It is disturbing to think that the leader of a beloved, trusted, and widely believed-to-be-ethical company like Apple has succumbed to avarice. That Tim Cook feels no qualms about — or perhaps even delights in — participating in a quid-pro-quo-driven corrupt administration in which flattery, fealty, gifts, and barely-concealed bribes are rewarded. That the United States devolving into kleptocracy suits Tim Cook just fine, because Apple’s pockets are deep enough to pay the vig. B...| Daring Fireball
Matthew Panzarino returns to the show. Topics include 007 logo creator Joe Caroff’s death at 103, Google’s weird “Made by Google” event hosted by Jimmy Fallon, the UK supposedly dropping its demand for an iCloud encryption backdoor, and Apple’s workaround for the Apple Watch blood oxygen sensor patent stalemate.| daringfireball.net
It’s reasonable — especially for paying customers — to expect at least some advance notice of older models going away. But it’s unreasonable to think that older models are going to remain available in perpetuity — especially in the current LLM climate, where model age is measured in months, or even weeks.| Daring Fireball
Are we supposed to be surprised, in the least, that it turns out Tim Cook runs Apple and has the final call over everything the company does?| Daring Fireball
What today’s workaround does is process and display the blood oxygen sensor data on your watch’s paired iPhone, rather than on the Apple Watch itself. That, apparently, is what the new US Customs ruling holds does not violate Masimo’s patent.| Daring Fireball
It’s like an otherwise delightful cocktail with one distinctive unpleasant ingredient, which ingredient was added, deliberately, to imbue the libation with an aftertaste of spite.| Daring Fireball
Cliff Edwards’s 2001 “Sorry, Steve: Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work” piece for Businessweek is deservingly notorious in the annals of claim chowder, but there are a few things about it worth keeping in mind even today.| daringfireball.net
The oddest part about the whole situation is that CNBC is being spun out into Versant, too, but while they’re losing the NBC peacock logo, they’re just keeping their name, unchanged.| Daring Fireball
These are the not the work of carpenters who care about the backs of the cabinets they’re building. These icons are so bad, they look like the work of untrained “How hard can it be?” dilettante carpenters who only last a few days on the job before sawing off one of their own fingers.| Daring Fireball
I think it’s a good start, and I couldn’t be happier that the WebKit team is even tackling the problem at all. As Simmons notes, line-wrapping layout in web browsers has, until now, been very crude — and the web has been around a long time.| Daring Fireball
It’s a natural consequence that an overly complicated law (the DMA) has resulted in an ever-more-complicated set of guidelines and policies (from Apple). It’s all downright byzantine.| Daring Fireball
I can see the argument that Apple’s answer is “Yes, it’s potentially confusing for many users”. But I can’t see the argument that the answer is “Yes, it’s potentially confusing for many users, but only if they’re trying to buy in-app content or subscriptions, but not confusing at all if they’re trying to buy, say, movie tickets.”| Daring Fireball
Link to: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-20/apple-vision-pro-chief-mike-rockwell-named-siri-head-giannandrea-keeps-ai-role| Daring Fireball
Sending this ad is completely destructive to all the hard work other teams at Apple have done to make Apple Wallet actually private — and, more importantly, *to get users to believe that it’s private*.| Daring Fireball
My biggest takeaway from WWDC 2025 is that Apple seemingly took some lessons to heart from its unfulfilled promises of a year ago. This year’s WWDC wasn’t merely focused on what Apple is confident it can ship in the next 12 months, but on what they can ship *this fall*.| Daring Fireball
Recorded in front of a live audience at The California Theatre in San Jose Tuesday evening, special guests Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel join me to discuss Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2025.| Daring Fireball
Most rank and file engineers within Apple do not believe that feature existed in an even vaguely functional state a year ago, and the first any of them ever heard of it was when they watched the keynote with the rest of us on the first day of WWDC last year.| Daring Fireball
The iPhone 16e is arguably just plain a better phone than the iPhone 15, and I think it’s almost inarguably a better value at $100 less.| Daring Fireball
If it takes Apple as long to have its own competitive LLMs as it did to have its own competitive web browser, I suspect they’ll soon be paying to use the LLMs that are owned and controlled by others, not charging the others for the privilege of reaching Apple’s platform users.| Daring Fireball
Truth Social is exceedingly unpopular when judged as a social network; but it’s exceedingly successful as a blog. All the other people using Truth Social are effectively reading his blog and shitposting comments and memes in response to his posts.| Daring Fireball
Are the results of this disastrous for Apple’s App Store business? I don’t think so at all. Gonzales Rogers is demanding that Apple ... do what Phil Schiller recommended they do all along. But are the results of this disastrous for Apple’s reputation and credibility? It sure seems like it.| Daring Fireball
This announcement is disappointing, but unsurprising. If it’s Apple’s general policy not to ship a product before it’s ready, that applies tenfold for a product involving LLM access to deeply private on-device information.| Daring Fireball
Who decided these personalized Siri features should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and advertise these features in a TV commercial, and promote them as a selling point of the iPhone 16 lineup?| Daring Fireball
Italic and bold emphasis are information-density additives. But as Kottke observes, used deftly, hypertext links are an information-density *multiplier*.| Daring Fireball
From the perspective of a company the size of Disney, it would cost veritable pennies to keep FiveThirtyEight’s website around forever. What a disgrace.| Daring Fireball
This “feature” accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they’re watching.| Daring Fireball
The iPhone 16e is an iPhone for people who don’t want to think much about their phone. But they *do* want an iPhone, not just any “whatever” phone. A just plain iPhone, with a good screen, good enough (and simple) camera, and great battery life.| Daring Fireball
The UK’s demands are simultaneously infuriatingly offensive, mathematically ignorant (regarding the nature of end-to-end encryption), dangerous (as proven by the recent Salt Typhoon attack China successfully waged to eavesdrop on non-E2EE communications in the United States), and laughably naive regarding the UK’s actual power and standing in the world.| Daring Fireball
Siri with Apple Intelligence gives confident but embarrasingly wrong answers to sports trivia questions, both famous (Super Bowls) and obscure (North Dakota high school hoops).| Daring Fireball
On the EU’s share of Apple’s worldwide revenue, and whether, per EC commissioner Thierry Breton, it is “unthinkable” not to serve the 450-million-citizen EU market.| Daring Fireball
Change for change’s sake alone is masturbatory. That with Safari 15 it actually makes usability *worse*, solely for flamboyant cosmetic reasons, is downright perverse.we| Daring Fireball
In the same way that the introduction of multitouch with the iPhone removed a layer of conceptual abstraction — instead of touching a mouse or trackpad to move an on-screen pointer to an object on screen, you simply touch the object on screen — VisionOS removes a layer of abstraction spatially.| Daring Fireball
Apple’s business model is no longer the straightforward selling of great products, and these new ads in the App Store are not designed to make anything better other than Apple’s Services bottom line.| Daring Fireball
