Post on Monday. [...] The fine is expected to be hundreds of millions of dollars and potentially more than $1 billion, the sources said. [...]

Apple is also in the EU’s crosshairs and a fine against the iPhone maker could be announced this week or next week, the sources said. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Apple and Meta were likely to face “modest fines” for DMA breaches. EU antitrust chief Theresa Ribera previously said a decision on enforcement actions for both companies was coming in March.

Reuters Reports European Commission Will Decline to Fine Apple Over Browser Choice Screen, But Hints It Will Over Anti-Steering Provisions ★

Foo Yun Chee, reporting for Reuters under the headline “Exclusive: Apple Set to Stave Off EU Fine Into Browser Options, Sources Say”:

Apple is set to stave off a possible fine and an EU order over its browser options on iPhones after it made changes to comply with landmark EU rules aimed at reining in Big Tech, people with direct knowledge of the matter said on Tuesday. The European Commission, which launched an investigation in March last year under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), is expected to close its investigation early next week, the people said.

A win’s a win and a closed investigation’s a closed investigation, but the browser choice screen never seemed like a problem for Apple. I follow this stuff closely, and have even written (at times extensively) about how dumb and ineffective these mandatory browser choice screens are, and I didn’t realize this investigation was still open, because it seemed so clear Apple had done what they needed to for compliance.

So, more interesting to me is this bit buried lower in the article, suggesting the EC is going to fine Apple next week over non-compliance with the DMA’s anti-steering provisions:

The Commission’s decision to close the investigation early next week will come at the same time as it hands out fines to Apple and Meta Platforms for DMA violations and orders to comply with the legislation, the people said.

In this second Apple case, the issue is whether the company imposes restrictions that hinder app developers from informing users about offers outside its App Store free of charge.

WWDC 2025 Dates: June 9–13 ★

Apple Newsroom:

To celebrate the start of WWDC, Apple will also host an in-person experience on June 9 that will provide developers with the opportunity to watch the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union at Apple Park, meet with Apple experts one-on-one and in group labs, and take part in special activities. Space will be limited; details on how to apply to attend can be found on the WWDC25 website.

Right on time: in recent years, WWDC dates have been announced on:

and now today, Tuesday 25 March 2025. Last Tuesday in March next year is March 31 — that’s my guess for next year’s announcement.

And, yes, the “25” in the logo has a decidedly glassy look and some animation that’s just plain fun.

Threads Is Losing to Bluesky ★

Jon Passantino, writing at Status:

Now Threads feels rather lifeless. While users still post there, for many it has become something of a second-tier platform — a place that they dump content out of habit, not because they’re having real conversations or finding meaningful engagement.

Matt Birchler:

I believe Meta that there are hundreds of millions of people signing on every month, but they seem to be doing absolutely nothing there. More interesting stuff is on Bluesky and Mastodon, and better conversation happens on those platforms as well.

I feel the same way. Threads has dropped to a decided #3 for me after Mastodon and Bluesky, and (a) I don’t really have room in my head or time in my day for 3 of these platforms, and (b) I’m more than OK with Meta’s entry falling by the wayside.

Like, if the answer at the moment for Twitter-style social media is Bluesky (general audience) and Mastodon (nerds), that’s ... the best outcome? Even X (chaos and Musk sycophancy) seems to have a better, more defined vision for what it’s supposed to be than Threads.

Monday, 24 March 2025

‘Tim, Don’t Kill My Vibe’ ★

Bryan Irace:

Barring a sharp correction, Apple looks increasingly likely to miss out on a generation of developers conditioned to first reach for tools like Cursor, Replit, or v0 — especially as Apple’s own AI tooling remains notably absent. This goes well beyond enabling new entrants to “vibe code” — experienced mobile developers who, despite history with Xcode and a predilection for building native apps, are begrudgingly swapping out their tools in acknowledgement of the inarguable productivity benefits. [...]

App Review has always long been a major source of developer frustration. Authoritarian yet inconsistent policy enforcement aside, it’s simply too hard to distribute software even to your own Apple devices, let alone someone else’s. This isn’t new by any means, but as the time to build an app shrinks from weeks/months to hours/days, it feels more egregious — and thus like more of a liability — than ever before.

This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece. I feel like Irace is onto something here that I haven’t seen anyone put their finger on before.

The App Store, when it debuted, made developers deliriously happy. The UIKit frameworks (a.k.a. CocoaTouch), Objective-C, and Xcode were all way better ways to create apps for mobile devices than anything else at the time. And for distribution, going through Apple and the App Store was way easier and way more democratic, and 70/30 was way more generous to developers, than anything from the various phone carriers around the world. You’d be lucky to get a 30/70 split from the carriers, and they’d only deal with large corporate developers. There were no indie or hobbyist mobile app developers before the App Store. (It’s kind of nutty in hindsight that network carriers were the only distribution channel for apps 17 years ago.)

17 years is a long time, though. And developers long ago stopped seeing the App Store as something that makes them happy, or that reduces friction and hassle from their lives. Instead they view it as a major source of friction and hassle. Apple should have focused on keeping the App Store as a thing that makes developers (mostly) happy all along, not (as things stand today) mostly miserable.

Basically, the threat to Apple that the App Store poses is not regulators coming for it. That’s a distraction. The threat, as I’ve long tried to argue, perhaps unsuccessfully, is that market forces will work against it eventually. Developers have long since grown resentful toward the technical and bureaucratic hassles of publishing through the App Store, and the size of the purchase commissions Apple keeps for itself. Apple’s commission percentages haven’t grown over time, but a 70/30 split that in 2008 seemed remarkably generous (or even the newer 85/15 small-business split) today seems like a platform engaging in usury and abusive rent-seeking.

AI might be the disruption that brings about the “eventually”, because now it’s coming for the developer tooling experience too. If Apple’s native programming frameworks and developer tools aren’t the best, most satisfying, most productive ways to create great apps, what’s left that makes developers happy to be creating for the iOS platform?

Apple should move mountains to refocus itself on making the experience of developing for (and on) Apple platforms the best in the world, including distribution and monetization. Instead, they seem to be resting on the assumption that it’s a privilege, self-evident to all, just to be allowed to develop for Apple platforms.

Software Update for AirPods Max to Enable Lossless Audio and ‘Ultra-Low Latency’ ★

Apple Newsroom:

Next month, a new software update will bring lossless audio and ultra-low latency audio to AirPods Max, delivering the ultimate listening experience and even greater performance for music production. With the included USB-C cable, users can enjoy the highest-quality audio across music, movies, and games, while music creators can experience significant enhancements to songwriting, beat making, production, and mixing.

Apple also started selling a new $40 USB-C to 3.5mm audio cable — male USB-C on the side that goes into your AirPods Max, male headphone jack on the other side to go into the audio-out port on a Mac or, say, an airplane seat.

Getting a Modern LLM Running on a 2005 PowerBook G4 ★

Andrew Rossignol:

I have been diving into the world of large language models (LLMs), and a question began to gnaw at me: could I bring the cutting-edge of AI to the nostalgic glow of my trusty 2005 PowerBook G4? Armed with a 1.5GHz processor, a full gigabyte of RAM, and a limiting 32-bit address space, I embarked on an experiment that actually yielded results. I have successfully managed to achieve LLM inference on this classic piece of Apple history, proving that even yesteryear’s hardware can have a taste of tomorrow’s AI.

A fun project, well-explained. Even a great choice of computer to run it on — the 12-inch PowerBook G4 is one of the best-looking computers ever made. (Via Joe Rossignol.)

‘On Tyranny’ by Timothy Snyder ★

I read Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny after the election. A collection of 20 essays — each relatively brief, some exceptionally brief — it’s more booklet than book, and can easily be consumed in an afternoon or a few evenings. I finished it with an unsettled feeling. I read it again last week, and my feeling now is both more unsettled and more resolute.

Snyder, a plain-speaking history professor at Yale, has a core message, which he’s been hammering since before Trump’s re-election: Do not obey in advance. Resist. The following passage hit me harder on this second reading, two months into Trump 2.0, than it did in November. From Chapter 19: “Be a Patriot”:

It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It is not patriotic to cultivate a relationship with Kim Jong Un; or to say that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are superior leaders. It is not patriotic to call upon foreign leaders to intervene in American presidential elections. It is not patriotic to cite Russian propaganda at rallies. It is not patriotic to share an adviser with Russian oligarchs. It is not patriotic to appoint advisers with financial interests in Russian companies. It is not patriotic to appoint a National Security Advisor who likes to be called “General Misha,” nor to pardon him for his crimes. It is not patriotic when that pardoned official calls for martial law. It is not patriotic to refer to American soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” It is not patriotic to take health care from families, nor to golf your way through a national epidemic in which half a million Americans die. It is not patriotic to try to sabotage an American election, nor to claim victory after defeat. It is not patriotic to try to end democracy.

A nationalist might do all these things, but a nationalist is not a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.”

A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well — and wishing that it would do better.

Democracy failed in Europe in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, and it is failing not only in much of Europe but in many parts of the world today. It is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures. A nationalist will say that “it can’t happen here,” which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.

I highly recommend the book. Get it at Amazon, Bookshop.org, or Apple Books.

The Trump Administration Accidentally Included Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor of The Atlantic, in a Signal Group Chat That Revealed War Plans for Yemen ★

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic (News+ link):

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining. [...]

The notion of a journalist being accidentally included in a war-planning group of national security leaders — and the very notion that U.S. national security leaders would use Signal to conduct such a group — is so preposterous that Goldberg had assumed the group was a hoax, with the intention of embarrassing him. But it was real.

Earlier today, I emailed Waltz and sent him a message on his Signal account. I also wrote to Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe, Tulsi Gabbard, and other officials. In an email, I outlined some of my questions: Is the “Houthi PC small group” a genuine Signal thread? Did they know that I was included in this group? Was I (on the off chance) included on purpose? If not, who did they think I was? Did anyone realize who I was when I was added, or when I removed myself from the group? Do senior Trump-administration officials use Signal regularly for sensitive discussions? Do the officials believe that the use of such a channel could endanger American personnel?

I’ll add: Do they sniff glue and eat paste?

There’s so much chaos at the moment resulting from the Trump administration’s actions during these first two months that it’s easy to overlook one salient fact: Trump has chosen to surround himself with idiots.

Sunday, 23 March 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Podcasting Technology Cadence’ ★

MG Siegler returns to the show to talk about the drama surrounding Siri and Apple Intelligence.

Friday, 21 March 2025

Weekly Sponsorships Here at Daring Fireball ★

How has your week been? My week was ... busy. That includes a new episode of The Talk Show recorded yesterday, dropping in your favorite podcast app soon. Amidst all the writing (and talking) I’ve been doing, I’m also working on filling up open weeks on the sponsorship schedule for Q2.

After a very full February and March, I’ve got a bunch of openings in the next few months — and openings for ~~the next two weeks, starting with this Monday~~. Update: The coming week just sold, but the next week, starting March 31, remains open.

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.

WorkOS: Launch Week ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF, once again, this last week. This has been WorkOS’s Launch Week, and they’ve got a slew of new features to show. Honestly, though, you should check out their Launch Week page just to look at it — it’s beautiful, fun retro-modern pixel-art goodness. Great typography too. I wish every website looked even half this cool.

New features launched just this week include:

WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]”
WorkOS Vault — Encryption Key Management (EKM) and Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK)
AuthKit Integrations — Native support for several new identity providers including LinkedIn, Slack, GitLab, BitBucket, Intuit, and more.

Ookla: ‘A First Look at How Apple’s C1 Modem Performs With Early Adopters’ ★

Ookla, the company behind the Speedtest download/upload bandwidth testing app:

Although it’s early in the adoption curve for the iPhone 16e, we analyzed the performance of the new device from March 1st through March 12th, and compared it to the performance of iPhone 16, which has a similar design and the same 6.1” screen. Both devices run on the same Apple-designed A18 SoC.

When we compare Speedtest Intelligence data from the top 90th percentile (those with the highest performance experience) of iPhone 16e and iPhone 16 users from all three of the top U.S. operators, we see the iPhone 16 performing better in download speeds. However, at the opposite end, with the 10th percentile of users (those who experience the lowest performance) we see the iPhone 16e performing better than the iPhone 16.

There are some differences, but overall the 16e’s cellular performance seems great for the frequencies it supports. And given the efficiency claims from Apple, it might be the better overall modem. (I also think the frequencies it doesn’t support don’t really matter all that much in real-world practice. If you know that you really make use of the crazy-high speeds of mmWave from Verizon, then you know the C1 modem is not for you.)

Yahoo Sold TechCrunch ★

Emma Roth, The Verge:

TechCrunch has a new owner, again. Yahoo has sold the tech news site to the private equity firm Regent for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement on Friday.

Regent is the same company that snapped up Foundry, the firm behind outlets like PCWorld, Macworld, and TechAdvisor on Thursday. Founded in 2005, TechCrunch has experienced many shakeups in ownership after AOL acquired the site in 2010.

A lot of shakeups in a lot of media companies’ ownership lately. Steady as she goes here at The Daring Fireball Company, a subsidiary of Fedora World Media Industries.

Matthew Belloni on the ‘Apple TV+ Experiment’ ★

Matthew Belloni has a very good take on Apple TV+ at Puck (that’s a gift link that should get you through their paywall — but which requires you creating a free account, sorry):

All of which fed into the self-centered fears of my lunch date. What, if anything, does the current state of Apple mean for its entertainment business? After all, more than five years into the Apple TV+ experiment, it’s never been entirely clear what C.E.O. Tim Cook and services chief Eddy Cue are up to in Hollywood. Certainly not making money, at least not in the traditional sense. The Information reported today that Apple lost $1 billion on Apple TV+ last year, following a Bloomberg report that more than $20 billion has been shoveled into making original shows and movies since 2019. That’s not nothing, even for a company worth $3 trillion.

The “loss” number is a bit misleading, of course, considering Apple has always said that a key goal is to leverage Leo DiCaprio and Reese Witherspoon to thicken its brand halo and the device “ecosystem,” ultimately boosting its other businesses. But still… for all its billions, Apple TV+ has accumulated only about 45 million subscribers worldwide, according to today’s Information report and other estimates.

That’s far less than Disney+, Max, and Paramount+, all of which launched around the same time. Those rival services are attached to legacy studios with rich libraries, but they’re not attached to a company with $65 billion in cash on hand and a device in the pockets of 1 billion people that also delivers bundle-friendly music, news, and games. Apple declined to confirm or comment on any numbers, but a source there suggested the subscriber number is higher than 45 million and that the global nature of the sub base is being undercounted by U.S.-oriented research firms. Maybe. The company reveals zero performance data beyond B.S. “biggest weekend ever!” press releases that the trades accept without skepticism and producers like Ben Stiller and David Ellison post with “blessed” emojis on their social media. No one outside the company really knows how the Apple TV+ business is performing.

One interesting nugget is this chart, which suggests that subscriptions to TV+ have boomed since Apple and Amazon worked out a deal to sell TV+ subscriptions through Amazon Channels in Prime Video at the end of last year. That deal has, seemingly, moved the needle. Another interesting nugget is that TV+ seems to suffer from a higher churn rate than other streaming services. Said Belloni’s Puck colleague Julia Alexander, “Fewer than 35 percent of all subscribers keep the service for longer than six months.”

That’s kind of crazy. I’d think TV+ would have less churn, not more, than the industry average — that the Apple TV+ audience is small but loyal. Perhaps this is the unsurprising side effect of Apple giving away 3-month trials when you purchase new devices. But I also truly wonder if TV+ subscriptions are the hardest for industry groups to measure, because so many people who do subscribe watch through tvOS (or, on their phones, on iOS) where everything is private. Belloni hints at this, and says little birdies at Apple told him the TV+ subscriber base is larger than they’re getting credit for.

And how do you count Apple One subscribers toward TV+’s subscriber base? My vague theory about Cue and Cook’s thinking about getting into this business has been about making it one leg among several on the stool of reasons to subscribe to Apple One. That Apple will take subscribers who are only subscribed to TV+, or only subscribed to TV+ and Apple Music, but what they really want is to get people to subscribe to Apple One, which, because it includes iCloud storage, almost certainly has very little churn.

Belloni closes thus:

Apple wouldn’t be the first tech powerhouse to dabble in professionally produced content only to retreat. [...] Neither Cook nor Cue has suggested anything like that, and Apple, in just over five years, has become a reliable partner and a high-quality buyer for Hollywood shows and movies. In some ways, it’s remarkable how fast Apple TV+ became part of the entertainment community. Whether that lasts is the question.

Here’s where I will point out that Apple isn’t like other tech companies. Apple isn’t a move fast and break things company. They’re a measure twice, cut once company. When they commit to something, they tend to stay committed. And they’re very, very good at playing long games that require patience, especially when entering new markets. Look at Apple Pay. 10 years ago, it was widely panned as a flop after a slow first year. Now it’s everywhere.

Is Apple’s Spending on TV+ Content a ‘Loss’ or a ‘Cost’? ★

Jill Goldsmith, Deadline:

Apple is losing more than $1 billion a year on streamer Apple TV+, according to a report in the Information that cited two people familiar with the matter. The tech giant has spent over $5 billion a year on content since launching Apple TV+ in 2019 but trimmed that by about $500 million last year, the report said.

The headline on Wayne Ma’s report at The Information set the framework: “Apple Streaming Losses Top $1 Billion a Year” — the story got picked up widely, and almost everyone who did framed it in terms of losing or a loss. But is it a loss when Apple expected the business to be unprofitable for a decade or more? From Scharon Harding’s paraphrasing at Ars Technica of Ma’s paywalled report:

Apple TV+ being Apple’s only service not turning a profit isn’t good, but it’s also expected. Like other streaming services, Apple TV+ wasn’t expected to be profitable until years after its launch. An Apple TV+ employee that The Information said reviewed the streaming service’s business plan said Apple TV+ is expected to lose $15 billion to $20 billion during its first 10 years.

For comparison, Disney’s direct-to-consumer streaming business had operating losses of $11.4 billion between the launch of Disney+ in fall 2020 and April 2024. Disney’s streaming business became profitable for the first time in its fiscal quarter ending on June 29, 2024.

The above two paragraphs of essential context are buried 13 paragraphs down. If Apple expected TV+ to operate in the red, to the tune of $15–20 billion over its first decade, and halfway through that decade (TV+ debuted in November 2019) it operated in the red to the tune of $1 billion for the year — doesn’t that mean costs are exactly in line with their expectations?

The insinuation here is that Apple’s pissing this money away and doesn’t know what they’re doing. Maybe they are! But if so it was exactly Eddy Cue and Tim Cook’s strategy to piss this money away. If Apple had expected TV+ to be profitable or break-even in 2024, then a $1 billion operating loss would be a story. But as it stands it’s just a cost. How much did Apple “lose” on electricity bills last year?

iOS 18 Software Updates Keep Re-Enabling Apple Intelligence for Users Who Had Turned It Off ★

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors last week:

With new iOS software updates, Apple has been automatically turning Apple Intelligence on again even for users who have disabled it, a decision that has become increasingly frustrating for those that don’t want to use Apple Intelligence .

After installing iOS 18.3.2, iPhone users have noticed that Apple Intelligence is automatically turned on, regardless of whether it was turned off prior to the update being installed. There is an Apple Intelligence splash screen that comes up after updating, and there is no option other than tapping “Continue,” which turns on Apple Intelligence .

If you’ve updated to iOS 18.3.2 and do not want Apple Intelligence enabled, you will need to go the Settings app, tap on Apple Intelligence, and then toggle it off. When Apple Intelligence is enabled, it consumes up to 7GB of storage space for local AI models, which is an inconvenience when storage space is limited.

I’d been seeing complaints about this, including from some friends who are developers and/or had previously worked on iOS as engineers at Apple. A bunch of regular DF readers have written to complain about it too. I wouldn’t call it a deluge, but I’ve gotten an unusual number of complaints about this. (And at CNet, Jeff Carlson reports the same thing happening with MacOS 15.3.2.)

I hadn’t experienced it personally because I have Apple Intelligence enabled on my iPhone. But my year-old iPhone 15 Pro was still running iOS 18.2. So I disabled Apple Intelligence on that phone, then updated it to 18.3.2. When it finished, Apple Intelligence was re-enabled. I also tried this on my iPhone 16e review unit, which was still running iOS 18.3.1 (albeit a version of 18.3.1 with a unique build number for the 16e). I turned Apple Intelligence off, upgraded to 18.3.2, and on that iPhone, Apple Intelligence remained off after the software upgrade completed.

So I don’t know if this is a bug that only affects some iPhones, or a deliberate growth hacking decision from Apple to keep turning this back on for people who have explicitly turned it off. But it’s definitely happening.

And while the 7 GB of storage space required for the model is a legitimate technical reason to turn it off, I think (judging from my email from DF readers) the main reason people disable Apple Intelligence is that they don’t like it, don’t trust it, and to some degree object to it. It could take up no additional storage space at all and they’d still want it disabled on their devices, and they are fucking angry that Apple’s own software updates keep turning it back on. Put aside the quality or utility of Apple Intelligence as it stands today, and there are people who object to the whole thing on principle or, I don’t know, just vibes alone. Feelings are strong about this. Turning it back on automatically, after a user had turned it off manually, leads those users to correctly distrust Apple Intelligence specifically and Apple in general.

If it’s a bug, it’s a bug that makes Apple look like a bunch of gross shysters. If it’s not a bug, it means Apple is a bunch of gross shysters. I’d wager on bug — especially after seeing it not happen on my 16e review unit. I’m thinking it’s something where it’s supposed to be enabled by default, once, for people who’ve never explicitly turned Apple Intelligence on or off previously, but that for some devices where it has been turned off explicitly, somehow the software update is mistaking it for the setting never having been touched. Apple needs to get it together on this one.

Apple Sued for False Advertising Over Apple Intelligence ★

Ina Fried, reporting for Axios:

The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, seeks class action status and unspecified financial damages on behalf of those who purchased Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones and other devices.

“Apple’s advertisements saturated the internet, television, and other airwaves to cultivate a clear and reasonable consumer expectation that these transformative features would be available upon the iPhone’s release,” the suit reads. “This drove unprecedented excitement in the market, even for Apple, as the company knew it would, and as part of Apple’s ongoing effort to convince consumers to upgrade at a premium price and to distinguish itself from competitors deemed to be winning the AI-arms race.”

Most of these class action lawsuits are bullshit, but it’s hard to argue with the basic premise of this one.

Thursday, 20 March 2025

The Seneca ★

This is beautiful and crazy, and no, I’m not going to buy one, but damn I’m tempted and I’d sure like to try one. I’m glad it exists.

Gurman: Tim Cook Has Put Mike Rockwell in Charge of Siri, Reporting to Craig Federighi ★

Mark Gurman, with a blockbuster scoop for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is undergoing a rare shake-up of its executive ranks, aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and stumbles, according to people familiar with the situation.

Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven’t been announced.

Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giannandrea’s command. Apple is poised to announce the changes to employees this week. The iPhone maker’s senior leaders — a group known as the Top 100 — just met at a secretive, annual offsite gathering to discuss the future of the company. Its AI efforts were a key talking point at the summit, Bloomberg News has reported. [...]

My quick take on this is that it’s a turf battle that Craig Federighi just won. It’s not just putting a new executive in charge of Siri, it’s moving Siri under Federighi’s group.

How Gurman got this scoop before Apple had announced the changes — even internally — is rather unbelievable. It’s not “Bloomberg” that got this scoop. It’s Mark Gurman. And trust me, Apple PR did not leak this to him deliberately. I’m sure they’re now accelerating an announcement, at least internally, framing it on their own terms. I can only guess that Gurman hinted at his sourcing in the passage above: Tim Cook must have announced these changes at the Top 100 retreat this week, and at least two of those attendees leaked the news to Gurman. Unprecedented.

Also:

Rockwell is currently the vice president in charge of the Vision Products Group, or VPG, the division that developed Apple’s headset. As part of the changes, he’ll be leaving that team and handing the reins to Paul Meade, an executive who has run hardware engineering for the Vision Pro under Rockwell.

I don’t find it surprising at all that Rockwell was given this task.

Giannandrea will remain at the company, even with Rockwell taking over Siri. An abrupt departure would signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous — something Apple is reluctant to acknowledge. Giannandrea’s other responsibilities include oversight of research, testing and technologies related to AI. The company also has a team reporting to Giannandrea investigating robotics.

This I find a little surprising. But maybe I shouldn’t. I don’t buy Gurman’s argument that dismissing Giannandrea would “signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous”. Apple already signaled that publicly when they announced that all of the ambitious features for Siri and Apple Intelligence that were promised for this year’s OS cycle would be postponed until next year’s OS cycle. That’s public tumult. But I mean, you can see for yourself that Apple’s AI efforts have been “tumultuous” by asking Siri on your iPhone, right now, what month it is.

What Apple needs to signal is that they don’t expect to deliver a significantly better Siri without making significant changes to the team behind Siri.

But maybe the answer is as simple as that Giannandrea is good at leading and managing teams doing advanced research that is abstracted from product. So move the products out of his division and into Federighi’s, and put someone who knows how to ship directly in charge of Siri. Leave Giannandrea in charge of a division focused on research and technology. Attention has moved on from “machine learning” to LLMs, but Apple’s machine learning game has gotten very good.

HealthKit as a Model for an Open Semantic Index From Apple ★

Here’s an update I just appended to my post yesterday, after linking to Gus Mueller’s suggestion that Apple open up a semantic index to third-party AI apps:

HealthKit already works a lot like what Mueller is suggesting here (for, say, “SemanticKit”). With explicit user permission — that can be revoked at any time — third party apps can both read from and write to your Health data. Apple does a lot of that itself, both through Apple Watch and from the various activity-related things an iPhone can track, but third-party apps and devices are welcome participants, in a private, easily-understood way.

Nobody is suggesting Apple should give up on AI. Quite the opposite. They really need to go from being a joke to being good at it, fast. But there’s no reason at all they should build out a strategy that relies on Apple doing all of it themselves, and Apple users relying solely on Apple’s own AI. Do it like Health — a model that has proven to be:

profitable (for Apple itself, selling devices like Watches);
popular (with users, who actually use it, understand it, and like it);
private;
and open to third-party developers, device makers, and medical service providers.

(Thanks to Bill Welense for the suggestion.)

The M1 MacBook Air Lives on at Walmart, Now Just $650 ★

Last March, when Apple introduced the then new M3 MacBook Airs, they moved the base model 13-inch M2 MacBook Air into the magic $999 spot in their own lineup, replacing the M1 MacBook Air. But mid-March it was announced that Walmart would begin selling the M1 MacBook Air — in one tech-spec configuration (8 GB RAM, 256 SSD), but three colors (gold, silver, space gray) for just $700.

This year Apple replaced the entire lineup of MacBook Airs that it sells itself with M4-based models, including the $999 starting-price model. Online, Walmart sells a handful of MacBook models now, at, per Walmart’s brand, slightly lower prices than Apple itself. But the one and only MacBook they seem to stock in their retail stores is the classic wedge-shaped M1 MacBook Air — now down to $650.

It’s over four years old now, and yes, 8 GB RAM and 256 GB of storage are meager, but it’s almost certainly the best new laptop you can buy for that price. Assuming Apple thinks this partnership is a success, eventually they’ll have to replace this with a more recent MacBook Air. But I suspect the main reason it’s still the M1 Air (and hasn’t been replaced by, say, the M2 Air) is not about the specs or performance, per se, but rather simply how it looks. It looks like an older MacBook. Walmart might not get an updated MacBook with a more-recent-than-M1 chip until Apple refreshes the industrial design on its current MacBook Airs.

Wednesday, 19 March 2025

‘Hey Siri, What Month Is It?’ ★

Whole Reddit thread examining this simple question: “What month is it?” and Siri’s “I’m sorry, I don’t understand” response (which I just reproduced on my iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.4b4). One guy changed the question to “What month is it currently?” and got the answer “It is 2025.”

Update: Ask Siri (with Apple Intelligence™) “ChatGPT, what month is it?” and, though you’ll have to wait a few extra seconds, you’ll get the right answer each time. Perhaps the current month is “broad world knowledge” and Siri shouldn’t even attempt to answer such a complex question on its own?

Apple Intelligence Is Coming to iOS in the EU in April ★

News from Apple that I let slip by a few weeks ago, but that seems apt again today:

Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system that delivers helpful and relevant intelligence, will soon be available in more languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (simplified) — as well as localized English for Singapore and India.

These new languages will be accessible in nearly all regions around the world with the release of iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4 in April, and developers can start to test these releases today.

With the upcoming software updates, iPhone and iPad users in the EU will have access to Apple Intelligence features for the first time, and Apple Intelligence will expand to a new platform in U.S. English with Apple Vision Pro — helping users communicate, collaborate, and express themselves in entirely new ways.

Given that Apple Intelligence isn’t exactly setting the world on fire, I think in the grand scheme of things, it’ll wind up being filed away under “Oh yeah, remember that?” that the EU got it 4-5 months after it debuted. (Clean Up in Photos is often great, and I genuinely enjoy notification summaries and miss them now that they’re disabled for news apps; the rest I don’t use, and the most ambitious aspects of Apple Intelligence are (you may have heard) delayed for everyone, not just the EU.)

Apple was concerned that the EU’s hardline interpretation of the DMA was such that the European Commission considered it a violation of the DMA that Apple Intelligence wasn’t an interchangeable component. Like the way the EC forced Apple to open up iOS to alternative app marketplaces — there was uncertainty whether they’d demand the same for system-integrated AI. And if that’s what the EC had demanded, they simply wouldn’t have gotten system-integrated AI for years. But I’m not sure how to square up today’s decisions — requiring Apple to enable third-party alternatives to system-level features like AirPlay and AirDrop — with an interpretation that the EU will be fine with Apple Intelligence only offering Apple’s own AI (along with Apple’s approved partners, like OpenAI).

I think the regime change at the European Commission has changed things to some degree, but quietly. Former competition chief Margrethe Vestager was a firebrand. Back in June last year, after Apple had announced that Apple Intelligence would be delayed indefinitely in the EU for iOS, she made clear that she thought it was anti-competitive:

“I find that very interesting that they say we will now deploy AI where we’re not obliged to enable competition. I think that is that is the most sort of stunning open declaration that they know 100% that this is another way of disabling competition where they have a stronghold already.”

But Vestager is gone, and until today we hadn’t heard a whit about DMA compliance from her successor, Teresa Ribera. In September, when the proceedings that resulted in today’s decisions opened, I wrote:

Also worth noting: Margrethe Vestager is on her way out, about to be replaced by Spanish socialist Teresa Ribera, a career climate expert (which, possibly, might give her an affinity for Apple, far and away the most climate-friendly large tech company) with no experience in competition law. To me that makes Ribera an odd choice for the competition chief job, but apparently that makes sense in the EU. It remains unclear to me whether Ribera supports Vestager’s crusade against the DMA’s designated “gatekeepers”. If she doesn’t, is this all for naught?

Until today, that remained an open question. Now it appears the Commission’s crusading course is unchanged — it’s just no longer accompanied by inflammatory commentary from the commissioners in charge.

EU Adopts New ‘Interoperability’ Requirements for Apple Under DMA ★

The European Commission, today:

Today, the European Commission adopted two decisions under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) specifying the measures that Apple has to take to comply with certain aspects of its interoperability obligation. [...]

The first set of measures concerns nine iOS connectivity features, predominantly used for connected devices such as smartwatches, headphones or TVs. The measures will grant device manufacturers and app developers improved access to iPhone features that interact with such devices (e.g. displaying notifications on smartwatches), faster data transfers (e.g. peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connections, and near-field communication) and easier device set-up (e.g. pairing).

Benjamin Mayo, reporting for 9to5Mac:

In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple firmly rebuked the EU decision announced today about specific interoperability requirements the company must implement over the coming months.

Apple said “Today’s decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple’s ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don’t have to play by the same rules. It’s bad for our products and for our European users. We will continue to work with the European Commission to help them understand our concerns on behalf of our users”.

In regards to customer privacy, Apple is especially concerned with the requirements surrounding opening up access to the iOS notification system. The company indicated these measures would allow companies to suck up all user notifications in an unencrypted form to their servers, sidestepping all privacy protections Apple typically enforces.

My interpretation of the adopted decision is that the EU is requiring Apple to treat iOS like a PC operating system, like MacOS or Windows, where users can install third-party software that runs, unfettered, in the background.

Apple’s statement makes clear their staunch opposition to these decisions. But at least at a superficial level, the European Commission’s tenor has changed. The quotes from the Commission executives (Teresa Ribera, who replaced firebrand Margrethe Vestager as competition chief, and Henna Virkkunen) are anodyne. Nothing of the vituperativeness of the quotes from Vestager and Thierry Breton in years past. But the decisions themselves make clear that the EU isn’t backing down from its general position of seeing itself as the rightful decision-maker for how iOS should function and be engineered, and that Apple’s core competitive asset — making devices that work better together than those from other companies — isn’t legal under the DMA.

Sebastiaan de With’s iPhone 16e Camera Review: ‘The Essentials’ ★

Sebastiaan de With:

You can speculate what the ‘e’ in ‘16e’ stands for, but in my head it stands for ‘essential’. Some things that I consider particularly essential to the iPhone are all there: fantastic build quality, an OLED screen, iOS and all its apps, and Face ID. It even has satellite connectivity. Some other things I also consider essential are not here: MagSafe is very missed, for instance, but also multiple cameras. It would be reasonable to look at Apple’s Camera app, then, and see what comprises the ‘essential’ iPhone camera experience according to Apple.

Apple Silicon Is Groundbreaking for AI ★

Alex Cheema is the founder of EXO Labs, an AI company focused on “AI you can trust with your data” by making systems that run locally, on computers you own and control. Apple provided him with two M3 Ultra Mac Studios, each maxed out with 512 GB of unified memory. Within a day, he had them linked together by Thunderbolt 5 and had the full DeepSeek R1 model running on his desk.

Sure, that’s over $20,000 of computing hardware. But to my knowledge there is no other way in the world to run the full DeepSeek R1 model for even close to $20,000, let alone doing it on your desk rather than a data center. It’s an exclusive advantage, made possible by Apple Silicon’s general performance and the breakthrough of Apple’s unified memory architecture, which lets the GPU cores access the same RAM as the CPU cores.

Apple has tremendous technical advantages to offer in AI. But they’re marketing Genmojis of hot dogs carrying briefcases.

‘Apple Needs to Get Out of the Way With AI’ ★

Gus Mueller:

A week or so ago I was grousing to some friends that Apple needs to open up things on the Mac so other LLMs can step in where Siri is failing. In theory we (developers) could do this today, but I would love to see a blessed system where Apple provided APIs to other LLM providers.

Are there security concerns? Yes, of course there are, there always will be. But I would like the choice.

The crux of the issue in my mind is this: Apple has a lot of good ideas, but they don’t have a monopoly on them. I would like some other folks to come in and try their ideas out. I would like things to advance at the pace of the industry, and not Apple’s. Maybe with a blessed system in place, Apple could watch and see how people use LLMs and other generative models (instead of giving us Genmoji that look like something Fisher-Price would make). And maybe open up the existing Apple-only models to developers. There are locally installed image processing models that I would love to take advantage of in my apps.

The analogy I used, talking with Jason Snell during my guest stint on Upgrade last week, was to the heyday of desktop publishing. The Mac was the platform for graphic design because it was the best platform for using design apps. Fonts worked better and looked better on the Mac. Printing worked better from Macs. Peripherals worked better. The apps themselves looked better on the Mac than they did on Windows. The Mac had taste and designers (hopefully) have taste. Graphic designers could understand how their machines worked, and maintain them themselves, in a way they couldn’t with PCs.

But Apple didn’t make any of the actual apps. Companies like Adobe and Macromedia and Aldus did. Independent small developers made niche extensions for use inside apps like Photoshop, FreeHand, and QuarkXPress. When a new app came along like InDesign — which quickly ate Quark’s lunch — the Mac remained the dominant platform to use.

Making a great platform where other developers can innovate is one of Apple’s core strengths. Apple got even better at it once Mac OS X hit its stride in the 2000s — the Cocoa APIs really did empower outside developers to make world-class apps providing experiences that couldn’t be matched on other platforms like Windows or Linux. Then it happened again, with a much bigger audience, with iOS. What desktop publishing was to the Mac in the 1990s, social media was to the iPhone in the 2010s. Apple didn’t make the apps — they made the best platform to use those apps.

Apple should be laser focused on doing this for AI now. Where I quibble with Mueller is that I don’t want Apple to get out of the way. I want Apple to pave the roads to create the way. Apple doesn’t have to make the cars (literally) — just pave the best roads. Make the Mac the best platform for outside developers to create innovative AI systems and experiences. Make iOS the best consumer device to use AI apps from any outside developer. Work on APIs and frameworks for the AI age. No company has ever been better than Apple at designing and delivering those sort of APIs. Lean into that. It’s as useful, relevant, and profitable an institutional strength (and set of values) today as ever.

In a follow-up post, Mueller shows he’s thinking like I’m thinking:

But off the top of my head, here’s one idea that I think could really help and reap benefits for both Apple and developers.

Build a semantic index (SI), and allow apps to access it via permissions given similar to what we do for Address Book or Photos.

Maybe even make the permissions to the SI a bit more fine-grained than you normally would for other personal databases. Historical GPS locations? Scraping contents of the screen over time? Indexed contents of document folder(s)? Make these options for what goes into the SI.

And of course, the same would be true for building the SI. As a user, I’d love to be able to say “sure, capture what’s on the screen and scrape the text out of that, but nope - you better not track where I’ve been over time”.

HealthKit already works a lot like what Mueller is suggesting here (for, say, “SemanticKit”). With explicit user permission — that can be revoked at any time — third party apps can both read from and write to your Health data. Apple does a lot of that itself, both through Apple Watch and from the various activity-related things an iPhone can track, but third-party apps and devices are welcome participants, in a private, easily-understood way.

‘A Delightful and Simple User Experience’ ★

Scharon Harding, writing for Ars Technica:

Reports of Roku customers seeing video ads automatically play before they could view the OS’ home screen started appearing online this week. A Reddit user, for example, posted yesterday: “I just turned on my Roku and got an ... ad for a movie, before I got to the regular Roku home screen.” Multiple apparent users reported seeing an ad for the movie Moana 2. The ads have a close option, but some users appear to have not seen it.

When reached for comment, a Roku spokesperson shared a company statement that confirms that the autoplaying ads are expected behavior but not a permanent part of Roku OS currently. Instead, Roku claimed, it was just trying the ad capability out. [...]

“Our recent test is just the latest example, as we explore new ways to showcase brands and programming while still providing a delightful and simple user experience.”

What I’d find delightful and simple is disconnecting my Roku box and throwing it out the window.

Two New PebbleOS Watches ★

Eric Migicovsky:

We’re excited to announce two new smartwatches that run open source PebbleOS and are compatible with thousands of your beloved Pebble apps.

Core 2 Duo has an ultra crisp black and white display, polycarbonate frame, costs $149 and starts shipping in July.

Core Time 2 has a larger 64-colour display, metal frame, costs $225 and starts shipping in December.

My advice would have been to return with just one watch. Make a decision: color or monochrome. I’d sort of lean toward black-and-white, to differentiate it from Apple Watch and other high-end smartwatches. They’re never going to out-color Apple on display quality, so why not go the other way and lean in on black-and-white utility and contrast?

I would also suggest that whining about the fact that iOS doesn’t allow third-party devices the sort of integration that Apple Watch offers isn’t the path forward. Instead of arguing that “Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones”, lean into the ways that Pebble can be awesome because it isn’t an Apple Watch. 30-day battery life is awesome. I don’t think Apple Watch will ever offer that. Being able to run whatever apps — including watch faces — that you want on your own Pebble watch is awesome, and I know Apple Watch will never offer that. Lean into what Pebble watches can do that Apple Watches can’t. If the experience as a Pebble owner can be a lot better paired with an Android phone than an iPhone, lean into that. Show how much better it is on Android than iOS. Compete.

If you can’t show how much better Pebble is when paired to an Android device (which they couldn’t do 10 years ago), then what’s the point?

Did TikTok Swing the Election to Trump? ★

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire regarding pollster David Shor’s appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast:

His surveys indicate a clear causal relationship: People who relied on TikTok for news were much more likely to swing toward Trump than those who got their information from TV. His most striking data point:

When you zoom in on people who get their news from TikTok but don’t care very much about politics, this group is eight percentage points more Republican than they were four years ago — which is a lot.

What remains unclear is why this shift happened. Was TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, subtly adjusting its algorithm to undermine Democrats? Or was the platform simply reflecting broader anti-incumbent sentiment? Shor concedes:

You could tell a story that maybe just anti-incumbent stuff is going to do really well on TikTok, and Democrats are going to do great now. I don’t really know. But I think that, for whatever reason, this major shift really helped Republicans.

It used to be that getting your message out required persuading reporters, editors, and gatekeepers — people trained to vet and verify information.

Now anyone can make a short video, and if it’s compelling enough, it spreads like wildfire — except that it may be following a path predetermined by TikTok’s algorithms.

I worry that the liberal/left response to this will be to declare, with exasperation, that people shouldn’t be getting their news or forming their political opinions by what they see on TikTok. You need to meet people where they are, and craft messages for the media they consume.

On Apple Exclaves ★

Random Augustine has written a splendidly nerdy but very approachable overview of the evolution of Apple’s XNU kernel over the last decade:

2017 — Page Protection Layer

With the release of the iPhone 8 and iPhone X containing the A11 processor, Apple introduced a security feature known as the Page Protection Layer (PPL). This hardware+software feature isolated a small part of the kernel and gave it privileges to modify memory page tables — critical structures that manage memory access. The rest of the kernel lost the ability to directly modify these page tables. The PPL’s limited attack surface ensured that bypasses were infamously rare. While PPL added a layer of protection, it was only partly effective as the rest of the kernel still held most privileges required to compromise data without modifying page tables.

2021–2023 — Secure Page Table Monitor

Following PPL, the release of the iPhone 13 containing the A15 processor introduced new functionality utilised in iOS 17: the Secure Page Table Monitor (SPTM). This replaced and improved upon the PPL by securing additional memory functions and dividing them into subsystems, further isolating small kernel components. Validation of code signatures, confirming that all code had been signed by Apple was also isolated.

Around this time, oblique references to exclaves began to surface in XNU source code. These exclaves were speculated to be the subsystems managed by SPTM. Then 2024 happened…

2024 — Exclaves: A major addition to XNU

With the release of XNU source code supporting M4 and A18 based systems (such as the iPhone 16), the curtain was partly pulled back on exclaves. (Exclaves are not active on prior processors).

It is now clear that exclaves are part of a much larger redesign of XNU’s security model.

I am reminded of Gall’s Law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

(I also suspect that Siri — today’s Siri at least — might be a canonical example of “a complex system designed from scratch”. But that’s a different topic.)

Firefox Users on iOS Have Doubled in France and Germany, From a Very Small Number to a Slightly Less Small Number ★

Nick Heer:

They are impressive, but my interpretation of statistics like these is that one often finds percentages used like this when neither actual number is very large. Nevertheless, another indication that browser choice screens can have a positive effect for smaller browsers and, conversely, also a reminder of the power of defaults.

Saying the daily users have doubled isn’t very meaningful when they don’t state the baseline. It’s a bit of a Bezos chart. And what’s the proof that this growth is from happy users — users who, upon seeing the DMA browser choice screen on their iPhones, realized only then that they wanted to switch to Firefox? Surely some number of users who switched to Firefox via the choice screen did so by mistake, because they were confused.

The best case scenario is that this growth for Firefox (and presumably for other alternate browsers that qualified for the EU choice screens) means that alternative browsers have gone from a tiny usage share to a twice-as-large-but-still-tiny share, and that most of the growth comes from happy users. I see no proof, though, that the growth hasn’t at least significantly come from confused users who now wonder what happened to Safari. And either way, the DMA’s mandatory choice screen has, thus far, been relatively ineffective overall.

Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro: Closed Studio Headphones ★

Ten years ago I bought a pair of Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro headphones for use while podcasting. My product research was rigorous and exhaustive: I asked Marco Arment which headphones I should buy, he said these, so I bought them. They’re offered in three impedance variants: 32, 80, and 250 ohms. Beyerdynamics describes 80 ohms as the best “allrounder” choice, and that’s what Marco told me to get.

I’ve since worn them to record at least 275 episodes of The Talk Show (I think this episode was the first) and nearly all of the five-years-and-counting run of Dithering. They sound great, but more importantly, they’re super comfortable. I can wear them for 3+ hours and my ears don’t feel too bad at all. They’re also built to last. Just about everything on mine still looks fairly new, despite my having worn them for something approaching 1,000 hours. No cracking on the cable and the padding on the headband looks new. The one part that didn’t look new were the velour ear pads. Last week I ordered replacements from Beyerdynamics for $40; they arrived earlier this week and I swapped the old pads for new today.

When I bought my headphones in 2015, they cost $250. Today the price is down to just $170, either direct from Beyerdynamic or from Amazon (that’s a make-me-rich affiliate link). I am not an audiophile, and I literally only use mine for podcasting. But I’ve spent quite a lot time podcasting with them over the last decade. I’ll bet I’m still using the same pair (with another set of fresh ear pads) 10 years from now.

Tuesday, 18 March 2025

Hyperspace 1.1 ★

New (well, newish) Mac app from John Siracusa:

Hyperspace searches for files with identical contents within one or more folders. If it finds any, it can then reclaim the disk space taken by all but one of the identical files — without removing any of the files!

You can learn more about how this is done, if you’re interested, but the short version is that Hyperspace uses a standard feature of the macOS file system: space-saving clones. The Finder does the same thing when you duplicate a file.

I love everything about this app. I love the name — it “works” in like at least three ways. I love that it’s right up Siracusa’s alley. I love that Siracusa has talked about it, at wonderful length, on ATP and expounded upon it on his blog. I love that the premise sounds a little crazy but the explanation makes all the sense in the world. I love that this small, laser-focused utility is fully and splendidly documented. I love the way it looks. It’s got a great icon. I mean of course it would, but still, let’s celebrate how fun this is.

Saturday Night Live’s Cue Cards ★

Not new, but new to me, is this delightful 7-minute short with a behind-the-scenes look at SNL’s cue card team, led by longtime main cue card guy Wally Feresten. Sometimes you just can’t beat analog.

Chris Ware on Richard Scarry and the Art of Children’s Literature ★

As a kid I loved Richard Scarry’s books. As an adult I loved (and love) Chris Ware’s graphic novels. As a parent I loved reading Scarry’s books, again, with my son. So of course this essay from Ware, commemorating the 50th anniversary edition of Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, hit hard for me. Bet it will for you too.

Monday, 17 March 2025

Om Malik on Apple Intelligence: ‘FUD, Dud, or Both’ ★

Om Malik:

I have my own explanation, something my readers are familiar with, and it is the most obvious one. Just as Google is trapped in the 10-blue-link prison, which prevents it from doing something radical, Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company weighed down by its market capitalization and what stock market expects from it.

They lack the moral authority of Steve Jobs to defy the markets, streamline their product lineup, and focus the company. Instead, they do what a complex business often does: they do more. Could they have done a better job with iPadOS? Should Vision Pro receive more attention?

The answer to all those is yes. Apple has become a complex entity that can’t seem to ever have enough resources to provide the real Apple experience. What you get is “good enough.” And most of the time, I think it is enough — because what others have on the market is worse. They know how to build great hardware; it’s the software where they falter. In the case of Apple Intelligence, they have been caught short because others’ AI products, even when flawed, are significantly better than Apple’s own offerings.

Hardware inherently keeps a company honest in a way that software doesn’t. Hardware either works or it doesn’t. The only way to “upgrade” hardware is via installing newer software, or by taking the hardware apart and replacing physical components. It’s hard to think of a company, in any field, whose software is “better” than its hardware. Maybe Nintendo? But even with Nintendo, I’d say it’s more like their software is as good as their hardware. Also, an interesting thought that popped into my head reading Malik’s post just now: part of what makes Vision Pro so fascinating is that the software is better than the hardware. The hardware for immersive VR is so early-days that even the industry state-of-the-art — which is Vision Pro — stinks compared to where it’s going to be in even just five years. The 1984 Macintosh was a shitty computer with a 9-inch one-bit display, no hard drive, and an absurdly meager 128 kilobytes of RAM. But the software was amazing!

But the bigger, better point Malik makes is that “good enough” is enough to make Apple’s software seem ahead of its competition. I tried to make this point all the way back in 2007 with “Apple Needs a Nikon”, and I think the problem is worse now than it was then. No other company is even vaguely in Apple’s league. But Apple is sliding toward mediocrity on the software side. It’s very open for debate how far they’ve slipped. I, for one, would argue that they haven’t slipped far, and with an honest reckoning — especially with regard to everything related to Siri and AI — they can nip this in the bud. You might argue that they’ve slipped tremendously across the board. But what I don’t think is arguable is that their competition remains below Apple’s league. That’s what gives credence to the voices in Cupertino who are arguing that everything’s fine. Apple’s the only team in the top tier for UI design.

The best thing that could happen to Apple would be for Google to ship an Android Pixel experience that actually makes iPhone owners insanely jealous. Google is incapable of doing that through UI design. They’re incapable of catching up to Apple on hardware. But maybe on the AI front they can do it. Apple needs a rival.

Tesla’s Share Price Has Been Suspect Since Like Forever ★

Tesla’s share price has been having a hard time of it lately. The stock has lost about half its value since its all-time high back in December, and, since Musk took office alongside Donald Trump in January, dropped for 7 consecutive weeks, rebounding only ever-so-slightly last week, after Musk got the president of the United States to turn the White House lawn into a cheesy Tesla (sorry, Tesler) dealership. Tesla stock dropped another 5 percent today, on a day when the overall market was slightly up.

I bookmarked this Bryce Elder column at the Financial Times back on January 31, and now seems like a good time to link to it:

The usual explanation for when Tesla trading resembles a Pump.fun shitcoin is: “because Elon talks a lot”. Here’s JPMorgan analyst Ryan Brinkman to expand on the theme:

It’s not clear to us why Tesla shares traded as much as +5% higher in the aftermarket Wednesday, although we have some leading theories. Perhaps it was management’s statement that it had identified an achievable path to becoming worth more than the world’s five most valuable companies taken together (i.e., more than the $14.8 trillion combined market capitalizations of Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, & Alphabet). Or maybe it was management’s belief that just one of its products has by itself the potential to generate “north of $10 trillion in revenue”. It may have even related to management guidance for 2026 (no financial targets were provided, but it was said to be “epic”) and for 2027 and 2028 (“ridiculously good”).

Brinkman, who has a long-standing “underweight” rating on Tesla, is beginning to sound a bit exasperated:

[T]he company’s financial performance and Bloomberg consensus for revenue, margin, earnings, and cash flow all keep coming down, but analyst price targets and the company’s share price keep going up. For instance, Tesla has missed Bloomberg consensus EBIT in 9 of the past 10 quarters by an average of -16.3%.

Consistently missing estimates is one thing. What Tesla has been doing is consistently missing lowered estimates. [...]

Tesla’s biggest asset is hyperbole. The more extreme the hyperbole, the more valuable it gets. Maybe after-hours market participants understand the dynamics better than Tesla bears, so are primed to park fundamentals and trade on vibes. Or maybe something else entirely is going on.

Sounds a lot like the other guy at the White House Auto Mall.

Michael Tsai’s Roundup of Links and Commentary on My ‘Something Is Rotten’ Piece Last Week ★

I’ve been commenting and expanding upon some of the commentary my piece prompted, and I have a few more coming, but it’s good to have Tsai collect a comprehensive overview.

Ray Maker on the Heart Rate Sensor of the Beats PowerBeats 2 Pro ★

Ray Maker, writing at DC Rainmaker:

This would not only be the first time Apple has created a non-watch heart rate sensor, but even more notably, the first time the company has enabled heart rate broadcasting over existing Bluetooth heart rate standards.

The question then becomes: Is it accurate?

Unfortunately, it turns out, that was not the question I should have started with. The real question to start with is: Is the heart rate function (accuracy aside), even usable? A lot of hours later, I have answers to both of those questions. And trust me, it’s a very mixed bag.

The answer:

It’s clear that any movement (even on a stationary bike) quickly leads to either dropouts or inaccurate heart rate. And outdoors running, it’s even worse. Ultimately, I don’t see any value in the heart rate sensor in this product, because it’s simply not good enough to be useful, even for casual use.

So maybe this feature is not soon coming to AirPods? I think there’s a good argument to be made that these are better than no heart rate monitor at all but also not nearly as good as an Apple Watch or dedicated device.

Chance Miller Reviews the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 ★

I’m a month late linking to it, but Chance Miller wrote a terrific review for 9to5Mac:

The last several releases from Beats, such as the Studio Buds Plus and Solo 4 headphones, have been powered by a custom Beats chip rather than an Apple-designed chip like what’s used in AirPods. For Beats, this has enabled better cross-platform support for Android users, but it’s also come at the cost of several popular features for Apple fans. For example, the Studio Buds Plus lack support for automatic in-ear detection, iCloud pairing, automatic device switching, personalized spatial audio, and more.

With the Powerbeats Pro 2, Beats has gone back to its roots and opted for an Apple-designed chip. The Powerbeats Pro 2 are powered by Apple’s H2 chip, the same chip used by the latest-generation AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4. This means you get the full suite of Apple-focused audio features.

The degree of shared engineering between Apple’s teams and Beats’s has always seemed odd to me. Sometimes it seems like Beats really is an independent subsidiary, focused on cross-platform headphones, and other times it feels like they’re making Apple products under a different brand label. The sweet spot seems to be about where they landed with these Powerbeats 2.

All of the aforementioned features and improvements make Powerbeats Pro 2 an incredibly compelling product, but Beats has one more thing: Powerbeats Pro 2 feature built-in heart rate monitoring.

Each Powerbeats Pro 2 earbud has a built-in heart rate monitor comprised of four components. First, there’s an LED sensor that emits green LED light at a rate of over 100 pulses per second. This light is emitted through the skin and hits your red blood cells. The photodiode then receives the reflected light from the red blood cells that is modulated by the red blood flow. There’s an optical lens that helps direct and separate the transmitted and received light, along with an accelerometer to ensure accuracy and consistency in data collection.

Beats adds that the Powerbeats Pro 2’s heart rate sensor technology is derived from Apple’s work on the Apple Watch.

It’s weird, but cool, that Beats has delivered in-ear heartbeat monitoring before Apple’s own AirPods have. But now it seems like a lock that this will be a feature in AirPods Pro 3, right?

What I always want in a review I read — and what I try to provide to readers through my own reviews — is a sense of whether a product is for me. Powerbeats Pro 2 aren’t for me — and I know it, because Miller’s review describes them so well. But they seem like a terrific product that a lot of people would prefer to AirPods Pro.

Michael Gartenberg on the Lessons Apple Learned (and Hopefully Has Not Forgotten) From MobileMe ★

Sebastiaan de With, on X, linking to my “Something Is Rotten” piece last week:

Ex-MobileMe team here. This was a brutal time.

It was so bad that when he presented iCloud onstage, Steve said “I know what you’re thinking: why should I trust them? They’re the ones who gave us MobileMe!”

Michael Gartenberg (who worked at Apple in product marketing for a few years at the tail end of the Jobs era), responded (across two tweets):

When I was at Apple and Apple University was still around there was a whole course on MobileMe and how it was possible that things ended up the way they did. Fascinating to hear all the backstory.

One of the lessons of the Apple University course was much of the MobileMe debacle was directly because Jobs didn’t care about it. He was too preoccupied with the newest iPhone at the time. He didn’t even introduce the product, a lot of the stuff crossed his desk that he ignored.

Twitter-like social posts enforce brevity, but I suspect Gartenberg would agree that it wasn’t that Jobs didn’t care about MobileMe at all. It was that he didn’t think he had to care enough to devote his personal attention to it. Yes, Apple should offer web-based functionality for some online fundamentals (email, calendar, contacts...) and, more importantly, Apple should provide over-the-air Internet sync for that data between customers’ devices. And it should just work, in the way that a hard drive “just works” without Steve Jobs paying close attention to the current state of Apple’s file system team. But then it turned out MobileMe didn’t “just work”, and Jobs decided that he needed to pay laser-focused attention to starting over and building what we now know as iCloud (which is really quite good, very reliable, and I’d say long ago surpassed the “it just works” threshold). Steve Jobs’s final keynote — at WWDC 2011 — was largely focused on the announcement of iCloud.

Who’s got that role inside Apple today — someone with high standards, good taste, and clout within the company — for Siri and Apple Intelligence? Someone who is going to say We didn’t care enough about this, but now we need to, and will.

‘Going National: The Drexel Microcomputing Project’ ★

From Drexel’s YouTube channel:

But far less recognized is that Drexel made the very bold decision of committing all students to purchase a previously unreleased and untested computer from Apple. This was, of course, the Macintosh (introduced in January 1984), which was unlike any previous computer. Drexel’s commitment to the Mac was also of great benefit to Apple, helping to legitimize this brand-new platform, which helped make the Mac a successful product that continues to thrive in education 40 years later.

This entire initiative, called the Drexel Microcomputer Project, was captured in a 1-hour documentary filmed by David Jones, Dean of the Pennoni Honors College from 2008 to 2014. The film premiered at Drexel in 1985.

I was very fortunate not only to know Dave Jones (who died in 2018) but to have him as a professor for several film criticism courses (one on westerns, and another on the works of Alfred Hitchcock). I was a computer science major, not a film major, but Jones didn’t care. He was also familiar with — dare I say, a fan of — my column in The Triangle, Drexel’s student newspaper. He took me to lunch my senior year and encouraged me to pursue writing as a career. He was a great teacher: thoughtful, kind, insightful, open-minded, and deeply knowledgeable.

I saw a screening of Going National back in 2011, and sat on a panel discussion with Jones to talk about it. It’s a good documentary, and he really captured the feel of Drexel’s campus at the time. It is a very ’80s movie. It was gratifying that I got to tell him, then, that his advice to me back in 1996 had worked out pretty well.

‘40 Years Ago, Drexel Made Computer — and Apple — History’ ★

Alissa Falcone, in a good piece looking back at (my alma mater) Drexel University’s groundbreaking deal with Apple 40 years ago to provide deeply discounted Macintoshes to all students, and integrate them throughout the campus and curriculums:

Drexel was prepared to buy IBM computers — and had equipped its computer centers with IBMs for decades — but the cost came to more than $1,000 per unit. IBM’s young competitor Apple, on the other hand, was willing to give discounts, provided the University agreed to secret negotiations and discreet showings of its newest, unreleased personal computer.

Bruce Eisenstein, PhD, Arthur J. Rowland Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering, was the head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the time, and had been the founding faculty adviser for the Drexel Computer Society started in 1972. He was Drexel’s choice to meet with an Apple representative to see the future Macintosh, which had never-before-seen properties like a mouse, icons on a screen and different fonts. This new Apple product was more powerful and easier to use than earlier personal computers; novices could supposedly master it in 30 minutes (without the need to memorize and type coded commands). And Apple agreed on the $1,000 price tag for a model that sold to the public for $2,495.

“I went back to the selection committee and I said, ‘Listen, you have to forget the IBM. This new computer from Apple is the one you have to get. They are going to make it available to us for a thousand dollars — that’s all inclusive.’ And the first question was ‘Is it compatible with the IBM computer?’ Well, no. Was there software for it? No. Were there any programs for it, like a word processor? Not yet. So the committee justifiably kept saying, well, what’s the name of this? What’s it like? I couldn’t tell them. I had to say you just gotta trust me on this. So they took a vote and unanimously voted to adopt the unknown computer that turned out to be the Macintosh,” Eisenstein recalled in Building Drexel: The University and Its City, 1891-2016.

Drexel chose the untested Macintosh even knowing that Apple wouldn’t announce it to the public until January 1984 and that the computers wouldn’t be ready until March, almost halfway through that momentous academic year.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Eisenstein, but I’d sure like to thank him for his prescience. By the time I got to Drexel in 1991 the Mac was infused throughout campus.

My 2015 Interview With ‘Becoming Steve Jobs’ Authors Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli ★

Ten years ago I played two small roles in the release of the aforelinked Becoming Steve Jobs. First, I got to announce the book here at Daring Fireball, after having been sent an advance copy a few weeks earlier. My praise for the book then was glowing, but in hindsight, I think I undersold just how good — and how essential — it is. At the time of its launch, the book remained in the shadow of Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography. Ten years later, I refer back to Becoming Steve Jobs regularly; Isaacson’s book almost never.

Second, the SoHo Apple Store in New York hosted a “Meet the Authors” event, and I had the pleasure of playing host for the interview. It’s still available, both as video and audio. And as I wrote at the time, “I’m kind of proud that it got flagged as ‘explicit’ — but that was Bill Gates’s fault.”

The Original ‘Something’s Rotten in Cupertino’ – Brent Schlender’s 1997 Story for Fortune ★

During Friday’s episode of Dithering — a free listen — Ben Thompson reminded me that my headline reference last week, alluding to the well-known line from Hamlet, had been used, to great effect, once before. Brent Schlender wrote a crackerjack piece for Fortune in March 1997 under the slightly-different-than-mine headline “Something’s Rotten in Cupertino”.

I should make very clear that I didn’t mean to allude to Schlender’s piece with mine. We both just riffed on the same idiom from Shakespeare. In my case, I’m writing about one initiative that’s gone awry inside a very successful, well-functioning Apple. The timeframe for Schlender’s piece, on the other hand, was the most precarious and dysfunctional period in the history of Apple. Then-CEO Gil Amelio had just announced the acquisition of NeXT in December 1996. By June, most of the board would be replaced, Amelio fired, and Steve Jobs would return as an “advisor”, and, by the end of 1997, as “interim CEO”. Schlender was all over what was really going on:

At Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, a power play is in progress that calls into question who’s really running the company and that may very well put Apple in play once again. So thick is this plot that it reaches into the homes of some of the most powerful CEOs in Silicon Valley. The delicious irony is that what triggered the soap opera is a move Amelio hopes is his masterstroke: Apple’s $400-million acquisition of Next, and the advisory services of Steve Jobs that come bundled with it.

Amelio’s big deal is beginning to look more like a Next takeover of Apple. Never mind that Next Software was a boutique with revenues that would amount to less than a rounding error to Apple. Jobs, the Svengali of Silicon Valley, may have outdone himself this time: Not only did he collect $100 million and 1.5 million shares of Apple stock for his stake in Next, but his fingerprints are all over Amelio’s latest reorganization plan and product strategy — even though Jobs doesn’t have an operational role or even a board seat.

To the Machiavellian eye, it looks as if Jobs, despite the lure of Hollywood — lately he has been overseeing Pixar, maker of Toy Story and other computer-animated films — might be scheming to take over Apple for himself. If anyone doubts he could do it, all you have to do is ask his best friend, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the richest man in Silicon Valley. Says he: “Steve’s the only one who can save Apple.”

We all know today this is exactly how it played out. But in March 1997 none of it was obvious at all. It really wasn’t even clear whether Apple would still exist as an independent company by the end of the year. Just extraordinary reporting and storytelling by Schlender.

Go ahead and re-read Schlender’s 1997 Fortune piece, which we should be thankful remains online at all, but which has been mangled, formatting-wise, by whatever series of CMS transitions have kept it online for 28 years. But if you want the best version of this saga, get yourself a copy of Becoming Steve Jobs, the 2015 biography Schlender co-authored with Rick Tetzeli. I just re-read chapter 8 over the weekend — the chapter covering Jobs’s momentous 1997 (in addition to the Apple-NeXT reunification, that was also the year he hammered out an aggressive new deal with Disney for five post-Toy Story feature films) — and it’s just so good. If you don’t already have a copy of Becoming Steve Jobs, get it at Amazon or from Bookshop.org or Apple Books.

Sunday, 16 March 2025

Dithering: ‘Being Real Points’ ★

A new feature in our membership CMS (Passport — check it out) lets us make individual episodes of Dithering free for everyone to listen to (on the web). I can’t think of a better way to first use this new capability than to open up Friday’s episode, recapping my “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” article, and the resonance with which it hit. Even the cover art — selected weeks ago — captures how I’ve felt this week.

Give it a listen. Subscribe if you enjoy it.

Saturday, 15 March 2025

WorkOS: Scalable, Secure Authentication ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring this week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC.

Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales. Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel. Upgrade your auth today.

How to Generate a Report of Apple Intelligence Requests Sent to Private Cloud Compute ★

From Apple’s support documentation:

You can generate a report of requests your iPhone has sent to Private Cloud Compute.

Go to Settings, then tap Privacy & Security.

Tap Apple Intelligence Report, then choose a report duration for the last 15 minutes (default) or last 7 days. Choose off to disable the report.

Note: The report may be empty if there haven’t been any Private Cloud Compute requests since you changed the duration.

Tap Export Activity, choose a place to store the file, then tap Export.

The report is saved as a file named Apple_Intelligence_Report.json.

Open the file with a text reader.

These are the iOS instructions, but they’re exactly the same on MacOS 15 Sequoia. My first generated report was empty for the last 7 days, and it was empty again even after running the Writing Tools Proofread function on the text of my 4,000-word “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” article from this week. But when I ran the Writing Tools Summarize feature on the same text, I wound up with a long entry that was sent to Private Cloud Compute. So, at the moment, Summarize seems like a good way to invoke Private Cloud Compute, even from a relatively powerful Mac.

Here’s the summary Apple Intelligence generated. I have to say: it’s pretty good. It’s completely petty but also completely me to notice and object to the way it uses two spaces after periods — and worse, only some of the time. Also, the sentence “This raises concerns about the company’s ability to maintain its position as a leader in AI innovation” is, let’s say, off the mark.

Update: Howard Oakley wrote a post with a brief overview of the structure and contents of these reports back on October 29.

New RCS Spec From GSM Association Adds E2EE; Both Apple and Google to Support It ★

Jess Weatherbed, reporting for The Verge:

iPhone and Android users will be able to exchange end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) RCS messages in the near future thanks to newly updated RCS specifications. The GSM Association announced that the latest RCS standard includes E2EE based on the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, enabling interoperable encryption between different platform providers for the first time. [...]

“End-to-end encryption is a powerful privacy and security technology that iMessage has supported since the beginning, and now we are pleased to have helped lead a cross industry effort to bring end-to-end encryption to the RCS Universal Profile published by the GSMA,” said Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer. “We will add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS in future software updates.” [...]

“We’ve always been committed to providing a secure messaging experience, and Google Messages users have had end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) RCS messaging for years,” Google spokesperson Ed Fernandez told The Verge. “We’re excited to have this updated specification from GSMA and work as quickly as possible with the mobile ecosystem to implement and extend this important user protection to cross-platform RCS messaging.”

This is nothing but good news. But it’s wrong to frame this along Google’s lines, that they’ve been there waiting for Apple to support E2EE for RCS. They’ve been waiting for Apple to support RCS at all, yes, and Google has also implemented their own proprietary E2EE layer for RCS. But until now, there was no E2EE specification in the open RCS spec. Now there is. That’s why it’s not just Android ↔︎ iOS RCS messaging that wasn’t able to use E2EE, but even Android ↔︎ Android, unless both devices were using Google’s own Messages app.

I have also noticed recently that Google Messages and Apple Messages now do a pretty good job of supporting each other’s tapbacks. And that hasn’t done anything to really change the green/blue messaging dynamic. Both things are true: RCS makes cross-platform messaging way better and iMessage remains vastly superior to RCS.

What I’m most interested about with Apple’s implementation of RCS encryption is how they’ll indicate it visually in chats. It’s not going to be with blue bubbles. Blue means “iMessage”, not “encrypted” — it just happens to be that iMessage started as a protocol based on end-to-end encryption. There’s no such thing as a non-encrypted iMessage — it’s part of the protocol, and always has been. But what happens when new/updated Android phones support the new RCS encryption spec, and older devices don’t? A lock icon for the encrypted chats? If it were up to me, iOS would drop support for non-encrypted RCS — iOS should use RCS with E2EE for every device that supports it, and fall back to dumb old no-encryption-at-all SMS for all devices that do not.

Apple Did Demo Swift Assist at WWDC Last Year, and Has Shown It, Under NDA, Since Then ★

In an item earlier this week observing that Swift Assist, the most ambitious Xcode-related Apple Intelligence feature shown at WWDC last year, not only hasn’t yet shipped but still is not in beta, I wondered whether Apple actually demoed it live last year. John Voorhees, writing for MacStories from WWDC last June, reports that they did:

Earlier today, I got the very first live demo of Swift Assist, one of the many developer tools introduced today by Apple. I also saw code completion in action. It was an impressive demo, and although the tools seem like magic and will undoubtedly be valuable to developers, they do have their limitations, which are worth exploring. [...]

The code completion demo also included a live demo of Swift Assist. Unlike code completion, Swift Assist requires an Internet connection because requests are sent to the cloud. As a result, it takes several seconds for Swift Assist to return results. The delay was noticeable compared to the speed of code completion, but it wasn’t a painfully long wait either.

I heard this week from a third-party developer who was invited to Apple for a one-day hands-on session with Swift Assist late last year. Swift Assist was definitely working, but seemingly not working too well. From that source: “The UI is very much complete (just like Siri), but the results the LLM produces were not very good. It could make very basic demo apps with a prompt like ‘make an app that takes the NASA satellite JSON and shows the current satellites traveling overhead right now’, but not too much more than that. It fell apart on more complex tasks.”

I remember the remote-inference-only aspect of the Swift Assist presentation from my Xcode briefing at WWDC: that because of its complexity, Swift Assist would not execute locally and would only run via Private Cloud Compute. My own notes on this from WWDC were mostly related to the privacy and security implications. That developers should feel safe using Swift Assist even with confidential code and projects because Private Cloud Compute would be guaranteed private. I also remember thinking, at the time, that I should be more skeptical about Apple’s claims about Apple Intelligence features that would execute locally, on-device, rather than the ones that would execute remotely, via Private Cloud Compute, because the way almost all “AI” features from other companies over the previous two years worked was entirely in the cloud. Apple’s statements that Apple Intelligence will perform much inference locally, on-device, seemed like the stretch goal.

But now in March 2025 I’m beginning to think it’s the other way around. What features and aspects of Apple Intelligence run in Private Cloud Compute, today, in March 2025? Do any? I’ve been poking around for a few days and I don’t have any answers. Is Private Cloud Compute running in production yet? How would we know? If you know, let me know.

Update: “How to Generate a Report of Apple Intelligence Requests Sent to Private Cloud Compute”.

Imagine How Powerful Meta Might Be Today If Their PR Wasn’t Run by Sycophantic Morons ★

Katie Notopoulos, writing at Business Insider (Apple News+ link):

It’s possible that this strident defense is backfiring — creating a “Streisand Effect” that’s publicizing the book even more.

Notopoulos isn’t one to pull punches or hedge, normally, but there’s no question that Meta has Streisand Effected the hell out of Wynn-Williams’s Careless People. I’m on my way to buy a copy this afternoon and I hadn’t even heard of its existence a day ago.

Sarah Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook from 2011 to 2017 — and her book, “Careless People,” details what she said were a bunch of bad things the company did. It also contains allegations that Joel Kaplan — who is now Meta’s chief global affairs officer — sexually harassed her. (Meta said this week that Kaplan had been cleared of the harassment allegations in 2017 after it investigated Wynn-Williams’ complaint.)

The book was released with hardly any pre-publishing fanfare: It was announced by its publisher, Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan, only a few days before it came out Tuesday. That’s an unusually short timeline.

Meta’s reaction has been emphatic and multi-pronged. The company created a page on its website that detailed a series of the claims in the book. It said some of these — like claims about its ambitions in China or its alleged failure to act in Myanmar — have already been reported in the news media as far back as 2017 and have been acknowledged by the company publicly. The company lists seven “new” claims from the book and then offers links to past coverage and company responses — calling the claims “old news.”

Meta’s strongest move was on Wednesday when it won a ruling in arbitration that said Wynn-Williams could no longer promote the book because of a non-disparagement clause in a contract she signed as an employee. The ruling was granted on an emergency basis and is temporary pending the completion of the full arbitration process, The Washington Post reported.

“Read the book that Meta not only doesn’t want you to read, but wants to prevent its author from even talking about” is a hell of a marketing angle. What an own goal.

‘Ted Lasso’ Renewed for a Fourth Season ★

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter:

After more than a year of speculation, Apple TV+ has ordered a fourth season of its Emmy-winning comedy Ted Lasso. The pickup comes after co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis closed a deal to reprise his role as the title character, the manager of the fictional AFC Richmond soccer club in London.

I dig Ted Lasso but this is like 0.1 percent as interesting as When are we going to get Severance season 3?! Gimme gimme gimme. And we haven’t even gotten to next week’s season 2 finale yet.

Best vs. First ★

CNBC story from 2016:

At a recent public appearance at the Utah Tech Tour, in a conversation moderated by Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch, Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out that Microsoft had tablets on the market decades before Apple.

Cook emphasized his company’s timing coming to market with new products to underscore the idea that it’s nearly impossible for a company to be the best, the first and to make the most of a given product. [...]

“It doesn’t bother us that we are second, third, fourth or fifth if we still have the best. We don’t feel embarrassed because it took us longer to get it right,” says Cook.

“For Apple, being the best is the most important and trumps the other two by far.”

This has been one of Apple’s guiding mantras for decades, and it has served the company very well. But it stops holding water when they promise to be first, but then aren’t first and aren’t the best.

If you only ever promise A, B, and C — and never mention X, Y, or Z — even when competitors ship their versions of X, Y, and Z first, your silence speaks for itself. Either you don’t think X, Y, and Z are important, or, you think it’s worth taking more time to get them right. But if you promise A, B, C, X, Y, and Z, and then only ship A, B, and C, you just look lost when competitors ship X, Y, and Z.

Jay Peters, last month for The Verge:

Google’s next I/O developer conference will take place on May 20th and May 21st, the company announced today. The event will be “open to everyone online” and will include “livestreamed keynotes and sessions,” according to an FAQ. Like past years, there will also be an in-person component at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California.

That’s still two months off but I got interested in the dates for I/O this week. After we recorded Friday’s Dithering (on which we talked about my “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” piece and, more so, the reaction to it, the resonance it seemed to strike), Ben Thompson and I were spitballing, and it popped into my head that Apple’s “more personalized Siri” delay is a marketing gift to Google.

What I would do if I worked at Google is prepare a live demo of Google Gemini on a Pixel phone doing exactly what Apple showed in last year’s announcement at WWDC, and then again in the Bella Ramsey TV commercial that Apple pulled from YouTube. Something like this:

Presenter: This is a live demo, on my Pixel 9. I need to pick my mom up at the airport and she sent me an email with her flight information. [Invokes Gemini on phone in hand...] Gemini, when is my mom’s flight landing?

Gemini: Your mom’s flight is on time, and arriving at SFO at 11:30.

Presenter: I don’t always remember to add things to my calendar, and so I love that Gemini can help me keep track of plans that I’ve made in casual conversation, like this lunch reservation my mom mentioned in a text. [Invokes Gemini...] What’s our lunch plan?

Gemini: You’re having lunch at Waterbar at 12:30.

Presenter: How long will it take us to get there from the airport?

Gemini presents a Google Maps driving directions popup window showing it will take 21 minutes.

Then do another live demo with the “What’s the name of the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grenel?” example from Apple’s now-pulled Apple Intelligence commercial. The exact same demos, but real: live and on stage. These would be great demos even if Apple had never promised to deliver them. But given that Apple did promise them for this year, and has now delayed them until “the coming year”, they’re devastating if Google can show them actually working on Apple’s own original timeline.

Stick to what Gemini can actually do, on actual Pixel phones running the new beta software — which by some accounts already includes the delayed personalized features of Siri. The point should be showing Google AI technology, accessing personal data from Google cloud services, using Google devices, delivering on the promises made by Apple a year prior. But there’s no need for Google’s presenters to mention Apple or Siri, or even mention unnamed “competitors”. Everyone watching the I/O keynote will recognize those demo prompts and draw the competitive conclusions for themselves. Nothing comes across as confident like not even acknowledging, let alone naming, your competition. And nothing serves as proof like a live working demo.

Friday, 14 March 2025

All-Hands Siri Team Meeting Leaks to Bloomberg ★

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg today:

Apple Inc.’s top executive overseeing its Siri virtual assistant told staff that delays to key features have been ugly and embarrassing, and a decision to publicly promote the technology before it was ready made matters worse.

Robby Walker, who serves as a senior director at Apple, delivered the stark comments during an all-hands meeting for the Siri division, saying that the team was facing a bad period. Walker also said that it’s unclear when the enhancements will actually launch, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the gathering was private.

Robby Walker is not Apple’s “top executive overseeing its Siri virtual assistant”. Take your pick of whether that’s SVP John Giannandrea or CEO Tim Cook, but Walker reports to Giannandrea. Gurman, of course, knows this better than I do; I suspect he knows Apple’s entire org chart. But it makes Bloomberg’s headline — “Apple’s Siri Chief Calls AI Delays Ugly and Embarrassing, Promises Fixes” — misleading. Also somewhat misleading in that headline is that these comments from Walker were clearly not meant to leak. This is not a public apology, like the one Tim Cook wrote and signed in 2012 in the aftermath of the Apple Maps launch with iOS 6.

Still, he praised the team for developing “incredibly impressive” features and vowed to deliver an industry-leading virtual assistant to consumers.

Those two words are the only direct quote in the first nine paragraphs of Bloomberg’s report, which is kind of crazy, because the second half of Gurman’s story is full of quotes. I suspect his editors did Gurman a disservice on this one. The quotes are juicy AF, but don’t really start until the 10th paragraph. Like, for example, which Siri features does Walker think are “incredibly impressive”? No snark, I’d love to know. Is it Siri’s sports knowledge? The new product knowledge feature, that gives incomplete and/or incorrect instructions for how to toggle preferences in Settings? OK I guess that’s some snark, but I sincerely and honestly would love to know which Siri features the senior director in charge of Siri considers “incredibly impressive”.

Walker told staff in the meeting that the delays were especially “ugly” because Apple had already showed off the features publicly. “This was not one of these situations where we get to show people our plan after it’s done,” he said. “We showed people before.”

“To make matters worse,” Walker said, Apple’s marketing communications department wanted to promote the enhancements.

Again, this meeting clearly was not intended to leak. (It’s perhaps another knock against the Siri team, in addition to the quality of their output, that they leak internal meetings.) But that comes across as Walker blaming marketing.

Walker also raised doubts about even meeting the current release expectations. Though Apple is aiming for iOS 19, it “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then,” Walker said. The company has several more priorities in development, and trade-offs will need to be made, he said.

“We have other commitments across Apple to other projects,” Walker said, citing new software and hardware initiatives. “We want to keep our commitments to those, and we understand those are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred.” He said decisions on timing will be made on a “case-by-case basis” as work progresses on products planned for next year.

“Customers are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri,” he said. “We’re going to ship these features and more as soon as they are ready.”

The customers still haven’t gotten their appetizers, but it’s time to start the entrees, so the kitchen staff is working on those now. But don’t worry, they hope to get the appetizers out alongside dessert. But it’s OK because dessert might be late too.

As of Friday, Apple doesn’t plan to immediately fire any top executives over the AI crisis, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

I’d be very curious to know just how many people could possibly be familiar with this particular matter. Because this particular matter comes down to what Tim Cook is thinking. I’m thinking it’s about six people he might discuss this with. Wait, no, I just thought of a seventh. I’m going to say seven, tops. But maybe I’m wrong, and Tim Cook is the chatty sort, who openly talks with a large number of senior managers about whom he might fire.

Walker said the decision to delay the features was made because of quality issues and that the company has found the technology only works properly up to two-thirds to 80% of the time. He said the group “can make more progress to get those percentages up, so that users get something they can really count on.”

It’s unclear exactly which features these are in reference to, but presumably they’re not the “incredibly impressive” ones. Because something that “only works properly up to two-thirds” of the time only seems regular impressive to me, not incredibly impressive. Maybe it’s the ones that work properly four out of five times that are incredible?

Walker compared the endeavor to an attempt to swim to Hawaii. “We swam hundreds of miles — we set a Guinness Book for World Records for swimming distance — but we still didn’t swim to Hawaii,” he said. “And we were being jumped on, not for the amazing swimming that we did, but the fact that we didn’t get to the destination.”

I’d say it’s a little more like selling customers tickets for a cruise that includes a stop in Hawaii, then never actually getting to Hawaii, and hoping they didn’t notice when the ship returns to port to disembark.

He showed examples during the meeting of the technology working: It was able to locate his driver’s license number on command and find specific photos of a child. He also demonstrated how the technology could precisely manipulate apps via voice control. It embedded content in an email, added recipients and made other changes.

That’s the biggest actual news in the report, and it’s in paragraph 23.

Walker said that some staffers may feel “relieved” over the delays. “If you were using these features in the build, you were probably wondering: Are these ready? How do I feel about shipping these to our customers? Is this the right choice?”

He added that some employees “might be feeling embarrassed.”

Again, I’ll reiterate that this was a private meeting, not meant to leak. Maybe it’s an inaccurate summary. I hope it is. But as reported by Gurman, this meeting reeks of you-all-deserve-participation-trophies-to-reward-your-hard-work-and-it’s-OK-to-feel-embarrassed vibes. What’s needed, quite obviously, is some “What is it supposed to do? / So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” vibes.

I Imagined It and Genmoji’d It ★

As a postscript to that last item, it occurred to me that because we’re close friends, I have a lot of photos of Paul Kafasis in my library. Here’s one from a year ago you can use as a reference. I wondered how Genmoji would do with “An owl who looks like Paul Kafasis, wearing a Celtics jersey, holding a basketball.” Here’s the best one, from my Mac running MacOS 15.3.1 Sequoia.

Genmoji output for “An owl who looks like Paul Kafasis, wearing a Celtics jersey, holding a basketball.”

It does resemble Paul. Not sure about how owl-like it is, the “holding” part, the slopping of “Celtics”, or the quality of orthodontia over in Genmojiworld.

The Legend of Larry Owl ★

Paul Kafasis, on a seemingly local-to-Boston Genmoji billboard from Apple:

Eventually, though, the penny dropped. After my umpteenth time passing the billboard, while trying to distract myself from the single-digit temperatures and the brutal wind chill, I realized what I’d been missing. That’s not just a basketball-playing ~~foul~~ fowl.

You see, the Last Tenement is located just a few hundred feet from TD Garden, home arena for the reigning NBA champion Boston Celtics. The Celtics have had many great players over the years, but only one had the last name “Bird”. Yes, this billboard is surely an allusion to the Hick from French Lick, Larry Bird.

It was obvious once I finally saw it, and I was so amused that I went by with my phone to snap the above pic. At that point, I noticed that the cartoon’s basketball jersey even seems to feature Larry Legend’s #33. It’s cut off, perhaps in the hopes of avoiding a lawsuit, but those numbers really can’t be anything else.

I can’t believe Kafasis didn’t recognize the caricature immediately, but he’s a bit younger than me and didn’t grow up like I did, familiarizing myself with the early 1980s “Familiar Birds of North America” illustrated guide from ... checks notes ... Playboy.

U.S. Lawmakers Urge U.K. Secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal to Hold Public Hearing Regarding Demand for Secret iCloud Backdoor ★

Zack Whittaker, reporting for TechCrunch:

A group of bipartisan U.S. lawmakers are urging the head of the U.K.’s surveillance court to hold an open hearing into Apple’s anticipated challenge of an alleged secret U.K. government legal demand.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, along with four other federal lawmakers, said in a letter this week to the president of the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) that it is “in the public interest” that any hearings about the alleged order are not held in secret.

From the letter, signed by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Alex Padilla (D-CA), and Congresspeople Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Warren Davidson (R-OH):

We write to request the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) remove the cloak of secrecy related to notices given to American technology companies by the United Kingdom, which infringes on free speech and privacy, undermines important United States Congress and U.K. parliamentary oversight, harms national security, and ultimately, undermines the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. [...]

Given the significant technical complexity of this issue, as well as the important national security harms that will result from weakening cybersecurity defenses, it is imperative that the U.K.’s technical demands of Apple — and of any other U.S. companies — be subjected to robust, public analysis and debate by cybersecurity experts. Secret court hearings featuring intelligence agencies and a handful of individuals approved by them do not enable robust challenges on highly technical matters. Moreover, given the potential impact on U.S. national security, it is vital that American cybersecurity experts be permitted to analyze and comment on the security of what is proposed.

Thursday, 13 March 2025

Swift Assist Hasn’t Shipped, and Isn’t Yet in Beta ★

Michael Tsai:

Swift Assist was supposed to arrive in 2024, but it never even appeared in a beta. Apple hasn’t announced that it’s postponed or cancelled. It’s not even mentioned in the release notes.

Apple announced two AI-powered features for Xcode last year: predictive code completion and Swift Assist. Predictive code completion is basically getting suggestions for what you might intend to write next. Swift Assist is far more ambitious, runs only in the cloud (via Private Cloud Compute), and promises to write entire components for you. So much like the rest of Apple Intelligence, it’s the simpler thing that has shipped, and the more radical ambitious thing that has not.

I looked into Swift Assist this week while researching, and checking my notes from WWDC, for my long piece yesterday. I had an entire briefing with the Xcode team at WWDC last year, and alas, I was late for it (previous briefing, with a different team, had started late), so I missed some stuff and my notes are unusually terse. What I wanted to check my notes for is whether or not I was shown a live demo of Swift Assist last June. But my notes don’t say, and my own memory is completely unsure whether the demos I saw performed were only for predictive code completion, or included Swift Assist.

If anyone else who was in those WWDC briefings remembers whether Swift Assist was actually demoed, please let me know. I’m genuinely curious if Swift Assist was another thing — like all of “more personalized Siri” — that wasn’t even in demonstratable shape at WWDC.

Update, 15 March: “Apple Did Demo Swift Assist at WWDC Last Year, and Has Shown It, Under NDA, Since Then”.

Wednesday, 12 March 2025

Brazilian Court Gives Apple 90 Days to Allow Sideloading on iOS ★

Filipe Espósito, reporting last week for 9to5Mac:

As reported by Brazilian newspaper Valor Econômico (via O Globo), a federal judge in Brazil ruled on Wednesday that Apple will have to open up the iOS ecosystem to third-party apps in Brazil just like the company did in the EU. The judge considers that the “limitations” imposed by the company on developers could jeopardize the entry of new competitors in the segment. [...]

But now Judge Pablo Zuniga has ordered that Apple will have to implement the required changes in Brazil within the next three months. The judge states that, despite Apple’s claims, the company “has already complied with similar obligations in other countries, without demonstrating a significant impact or irreparable damage to its business model.”

Presumably Apple will just roll out in Brazil the same compliance rules, policies, and APIs that they started offering last year in the EU. But will Brazilian users get access to EU third-party app marketplaces, and vice-versa? Or will Apple try to segregate these app marketplaces region-by-region, such that Brazilian users will only get access to Brazilian third-party app marketplaces, and EU users will remain limited only to EU third-party app marketplaces?

I asked Riley Testut, the founder of AltStore PAL, if he knew the answers to those questions. His answer, via iMessage:

We haven’t heard anything from Apple (unsurprisingly), but I think it’ll be somewhere in the middle. It’s likely Apple will add some requirements for existing marketplaces to launch in Brazil like they did with EU (e.g. requiring us to have a subsidiary in Brazil) so we’ll all need to get approval again. But assuming marketplaces meet all requirements, I think users in both places will eventually be able use e.g. AltStore PAL and Epic Games Store.

“In the middle” sounds about right from Apple’s perspective too. They’re not going to make this as easy as possible, but I don’t expect them to make it obstinately spiteful either.

Apple Adds Disclaimers Regarding Delayed AI Siri Features ★

Benjamin Mayo 9to5Mac:

Apple is still reeling from the last-week’s news that the most compelling new Apple Intelligence features for Siri have been indefinitely delayed. Over the weekend, it pulled a YouTube ad showcasing personal context running on the iPhone 16. Now, it has updated the Apple website with a new disclaimer wherever the unreleased Siri features are mentioned on the iPhone marketing pages. [...]

The new message to customers found on Apple’s website is different, but equally as vague. It reads:

Siri’s personal context understanding, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions are in development and will be available with a future software update.

Google Changes Chrome Extension Policies Following the Honey Link Scandal ★

Jay Peters, The Verge:

Google has updated its affiliate ads policy for Chrome extensions after creators accused PayPal’s popular Honey browser extension of being a “scam.”

Honey was accused of taking affiliate revenue from the same influencers it paid for promotion by using its Chrome extension to swap in its own affiliate link before you checked out. According to the updated Google policy posted today, this isn’t allowed in most cases

I wouldn’t say they were merely accused — they were caught, red-handed.

Tuesday, 11 March 2025

Aaron ‘Homeboy’ Tilley Among Those Laid Off From the WSJ’s Tech Staff Last Week ★

Last week The Wall Street Journal laid off about a dozen tech reporters and editors — not on the fun side, where folks like Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen work, but on the straight news side. Chris Roush at Talking Biz News obtained a memo sent to the staff from WSJ editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, which concluded:

We’re also creating a new Tech & Media enterprise team, reporting to Sarah, and we’re creating two new jobs on this team based in San Francisco. In the coming weeks, we’ll be reconfiguring beats on the tech team to give more of them a wide ambit. Fewer will focus narrowly on individual companies. We are also advertising for a new tech-focused job on Heard in New York.

These changes do mean that some reporters and editors in San Francisco and New York will be leaving us. I want to thank them for their contributions to the Journal. I want to especially thank Jason Dean, who is departing, for his long and distinguished service.

It was the reporters who focused on specific companies who got laid off, including the Journal’s beat reporter for Apple for the last 6 years, Aaron Tilley. Tilley was last in the news himself a month ago, when one of his former sources, a now-former Apple engineer named Andrew Aude, settled a lawsuit filed by Apple (and who addressed Tilley in text messages as “Homeboy”) and issued the following public apology:

I spent nearly eight years as a software engineer at Apple. During that time, I was given access to sensitive internal Apple information, including what were then unreleased products and features. But instead of keeping this information secret, I made the mistake of sharing this information with journalists who covered the company. I did not realize it at the time, but this turned out to be a profound and expensive mistake. Hundreds of professional relationships I had spent years building were ruined. And my otherwise successful career as a software engineer was derailed, and it will likely be very difficult to rebuild it. Leaking was not worth it. I sincerely apologize to my former colleagues who not only worked tirelessly on projects for Apple, but work hard to keep them secret. They deserved better.

I have no idea whether this fiasco had anything to do with Tilley being laid off (perhaps not, given Tucker’s decision to have fewer reporters on staff who “focus narrowly on individual companies”) but it couldn’t have helped. It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement to have someone publicly declaring that they deeply regret ever having been a source for a Wall Street Journal reporter, and that doing so not only cost them their job but ruined their entire career.

It also probably didn’t help Tilley’s case that he wasn’t very good at covering Apple.

Steal My Tesla ★

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in 2016, on Donald Trump as President: ‘This Is Not Going to End Well One Way or the Other’ ★

A clip from this 2016 interview with Marco Rubio — then a candidate for the Republican presidential primary, today Trump’s secretary of state — by CNN’s Jake Tapper is making the rounds on social media. It’s extraordinary. I’m linking here to the full video, hosted on Rubio’s own YouTube account (for now — watch for this to go down the memory hole) starting at the 7:54 mark:

Tapper: You compared Donald Trump to a third world dictator yesterday in an interview with The New York Times. How so?

Rubio: Well, I don’t know about a dictator. I said a third world strong man. You know, he’s running for president. So no matter what, he won’t be a dictator unless our republic completely crumbles, which I don’t anticipate it will. But, yeah, here’s what happens in many countries around the world: You have a leader that emerges and basically says, Don’t put your faith in yourselves. Don’t put your faith in society. Put your faith in me. I’m a strong leader, and I’m going to make things better — all by myself. This is very typical. You see it in the third world. You see it a lot in Latin America for decades. It’s basically the argument he’s making. That he, single-handedly, is going to turn the country around. We’ve never been that kind of country.

We have a president. The president is an American citizen who serves for a period of time, constrained by the constitution and the powers vested in that office. The president works for the people, not the people for the president. And if you listen to the way he describes himself and what he’s going to do, he’s going to single-handedly do this and do that without regard for whether it’s legal or not.

Look, I think people are going to have to make up their mind. I can tell you this. No matter what happens in this election, for years to come, there are many people on the right, in the media, and voters at large that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump, because this is not going to end well one way or the other. He’s going to be the nominee, and he’s going to lose. Or, he’ll have thrown this party into its most chaotic and divisive period ever. And that’s unfortunate because the Republican Party is the home of the limited government free enterprise movement in America. And if it crumbles or divides or it splits apart, it’ll be very difficult to elect candidates that hold those views at any level of government until we can bring the party back together.

Breathtakingly prescient and succinct.

The New Yorker Modernizes a Few Words in Its Style Guide ★

Andrew Boynton, head of copy at The New Yorker:

Keen-eyed grammar fans may notice some changes in our pages — and in this newsletter. Last fall, David Remnick, the editor, suggested convening a group to talk about the magazine’s house style, to see if any rules might bear reëxamination. The group — comprising copy editors, current and former, and editors — met this past January and came up with a list of styles that might qualify for changes, and in a subsequent meeting the following month the director of copy and production and I came up with a limited list of proposals. It was decided that, while no one wanted to change some of the long-standing “quirky” styles (teen-ager, per cent, etc.), some of newer vintage could go. Along with a few other changes, “in-box” is now “inbox,” “Web site” is now “website,” “Internet” is now “internet,” and “cell phone” is now “cellphone” (though everyone acknowledges that the word “cell” in this context will soon disappear altogether).

Some of you may lament the changes as being radically modern, while others are likely to greet them as long overdue. Welcome to 1995, you may be thinking. (Italicized thoughts are new, too.) Regardless, it should be noted that the diaeresis (see that “reëxamination,” above) has overwhelming support at the magazine, and will remain.

I’m in favor of all these changes except for lowercasing “Internet”. I actually started lowercasing it years ago — I think right around when the AP changed its style — but I was chatting post-Dithering with Ben Thompson a week or two ago and he offhandedly mentioned that lowercasing “internet” is a pet stylistic peeve of his, because there’s only one Internet. He said that and I was like, Yeah! — But so why did I start lowercasing it? The Internet is a lot like the Earth. It’s everywhere. It is our universe, in a sense, from the human-scale perspective. But it’s a unique and distinct thing, thus deserving to be treated as a proper noun. (The universe doesn’t get capitalized because while it’s a one-off, it’s not a name. We speak of the universe like we speak of the planet, which is lowercase.) It’s almost disrespectful to lowercase it, and the Internet is one of the great achievements in the history of mankind.

New MLB Caps Are So Fugly They Make MAGA Hats Look Well-Designed ★

If these caps were a student project it’d get an F. Who thinks you can print one logo on top of another? They look like mistakes, like caps that got run through the embroidery machine twice. The only good one is for the “ASHOS”, which comes close to the actual word everyone uses for that team of cheaters.

Update, 3pm ET: It looks like maybe MLB and New Era (the hatmakers) have put the whole lineup of caps out of their misery.

Josh Marshall on Kevin Drum ★

Josh Marshall:

I think more than anything I admired Kevin’s restraint and his caution. Blogging is a hustle and the incentives for hyperbole and breathlessness are endless. That makes most people easy to ignore. But Kevin — who had a whole career in the normal-person rat race before he started this — sweated the details. He had a serious mind for facts and numbers and he knew how to work with data. His posts were always overflowing with numbers and charts and levels of detail and nitty gritty I couldn’t pile into my brain because I was too scattered and unfocused. When he said something, you had to take it seriously. When he disagreed with you, you knew it was time to re-check your work. Kevin was almost all signal and very little noise. That was his defining mark.

Kevin Drum, Pioneering Political Blogger and Columnist, Dies at 66 ★

Marian Drum, posting yesterday on Kevin Drum’s site:

With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025.

No public memorial services are planned.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to the charity or political cause of your choice.

He was writing right up until the end. No one, on either side of the political spectrum, better wrote about “DEI”. Just in the last week, he had posts on Ukraine/Russia, the LA Times’s stupid new AI-generated “bias meter”, the looming congressional budget crisis, Trump’s tariff crusade. He remained on top of everything that’s going on, not only while cancer was killing him, but while he was stoically keeping his readers fully abreast of his declining health. I mean, Christ, read this update from February 12 — I thought that was it. Dying from cancer is harrowing. He knew the end was near, and as with everything he wrote in his long career, he had the numbers to back it.

I didn’t know Drum personally at all, but there’s a certain kinship amongst bloggers from the very turn of the century. I’ve read Drum’s site continuously for over 20 years and I don’t know anyone whose style and approach can fill the void he leaves. He was obviously a very kind and generous person, but his approach to policy was ruthlessly (and thus to me, admirably) data and evidence driven. Strong opinions, loosely held. He brimmed with curiosity. Who, what, when, and where are all good questions but why is the most interesting one, and Drum always wanted to figure out why. I sure didn’t get his love for cats, but I’m also so glad he shared stuff like that. His approach to actual politics could come across as wonky, but his personality was always there. As natural-born a blogger as anyone who’s ever done it.

I miss his voice already.

Monday, 10 March 2025

Front Page Tech on a New UI Style for iOS 19, Back on January 17 ★

Jon Prosser, in a YouTube video with mocked-up animations showing exactly what he’s talking about, 51 days ago:

Today we have your very first exclusive look at the changes coming to iOS 19 — with a redesigned camera app and possibly ... a redesigned iOS.

Basic idea is something very much akin to the look and feel of VisionOS, but brought to the Camera app, and perhaps throughout the entire system (or just parts of it) in iOS 19. Seems cool, seems fresh, and seems aligned with where Apple has been heading.

Here’s Parker Ortolani, himself a talented designer with a particularly keen eye for trends, writing on his blog February 4 after Apple Invites debuted:

The rumored Apple Invites app has arrived. While I obviously haven’t had much time to play with it, I have quickly browsed through the UI and wanted to share some observations. The last new Apple app, Apple Sports, already felt out of place in iOS 18. It has a more visionOS or watchOS-like design language utilizing colorful backgrounds, glassy floating UI elements, expanding buttons, and lots of layered shapes. Apple Invites takes it all even further. It’s got big beautiful cards, translucent cells, big bold buttons, and an emphasis on content. It feels so clearly like a hint of what is to come in a future iOS update. It’s almost screaming it in our faces. It seems awfully suspect that Apple’s two latest apps have a whole new design language that does not mesh with the rest of the OS.

Now comes today, with Mark Gurman dropping this vagueness at Bloomberg:

The revamp — due later this year — will fundamentally change the look of the operating systems and make Apple’s various software platforms more consistent, according to people familiar with the effort. That includes updating the style of icons, menus, apps, windows and system buttons. As part of the push, the company is working to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the project hasn’t been announced. The design is loosely based on the Vision Pro’s software, they said.

That’s it. No screenshots. No mockups. No specific description of the changes. Just “loosely based on the Vision Pro’s software”. Jon Prosser not only said this was coming, but commissioned full, realistic animations to illustrate it, 51 days ago. And astute observers like Ortolani and others have observed, for over a month, that Apple itself is starting to hint at this new design language in its own already-shipping new apps for iOS.

I’m so old I remember when YouTubers made videos about months-old Gurman stories, not the other way around. There’s weak sauce, and then there’s eating paste.

Yours Truly Guesting on ‘Upgrade’ With Jason Snell ★

Upgrade:

It’s been a quiet week, so John Gruber briefly joins Jason to discuss Apple’s AI delay, new Macs, new iPads, and the future of Apple regulation worldwide.

Recorded earlier today, so it covers, somehow, all of last week’s Apple news — and last week was a kind of crazy week in Appletown. I even squeezed in some parenting advice for Myke Hurley, who’s out on paternity leave.

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:

Google Gemini: Chat to supercharge your ideas.

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.

VisionOS 2.4, Now in Beta, Will Add New ‘Spatial Gallery’ App and Support for Apple Intelligence, Along With a ‘Vision Pro’ App for iPhones ★

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?

WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. Their simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior.

Your users trust you. Keep it that way. Check out WorkOS Radar today.

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.