Linked List: April 2026

Thursday, 2 April 2026

John Buck on the Invention of QuickTime ★

John Buck at The Verge (gift link), excerpted from his great book, Inventing the Future:

Steve Perlman: Almost everyone at Apple, and definitely everywhere else, assumed that multimedia would always require specialized hardware — and be expensive. A few of us thought otherwise.

One of the few was Gavin Miller, a research scientist in Apple’s Graphics Group, who worked with Hoffert to crack the problem of software compression and decompression, otherwise known as codec.

Gavin Miller, research scientist: We went for a lunchtime walk, and by the end of it, we had generalized the model to include constant color blocks and 2-bit per-pixel interpolating blocks. This allowed us to trade off quantization artifacts in large flat areas for more detail in textured areas. The result was an increase in quality and performance that helped to make the codec practical for really small video sizes.

Just a typical lunchtime walk-and-talk.

Fun anecdote from 1990:

He asked Peppel to create a product plan that he could announce at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on May 7th. That day, Casey took to the stage and announced QuickTime to a stunned audience, saying, “Apple intends to develop real-time software compression/decompression technology that will run on today’s modular Macintosh systems. A system-wide time coding to allow synchronization of sound, animation, and other time-critical processes.”

Casey explained that Apple’s new multimedia architecture would be delivered by the end of the year. He did not say that QuickTime had no budget, staff, or offices.

Worthington: We were dumbfounded.

Konstantin Othmer, QuickDraw engineer: I was standing next to Bruce Leak, and asked him, “What the heck was that?” He said he had no idea.

QuickTime actually shipped by WWDC 1991, teaching Apple the important lesson that anything they announce at WWDC, no matter how premature, will ship as promised.

Artemis II Crew on Way to Moon ★

Great roundup of links from Stephen Hackett:

The crew is made up of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen. They are now on their way to the moon, set to return in 10 days. Their rocket may be the product of a hugely-flawed program, but right now, that doesn’t matter. They are getting us closer to returning to the lunar surface than we’ve been in 50 years. That’s worth celebrating.

OpenAI, Supposedly Tightening Its Focus on Its Core Products, Buys Tech-Industry Talk Show TBPN ★

Katie Deighton, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link; also on News+):

OpenAI bought TBPN to encourage constructive conversation around the changes AI creates by helping the show grow, according to a memo sent by Fidji Simo, the OpenAI’s CEO of applications. TBPN will report to Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, and will help with company communications and marketing outside of the show.

“They’ve helped many brands market online and because they have a strong pulse on where the industry is going, their comms and marketing ideas have really impressed me,” Simo wrote in the memo.

But TBPN will remain editorially independent, retaining control over its programming, editorial decisions, guest selection and production schedule, OpenAI said.

Yes, I’m sure they’ll remain totally independent. You know, like The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos, and CBS News under David Ellison. Many news and commentary publications have remained steadfastly independent while reporting to the head of PR for a company they ostensibly cover.

StepSecurity:

If you have installed [email protected] or [email protected], assume your system is compromised.

There are zero lines of malicious code inside axios itself, and that’s exactly what makes this attack so dangerous. Both poisoned releases inject a fake dependency, [email protected], a package never imported anywhere in the axios source, whose sole purpose is to run a postinstall script that deploys a cross-platform remote access trojan. The dropper contacts a live command-and-control server, delivers separate second-stage payloads for macOS, Windows, and Linux, then erases itself and replaces its own package.json with a clean decoy. A developer who inspects their node_modules folder after the fact will find no indication anything went wrong.

This was not opportunistic. It was precision. The malicious dependency was staged 18 hours in advance. Three payloads were pre-built for three operating systems. Both release branches were poisoned within 39 minutes of each other. Every artifact was designed to self-destruct. Within two seconds of npm install, the malware was already calling home to the attacker’s server before npm had even finished resolving dependencies. This is among the most operationally sophisticated supply chain attacks ever documented against a top-10 npm package.

Could be my bigotry against JavaScript speaking, but I find it unsurprising that this happened to the same framework that this and this happened to.

‘No, We’re Not Stupid. Our Dads Just Got Us Crummy Computers.’ ★

Back in March 1991, Saturday Night Live ran what I consider the best Apple parody ad ever made: “McIntosh Jr.” Siracusa and I talked about it on The Talk Show this week, celebrating Apple’s 50th anniversary, so I looked it up for the show notes. Alas, this appallingly low-resolution copy hosted on Reddit is seemingly the only free-to-watch copy of it available. (If you can find — or make — a better version, let me know.) If you have a Peacock account, you can watch it in much higher quality in their SNL archive: Season 16, Episode 16, starting at 7:30, just after host Jeremy Irons’s monologue. (It rolls right into a good “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey”.)

We just recorded tomorrow’s episode of Dithering, and Ben asked me my favorite Apple commercial of all time. I was tempted to say this one, despite the fact that it isn’t real. The best parodies are the ones that hew the closest to the truth of their subject, that exaggerate the least. And the message of “McIntosh Jr.” is, at its heart, the actual purpose of the Macintosh, and of Apple writ large. Computers that enable you to do your best work. Bicycles for the mind. And, yes, the power to crush the other kids. That’s what drew me and Siracusa to Apple computers, and keeps us drawn to them today.

Jason Snell on Covering Apple for 33 Years ★

Jason Snell, writing at Macworld, regarding joining the staff at MacUser back in 1993:

But as amazing and revelatory as the Mac was for me as a writer and editor of print and online publications, I rapidly discovered that the Apple of the period was a mess. My first day as a full-time employee, a copy editor popped his head over the cubicle wall and asked me if I had heard anything about layoffs. Welcome to the media, kid.

‘Great Things in Business Are Never Done by One Person. They’re Done by a Team of People.’ ★

60 Minutes published a short clip of a 2003 Dan Rather interview with Steve Jobs, and it’s a good one. Seems apt both regarding Apple’s continued success after Jobs’s death, and a refutation of the personality cult in The White House.

David Pogue: ‘Apple and Me’ ★

David Pogue, on his new blog at Substack:

When the iPhone was about to go on sale in 2007, a thousand people lined up around the block at New York City’s Apple Store.

I’d written a parody of “My Way,” with the crazy idea of filming a music video with the participation of people standing in that line. It was a total blast; everyone in line was game. I edited the results together and uploaded it — and for six hours, ladies and gentlemen, it was the most watched video on YouTube. (It’s still there.)

Anyway. That night, I got a call from Jobs’s assistant. “I have Steve on the line,” she said. “Can you take the call?”

I was out to dinner with my family, but I said yes.

“David?” Jobs said when he came on the line. “I saw that song video you posted today.”

Oh GREAT, I thought. I steeled myself for another epic reaming by the CEO of Apple.

“I just wanted to say, it was the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Trump’s White House Ballroom Design Is Shit ★

The New York Times (gift link):

Critics warn it still has many issues — its portico is too big, its stairs lead nowhere, its columns will block views from inside the ballroom.

And that’s just the portico.

This is a really good piece, with animated-as-you-scroll illustrations pointing out specific problems with the design.

Such details affect how people passing by experience these iconic places, and how each structure fits into a capital city that has been planned around civic symbols and sightlines since the 1790s. The deliberation is also an expression of democracy, said Carol Quillen, the president and chief executive of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has sued the administration over the ballroom.

“Even if we are slow and we make mistakes and we fight, that process has meaning to us,” Ms. Quillen said. No project belonging to the public should be the vision of just one man, she said.

That is, however, how the ballroom has often been described.

“President Trump is the best builder and developer in the entire world, and the American people can rest well knowing that this project is in his hands,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. Past administrations and presidents have wanted a ballroom for more than 150 years, he said, and Mr. Trump will accomplish it.

The way that these lickspittles talk about Trump exactly the way North Koreans speak of Little Kim, or that anyone in any other cult speaks of the cult leader, is just revolting. Even the Chinese don’t speak of Xi “The Pooh” Jinping like this. No one in China pretends Xi is a genius architect.

Wednesday, 1 April 2026

Chris Espinosa, Employee #8, Profiled in The New York Times ★

Kalley Huang, writing for The New York Times (gift link):

As that happened, Apple laid off staff “again and again and again,” Mr. Espinosa said. His manager told him that he had been spared because he had worked for the company for so long that his severance package would be too expensive.

“I was wondering what I was going to do because I had no college degree and I had only worked at one company,” Mr. Espinosa said. Then he figured: “I was here when we turned the lights on. I might as well stick around until we turn the lights off.”

Lovely read.

The Talk Show: ‘Apple at 50’ ★

Who better to join the show to commemorate Apple’s 50th anniversary than John Siracusa?

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More on Apple’s Fun ‘Rewind’ Video ★

Lex Friedman (with an embedded video to prove it):

If you reverse the new Apple video that plays in “rewind,” it’s the Think Different ad music, pitched up.

Of course it is.

And, regarding that “◀︎◀︎ REW” button where the “REW” was set in bitmapped Chicago 12” but the “◀︎◀︎” was modern, Craig Hockenberry fixed it:

I pretended to be Susan Kare and fixed it, bottom is the original, top is my interpretation.

Ben Cohen of the WSJ Tours Apple’s Archive of Prototype Hardware ★

Lots of fun things I’ve never seen before in this 7-minute video. Best not to spoil them.

New Jersey, the Jackass State ★

By far the dumbest Internet Jackass Day “joke” I’ve seen so far is this one from the official New Jersey state account on Twitter/X, claiming that effective immediately, they’re lifting the statewide ban on self-service gasoline. For those of you who’ve never been there, I swear, you cannot pump your own gas anywhere in the state. It’s so ridiculous — and the historical reason so crooked — that people have a hard time believing it. You have to wait for an attendant, who is generally rude and almost always slow. Back in the day, they were extra slow returning with change when you paid in cash, hoping you’d just give up and leave. I’d rather run out of gas and just abandon my car on the side of the road than buy a single gallon of gas in New Jersey. And yet here’s the official state Twitter account yucking it up like the joke isn’t on them.

Ryan D’Agostino Profiles Tim Cook for Esquire on Apple’s 50th ★

Ryan D’Agostino, writing at Esquire (News+ link, in case Esquire stiffs you with their paywall):

Cook was at Jobs’s house the day he died. As he drove back to the office to announce it to the employees and, in so doing, to the world, he felt a strange kind of shock — strange because Jobs had been sick for so long, had even refused medicine when he was first diagnosed, instead trying to cure the disease with fruit juices, and so there should have been no shock at all.

“By that time, unfortunately, there was an inevitability to it,” Cook says. “But I was in denial for so long about the disease and where it would go, because I had watched him bounce back so many times, I assumed he always would. When I took the CEO role, I thought he was going to be executive chairman forever — that’s what I thought literally six weeks earlier. Looking back, I know somebody could say, How could you think that, given the circumstances? But that’s not the way I was wired in that moment.”

D’Agostino, fondly recalling the Apple IIe his family got for Christmas in 1983, wrongly remembers that, “When we turned it on, there was a little trash can in the corner of the screen.” Don’t let that conflation of the IIe and the Macintosh (yet to come in 1983) turn you off. It’s a good profile. Cook’s thoughts on Steve Jobs are touching, and D’Agostino gets Cook to expound upon his strategy of “engagement” with the Trump administration to a degree that I don’t think any other interviewer has. Cook’s answer is over 400 words, and Esquire, to their credit, ran the whole thing.

Inside Apple’s AirPods Max 2 and the H2 Chip Upgrade ★

Jacob Krol, writing at TechRadar:

To understand exactly what that means five years on, TechRadar sat down with Apple VP of Platform Architecture Tim Millet and Director of Audio Product Marketing Eric Treski to unpack how AirPods Max 2 is finally catching up to its own ambitions. [...]

One of the boldest claims Apple makes for AirPods Max 2 is a 1.5× improvement in active noise cancellation — achieved without changing a single physical component. “Getting those improvements to ANC and especially that 1.5 times more powerful ANC, which of course is a feat in itself, considering we didn’t change the actual design of the headphone at all from a form factor or material standpoint,” says Treski.

That improvement isn’t limited to a specific frequency band either. “We take that average at 1.5 times across an average of all frequencies. We’re not cherry-picking individual frequencies or a certain range,” he adds. That means AirPods Max 2 should perform better whether it’s blocking louder, booming sounds or higher-pitched ones — and that’s a high bar, given that the original AirPods Max were no slouches when it came to blocking out sound.

Hershey Says It Will Shift Back to Classic Recipe for All Reese’s Products After Criticism ★

The AP:

Hershey said Wednesday it will use classic recipes for all Reese’s products starting next year, a change that comes after the grandson of Reese’s founder criticized the company for shifting to cheaper ingredients.

Running to the press never works.

(Stick to Trader Joe’s, I say.)

Apple Marks 50th Anniversary ★

The Apple.com homepage has a nice little animation showing sketches of the company’s most iconic products. The video file itself is hosted here, but I’m not sure how permanent that link is.

Tim Cook posted a different video on Twitter/X, a VHS-style “rewind” through Apple product history. This one’s more fun. There’s an absolutely exquisite audio glitch at a certain moment — chef’s kiss. Bit of a shame that it’s only on X as far I know. Update: Ah, Apple posted the same video to their homepage, linked to a “◀︎◀︎ REW” button set in bitmapped Chicago 12, but it’s seemingly only shown when you visit on an iPhone. I don’t see the button from my Mac or iPad. But you should be able to watch the video from any device at this link. (I would have awarded bonus points for making the “◀︎◀︎” triangles pixel art too. I mean, come on!)

And, last night, Paul McCartney played a full concert at Apple Park for Apple employees. Good to see the two Apples burying the hatchet.