11-20-24 -

Regardingand, Well, AgainstSubstack
Anil Dash, “Don’t Call It a Substack”: We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to pro...

11-19-24 -

Dr. Oz
The Hollywood Reporter, which of course is where one now goes to find news of incoming Executive Branch appointments and nominations, “Trump Nominates Dr. Mehmet Oz to Run Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services”: “America is facing a...

11-17-24 -

[Sponsor] Upgraded
Get a new MacBook every two years with low monthly payments, AppleCare+ coverage, and effortless upgrades. You don’t have to pay for your device all at once. With our upgrade program, you spread the cost over 36 low monthly payments. Upgrade to...

11-12-24 -

Disambiguating iPhone Model Names That Have the S Suffix
Here’s the Apple support page listing the devices compatible with iOS 18. They’re listed in chronological order, oldest to newest, and the list begins with the iPhone XR and iPhone XS from 2018. But on this support page, Apple styles the “R�...

11-08-24 -

How It Went
My mom died at the end of June this year. I know, and I’m sorry — that’s a hell of a way to open a piece ostensibly about a depressing, worrisome, frightening election result. But here’s the thing I want to emphasize right up front: m...

11-08-24 -

It Doesnt End
Hunter S. Thompson, writing in September 1972, a little over month ahead of Nixon’s landslide reelection: The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states. Well �...

11-07-24 -

I Wonder
Jeff Bezos, yesterday at 10:29am on X: Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and ...

11-05-24 -

Kottke on the Art and Power of Hypertextual Writing
Jason Kottke, going meta on that one-paragraph hypertext editorial from the NYT that I linked to yesterday: What makes this piece so effective is its plain language and its information density. This density is a real strength of hypertext that...

10-28-24 -

[Sponsor] Nomorobo
Whether you are red, blue, or in between, there’s one thing we can all agree on: no one likes political robocalls or texts. Every year they just seem to get worse. But there is good news! While every candidate, campaign, and political party use...

10-28-24 -

In Defense, I Swear, of the Magic Mouses Charging Port Placement
Jay Peters, The Verge, “Apple Put the Magic Mouse’s Charging Port on the Bottom Again”: Apple’s new USB-C-equipped Magic Mouse somehow still has the charging port on the bottom. While Apple could have used the launch as an opportunity ...

10-26-24 -

Profiles in Cowardice: Owner Jeff Bezos and Publisher William Lewis of The Wa...
Sewell Chan, writing for Columbia Journalism Review on Wednesday, “Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Resigns After Owner Blocks Presidential Endorsement”: Mariel Garza, the editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times, resigned on Wednesda...

10-25-24 -

Vision Pro Bites Dog
Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas — here’s Techmeme’s roundup of summaries and regurgitations), “Apple Sharply Scales Back Production of Vision Pro”: Apple has sharply scaled back production ...

10-22-24 -

The Sordid Tale of Rudy Giulianis Yankees World Series Rings
The aforelinked piece on Rudy Giuliani losing his possessions to pay the two Georgia election officials he was convicted of defaming made reference to the dispute regarding his four World Series rings, from the Yankees championships during his tim...

10-16-24 -

[Sponsor] Weather Up: At-a-Glance Forecasts
Weather Up offers an innovative, glanceable widget and complication design, with interactive widgets that supported the new tinted mode in iOS 18. Weather Up is built by privacy fanatics (we round off significant digits so even our server doesn’...

10-10-24 -

Consider the Plight of the VC-Backed Privacy Burglars
Kevin Roose wrote a column for The New York Times last week under the headline “Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?”, about which Jason Snell quipped, “It’s rare that a story is worse than its provocative headline, but this one manages it.”...

09-25-24 -

A Few Brief Thoughts on Meta Connect 2024
I’ll link first to The Verge’s “Everything Announced at Meta Connect 2024” roundup because Meta still hasn’t posted today’s keynote address on YouTube; best I’ve found is this recording of the livestream, starting around the 43m:20s ...

09-25-24 -

Panels, a New Wallpaper App From Marques Brownlee
A swing-and-a-miss from MKBHD, but I think criticism of the app is on two separate levels, but they’re being conflated. Level 1: the app is not good. Level 2: a paid wallpaper app? — LOL, wallpapers are free on Reddit. That second form of ...

09-23-24 -

[Sponsor] Method
Method Financial’s authentication technology allows instant access to a consumer’s full liability portfolio using just personal information and consent, eliminating the need for usernames and passwords. With just a few lines of code, Method�...

09-18-24 -

The iPhones 16
One of the many memorable moments in Steve Jobs’s 2007 introduction of the original iPhone was this slide showing four of the then-leading smartphones on the market. Jobs explained: Now, why do we need a revolutionary user interface? Here’...

09-16-24 -

Thoughts and Observations in the Wake of Apples Its Glowtime Keynote
Back in July 2007, I contributed this photo to a Flickr group called, self-describingly, “The Items We Carry”: 17 years later, I’ve consolidated. 2007 was so long ago that Field Notes hadn’t yet been created; my back-pocket notebooks ar...

09-16-24 -

The Things They Carried
Thoughts and Observations in the Wake of Apple’s ‘It’s Glowtime’ Keynote Back in July 2007, I contributed this photo to a Flickr group called, self-describingly, “The Items We Carry”: 17 years later, I’ve consolidated. 2007 was s...

09-09-24 -

[Sponsor] Tiptop
Tiptop is a completely new way to pay that makes everything you buy more affordable with trade-in at checkout. Tiptop lets you select any item you own from our catalog of over 50,000 choices and receive instant credit towards your purchase. Mercha...

09-08-24 -

The iOS Continental Drift Fun Gap
There’s a scene in Martin Scorsese’s Casino. Gangster Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and two of his goon friends are in a nightclub in the Tangiers casino resort (a fictionalized version of the old Stardust), which is run by Ace Rothstein (Robert D...

09-06-24 -

The iOS Continental Drift Widens
At the end of August, Apple announced several more DMA compliance changes. They are worth examining in detail. Changes to the Mandatory Browser Choice Screen Developers of browsers offered in the browser choice screen in the EU will have addi...

08-10-24 -

The Mac Is a Power Tool
Back in the day, on classic Mac OS, there were no “privileges” for software. If you launched an app, or installed a system extension, that software just did what it wanted. Something as (seemingly) innocuous as a game or as necessarily powerfu...

08-05-24 -

Apples Profits From Services Are on the Cusp of Surpassing Its Profits From D...
Jason Snell, “Existential Thoughts About Apple’s Reliance on Services Revenue”: The intersection of hardware and software has been Apple’s home address since the 1970s. And yet, a few years ago, Apple updated its marketing language and...

07-23-24 -

[Sponsor] 1Password: The Infinite Loop of Security
When the EU enacted GDPR in 2018, executives and security professionals waited anxiously to see how the law would be enforced. And then they kept waiting ... and waiting ... but the Great European Privacy Crackdown never came. For a while it seeme...

07-19-24 -

Apple Strikes Deal With Taboola to Sell Ads for Apple News
Sara Fischer, reporting this week for Axios: Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps, Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios. The deal provides new va...

07-17-24 -

The AT&T Data Breach Shows Why RCS Cant Be Trusted and the Downside of Apple ...
Here’s a hot take: last week’s news of a massive AT&T breach revealing the phone call and text messaging records of all AT&T customers for six months in 2022 exemplifies why RCS is a terrible protocol that ought not exist, and ...

07-14-24 -

Its the Guns, Its the Guns, Its the Guns
Josh Marshall, writing at Talking Points Memo: Political violence and especially electoral violence strike at the heart of the open, free and democratic choice-making upon which our civic democratic system and the legitimacy of its choices are...

07-08-24 -

[Sponsor] Dabba
Imagine you could go back in time when Alex Bell started his phone company. Imagine for a moment that you could have owned a piece of his network. Well, you can’t. Until someone invents a time machine. Which they haven’t. What you can do howev...

07-02-24 -

[Sponsor] BriefLook
Use your iPhone to get an instant summary of your physical mail, even across languages! Quickly understand English mail in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, or many, many other combinations. Learn what the mail is, who it’s from, what it’s about, and...

06-24-24 -

Apple Disables WebKits JIT in Lockdown Mode, Offering a Hint Why BrowserEngin...
Last week I mentioned Apple’s prohibition on JITs — just-in-time compilers — in the context of their rejection of UTM SE, an open source PC emulator. Apple’s prohibition on JITs, on security grounds, is a side issue regarding UTM S...

06-23-24 -

WWDC 2024: Apple Intelligence
An oft-told story is that back in 2009 — two years after Dropbox debuted, two years before Apple unveiled iCloud — Steve Jobs invited Dropbox cofounders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi to Cupertino to pitch them on selling the company ...

06-21-24 -

Training Large Language Models on the Public Web
Yesterday, quoting Anthropic’s announcement of their impressive new model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, I wrote: Also, from the bottom of the post, this interesting nugget: One of the core constitutional principles that guides our AI model develop...

06-21-24 -

By My Count Trump is Batting .900 on the Ten Commandments
Sara Cline, reporting for the AP: The legislation that Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law on Wednesday requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” in all public classrooms, from kinderg...

06-21-24 -

The EU Is Reaping What It Sows With the DMA: Uncertainty
Ian Betteridge: So, Apple, which bits of the DMA does Apple Intelligence violate? Because unless you can actually tell us - which case we clearly have a bit of a problem with some of the claims you’ve made about how it works — or you�...

06-17-24 -

[Sponsor] Kolide by 1Password: Looking Past the Smoke and Mirrors of the MGM ...
The September 2023 MGM hack quickly became one of the most notorious ransomware attacks in recent memory. Journalists and cybersecurity experts rushed to report on the broken slot machines, angry hotel guests, and the fateful phishing call to ...

06-14-24 -

The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2024
Recorded in front of a live (and lively) audience at The California Theatre in San Jose Tuesday evening, special guests John Giannandrea, Craig Federighi, and Greg Joswiak join me to discuss Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2024. 3D video with ...

06-10-24 -

[Sponsor] DetailsPro
DetailsPro brings SwiftUI to Apple designers. Without writing a line of code, you can bring your next idea to life in SwiftUI right from your iPhone. An easy interface, built-in templates, and a community of designers sharing files will have you u...

06-07-24 -

Gurmans Epic Pre-WWDC Leak Report
More from Gurman’s Friday-before-WWDC report at Bloomberg. But before I start quoting, man, his report reads as though he’s gotten the notes from someone who’s already watched Monday’s keynote. I sort of think that’s what happened, given...

06-04-24 -

Now Qualcomm Went Long
At the conclusion of Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon’s keynote yesterday at Computex 2024 in Taipei, he unveiled a new ad starring Justin Long, who played the Mac in Apple’s long-running “Get a Mac” (“I’m a Mac …” / “… and I’m a ...

05-27-24 -

[Sponsor] Atoms MKBHD 251.1
Marques Brownlee and Atoms is a partnership between innovators with a shared love for creativity, craftsmanship, and storytelling. This limited edition Model 251.1 is our second collaborative sneaker and features a matte black design with reflecti...

05-24-24 -

Spotifys Car Things to Be Rebranded as Car Bricks
Chris Welch, writing for The Verge, “Spotify Is Going to Break Every Car Thing Gadget It Ever Sold”: Unfortunately for those owners, Spotify isn’t offering any kind of subscription credit or automatic refund for the device — nor is...

05-15-24 -

Follow-Up on Apple No Longer Including Stickers With New Products
I got some pushback from readers for saying “Boo hiss” to the news that starting with this week’s new iPads, Apple is no longer including logo stickers in the boxes, and more or less rolling my eyes at the environmental concerns. My thinkin...

05-14-24 -

The M4 iPad Pros
The consensus from product reviewers — including yours truly — has been remarkably consistent for the latter half of the iPad’s entire existence, especially when it comes to iPad Pros: incredibly powerful and beautiful hardware hamst...

05-08-24 -

Brief Thoughts and Observations on Yesterdays Let Loose iPad Keynote
Keynote / Mini Events Apple hosted about 50 members of the media in New York City, in their ludicrously spacious Tribeca townhouse, to watch the keynote stream live. They had a hands-on area post-keynote, and a bunch of demos and briefings throug...

05-06-24 -

[Sponsor] Nylas for Email and Calendar APIs
Nylas recently launched v3 of their API. They rebuilt an already-great API platform with the developer experience and productivity in mind — redefining what a modern API should look like. One API for email, calendar, and contacts has never l...

05-06-24 -

[Sponsor] Nylas for Email and Calendar APIs
Nylas recently launched v3 of their API. They rebuilt an already-great API platform with the developer experience and productivity in mind — redefining what a modern API should look like. One API for email, calendar, and contacts has never l...

05-06-24 -

[Sponsor] Nylas for Email and Calendar APIs
Nylas recently launched v3 of their API. They rebuilt an already-great API platform with the developer experience and productivity in mind — redefining what a modern API should look like. One API for email, calendar, and contacts has never l...