Eshu Marneedi

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge:

Apple TV Plus is losing more than $1 billion every year despite reaching 45 million subscribers in 2024, according to a report from The Information. It’s reportedly the only Apple subscription that isn’t generating a profit.

As part of an effort to take “a harder line on spending,” Apple cut its initial $5 billion budget for Apple TV Plus content by around $500 million, The Information reports. Even with hit original shows like Severance, Apple TV currently captures less than 1 percent of total monthly streaming services viewership, as opposed to Netflix’s 8.2 percent, according to data from Nielsen cited by The Information.

People online have been saying the $1 billion number isn’t so bad because Apple makes a profit on Apple TV+ subscriptions eventually by getting people into its product ecosystem of iPhones, iPads, and Macs. But that’s untrue: Apple TV+ is pre-installed on nearly every new smart television, is available via an Android app, and has a great website. People don’t need to buy an Apple device to view TV+ content, and they aren’t incentivized to, either, since the third-party experiences are as good as the native apps on Apple devices. The Apple TV+ part of the business isn’t meant to generate a profit nor push more Apple device sales — it’s a way for Apple to immerse itself in pop culture.

The second season of “Severance” — available to stream exclusively on Apple TV+ and the TV+ channel on Amazon Prime Video — is a global cultural phenomenon. The Democratic Party is posting images of Britt Lower’s character, Helly Riggs, on its X feed to poke fun at the president, for heaven’s sake. Even Max, the streaming service owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, decided to post screenshots of the main “Severance” cast in its shows. Anyone who hasn’t watched “Severance” is missing out on a lot of fun, and the only way they can is by subscribing to Apple TV+.

The best part about the “Severance” spectacle is that the first season wasn’t even very popular. It was a slow burner and only began to take off after the season finale in April 2022 when everyone began watching and hearing about it on Twitter. Eventually, it did indeed become popular — and the TV critics loved it — but Apple could’ve skimped out on the amount of money it gave the creators. 2023 was a tough year for television thanks to the SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America strikes, and it wasn’t immediately apparent if a second season of “Severance” would even be a hit. That would be the calculus if “Severance” was on any other network, especially Warner Bros. Discovery, which is notorious for canceling movies midway for tax breaks. It’s hideous how bad the entertainment industry is with funding good shows; Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, publicly voiced confusion about why Apple TV+ exists.

Sarandos, David Zaslav, Warner Bros. chief executive, and Bob Iger, Disney’s chief executive, all have one thing in common: they see profitability as paramount. (Same with Paramount’s owners — pun unintended.) I’m not saying they don’t have good reason to because Netflix, Max, and Walt Disney Studios wouldn’t survive if they weren’t profitable. But the unprofitability of Apple TV+ is much of the reason why TV+ shows are so good and consistently renewed. Apple spent $20 million per episode on a show that wasn’t even a widespread success yet, and the gamble paid off. I don’t think “Severance” is profitable, but Apple TV+ was a must-have streaming service for a few months. When the next season of “Ted Lasso” comes out, people will subscribe again; same with “Shrinking.” None of these shows are profitable, but they’re cultural phenomena. That’s priceless.

“Severance” is such an artfully, beautifully crafted show — especially Season 2. Netflix’s shows are meant to be binged intermittently during social media scroll breaks. Disney+ is objectively for children and “Star Wars” die-hards. Max’s situation is perhaps the most dire, as a company once known for making the most well-crafted television has now turned into a B-list sitcom channel. Apple TV+ is what HBO used to be — a home for high-quality content made for adults with an attention to detail. “Severance” is not meant to be binged, and looking away for even a second is less than advisable because of how much detail is packed into each frame. There’s a whole subreddit and wiki dedicated to the most clever and hysterical theories about the show. No show in recent history has cultivated this much fandom. The “Severance” universe really does live on its own, and every bit of it is captivating. This attention to detail is only possible because Apple doesn’t pressure the creators to make binge-able television.

There’s no advertising-supported version of Apple TV+. There’s no need for one, either, because even the mere existence of one would tick off the astute viewers of TV+ content so much that Apple’s brand reputation would be in the toilet. There’s only one hugely successful company in the world that would lose over a billion dollars yearly just to make its content a tiny bit better: Apple. Profitability isn’t the focus — entertainment quality is. That’s why “Severance” exists — it caters to the same people who buy Apple products for their design or thoughtful technology. “Severance” has Apple’s DNA all over it, and it wouldn’t exist on any profit-driven network.

Eric Migicovsky, the founder of Pebble and everyone’s favorite bootleg iMessage service, writing on his blog announcing Pebble’s resurrection:

I want to set expectations accordingly. We will build a good app for iOS, but be prepared - there is no way for us to support all the functionality that Apple Watch has access to. It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.

Migicovsky thoughtfully lays out a list of ways the Pebble can’t compete with the Apple Watch because Apple restricts what parts of iOS a third-party smartwatch can access. That part I agree with because it’s hard not to — they’re hard and fast facts about the limits of iOS. But where Migicovsky and I diverge is at the whining bit:

Apple claims their restrictions on competitors are only about security, privacy, crafting a better experience etc etc. At least that’s what they tell you as they tuck you into bed. I personally don’t agree - they’re clearly using their market power to lock consumers into their walled ecosystem. This causes there to be less competition, which increases prices and reduces innovation. DOJ seems to agree. For now at least…Tim Apple paid $1m to sit near Trump at the inauguration, so who knows how long until Trump tells DOJ to drop the case. There’s also an Apple Watch class-action lawsuit working its way through the system.

Migicovsky writes this as if he didn’t lobby senators in January 2023 to encourage them to send a letter to the then-assistant attorney general, which then prompted a section in the United States v. Apple Justice Department lawsuit Migicovsky now writes about. But that’s not the point: If Apple wants to make the Apple Watch an appealing product for its users, it should be able to. Being mad about Apple products working well with other Apple products is the most insane anti-business juxtaposition I’ve ever heard. Migicovsky can’t play socialist while trying to run a capitalist smartwatch business — that’s not how economic systems work.

Nothing will ever beat the Apple Watch because it’s built for iPhones. People love their iPhones and people love their Apple Watches — I haven’t heard a single person quibble about how they’d want to use their Galaxy Watch with their iPhone over the Apple Watch. No other smartwatch, hardware-wise, gets even close to the Apple Watch. It’s the No. 1 watch in the entire world for a reason: it’s elegant, fast, and useful. I liked the Pebble when it first came out and I’m excited about the redux, but it’ll never be as good as the Apple Watch. Case in point: even the highest-end Pebble has an e-ink display. That’s not a bad thing because the Pebble has a lot going for it, namely its 30-day battery life and customizability, but people will continue to buy the Apple Watch for its usefulness and the Pebble for its novelty. I don’t see anything wrong with that.

I wish Migicovsky success with the new Pebble project. I’ve seriously considered buying one — and I still might — and adore the idea. But I also know whom I don’t wish success: the European Commission, a returning character on this website. Here’s Benjamin Mayo, reporting for 9to5Mac:

The EU has followed up on its Digital Markets Act specification procedures for Apple regarding the iPhone’s interoperability with third-party connected devices like smartwatches and headphones, as announced last fall.

Today’s announcement details exactly what third-party integrations the EU commission expects Apple to implement. This includes giving third-party devices access to iOS notifications, as well as way for companies to make like-for-like competitors to AirDrop file sharing, AirPlay streaming, and much more…

Today’s measures revolve around opening up iOS connectivity features. This includes allowing connected devices, like third-party smartwatches, full access to the iOS notification system, as well as background execution privileges, just like how the Apple Watch works with the iPhone.

The EU has made it clear that it expects all features provided by Apple to support interoperability free of charge, for any type of connected device. The EU also expects Apple to make the relevant frameworks and APIs available at the same time they arrive as Apple platform features; third-party access is not allowed to launch later.

Is this real life? Seriously, is Joseph Stalin’s family lineage running Europe these days? I don’t think I have a steady footing for patriotism these days thanks to the United States’ tyrannical, lawless government, but I also feel I’m entitled to fight for free markets. This is a mile (kilometer?) closer to a future where every device in the European Union runs some kind of “euOS” run by the government and whose roadmap must be OK’d by geriatric parliamentarians with no technical knowledge whatsoever. Mayo writes “third-party access is not allowed to launch later.” What does “not allowed” mean? If Apple’s software teams hit a snag in the development process, are they just supposed to delay all of their platforms and launches until they finish? What happens if they don’t?

Regulation is the act of supervising a corporate entity in some way to ensure the well-being of a country’s citizens. Regulation doesn’t involve literally controlling a company’s product roadmap and timelines. What if Apple decides to delay the release of iOS 19 in the European Union because it added a feature and now has to scramble to enable third-party access to it? Would that cross the threshold for a fine? I mean, these timelines are ludicrous:

In collaboration with Apple, the EU has also announced a timeline for the above listed features. Third-party support for iOS notifications should go into beta by the end of this year, with full rollout in 2026. Similar timelines are expected for proximity pairing, background execution and other noted features. Media casting alternatives are penciled in for end of 2026. In general, it seems that much of this support will roll out as part of iOS 19, with full support coming by iOS 20 at the latest.

Soon enough, the European Commission — the European Union’s legislative body — will begin forcing Apple to release iOS versions on exact dates Europe likes for no particular reason. Serious question: Who thinks this is an appropriate way to regulate a business? What benefit does this provide to customers? What benefit does combining the private and public sectors so awfully have to end users? I can think of many adverse effects: the end of end-to-end encryption, the end of the right to remain silent, and the end of trade secrets. This is not regulation from the developed West; this is tyrannical governance straight out of China’s playbook. If the European Union thinks it’s acceptable to police an international company’s release timelines, what’s stopping it from mandating Apple disable Advanced Data Protection in the European Union? The United Kingdom did it, too, so why not the European Union?

I can argue all I want about how Apple shouldn’t be mandated to open iOS up to third-party device manufacturers, but that’s just beating a dead horse. If the European Union passed a law forcing interoperability, so be it. I don’t have the stamina to argue against it anymore and neither does Apple — it got itself into this situation and it’ll reap the consequences. (This is a notable tone shift from my commentary on this subject last year.) But it’s unacceptable for a government to dictate when and how a company releases features. It’s even more inappropriate in a Western democracy for any government to threaten penalties for failing to comply with tyrannical demands.

What I hope readers take away from this is that it’s not necessarily what regulation asks for that’s the problem; it’s how it’s asked for. Migicovsky’s requests aren’t too unreasonable — I’ll still advocate against them, but proponents of interoperability aren’t standing on a weak footing. The European Union passed a law — a bad law, but a law nonetheless — but how it’s enforcing that legislation is patently intolerable. While last year ushered in a new regulatory reality for Apple and other “Big Tech” companies, this year is all about how those companies choose to comply with those laws — and how governments around the world, on both sides of the Atlantic, choose to apply them.

Our good pal Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

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.

Walker is not a top executive; he’s a senior director at Apple, just as Gurman writes, which means he reports to someone who’s listed on Apple’s leadership page. Either way, some manager with an indeterminate amount of power within the confines of Apple Park decided it was a good idea to pull the team together. That’s an intriguing snippet of news. What’s also newsworthy is the fact that Apple spent months advertising a feature that seemingly, again, does not exist. (I’ll get to that in a bit.) Someone who ostensibly leads the Siri team in some fashion doesn’t know when (read between the lines: if) the “more personalized Siri” will ever ship, which is arguably the largest disaster within Apple since the Apple Maps fiasco of 2012.

During the all-hands gathering, Walker suggested that employees on his team may be feeling angry, disappointed, burned out, and embarrassed after the features were postponed. The company had been racing to get the technology ready for this spring, but now the features aren’t expected until next year at the earliest, people familiar with the matter have said.

I don’t know who these “people” are. Just two paragraphs ago, Gurman said the “people” relayed to him that nobody, including the higher-ups, knows when the new Siri will ship. But now, apparently, he’s got a source just a few sentences later who can “expect” the features to come next year “at the earliest.” I believe nobody knows anything about the status of the new Siri.

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

Walker needs to get onstage at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June and demonstrate exactly one “incredible impressive” Siri feature that currently exists on any of Apple’s platforms. I don’t want him in a video. I want him in front of a live audience all with tomatoes in their hands so they can pelt him if he can’t defend himself.

Apple shares had fallen 16% this year through Thursday’s close, part of a broader stock rout that has walloped tech companies. The stock rebounded Friday, but pared gains during the afternoon. Apple was up 1.4% at $212.58 as of 2:18 p.m. in New York.

People wonder why I despise this publication.

But when Apple demonstrated the features at WWDC using a video mock-up, it only had a barely working prototype, Bloomberg has reported. 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.”

“We showed people before,” Walker is quoted as saying. Bingo. Apple has built a reputation for delivering on products. When it said Portrait Mode was coming later during the iPhone 7 Plus announcement back in 2016, it really did come out. When it announced Deep Fusion at iPhone 11’s keynote in 2019, it delivered. ProRAW? Delivered. ProRes? Delivered. I can name hundreds of things Apple promised in keynotes and delivered just months later in beta. Each of those times, the media was briefed on the features and was shown them live, even if they weren’t stable enough to ship in even a developer beta release of the software. But this time, as John Gruber, the author of Daring Fireball, noted in his beyond excellent introspection of the situation, Apple didn’t demonstrate any of these new features to the media because they probably didn’t exist.

When Gurman writes the new Siri was a mere “barely working prototype,” I’m almost certain it was just a hard-coded user interface. I truly believe there was no large language model powering that experience. Apple’s marketing and development teams work in tandem, in parallel, almost all the time, so it wasn’t just a fabricated video. The Siri team really did spend a few weeks in Xcode coding up a nice-looking interface to show onstage. The Human Interface team really did spend months crafting the beautiful Siri glow animation to show off during the keynote. It was all an elaborate marketing spiel intentionally created to mislead viewers and the media. As Gruber wrote, Apple truly can no longer be trusted on almost any timeline in the future. If it says a feature is coming “later this year,” I’ll take it with a grain of salt. Expect to see more harsh criticism of Apple’s delayed timelines in my operating system hands-on articles later this year.

“To make matters worse,” Walker said, Apple’s marketing communications department wanted to promote the enhancements. Despite not being ready, the capabilities were included in a series of marketing campaigns and TV commercials starting last year.

Gurman is paraphrasing again, but this is good introspection on Walker’s part. Unfortunately, it’s not the low-level engineers clicking on Xcode every morning who need to hear this — it’s Greg Joswiak, Apple’s marketing chief, who deserves to be severely reprimanded for publicly advertising a feature that, by Apple’s own admission a few months later, does not exist.

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.

I’m calling it now: This feature will never come to fruition. Clearly, “several more priorities” are vastly more critical than shipping a feature announced nearly a year ago. I’d love to know what those priorities are; what priorities could possibly take precedence over developing a feature already advertised? Imagine someone went to a fast food restaurant and placed an order, making a total of five orders for the kitchen to prepare. Instead of preparing those orders, the manager goes, “I want you all to get the frier ready for tomorrow’s lunch rush.” Tomorrow’s lunch rush should never be given even a modicum of priority over today’s five orders — never, never, never. Every Siri feature “in the pipeline” should be delayed indefinitely.

The fact that this order hasn’t been passed down to senior managers from the higher-ups is a complete failure of leadership. Speaking of leadership:

Walker said that there is “intense personal accountability” about this effort shared by his boss John Giannandrea, the head of AI at Apple, as well as software chief Craig Federighi and other executives.

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…

This mess was created entirely by Federighi and Gianandrea, neither of whom have adequately prepared their teams for developing a set of features on a time crunch. I give app developers a hard time about shipping OS-specific updates months after iOS release day — three months after WWDC. It’s been a year and Apple still hasn’t developed a key feature demonstrated in the WWDC keynote. If Apple executives truly felt “intense personal accountability,” they would’ve gotten to work six months ago.

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.”

This quote should be the entirety of the Apple Intelligence portion of this year’s WWDC keynote, ending with the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” theme song.

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

“You might have co-workers or friends or family asking you what happened, and it doesn’t feel good,” Walker said. “It’s very reasonable to feel all these things.” He said others are feeling burnout and that his team will be entitled to time away to recharge to get ready for “plenty of hard work ahead.”

Clearly the pep talk has done nothing, as the meeting was leaked by one of these employees to one of the best Apple reporters less than a week after Apple’s initial announcement.

Walker ended the meeting upbeat, saying that Apple will “ship the world’s greatest virtual assistant.”

We’ll see about that.

iPads and Mac laptops got a cleanup, but Mac desktops are still confusing

Apple last week announced updates to many of its popular iPads and Macs. It first began on Tuesday, announcing two new iPad models:

Apple today introduced the faster, more powerful iPad Air with the M3 chip and built for Apple Intelligence. iPad Air with M3 brings Apple’s advanced graphics architecture to iPad Air for the first time — taking its incredible combination of power-efficient performance and portability to a new level. iPad Air with M3 is nearly 2x faster compared to iPad Air with M1, and up to 3.5x faster than iPad Air with A14 Bionic… Designed for iPad Air, the new Magic Keyboard enhances its versatility and delivers more capabilities at a lower price. With iPadOS 18, support for Apple Intelligence, advanced cameras, fast wireless 5G connectivity, and compatibility with Apple Pencil Pro and Apple Pencil (USB-C), the new iPad Air offers an unrivaled experience…

Apple today also updated iPad with double the starting storage and the A16 chip, bringing even more value to customers.

It continued on Wednesday:

Apple today announced M3 Ultra, the highest-performing chip it has ever created, offering the most powerful CPU and GPU in a Mac, double the Neural Engine cores, and the most unified memory ever in a personal computer. M3 Ultra also features Thunderbolt 5 with more than 2x the bandwidth per port for faster connectivity and robust expansion. M3 Ultra is built using Apple’s innovative UltraFusion packaging architecture, which links two M3 Max dies over 10,000 high-speed connections that offer low latency and high bandwidth. This allows the system to treat the combined dies as a single, unified chip for massive performance while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading power efficiency. UltraFusion brings together a total of 184 billion transistors to take the industry-leading capabilities of the new Mac Studio to new heights.

And concluded with a MacBook Air update:

Apple today announced the new MacBook Air, featuring the blazing-fast performance of the M4 chip, up to 18 hours of battery life, a new 12MP Center Stage camera, and a lower starting price. It also offers support for up to two external displays in addition to the built-in display, 16GB of starting unified memory, and the incredible capabilities of macOS Sequoia with Apple Intelligence — all packed into its strikingly thin and light design that’s built to last. The new MacBook Air now comes in an all-new color — sky blue, a metallic light blue that joins midnight, starlight, and silver — giving MacBook Air its most beautiful array of colors ever. It also now starts at just $999 — $100 less than before — and $899 for education, making it an incredible value for students, business professionals, or anyone looking for a phenomenal combination of world-class performance, portability, design, and durability. With two sizes to choose from, the new 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air are available to pre-order today, with availability beginning Wednesday, March 12.

It was a busy week in Cupertino, and in pre-Covid (or even during-Covid) times, it would almost certainly warrant a full-blown event broadcast from Apple Park. But, alas, we’re stuck with lousy press releases — not even a fun video like the MacBooks Pro from last fall. I really wish Apple would stop doing this.

The new iPads are nothingburgers, and I can only think of two things to remark on: release cycle and Apple Intelligence (or the lack thereof). The M2 iPad Air was released last May, meaning it wasn’t even out for a year before it was replaced, making it one of the shortest-lived iPads ever. None of the iPads, for that matter, are on a steady release cycle:

New iPads Pro aren’t due until next year and the iPad mini just received an update last year. I don’t mind the iPad mini’s cycle being so irregular, but the rest of the iPads should all be on an 18-month cadence. One announcement in October, the other in the spring. By contrast, every Mac laptop gets an update yearly at roughly the same time. (I’ll get to desktop Macs in a bit.)

Update cycle quibbles aside, the iPad Air is pretty meh, but I think that’s alright. It’s the iPad for everyone, and the distinction between it and the iPad Pro is pretty well-defined. I think it sells the best, too, and I don’t have any complaints about it. It’s a boring iPad, but it’s the device most people should buy. Case closed. The iPad (no suffix), on the other hand, is primarily intended for schools and toddlers. For $350, I don’t think it needs to do much other than have a decent display and competent processor, and the 11th-generation iPad does both of those things well. I, along with Mark Gurman, the most reliable Apple leaker in the business, thought it would have the A17 Pro, matching the iPad mini from last year to receive Apple Intelligence, but that didn’t happen. I think that’s probably to reduce costs because most people buying (or using, rather) the base-model iPad aren’t interested in Writing Tools or whatever. So it goes. Both iPads remain products in Apple’s lineup for yet another year.

The Macs are far more delightful and what I expected when Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, posted a “Something in the Air” teaser on X — and only X, much to my chagrin — a day before the first press releases were sent. The new MacBook Air’s highlight is the $1,000 starting price for the latest M4 processor. Finally. With this, the MacBook Air becomes the single best computer for the money sold in the world, bar none. My only complaint is that it starts at 258 gigabytes of storage, which is too low for anything in 2025, but it’s not much to argue over when most high school and university students store everything on Google Drive, anyway. For everyone else, I’d recommend bumping up to 512 GB, which costs an insane $200 extra. (That’s where they get everyone.) Thanks to Apple Intelligence, it starts at 16 GB of unified memory, which is fantastic, and it comes in a beautiful yet muted sky blue finish. I really wish Apple would make Mac laptops like the iBooks again. There has to be a market research reason, but the lack of color is a shame.

Walmart still sells the M1 MacBook Air for an astonishing $630, which is great, but for $370 more, the current-generation MacBook Air is such an incredible value that it’s not even really close. It even blows the Mac mini out of the water — for $400 more, it’s a Mac mini with a screen, trackpad, keyboard, speakers, and now an improved webcam. The MacBook Air has always been good, but now it’s unbelievable what a deal it is.

The Mac Studio, however, is anything but a deal. It’s still $2,000 for the base model and $4,000 for the higher-end one, but puzzlingly, the two configurations include the M4 Max and M3 Ultra. I was puzzled by this initially, but then I realized the M4 Max doesn’t have the “UltraFusion” interposer that allows two processors to be fused together. Every high-end M-series chip has had the interposer, but interestingly, the M4 doesn’t. Apple later said to the media that not every generation will have an Ultra variant, putting the guessing games to an end, but this weird staggered lineup means the M4 Max and M3 Ultra are relatively similar in performance. Graphics-wise, the M3 Ultra still is more performant, but that effect won’t be felt by most Mac Studio buyers.

Last year, I wrote about how the Mac Studio is not long for this world because it’s updated infrequently and only has the same processor as the MacBooks Pro, which have gorgeous screens and everything else a laptop needs for only about $1,000 more. I still feel that way — even more so, in fact. The Mac Studio and the Mac Pro both occupy redundant areas in the Mac market, and I think at least one of them has to go. My eyes are on the Mac Studio: While I hate to see it leave, the high-end, $4,000 Mac Studio doesn’t deserve to exist. If it’s going to be operated infrequently, it should be eclipsed by the Mac Pro, which has always been a product for the 1 percent of Mac users who need extra processing power. That computer still has an M2 Ultra, which is unbelievable in 2025. If it runs a year behind, it might as well have the latest Ultra processor. That way, there’s no worry about how frequently it’s updated.

The base-model Mac Studio, meanwhile, deserves a price reduction to, say, $1,800, and it should be updated alongside the MacBooks Pro every year. With the infrequently updated Mac Pro out of the way, the Mac Studio would function like the Mac mini does to the consumer-level MacBooks Air. It would fit perfectly in Steve Jobs’ grid of Macs:

Meanwhile, the Mac Pro could hang out somewhere on the side as a computer for even more professional professionals. I think this grid makes much more sense in the Apple Silicon era, and every model would also be priced fairly. People could get every processor in either a desktop or laptop configuration at a reasonable price every year, as the desktops would be updated alongside their laptop counterparts. Consumer models in the spring, professional ones in the fall. Clearly, the Mac Pro is meant to be the low-yield, infrequently updated computer, so it should adopt the latest Ultra-series processor, which also isn’t updated every year. The Mac Studio should be dedicated to delivering the latest-generation processors at a good price, just like the Mac mini.

I don’t think Apple will ever do this because the marketing department is drunk with power, but here’s hoping. In the meantime, good luck explaining this chaotic mess to a normal person just looking to buy a pro-level Mac. (And yes, there are plenty of pro Mac buyers who don’t have a doctorate degree in Cupertino-ese.)

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is preparing one of the most dramatic software overhauls in the company’s history, aiming to transform the interface of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac for a new generation of users.

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.

Gurman is incredible at writing long-winded diatribes (or puff pieces) with just about a paragraph of actually newsworthy information. I don’t read his reporting for details; I read it because I know it’s accurate. There’s nobody in the business like Gurman, whose rumors are accurate to a tee almost every single time. He rarely misses, and when he does, that in and of itself is newsworthy. So, I’m not commenting on Gurman’s article, which is over a thousand words of irrelevant backstory including how this redesign is somehow a push to invigorate sales after the pandemic — which is about the goofiest Apple commentary I’ve heard in a while, knowing the pandemic ended nearly three years ago and Apple has done fine since — but rather the prospect of a full redesign of Apple’s operating systems.

It’s true that iOS hasn’t received a major design overhaul since iOS 7, instead opting for minor revisions that bring it in line with modern aesthetics and trends. By contrast, macOS was only updated five years ago; macOS 11 Big Sur took the Mac from the OS X Yosemite 10.10 era into the modern iOS-like styling macOS carries today. The rounded corners are reminiscent of the post-iPhone X curves found throughout iOS; linear gradients and Gaussian blurs in the form of “frosted glass” follow iOS’ footsteps; and SF Symbols throughout the OS made the operating systems feel like they stem from the same family. Gurman says, by contrast, that window styles and buttons are markedly different across operating systems, when that’s the furthest from the truth.

The Mac has Mac-specific design idioms because it uses different input devices: keyboards, mice, and trackpads. If Apple brought, say, the visionOS aesthetic to the Mac, just toggling a few buttons would require moving the mouse way too much. The three platforms are as close as they feasibly can be while accentuating each device’s strengths — aside from iPadOS, which I agree needs a major rethinking. I’m still not a fan of the macOS Big Sur redesign as much as I’ve gotten used to it because I think it makes apps too spread out. A good example is System Settings, which is perhaps one of the most bizarre pieces of user interface that Apple has created in the last 15 years — it’s genuinely awful. Widgets on the Mac are visually identical to iOS, which makes no sense since the Mac prefers smaller, more detailed, and compact user interfaces due to Macs’ larger screens. SwiftUI, which normalizes UIs across platforms, is sometimes downright bizarre on the Mac. I think more of the same monotony on macOS would only throw Mac users into a fit of rage.

Don’t even get me started on iOS. Truth be told, I think iOS’ design is as perfect as it can be currently. Fundamentally, the OS feels intuitive — I know my way around it and if I know anything about iOS users, I know they like it that way. Here’s a question for the skeptical: What on iOS actively looks dated or out of place? It’s possible that iOS 19 looks and feels beautiful — more beautiful than iOS already is — but does it need to be more aesthetically pleasing? At a certain point, when a company hits over a billion daily active users, there comes a time where it should settle down and find itself a design to stick with.¹ People are inherently resistant to change, and now that iOS is an established platform, there’s no way for Apple to eloquently do an iOS 7-like radical redesign of basic system elements.

iOS 7 went from a skeuomorphic design modeled after physical objects to a flat, much more computer-like interface. visionOS, meanwhile, attempts to blend the real world into a flat design, incorporating translucency and generally omitting color. On iOS, color is a primary layer of texture — accent colors instantly tell a user what a button does. visionOS uses depth, both created using shades of gray and literal, stereoscopic depth, to differentiate elements. This “loose” resemblance Gurman writes about probably relates to the Apple Sports or Invites apps, which both look starkly out of place on iOS. I’ve been hesitant to say either app looks like visionOS because, really, neither does. They look stupid. They incorporate color where it makes no sense and borrow interface elements from visionOS, like the main picker in the Sports app or the translucency in the Invites Settings sheet, in a way that’s rudely uncanny. Neither app looks like one made by Apple.

Bringing this paradigm to the rest of iOS would be an unmitigated disaster, aside from screwing with people’s resistance to change. Let’s talk about that Settings sheet in Invites: Why is it translucent at all? What does translucency accomplish there? On macOS, translucent sidebars add depth and allow a sliver of a person’s background wallpaper to shine through. On visionOS, translucency blends the OS seamlessly with its surroundings, eliminating claustrophobia and allowing light into a person’s field of view. But what does that same translucency accomplish in Invites, where the only thing that shines through is an odd pop of color on the main Scheduled page, which seemingly overrides the OS’ light or dark appearance? I’m serious: the Ukrainian-themed yellow and blue gradient does not change with system appearance, and thus, the app looks the same in both settings. What is the point of this?

The Sports app irritates me beyond reason. It also doesn’t obey light and dark mode, much like its rebellious Invites cousin, and the app is centered around these awful cards that come in from the bottom and expand as a person scrolls down. This idea is mimicked on visionOS, where the goal is to have windows start small and engross a user if they choose, as immersion can be overwhelming on Apple Vision Pro, but iOS is finite. It doesn’t require interfaces to move around constantly. Similarly, swiping left to right is an atypical method of switching between content on iOS. Typically, most iOS apps use a segmented control displayed at the top. If there’s too much information to hide behind one, a nested navigational hierarchy is preferred, either using tabs at the bottom or a navigation view with a sidebar (Music and Mail are canonical examples). Sports has one lateral sliding mechanism, one atypical segmented control, and a toggle to switch teams. What is going on?

Even if Apple wanted to force this on users, it couldn’t force it on app developers, who are patently uninterested in following Apple’s lead on anything. Many of the major iOS developers still don’t support dark mode app icons, and they were introduced a year ago. This isn’t 2013. I’m all for apps incorporating whimsy and dabbles of skeuomorphism in their interfaces — I even encourage it — but that shouldn’t be forced anymore. The iOS design is fine, and if the plan is to roll back some of what Apple did over a decade ago, it won’t work. There are apps in 2025 that still don’t support dark mode. They will never, ever adopt a new set of guidelines for how to make apps. The result will just be a hodgepodge of design ideas that all look bad. Does this sound like a good idea? Any Apple designer who thinks it is should write an email to their manager listing every app on their iPhone that doesn’t support dark mode.

Good luck.

Jacqueline Roy, an Apple spokeswoman, in a written statement to John Gruber at Daring Fireball:

Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also 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.

This “more personalized Siri” featuring Apple’s personal context artificial intelligence feature was demonstrated at the Worldwide Developers Conference last year as part of iOS 18 and was supposed to be out by the spring. Apple never acknowledges future products — for all intents and purposes, this is supposed to be a current feature of iOS just coming in a future update. But reading the tea leaves leads me to believe that the new Siri won’t ship until the fall, perhaps as part of iOS 19, which is rumored to feature no substantial improvements to Apple Intelligence. This year’s WWDC invites should be out in a few weeks, and Apple’s development teams are all hard at work on putting the final touches on the next operating systems scheduled to go into beta in June. There’s just no time to ship these 18.x features by the end of the month.

But why? Apple’s demonstration last June was supposedly recorded live, so the features must’ve been partially developed by then — or at least, that’s what I thought. Most likely, WWDC was the work of Apple’s marketing department with no oversight from engineering, similar to the AirPower wireless charging mat announced alongside the iPhone X in 2017 that died because it was impossible. Phil Schiller, Apple’s then-marketing chief, proudly proclaimed that his teams “know how to do this” on that September morning, just like Craig Federighi, Apple’s software vice president, said about Apple Intelligence. Neither of them seemed to be correct in their assertions. Here’s Mark Gurman reporting for Bloomberg on the internal shenanigans at Apple:

Since then, Apple engineers have been racing to fix a rash of bugs in the project. The work has been unsuccessful, according to people involved in the efforts, and they now believe the features won’t be released until next year at the earliest.

In the lead-up to the latest delay, software chief Craig Federighi and other executives voiced strong concerns internally that the features didn’t work properly — or as advertised — in their personal testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters…

Some within Apple’s AI division believe that work on the features could be scrapped altogether, and that Apple may have to rebuild the functions from scratch. The capabilities would then be delayed until a next-generation Siri that Apple hopes to begin rolling out in 2026.

If Gurman’s reporting is to be believed, there’s no functioning version of the “new” Siri at Apple Park. Marketing seems to have caught on; an advertisement from last fall showing the actress Bella Ramsey asking questions to the more personal version of Siri was deleted this week upon the news of the statement. The fancy rainbow glow at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store — “when I say A, you say I” — the “Hello, Apple Intelligence” slogan on all of last year’s iPhone models, and the countless occurrences of billboards in subway stations and city streets around the country were all for nothing. They advertised nothing. Those features never existed beyond a nonsense presentation cobbled together in a few months.

I gave Humane a hard time for shipping the Ai Pin in a state where it was nothing more than overpriced vaporware. The Ai Pin does nothing it was supposed to and I rightfully flamed Humane for its marketing lies and subsequent pump-and-dump scam. I’m applying my standards evenly: Apple sought to capitalize on the AI stock market gold rush last year, put together a fancy demonstration for eagle-eyed WWDC viewers, and never shipped the feature. The only difference between the two companies is that I still presume Apple intended to release them in the spring, whereas Humane’s primary motive was to find the first idiot to buy the company for an obscene amount of money. Either way, the outcomes were the same.

This is sheer, unbridled incompetence, and there’s no other way to put it. John Gianandrea — Apple’s machine learning chief who has accomplished almost nothing during his time there — Federighi, and Tim Cook, the company’s uncharismatic, slow-as-a-snail chief executive, all need to huddle and figure out how to address their collective lack of meaningful leadership skills. Otherwise, they should all be fired. I’m not saying this as a fluke — if Scott Forstall, Apple’s previous software chief pre-Federighi, was forced out of Apple due to the cataclysmic Apple Maps failure, Federighi and Gianandrea should be out of the door by next week. The only difference was back then, in 2012, Apple still had a culture dominated by the Steve Jobs school of thought. People who didn’t do good work were sacked with no remorse. Apple under Cook is ruled by a hierarchy of convoluted politics, whereas Jobs governed like a monarch.

Federighi, Gianandrea, and Cook’s roles in the Apple Intelligence drama have significantly undercut Apple’s leadership in software. That politics is, in my eyes as an outside spectator, the real reason why Apple has no AI strategy. There’s only one solution I can think of: Gut the entire department and buy another company that knows how to make large language models. Of the ones out there — or the ones for sale, anyway — Anthropic jives the best with Apple’s ethos of privacy and safety at the heart of every core innovation. Claude is designed to be safe — so safe, in fact, that it doesn’t even search the web yet. I’ve written this before, but the problem doesn’t lie in the low-level programmers who write code in Xcode or fiddle with models, but rather the people with oversight tasked with managing the direction of the company. Anthropic’s direction is very similar to Apple’s, if it had a direction at all: build artificial general intelligence that’s safe and benefits humanity. Apple just needs to adopt the fast-paced nature of a Silicon Valley start-up. Cook’s politicking both inside and out needs to go.

Apple doesn’t have a money or a people problem. Gianandrea worked for years at Google, developing some of the best machine learning in decades. Federighi’s teams are efficient and produce beautiful and intuitive software used and relied upon by billions daily. Cook’s leadership has turned Apple into the most valuable company in the world. The engineers who do the scut work make products worth praising day in and day out. They’re some of the most talented, smart, and creative people in software development. On paper, Anthropic pales in comparison to Apple’s efficiency and knack for great hires. But Apple needs a direction after playing internal politics for far too many years. There’s too much bureaucracy in that company. Every report from Gurman leaves me feeling like the low-level programmers at Apple are trying to send a message that the C-suite just isn’t interested in doing the work. They’re not worried. They’re never worried. They’ve become too comfortable in their company’s place as top dog. They need a fire under their seat, and the people at Anthropic have exactly that.

Ryan Christoffel, reporting for 9to5Mac:

Apple released the latest iOS 18.4 and visionOS 2.4 betas today. Beta 2 arrives with a brand new app on each platform: ‘Apple Vision Pro’ is the newest iPhone app, and ‘Spatial Gallery’ is new to Vision Pro.

The new ‘Apple Vision Pro’ app on iPhone offers a dedicated home to:

• view your Vision Pro’s model number, software version, and serial number
• access tips and the Vision Pro user guide
• and discover new and recent Vision Pro content, such as immersive videos, apps and games, and more…

From Apple Newsroom:

With Spatial Gallery, users will enjoy breathtaking and intimate moments spanning art, culture, entertainment, lifestyle, nature, sports, and travel, with new content released regularly. At launch, users can discover remarkable perspectives from photographers like Jonpaul Douglass and Samba Diop; new stories and experiences from iconic brands including Cirque du Soleil, Red Bull, and Porsche; behind-the-scenes moments from Apple Originals like Disclaimer, Severance, and Shrinking; and special moments from top artists.

Finally, there is some new content for Apple Vision Pro. Neither of these apps change the experience of using visionOS — which still lacks experiences and entertainment — but it’s a step in the right direction. This is the first major visionOS update since the ultra-wide Mac Virtual Display feature from last fall; visionOS 2.4 also adds Apple Intelligence, which is interesting to exactly zero people. I poked around in the Apple Vision Pro iOS app — installed by default for people on the iOS beta with an Apple Vision Pro signed into their Apple account — and I think it’s well-made and helpful. Apple realizes it’s cumbersome to strap on the headset just to check if there’s anything new to watch, so the app allows users to add immersive content to their watchlist and download apps for later use. I like the idea, and over time, as more content is added, I feel like it’ll be handy to add things throughout the week and put the headset on over the weekend to experience saved content.

The “Spatial Gallery” is a bit of a mixed bag, but it reminds me of Apple TV+ when it first launched and had next to no compelling content. Sure, perhaps the idea of “Apple Original” visionOS-specific content isn’t appealing now, but in the future, I can see this as being a great place to view immersive video clips and photos. Maybe the app could even be used to live stream Apple events, but that might be wishful thinking. A few years ago, Apple shipped a companion game to “For All Mankind” using the augmented reality feature on iOS, and I can imagine something similar coming to the Spatial Gallery app. (Just imagine sitting in the Macrodata Refinement office from “Severance.”)

Moreover, I want Spatial Gallery to become a place for user-generated content. I don’t expect or even want it to be a social network, but I think people should be able to sell their own visionOS environments like apps or iMessage sticker packs on iOS. This opens up the opportunity for not only third-party developers to make their own themed environments — Disney+’s come to mind — but also independent creators and photographers, who have to resort to shipping panoramas that can only be opened in the foreground. Apple’s environments, while serene, are limited, and it’s not like the company is shipping new ones with every visionOS update. Much like games and apps, environments should be an additional, productivity-focused layer of interaction on visionOS.

I’m really just writing this to express some positivity toward Apple Vision Pro. This is the first update in a year worth celebrating, and while it’s no live sports subscription or YouTube app, it’s something. Is Apple Vision Pro any better after this update? No — nobody should buy it. I’m severely regretting purchasing mine because, again, there’s not much to do on it, comfort hurdles aside. Really, I want Apple to give users a reason to put the headset on at least once a week. There aren’t that many of us, but if all of us stop using Apple Vision Pro, the product line is all but dead. Once a product has reached stasis, it’s very hard to resurrect it, so Apple needs to start adding content that’s worth sparing a few minutes of neck pain. (And no, Apple Intelligence shouldn’t be part of the plan.)

People made fun of the original 2010 iPad for being a “bigger iPhone,” and while that was true at the time — or even now — it sold like hotcakes because there was a thriving app ecosystem. Instapaper, Kindle, The New York Times, YouTube, Netflix, and so many more apps that benefited from the larger screen came to the iPad when people wanted the iOS experience they knew and loved to fit more content. The iPad, in my eyes, revitalized online media. It made e-books worthwhile, television streaming became more common, and online newspaper subscriptions began to thrive. If Apple wanted, visionOS could be the next frontier in computing. It could replace movie theaters — sorry, Sean Baker — and usher in a new era of online media. I wrote about this last October when the “Submerged” short film debuted on visionOS, and it’s even truer now.

Wes Davis, reporting for The Verge:

Amazon is finally launching the long-awaited generative AI version of Alexa — Alexa Plus — that, if all goes well, will take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker to control your smart home or getting info on the fly.

Some of the new abilities coming to Alexa Plus include the ability to do things for you — you’ll be able to ask it to order groceries for you or send event invites to your friends. Amazon says it will also be able to memorize personal details like your diet and movie preferences.

Alexa Plus is $19.99 per month on its own or free for Amazon Prime members — a better deal, considering Prime costs just $14.99 per month or $139 per year. That comes with access to the Alexa website, where the company said you can do “longform work.” Amazon also said it created a new Alexa app to go with the new assistant. Alexa Plus will work on “almost every” Alexa device released so far, starting with the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21. The new system will be free for anyone in early access, which will start rolling out next month.

The actual Alexa+ announcement isn’t very interesting and was teased September 2023 as “Alexa 2.0,” a large language model-powered version of the normal Alexa chatbot. It works just like Gemini now¹, drawing from a pool of personalized information and webhooks to complete more complex tasks than the Siri-like Alexa introduced in 2014. Expect it to function in practice like ChatGPT’s voice mode or Gemini on Pixel phones (formerly “Assistant with Bard”), using the breadth of the world’s knowledge thanks to web integration and various application programming interfaces thanks to Amazon’s connections and server business, Amazon Web Services.

One peculiar note is the pricing structure: $20 a month, like any other artificial intelligence chatbot on its own, but free for Amazon Prime subscribers, which, if we’re being honest, is most Echo owners anyway. Even I, an active Amazon hater, subscribe to Prime. Amazon Prime, for context, costs $16 a month and offers free Amazon delivery, among many, many other perks. This has led a lot of people to ponder how Amazon is making a profit on Alexa+ if it already made “minimal” margins on Amazon Prime by itself before running LLM servers all day for the new chatbot. The answer lies in Prime’s genius business model: it only subsidizes the free shipping aspect. Free two-day shipping to virtually any urban address, at Amazon’s scale, is dirt cheap, and the rest of the $16 is profit because the rest of the services (Prime Video, Music, etc.) are just fancy names for content licensing deals Amazon could eke out with just a few billion dollars a year.

Alexa+ is powered by Amazon’s own LLM — Amazon Nova, according to Davis — and some off-the-shelf models from Anthropic, and both are obviously run on AWS, which Amazon owns. It doesn’t have to build any new servers or pay any API costs. The infrastructure is there and has been for years — at least ever since AWS started selling AI server space for third parties after the ChatGPT boom. The $20 monthly entry fee for non-Prime members is a marketing gimmick to get people to purchase Prime, which Amazon makes a disgusting amount of profit on. It looks like a bargain on the consumer’s side, but it’s just a ploy to sell more Prime subscriptions. And if any fool actually pays the $20 for Alexa+, that’s just free money for Amazon. It’s not generous on Amazon’s part because it (a) sells more Prime subscriptions and (b) satiates investors’ appetite for AI juice in every product. Clever business move, Jeff Bezos.

This brings me to the world’s most advanced AI technology company, Apple of Cupertino, California. The new Siri — previewed nearly a year ago — better be able to develop a cure for cancer and end childhood poverty at this rate because of how long it’s been in the oven. Seriously, what the hell is Apple doing? Amazon — the company that forces its employees to urinate in water bottles and still was sweating bullets about missing its timeline — has a solution for the LLM wars while the Apple Intelligence-powered Siri has no official estimated arrival time. And forget about the truly LLM-powered one, which is aimed for a release next spring. Apple just isn’t behind; it’s living in the medieval times.

Deep inside, I know the new Siri isn’t going to be worth the wait. It’s entirely reliant on app developers to integrate App Intents into their apps, something the big names like Google and Uber aren’t bound to do anytime soon. Without App Intents — Apple’s version of Google’s Gemini apps, Amazon’s webhooks, and OpenAI’s Operator — the only Siri will really only work with Apple’s own apps like Mail and Messages. Sure, that might be helpful, but when shouting into the air at an Echo probably yields a better answer than the iPhone in someone’s hand, there’s really no point. Keep in mind: These products live together. There are hundreds of millions of iPhone users with an Alexa-powered smart speaker in their home — does Apple really think people are desperate for LLM voice assistants? If Siri fails, ChatGPT is two button presses away. Alexa+ is putting on a show, Gemini is hanging out, and Claude really is developing the cure to cancer or something like that. Nobody is waiting on Apple.

What comes first: the first public beta of iOS 18.5 containing the “new” Siri or Alexa+’s full rollout to all Echo Show devices? My money’s on the latter.

From the Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced its largest-ever spend commitment, with plans to spend and invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. This new pledge builds on Apple’s long history of investing in American innovation and advanced high-skilled manufacturing, and will support a wide range of initiatives that focus on artificial intelligence, silicon engineering, and skills development for students and workers across the country.

“We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our long-standing U.S. investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country’s future,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “From doubling our Advanced Manufacturing Fund, to building advanced technology in Texas, we’re thrilled to expand our support for American manufacturing. And we’ll keep working with people and companies across this country to help write an extraordinary new chapter in the history of American innovation.”

As part of this package of U.S. investments, Apple and partners will open a new advanced manufacturing facility in Houston to produce servers that support Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system that helps users write, express themselves, and get things done. Apple will also double its U.S. Advanced Manufacturing Fund, create an academy in Michigan to train the next generation of U.S. manufacturers, and grow its research and development investments in the U.S. to support cutting-edge fields like silicon engineering.

Cook is a con artist whose masterful swindling hasn’t proven it will pay off over a month into President Trump’s second term. Make no mistake: This is just another instance of Apple’s politicking that comes around every four years to placate the new administration for some favorable business terms. This time, it’s all about the 10 percent China tariff already in place and eating into Apple’s margins; last time, it was about dodging the ire of Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission under former President Joe Biden. From April 2021, also on Apple Newsroom, just three months after Biden’s inauguration:

Apple today announced an acceleration of its US investments, with plans to make new contributions of more than $430 billion and add 20,000 new jobs across the country over the next five years. Over the past three years, Apple’s contributions in the US have significantly outpaced the company’s original five-year goal of $350 billion set in 2018. Apple is now raising its level of commitment by 20 percent over the next five years, supporting American innovation and driving economic benefits in every state. This includes tens of billions of dollars for next-generation silicon development and 5G innovation across nine US states.

“At this moment of recovery and rebuilding, Apple is doubling down on our commitment to US innovation and manufacturing with a generational investment reaching communities across all 50 states,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re creating jobs in cutting-edge fields — from 5G to silicon engineering to artificial intelligence — investing in the next generation of innovative new businesses, and in all our work, building toward a greener and more equitable future.”

Sounds familiar, except this time, the announcement is much more artificial intelligence-coded, while 2021’s announcement was all about 5G. In 2021, Apple announced an all-new campus in Raleigh, North Carolina, pledging to invest $1 billion in the campus and associated jobs themselves while also spending $100 million on schools in the state. According to the news, Apple postponed the North Carolina campus indefinitely last June despite apparently owning enough land to begin building. Now, Apple is “announcing” an “advanced manufacturing facility” in Houston — which will presumably cost much of that $500 million — and if history is predictive, it will go the way of the Raleigh headquarters from four years ago. Sounds like a successful business endeavor.

Meanwhile, also from Apple’s press release on Monday, the company is planning to add 20,000 new jobs over the next four years, and it also wonderfully touted how many billions of dollars it paid in U.S. taxes. I wonder who these numbers are for. But Apple already adds 5,000 jobs a year, as evidenced by Apple’s use of the exact same number in the 2021 press release:

Apple is on track to meet its 2018 goal of creating 20,000 new jobs in the US by 2023. With today’s new commitment, Apple is setting a target of creating 20,000 additional jobs in states across the country over the next five years.

None of what Apple posted on Monday is new, but that doesn’t stop Trump from taking credit for it.¹ And why would Cook correct Trump when it’s in his best interests to shut up and bend the knee further? The plan of obsequiousness isn’t working — the iPhone 16e from last week is 12 percent more expensive than the previous model, which is almost certainly a taste of what to expect come September when the flagship iPhone models are announced. That Texas plant isn’t going to reduce costs, either, because (a) it never will exist, and (b) Apple has no reason to invest so much into a U.S. facility without any subsidies from the federal government.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which produces, or fabricates, Apple’s Arm-based custom silicon, built a fab in Arizona over two years thanks to Biden’s Chips and Science Act, which provided a boatload of funding to kickstart the project. Even so, the project only produces 4-nanometer processors — not the 3-nm ones Apple uses in its latest devices. Now, the Chips Act, like much of the federal government, is in the hands of Elon Musk, a purported “adviser” to Trump whose sole interest is to enrich himself and give his companies as much federal spending as possible without letting anyone else benefit from Americans’ tax money. Apple has no fiscal interest in manufacturing its products in the United States for at least the next four years, and probably longer since the Democrat who occupies the Oval Office in 2029 will probably be more focused on ensuring a speedy recovery from Trump and Musk’s shenanigans.

Here’s what Apple had to say in its nonsense press release about the Arizona TSMC plant:

The fund’s expansion includes a multibillion-dollar commitment from Apple to produce advanced silicon in TSMC’s Fab 21 facility in Arizona. Apple is the largest customer at this state-of-the-art facility, which employs more than 2,000 workers to manufacture the chips in the United States. Mass production of Apple chips began last month.

But the passage has no mention of the Chips and Science Act at all, which was central to the construction of the facility, to begin with, because that would anger Trump’s camp and negate the whole point of the flattery puff piece. It doesn’t explain how federal subsidies would be crucial to ensuring manufacturing remains in the United States, it fails to mention how backing away from Taiwan weakens American companies, and it wouldn’t dare to ever state how taking Russia’s side in a brutal, three-year-long war with Ukraine only results in China’s power over our economy. There is no constructive feedback or criticism in this statement — no ideas, no concepts, and no plans for the future of American innovation. It is a simple regurgitation and reworking of a years-old template stashed in a Pages document on someone’s Mac at Apple.

I don’t care who’s in the Oval Office: If Apple is serious about American manufacturing, it should have a proper meeting with the federal government destroying every aspect of investment and work put in over the last four years. China is so proficient in manufacturing cheaply because it subsidizes the slave labor found in Foxconn factories. TSMC makes the most money in Taiwan because the Taiwanese government knows how important TSMC is to its economy. The U.S. government, meanwhile, is emboldening its biggest adversaries for cheap bribes while stealing congressionally appropriated money from rightful American businesses and putting it in the hands of a kleptocratic billionaire narcissist. And Cook seems to be perfectly fine with this new reality, which makes complete sense coming from the most spineless Silicon Valley mogul.

The ‘e’ stands for ‘expensive’

The iPhone 16e. Image: Apple.

Apple on Wednesday announced an all-new iPhone model, succeeding the previous-generation iPhone SE but nevertheless carving out a new spot in the now-convoluted iPhone lineup. The new model, called the iPhone 16e, follows the same philosophy as the SE line of iPhones — the latest-generation processor with otherwise lackluster specifications —  and brings Apple Intelligence to Apple’s cheapest iPhone, but otherwise sports a recycled design from the iPhone 15, sans one camera lens and a few other features that make it sit weirdly within the lineup. But the most important detail is the price: the iPhone 16e costs 12 percent more than its predecessor, at an eye-watering $600. Among many of its other glaring omissions, I think the price instantly negates any reason to buy this iPhone. But that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting: For one, it’s Apple’s first iPhone with a custom cellular modem, called the Apple C1 — an interesting branding choice coming from a company typically coy about underlying technologies. The C1 makes the iPhone 16e one of Apple’s most interesting smartphones in a while, but I reckon its time will be short-lived, with the more flashy iPhone 17 Slim anticipated to be released later this year, along with the rest of Apple’s autumnal iPhones.

What Does ‘e’ Even Mean?

Up until Tuesday night, I was dead-set on the “fourth-generation iPhone SE” name. Apple refreshed the iPhone SE’s design drastically in 2018 and didn’t find the need to change the name, so I was positive the SE moniker would always designate Apple’s most affordable iPhone. There is even an Apple Watch named SE, too — it just makes sense to call the next cheap iPhone the iPhone SE. I was wrong, and Apple decided to go for “iPhone 16e.” I think the name has a few different meanings: it still sounds familiar, can be updated yearly to match the previous year’s flagship iPhones, and models the Google Pixel’s “A”-series naming scheme. The “e” could stand for many things — chiefly “economy” — but I truly believe Apple wanted to pick any letter other than A and landed on E because it sounded similar to “SE.” (SE stands for “special edition,” according to Phil Schiller, Apple’s then-marketing chief.)

Why a letter? If I had to guess, it’s probably because it’s easy to increment. In a way, I’m glad Apple is done with the “fourth-generation” nonsense. For most people, it’s too difficult to remember, and for journalists, it’s too cumbersome to write. Apple’s naming schemes vary across device lines: iPhones increment yearly (14, 15, 16, etc.), iPads have the “nth-generation” prefix that often goes into parentheses (“11-inch iPad Pro (fourth-generation)”), and Macs are known by their year (“2022 MacBook Pro”). The iPhone SE lineup has always been named by its generation, like iPads, but people usually choose to increment the number anyway, i.e., “iPhone SE 2, iPhone SE 3,” etc. Keeping the flagship iPhone number simplifies the name and allows Apple to update the device yearly around springtime. But e? It couldn’t do better than that? I still think “iPhone SE 4” is a perfectly fine name, especially because “e” adds ambiguity to the lineup. I despised the iPhone XR’s name for this reason, too — letters should mean something, and the “R for Retina” theory never spoke to me.

Time will tell if Apple sticks with the “e” name or if it goes the way of the “c” in “iPhone 5c” and “R” in “iPhone XR.” But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t surprised when I read that the “e” was lowercase, not uppercase and subscript like the XR. The only case of this in the iPhone’s history is the iPhone 5c, which leads me to ask: Why didn’t Apple go back to 2013 and call this iPhone the “iPhone 16c?” Even “iPhone 16R” would make more sense than “e,” yet another letter to clutter the iPhone release timeline. Either of those names would also give Apple a nice excuse to offer the iPhone 16e in some snazzy colors — it’s only offered in a boring white and black now. Maybe it doesn’t want to adopt the name of a badly received low-end iPhone, but I recall the iPhone XR being very well-received for its time. The name stuck so well that it was rumored up until the last minute that the iPhone 11 would be called “iPhone 11R”; Apple ditched the letter for the “Pro” scheme the lineup carries now.

‘$600, Fully Subsidized?’

The iPhone SE’s price has steadily crept up over the years, and even the last generation’s $430 price tag was too unfathomable for me to recommend to anyone. By contrast, the iPhone 16e has a lot to offer, and I think a minor price increase is warranted: an organic-LED screen, (binned) A18 processor, Action Button, 48-megapixel camera, and USB Type-C port all are worth at most a $70 price increase. But anything over $500, and it isn’t a “low-end” smartphone anymore; $600 is flagship pricing for a below-average specification sheet. It doesn’t have the Dynamic Island, Camera Control, ultra-wide camera, or even MagSafe, a feature introduced in 2020 with the iPhone 12 mini that cost only $100 more than the iPhone 16e when it launched. Seriously, when I saw the newest iPhone in Apple’s lineup was missing MagSafe, a core feature of the iPhone, I was shell-shocked.

But then it hit me: The price increased 12 percent, just 2 percent more than President Trump’s 10 percent tariff on all Chinese-made products. Suddenly, everything made more sense — the material cost for the higher-end iPhone 15-era components cost Apple 2 percent more than the iPhone SE, but the rest is thanks to the Trump administration. That doesn’t explain why the phone is 730 euros (approximately $761) in Europe, but it is a possible reason for the higher component costs. I’m not willing to put the blame entirely on the Trump administration because of truly how outrageously overpriced it is in Europe — a relatively tariff-free land — but it’s something to consider for the fall. I think the most likely outcome is that the base-model Pro iPhone starts at 256 gigabytes of storage, and Apple bumps the price to $1,100, just like it did for the Pro Max model a few years ago, but I still don’t know how much the base models will go up. (I do still think prices will increase across the board, though.) This should serve as a word of caution for what Apple thinks is acceptable in the new regulatory climate.

Back to the iPhone 16e: The phone doesn’t make sense at its current price, not even in the slightest. Most people in the United States don’t buy their phones outright — they buy them in monthly installments on a two-year contract. Doing some rough math, that’s $25 to $27 a month over 24 months for a base model, 128 GB iPhone 16e. An iPhone 16 would cost $33 to $35 a month, which really isn’t that much more money, especially if carrier deals come by with any frequency, as they typically do. The standard iPhone 16 is a much better iPhone: a better camera, better screen, faster charging, MagSafe, and Camera Control all come at just $8 more a month. That’s the price of a reasonably sized Starbucks coffee. And people buying used iPhones are better off purchasing a refurbished iPhone 14 at $530 — $70 less for a better camera and only marginally worse chip — or, even better, waiting until September for the iPhone 16 to drop to $700. That’s the best option for anyone who cares about Apple Intelligence, the Dynamic Island, Camera Control, and the new Photographic Styles, the latter omission of which is the most disheartening because I think they’re the best feature of the iPhone 16 line. (As an aside, Visual Intelligence is demoted to an Action Button feature on the iPhone 16e.)

I don’t think Apple deserves any accolades for increasing the base storage to 128 GB — it is 2025, for heaven’s sake — but it certainly deserves blame for charging nearly $800 in Europe for a phone with a single camera lens. (Well, two, if we’re being pedantic, thanks to the 2× binning feature first introduced in iPhone 14 Pro; I believe it’s the same sensor as found on iPhone 16.) It’s telling that the only iPhones Apple compares the iPhone 16e to on its website are the iPhone 11, iPhone 12 and 12 mini, and the older iPhones SE — it bests none of Apple’s recent flagship handsets.

Apple C1

After years of development, Apple finally debuted an in-house, custom cellular modem to replace Qualcomm’s models still used in higher-end iPhones. I’m surprised Apple even mentioned the C1 beyond a footnote in its press release and “event” video, knowing it doesn’t usually disclose what modems its devices have, but I don’t blame the marketing department for this one. Apple C1 truly is a big deal because it opens up a new paradigm for success (and failure, but most likely success). The C1 is a 5G modem — but with no millimeter-wave functionality, which is fine by me — that Apple says provides sizable efficiency gains, but I reckon it’ll be even more impressive if 5G is turned off or in the “Auto” mode as it is by default. Time will tell if the C1 is unreliable garbage or not, but I have confidence in Apple, and I’m excited for when a higher-end, more advanced C2 or C3 is added to the flagship iPhones, perhaps in 2026.

I anticipate the C1 serving as a test run of sorts. If it fails catastrophically, Apple will go back to the drawing board and ship the C2 toward the end of the decade, cutting its losses on a relatively low-yield, low-production iPhone. But if it goes well, it’ll start adding the C1 to the iPads, maybe go up a generation to the C2, and then slowly introduce it to the flagship models in a few years. That’s why I thought the C1 would be nothing more than a footnote — because understating it would allow Apple to pause the rollout with minimal scrutiny or even try shipping some iPhones with the C1 and others with a Qualcomm modem, as it did with the iPhone 7. My only hesitation is that modem switches haven’t gone well for Apple; the iPhone 7’s Intel modems were bad, and the company quickly had to shift back to committing business with Qualcomm, one of its archenemies. (Bear in mind Intel and Apple were friends in 2016.) This time, Apple can’t pawn off the responsibility for bad modems to Intel — it’s all or nothing.

I truly believe Apple doesn’t want to renew its contract with Qualcomm come 2026, which is as long as it’s valid for now, but for that dream to be realized, the C1 better be up to snuff. Any media fiasco for this otherwise subdued technology is bad news, just like iPhone 4’s “Antennagate” scandal. I think it’ll be fine, but don’t be surprised if it ends up in the news a lot over the coming months. The modem is one of the most fundamental parts of the iPhone, and the launch of the C1 needs to go well for Apple’s processor division to have another triumph post-Apple silicon Macs.

Brody Ford, reporting for Bloomberg:

HP Inc. will acquire assets from Humane Inc., the maker of a wearable Ai Pin introduced in late 2023, for $116 million.

The deal will include the majority of Humane’s employees in addition to its software platform and intellectual property, the company said Tuesday. It will not include Humane’s Ai pin device business, which will be wound down, an HP spokesperson said.

Humane’s team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers, and connected conference rooms, said Tuan Tran, who leads HP’s AI initiatives. Chaudhri and Bongiorno were design and software engineers at Apple Inc. before founding the startup.

For people who spent $700 on an Ai Pin like a sucker, Humane published a nice knowledge base article effectively announcing its devices will become the world’s most expensive paperweights in just 10 days:

• End of Consumer Availability: Effective immediately, new purchases of the consumer Ai Pin will be discontinued.

• Device Timeline: Your Ai Pin will continue to function normally until 12pm PST on February 28, 2025. After this date, it will no longer connect to Humane’s servers, and .Center access will be fully retired.

• Device Features: Your Ai Pin features will no longer include calling, messaging, Ai queries/responses, or cloud access.

• Data Access: We strongly encourage you to sync your Ai Pin over Wi-Fi and download any stored pictures, videos, and notes from .Center before February 28, 2025. If you do not do this, your data will be lost upon deletion on February 28, 2025 at 12pm PST.

• Data Deletion: On February 28, 2025 at 12pm PST all remaining consumer data will be permanently deleted.

But the best part of the announcement that truly made me burst out laughing is unfortunately hidden in a frequently-asked-questions page on Humane’s support website:

Can I still use my Ai Pin for offline features?

Yes. After February 28, 2025, Ai Pin will still allow for offline features like battery level, etc., but will not include any function that requires cloud connectivity like voice interactions, AI responses, and .Center access.

It’s good to know that I’ll be able to occasionally ask my useless hunk of plastic and metal what its battery level is. It’s genuinely hysterical. Bear in mind that this is entirely Humane’s fault for stubbornly — and perhaps cunningly — pawning off all processing to the cloud and hiding it behind a mandatory “Humane Plan” subscription. Before Humane even went out of business, anyone who failed to renew the eye-watering $25 monthly subscription would have their pin disabled. It couldn’t even take photos because doing so required access to the “Humane.center” cloud portal. Humane didn’t even stand on the same moral footing as Rabbit’s R1 — an even worse cryptocurrency scam — which doesn’t require a subscription to connect to large language models. (Speaking of Rabbit, I reckon that, too, will meet its maker in six months, right in time for its partnership with Best Buy to die due to a lack of sales.)

I knew this was going to happen; we all knew this was going to happen, and the only company stupid enough to buy such a worthless firm for millions of dollars is HP. Some people online are seemingly surprised Humane was able to “make” $116 million out of the deal with HP, but it’s just an astonishing failure. Humane raised approximately $230 million beginning in September 2020, according to Tracxn, a website that collects venture capitalist funding data, so the $116 million deal is only about half of what Humane needs to pay its investors back.¹ I don’t think the Ai Pin’s sales came remotely close to over $100 million, which means HP is probably buying most of Humane’s debt — however much there is. It makes complete sense, actually: HP is renowned for its Instagram-caliber acquisitions and sky-high consumer satisfaction, so I believe it’ll turn Humane around into a successful, multibillion-dollar wing of the company by the end of the year, just like its printer subscription business.

In the meantime, Imran Chaudhri, the company’s founder who apparently is known as an “utter fraud” by Apple employees who used to work with him during his time there, can get back to his Buddhist monk meetings while laying off presumably his entire staff. I truly can’t tell what HP is acquiring here — the technology is being sunsetted, the staff is laid off, and I can’t imagine HP would want to drag around the defaced Humane branding for much longer. How is this company worth $116 million when its debt alone is double that? For heaven’s sake, whatever’s left of the company didn’t even have the moral compass to allow buyers to jailbreak their pins, so if anything, HP is acquiring a rotten carcass of braindead engineers and a pompous narcissist as department head. Sounds like a winning strategy.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I knew all of this would happen just weeks after the Ai Pin was officially revealed. Here’s what I wrote in November 2023 about the company’s future:

I have major concerns about how Humane will be able to keep this product up and running far into the future. What happens if OpenAI sunsets its API? What happens if Humane goes out of business? What if an Ai Pin breaks; what does the service procedure look like? What if Humane retires its MVNO? These are all concerns anyone who buys a product from a scrappy Silicon Valley start-up shares. But this time, it’s different. The Humane Ai Pin is not cheap; it’s $700. For $700, Humane has to have its stuff figured out.

Narrator: It did not, in fact, have its stuff figured out. I ended my piece by saying that I was rooting for Humane but thought this product just missed the mark. That was before the outstanding reviews that would come the following spring:

• The Verge: “Not even close.”
• Marques Brownlee: “The worst product I’ve ever reviewed.”
• Engadget: “The solution to none of technology’s problems.”

It didn’t just miss the mark; it was a scam. It did nothing it was advertised to do, it became a worthless paperweight after less than a year in production, and the company had no direction after its launch. The Humane Ai Pin was a poorly conceived effort to show investors Humane was worth spending money on after the original 2018 concept failed and large language models were introduced to pick up the slack. Nobody could convince me Humane’s original vision for the project in 2018 was based on LLMs because OpenAI had barely existed as a company and the foundational “Attention is All You Need” paper that invented transformer models (the T in “GPT”) was only written months earlier. I don’t know what Chaudhri’s original concept was for the Humane Ai Pin, but what actually shipped was a hastily cobbled-together concoction of web calls for an outrageous $700.

I feel bad for Humane customers, but I don’t have any sympathy for Humane itself. I don’t feel like I’m dancing on its grave. Its founders knew what they were doing with full intention to deceive investors and buyers. The plan all along was to sell enough units to make some media headlines, cut losses, and sell a hefty amount of debt to the first idiot who offered. The plan worked.

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s long-promised overhaul for the Siri digital assistant is facing engineering problems and software bugs, threatening to postpone or limit its release, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The company first unveiled plans for a new AI-infused Siri at its developers conference last June and has even advertised some of the features to customers. But Apple is still racing to finish the software, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. Some features, originally planned for April, may have to be postponed until May or later, they said.

Inside Apple, many employees testing the new Siri have found that these features don’t yet work consistently. And it’s nearing crunch time for the software to be ready. Though iOS 18.4 won’t be released publicly until April, the beta version for developers is expected to debut as early as next week.

Forget the new Siri: The current version of Siri is more inept at answering questions than ChatGPT even with the OpenAI integration. I’m unsurprised — vindicated, even — the new Siri has been delayed once more because Apple is struggling with even the most basic of Apple Intelligence features and has been for months. The entire machine learning division at Apple needs a gut and redo because of how comically useless the team is at even developing easy ML or artificial intelligence features. The iOS 18.4, now iOS 18.5 version of Siri, doesn’t, to my knowledge, even rely on new large language models at all. It’s instead powered by App Intents, a technology that has already existed for years, and the existing so-called foundation models powering subpar features like notification summaries. These features were announced eight months ago, and there isn’t even a sign of them coming to market anytime soon.

I’ve slowly but surely concluded that Apple isn’t cut out for AI or ML anymore. The 2011 and 2025 versions of Siri are nearly identical, feature-wise — they still get questions wrong, punt questions to a third-party service (Wolfram Alpha in 2011; ChatGPT now), and are extraordinarily unreliable. The ChatGPT integration, just like 2011 Siri, still doesn’t have contextual replies, i.e., asking follow-up questions without explicitly mentioning the context is impossible. I was excited about ChatGPT coming to Siri — forget about App Intents — but Apple couldn’t even make a basic web integration correctly. It’s no wonder that it’s having a hard time building features Gemini has had since last September.

It’s idiotic to give Apple even a small pass for being late because it got caught off-guard by ChatGPT. Everyone did. Google did and sounded a five-alarm fire, quickly shipping Bard half a year later. Bard wasn’t good — it wasn’t even decent — but it came in spring 2023, just a few months after ChatGPT, while Apple’s similar offering is rumored to come next spring. I’m calling it right now: The Siri LLM is going to pale in comparison to whatever OpenAI has by then, which will most likely be ChatGPT 4.5 or even GPT-5 with some reasoning apparatus. Bard was to ChatGPT what Siri will be to ChatGPT, except three years later. There is genuinely no excuse for this lack of direction coming from the most valuable company in the world. Apple, without a doubt, has more talented engineers, more money, and more resources than Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity combined, and if it can’t find the people to write the code, it should go out and find them tomorrow.

The fact that we’re waiting nearly a whole calendar year to receive an iOS update “demonstrated” (it was scripted) at the Worldwide Developers Conference video presentation last June is a testament to Apple’s utterly poor leadership. Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, needs to go. He is bad at managing a technology company, he’s bad at politics, and frankly, he’s a bad person. Apple, under the last year of his leadership, is behind in AI, fighting a non-winnable war with the European Union, and about to be tariffed to the sun and back even after donating a $1 million bribe to President Trump’s inaugural committee. Even Russians who bribe their president get what they want, but Cook’s company is still fighting a lawsuit from the Justice Department for no reason. That’s the result of pointless political posturing.

Every day Cook remains in the chair is another losing day for Apple. This week, Apple is behind on Apple Intelligence. Last week, the company resumed advertising on a platform owned by a neo-Nazi. Before that, it got into a spat with two independent developers saying Apple “approved” a pornography app on a third-party app marketplace in Europe. Earlier, it scraped its first-generation augmented glasses product. In January, it got flamed by the British Broadcasting Corporation for sending inaccurate summaries of news stories to millions of people. I genuinely cannot remember the last piece of good, heartening Apple news I’ve read in a while. It’s hard to write about this company — it’s so hard that I, a blogger who reads about Apple for a living, spent the long weekend procrastinating about writing this piece.

What is the deal with Cook writing love letters to Elon Musk on X? Apple last week announced an “Apple Launch” event for the rumored next-generation iPhone SE, and the only place it posted the preview was X. It sent no emails to the press, didn’t choose to advertise on any other social media platform, and didn’t even post a copy on its own website. I’m dead serious: Anyone on Apple’s homepage or newsroom will have no clue that an announcement is scheduled next week. The only way to find out is by following Cook on X, a platform Apple has no stake in. It’s delusional to think Apple is anything but a spineless, directionless mess of a company in 2025. Its best product is Apple TV+ — not the iPhone, not the Mac, and certainly not Apple Intelligence. It’s fighting with regulators around the world, its developers are reluctant to build anything, and its chief executive’s only strategy is to give more money in bribes to the “special government employee” running the country into the ground.

Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”¹, giving money to Nazis, or swatting developers away like flies isn’t going to fix Apple’s problem. Hiring engineering talent to fix Apple Intelligence, working out a proper deal with OpenAI with money to bring the advanced voice mode to Siri, and making amends with developers to boost Apple Vision Pro are genuine strategies to repair the company’s defaced public image. An Apple Invites app that doesn’t even have iPad or Mac versions and with a design that frankly is painful to look at isn’t the solution to these problems. Bringing a broken, downright useless AI suite to a platform used by a grand total of about 14,000 people globally isn’t a way to juice sales of a $3,500 paperweight. If you told me I’d write these words about Apple even a year ago, I’d have told you to get a life. But they’re coming from me now, and I mean them. Tim Cook needs to go.

I look forward to writing about the new low-end iPhone on Wednesday, whatever it’s called.

The iOS 7 of on-screen graphics

On Sunday, Fox Sports debuted an all-new, redesigned score bug during Super Bowl 59. A score bug is, as defined by Wikipedia, a “digital on-screen graphic… displayed… during a broadcast of a sporting event in order to display the current score and other statistics.” Fox’s score bug has been center-aligned for years to accommodate vertical videos posted to the internet, and I generally liked the network’s old design for myriad reasons. The new one breaks everything good about its predecessor, and I think the reasons for criticizing it are more complicated than the innate nature of humans to dislike change. For context, here are the two items in question — first new, second old:

Fox Sports’ new score bug, first debuted during Super Bowl 59.

Fox Sports’ old score bug, first debuted during Super Bowl 58.

For me, every score bug on television must meet the following criteria:

• It must have high contrast. Black text on a white background is preferred, but white text on black is also acceptable.
• The font must be in boldface with clear, sans-serif numerals.
• It must emphasize color to differentiate teams rather than flags or logos, which are indiscernible or hard to decipher from faraway distances or odd angles.
• It must occupy as little vertical and horizontal space as possible while maintaining a large font size.
• It must clearly emphasize which team or player has possession of the ball at all times.

Fox’s old chyron accomplished most of these objectives well enough for my liking. The numbers were white on a black, gradient background, which was great — a remarkable change from tennis score bugs, which are tiny with bad contrast. The logos of the teams were surrounded by their colors, which made it easy to check the score without looking too hard. It was clear enough which team had possession by the white line that appeared above the score. And perhaps most importantly, the score bug was compact while retaining readability, which made it less distracting while providing ample utility. My only complaint was that I felt the design looked too busy, almost like it was made for the 2010-to-2015 era of user interface design. I don’t think there was a doubt in any designer’s mind that the Fox chyron could do with bold gut and redo.

So, on Sunday, the update came, and it was horrendous. From the moment I laid my eyes on it, it looked like it wasn’t rendered properly or that half the chyron was missing. The timer in the center with the translucent gray background is by far the laziest design I’ve seen on national television in recent history, and while I think the contrast between the text and background is acceptable, I at least think the corners should be rounded. And Fox practically gave up when designing the numbers, which are aggravating beyond belief. It’s not the size that bugs me; it’s that they have no background color at all. It might be that I’m especially persnickety about contrast, but the subtle gradient on the numerals isn’t enough for me. They should have a color background or, even better, a near-pitch-black surface like Apple TV+’s Friday Night Baseball score bug.

I actually think Apple’s score bug nails it, albeit I think it could do with more color to differentiate between teams. (Jason Snell at Six Colors has good images on his post about Friday Night Baseball from a few years ago.) The numerals are bold and clear, the graphic isn’t too large, and it uses varying amounts of transparency to guide the eyes to the most important information first. It perfectly exemplifies my biggest gripe with Fox’s new chyron: it’s laid out unnaturally for English readers. English is read left to right and top to bottom, and thus, the most important information in any graphic should be at the top left because that’s where our eyes are most inclined to look first. Because Fox’s new score bug is so large, it’s unnatural to begin at the center; I start reading from left to right. Suddenly, the score bug isn’t so glanceable anymore. Apple’s design maximizes design versatility by center-aligning information at the top.

The new Fox chyron has no information density or architecture whatsoever; it’s entirely unclear what someone should pay attention to at just a glance. The team names are highlighted in their colors, but that’s not the most important part of the bug: the score is. The score and teams have no continuity; they’re almost on separate lines due to the horizontal line gap. The only way to read the new graphic is from left to right: Kansas City, 0, 1:49 remaining, second quarter, 17, Philadelphia. A good score bug should place the scoring information first, at the top, hierarchically: Kansas City, 0, 17, Philadelphia. The current down is important in football, but nothing trumps the score, which must always reign supreme. The layout of the new score bug is too horizontally focused, which has the unfortunate side effect of making the graphic too large. It’s almost always easier to lay text out vertically than horizontally to preserve screen real estate — it’s just a more compact layout.

There are elements of the new design that I appreciate, like the letters representing the teams over the logos that casual viewers don’t seem to remember, or the highlight color behind the down number to instantly relay which team has possession, which is significantly more readable than the previous design. But mostly, I believe the few strengths outweigh the numerous shortcomings: the layout is awful, it’s lacking in contrast, and the minimalist design just doesn’t fit with the theme of the broadcast. On the third point: I contend the previous score bug was too flashy and carried too much 2010s aesthetic, but the new one is arguably worse. It reminds me of iOS 7, when Jony Ive, Apple’s ex-chief designer, flattened all of the life out of iOS and made the operating system scream monotony. Again, minimalism isn’t a bad thing: look at Apple’s Friday Night Baseball chyron for an example. But the hard 90-degree angles and boxy backgrounds aren’t elegant or tasteful and are too bland for my liking.

Perhaps I’m asking too much from a mediocre sports broadcaster, but it’s evident that the new design is a significant regression from the previous version. I don’t think Fox should eliminate the new design, however. Here are my proposals to improve the existing design, ranked in order of importance:

1. Place the scores at the top and everything else one level below the main data. The old chyron accomplished this perfectly: Use translucency and color to separate the two levels and establish a hierarchy.

2. Use gradients instead of solid color blocks. The entire score bug should be one continuous piece, not floating tiles hovering over the field with hard, uninviting corners. Use a large enough rounded rectangle with gradients for the team’s colors, being sure to keep the initialisms over the un-discernible logos.

3. Retain transparency where it’s needed. The colors can be slightly translucent so long as they don’t impact contrast. Prefer solid-colored numerals over gray gradients, but use translucency in the background to make the score bug less conspicuous overall. The current version, again, has two floating tiles of color suspended in mid-air. It doesn’t look like a chyron — it looks out of place.

Interface design is difficult, and even Apple took years to perfect iOS’ design post-iOS 7. But the way Apple addressed iOS 7’s shortcomings was by slowly incorporating shadows, depth, and textures into its operating systems in the coming years. Notably, this wasn’t a pivot back into skeuomorphism as much as it was an introduction of basic digital-first materials in software design. The Dynamic Island’s rounded corners and whimsical animations don’t necessarily model a real-world object, but they add character to the operating system after crossfades and harsh transitions took over in 2013. macOS 11 Big Sur re-introduced rounded corners after macOS 10.10 Yosemite removed them, creating a stoic, business-like design. iOS now uses three shades of certain system colors — primary, secondary, and tertiary — to designate importance.

Fox’s new score bug is an iOS 7-style pivot from the textual design of the previous graphic. That sets it up for a long career in the 2020s, but Fox needs to bring humanity back into the design, incorporating curves, hierarchy, depth, and texture into a more pleasing, sensible chyron. Describing a score bug like this might seem inappropriate for such a simple, almost unimportant element when the primary focus should be on the game, but it’s important to make information glanceable when so many people need to look at it for hours. The best designs are the ones that go unnoticed except for when they change, and Fox’s latest design is too distracting and attracts too much attention. A score bug should be subdued and easy on the eyes, and the new one is anything but.

Joseph Menn, reporting exclusively for The Washington Post:

Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues.

Rather than break the security promises it made to its users everywhere, Apple is likely to stop offering encrypted storage in the U.K., the people said. Yet that concession would not fulfill the U.K. demand for backdoor access to the service in other countries, including the United States.

The office of the Home Secretary has served Apple with a document called a technical capability notice, ordering it to provide access under the sweeping U.K. Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, which authorizes law enforcement to compel assistance from companies when needed to collect evidence, the people said.

It’s already possible for governments around the world — including the United States, via the Federal Bureau of Investigation — to subpoena Apple and receive access to an entire user’s Apple account, including their photos, text messages, and iPhone backups, as long as the account doesn’t have Advanced Data Protection enabled. Advanced Data Protection, introduced in December 2022 after years of setbacks due to government pressure, effectively hands the user the encryption key to their Apple account; in the case of traditional Apple accounts, Apple stores a second copy of the encryption key on its servers. It’s a hassle to enable Advanced Data Protection, mainly because it requires storing safely a 35-character recovery key, which can be used to decrypt the data in the event a user loses access to all of their Apple devices, which usually store the keys. Most users don’t turn it on because if they lose that recovery key, Apple can no longer let them into their account.

Still, though, privacy-minded users like myself choose to enable Advanced Data Protection for added security. I’ll never be anywhere without my iPhone, and I’ve used the same passcode on it for years, so it’s burned into my muscle memory. If I were to lose my iPhone and my house with all of my Apple products in it burned down on the same day, I’d probably have bigger problems than being locked out of my Apple account. What’s more likely is that some hacker gets access to my Apple account credentials or designs a social engineering ploy to cajole Apple Support to reset my password — Advanced Data Protection shields against both plausible scenarios. And, perhaps most importantly, the government can’t subpoena Apple for any of my data. It’s not like I have anything to hide, but I don’t want the government to ever gain access to my private information. With President Trump’s FBI, subpoenas into political antagonists are about to become much more common, and I’m protected against that threat with Advanced Data Protection.

The British government isn’t happy with its citizens living a private life away from the government’s eyes, though — or, perhaps even worse, any citizen in any country having any semblance of privacy. Since when do British laws apply outside Great Britain (and Northern Ireland)? I’m confident Apple won’t back down to the British, just like it stood up against the FBI’s incursion after the San Bernardino terrorist attack, but I’m unsure how it’ll deal with the demand to subpoena every account worldwide. What right does Britain have to enforce its law on another country’s soil? That’s like a U.S. police officer going to England and arresting a kid for drinking at 19. If the British are fighting an international criminal scheme, that’s great — work with the countries the suspects are in and obtain a warrant through their federal law enforcement. If the foreign nation can’t get access to a user’s data because it’s encrypted, so be it, but just because one country wants access to its citizens’ data doesn’t mean encryption should be banned from the planet.

Apple won’t give Britain a back door into Advanced Data Protection — that’s impossible without tossing a secret encryption key to the government right before locking a user’s account down. But even if nothing happens — as I suspect it’ll go down — this is a dangerous precedent for a Western democracy. If Britain gets even a sliver of what it wants, it opens up the floodgates for the regulation-thirsty European Union and fascist, Elon Musk-led, lawless U.S. kleptocracy. The Trump administration openly and gleefully defies court orders with a direct constitutional precedent — who is to say it wouldn’t immediately demand Apple unlock millions of Apple accounts owned by Democrats because the British also got their way in?

Apple isn’t even allowed to discuss this dictatorship-esque coercion by the British government, and if it wasn’t for leakers within either Apple or the Home Office, the public would never know about the incursion. That’s genuinely frightening. At a time when people’s lives are in danger due to a rogue Western political administration wreaking havoc on a country that used to paint itself as the arbiter of democracy, Britain is sending a message across the pond that being China-like is acceptable. This puts the data of millions of Europeans and Americans at risk. It tests the limits of government so unnervingly and despicably. Encryption is a fundamental human right, and when Western democracies eliminate people’s right to free expression, citizens should fight back with force. (And enable Advanced Data Protection, regardless of where you live.)

Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories:

I think both Tapestry and the new Reeder are exquisitely designed apps, for different reasons. I know that Tapestry’s colorful and opinionated design doesn’t work for everyone; personally, I dig the different colors for each connected service, am a big fan the ‘Mini’ layout, and appreciate the multiple font options available. Most of all, however, I love that Tapestry can be extended with custom connectors built with standard web technologies – JavaScript and JSON – so that anyone who produces anything on the web can be connected to Tapestry. (The fact that MacStories’ own JSON feed is a default recommended source in Tapestry is just icing on the cake.) And did you know that The Iconfactory also created a developer tool to make your own Tapestry connectors?

My problem with timeline apps is that I struggle to understand their pitch as alternatives to browsing Mastodon and Bluesky (supported by both Tapestry and Reeder) when they don’t support key functionalities of those services such as posting, replying, reposting, or marking items as favorites.

Maybe it’s just me, but when I’m using a social media app, I want to have access to its full feature set and be able to respond to people or interact with posts. I want to browse my custom Bluesky feeds or post a Mastodon poll if I want to. Instead, both Tapestry and Reeder act as glorified readers for those social timelines. And I understand that perhaps that’s exactly what some people want! But until these apps can tap into Mastodon and Bluesky (and/or their decentralized protocols) to support interactions in addition to reading, I’d rather just use the main social media apps (or clients like Ivory).1 To an extent, the same applies for Reddit: if neither of these apps allow me to browse an entire subreddit or sort its posts by different criteria, what’s the point?

I really enjoyed Viticci’s piece, a link post to an article from David Pierce at The Verge covering The Iconfactory’s new Tapestry app. The concept of “timeline apps” (thanks to Pierce for the phrase) has been floating around in my head for a few months now since the release of the new Reeder, a subscription product that combines Bluesky, Mastodon, RSS — really simple syndication — podcasts, and more into one timeline. The new Reeder was such a departure from the previous RSS-only version that it required me to look at it from the perspective of someone who was new to RSS and couldn’t quite grok the point of it when social media already serves as an excellent, oftentimes personalized link aggregator. The chronological timeline-style nature of RSS makes it a convoluted solution for the vast majority of people, so Reeder is a perfect middle ground between chronological timelines and social media algorithms.

I really wanted to try the new Reeder, and I even subscribed to it for a month to give it a shot, abandoning my beloved NetNewsWire for a few days to see what it was like. I found myself less confused after my flirt with the idea but disheartened simultaneously. I really like Reeder and Tapestry — they’re gorgeous apps designed by talented independent developers with a knack for good design. Yet, I just have no place for them in my life. I use RSS to read the news in a chronological, unsorted format where I can pick and choose what I want to read. If I ever want to see what everyone else is reading, I can go to Bluesky or Threads, which are amalgamations of everything people I follow are into. To check what’s trending — or if I’m in a pinch and really need what’s important — I check a site like Techmeme or Political Wire by Taegan Goddard. Timeline apps don’t fulfill either of those needs well enough for me. They look like social media but aren’t as personalized as Bluesky or Threads.

And, as Viticci writes, if I see a social media post, I’ll probably want to like it or reply. Timeline apps are read-only, which makes sense from an RSS standpoint, but it waters down social media for me. In my eyes, the news and social media are related but separate media sources, and I appreciate viewing them discretely in their own bespoke apps. There’s a reason I avoid following news sources on social media, with the exception of Techmeme and The Verge because I typically check social media before RSS and need critical news on my timeline. Timeline apps are sub-par social media clients because they’re designed to bridge the gap between feeds and stories. They’re meant for an audience accustomed to feeds and stories in one app.

Yet I keep coming back to timeline apps because I find them delightful. I don’t want RSS and social media to be in one, but I do want an RSS reader with a smidgen more organization than only folders. Ultimately, I do enjoy social media and don’t begrudge my time on it, unlike some other RSS users, and replicating that experience with hard news would be an interesting concept. Tapestry nails the user interface of a lightweight “catch-up-and-leave” app so well, which makes sense coming from the company that made Twitteriffic, the ultimate app to look at while waiting on the toaster. To me, RSS is a sit-down experience where every article is meant to be opened and read, whereas social media often turns into mindless scrolling. There’s nothing bad about mindless scrolling in moderation, and Tapestry understands this.

When an item is tapped, Tapestry doesn’t just open the full article, unlike traditional RSS client. It displays the headline, a hero image, and the description provided by the RSS feed. For instance, a New York Times article will display the author-written blurb at the top of the page. (If a description isn’t provided, the app clips the article’s text after about 500 words.) If I want, I can tap the article one more time to open it in the in-app browser, just like social media, but if I choose to save it for later or disregard it entirely, there’s no pressure on me to indicate so, i.e., there’s no read/unread marker. Tapestry is just a timeline of links and shorthand clips of text. It’s not meant to be an RSS reader, but it’s so much more than social media. It’s uncannily reminiscent of Google Reader and the heyday of short, link blogs.

I love Tapestry and Reeder so much. Reading requires at least some attention, but social media scrolling doesn’t because it removes the pressure of having to do something with what someone has just read. I guess I’m reading the news on social media, but it doesn’t feel like I’m reading down the list of the going wrongs in the same way RSS does. Tapestry is an RSS reader that addresses what’s occasionally my biggest gripe with RSS: how boring it gets. I find it such an amazing app for wasting time.

That’s also exactly why I can never find a use for it: I need RSS for my job. I find stories to write about using RSS; I don’t use social media for that. Tapestry can never negate my need for a proper, NetNewsWire-like RSS solution, and it’s not good enough to replace any of my plethora of social media apps. Plainly, I have no use for it. No matter how much joy it gives me, I can’t find a place to squeeze it in. I realize this is a shameless first-world problem — and believe me, I feel shame in writing about it — but it’s a problem I’ve been trying to solve for a few months. It’s not Tapestry or Reeder’s fault — it’s my fault for having a rigid media consumption diet impossible to break away from. Does it work for me? Yes. But I also suffer from shiny object syndrome, and the fresh, hot bits are way too enticing for me to ignore.

Even if you don’t plan on using it, give Tapestry a shot. It’s free in the App Store.

A large assortment of New York Times journalists, reporting Monday in a piece titled “Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government”:

In Elon Musk’s first two weeks in government, his lieutenants gained access to closely held financial and data systems, casting aside career officials who warned that they were defying protocols. They moved swiftly to shutter specific programs — and even an entire agency that had come into Mr. Musk’s cross hairs. They bombarded federal employees with messages suggesting they were lazy and encouraging them to leave their jobs.

Empowered by President Trump, Mr. Musk is waging a largely unchecked war against the federal bureaucracy — one that has already had far-reaching consequences.

Mr. Musk’s aggressive incursions into at least half a dozen government agencies have challenged congressional authority and potentially breached civil service protections.

Top officials at the Treasury Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development who objected to the actions of his representatives were swiftly pushed aside. And Mr. Musk’s efforts to shut down U.S.A.I.D., a key source of foreign assistance, have reverberated around the globe.

The reporters continue:

Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Musk and his allies have taken over the United States Digital Service, now renamed United States DOGE Service, which was established in 2014 to fix the federal government’s online services.

They have commandeered the federal government’s human resources department, the Office of Personnel Management.

They have gained access to the Treasury’s payment system — a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

Mr. Musk has also taken a keen interest in the federal government’s real estate portfolio, managed by the General Services Administration, moving to terminate leases. Internally, G.S.A. leaders have started to discuss eliminating as much as 50 percent of the agency’s budget, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Perhaps most significant, Mr. Musk has sought to dismantle U.S.A.I.D., the government’s lead agency for humanitarian aid and development assistance. Mr. Trump has already frozen foreign aid spending, but Mr. Musk has gone further.

USAID is now dead, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio assuming the top role in the organization. Thousands of foreign aid programs are completely gone, especially in South Africa, where Musk is from. Musk works as a “special government employee,” according to Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary who doesn’t even know the White House’s official position on some of the most consequential executive actions. (“The binder is in my head,” she says, referring to the binder of files press secretaries typically carry around.) This “special” access essentially gives him access to everything in Trump’s Washington, which is completely psychotic. “Special government employees” are only part-time consultants who offer experience from their own fields. They don’t have the right to fire whoever they want for fun on a Saturday.

Over the weekend, Musk waltzed into the Treasury Department and demanded access to the entire payment network the federal government uses to issue grants and loans. The entire thing. Treasury Department officials, who are career workers and not political appointees, and thus who can’t be fired by the president or any of his advisers, rejected Musk’s offer. They were placed on administrative leave the next morning. The same went for USAID, which Musk called a “criminal organization” for some ridiculous reason, probably because it gives money to anti-apartheid efforts in South Africa, which Musk, a noted neo-Nazi, staunchly rejects. Either way, both departments are now under full control by Musk.

It’s worth noting why this is specifically a coup and not just a deranged, rogue administration hellbent on destroying the United States from the inside. (It is, but that’s not relevant here.) The White House — also known as the executive branch — has absolutely zero discretion over federal spending. None, nil, null, naught, nothing, nada. If Congress passes a law that tells the president to spend money on something, that money must be spent that way. (Trump’s refusal to obey this core tenet of the American government caused his first impeachment in 2020.) The president, nor anyone who works for him, cannot disobey the law that Congress signed. He can veto a budget Congress passes, but he can’t violate the law. Appropriations are laws like any other statute passed by the legislature. Here’s Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution:

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

That statute isn’t ambiguous in the slightest. The laws are made by Congress, and no money can be appropriated without its approval. When the president wants to, say, suspend arms sales or foreign aid to a country on suspicion that it has broken the law or conditions placed on that aid, he may do so, but he must notify Congress if he pauses sales for 90 days or longer. This is the rule for everything in the federal government: While the executive branch enforces the law, it does not make the law. By turning off the USAID spigot, which was authorized by Congress months before Trump made his return to the Oval Office and Musk got his fingers on the federal government, the Trump administration is in blatant violation of not only the law Congress passed which appropriates funds to USAID, but also the foundational document of this government. This is entirely unconstitutional, and it’s being undertaken by an unelected billionaire bureaucrat who hasn’t even signed the ethics papers required to be a government employee.

Musk, who has no qualification nor right to be in the government whatsoever, came in with his billions and started firing people for no reason. Nobody has the right to fire these people other than career officials themselves. No political appointee can fire a career worker due to a law called the Civil Service Reform Act, passed in 1978. Civil workers are in a different class from political appointees associated with the administration, and Musk has no right to fire them or place them on leave. This is a coup, plain and simple — an unelected, unauthorized, unwelcome psychopath with a boatload of money is waging war against the United States and misusing tax money collected by Congress to enrich himself.

Musk has total, unfettered access to the coffers of the U.S. government. He can shut the whole thing down, change how money is distributed, or even worse, turn off programs he doesn’t like and use the remaining money to pay his companies. He controls the Treasury Department, for heaven’s sake. This is a brazen attack on the fundamental sovereignty of the United States. An immigrant from South Africa has infiltrated our country’s money supply and is using it to enrich himself without the knowledge or approval of the president, who’s too busy waging a trade war with Canada and Mexico to be bothered with anything Musk is doing. The people in charge of our country’s most important assets are 19-year-old college freshmen who named themselves after male genitalia on LinkedIn. (But saying that on X results in an immediate account suspension, which is illegal.) Here’s a story from some reporters at Wired, titled “A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System”:

A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.

Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a top-secret mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.

And here’s another story about how Musk’s lieutenants at DOGE have access to people’s Social Security numbers from Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum at Musk Watch:

Several of Elon Musk’s associates installed at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have received unprecedented access to federal human resources databases containing sensitive personal information for millions of federal employees. According to two members of OPM staff with direct knowledge, the Musk team running OPM has the ability to extract information from databases that store medical histories, personally identifiable information, workplace evaluations, and other private data. The staffers spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly and feared professional retaliation. Musk Watch also reviewed internal OPM correspondence confirming that expansive access to the database was provided to Musk associates.

The arrangement presents acute privacy and security risks, one of the OPM staffers said.

Among the government outsiders granted entry to the OPM databases is University of California Berkeley student Akash Bobba, a software engineer who graduated high school less than three years ago. He previously interned at Meta and Palantir, a technology firm chaired by Musk-ally and fellow billionaire Peter Thiel. Edward Coristine, another 2022 high school graduate and former software engineering intern at Musk’s Neuralink, has also been given access to the databases.

This is a complete hostile takeover of the federal government, much like Musk’s haphazard acquisition of Twitter back in 2022, except this time involving the most important collection of individuals in the world, bar none. This isn’t a social network — this is people’s livelihoods. Tens of millions of people rely on food stamps and Medicare to survive. Hundreds of thousands of businesses — including Musk’s own — elected favorable members of Congress to pass appropriations laws that would benefit their companies. Millions of Americans voted election after election to ensure their voices were heard. This is how a democracy works. Trump, but more especially Musk, is tearing down the fabric of American democracy. We live in an autocracy now controlled by an unelected billionaire who broke into the federal government in violation of every single foundational document this country was built upon.

I fully realize I sound insane writing this. How could the first and strongest democracy in the world break so quickly in just a few weeks? I feel crazy. I feel like a crank who’s lost their mind. I cope with that feeling by writing about my thoughts in a not-totally-rambling way. I hope everyone reading this finds a sliver of sanity and clings to it for dear life.

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. has canceled a project to build advanced augmented reality glasses that would pair with its devices, marking the latest setback in its effort to create a headset that appeals to typical consumers.

The company shuttered the program this week, according to people with knowledge of the move. The now-canceled product would have looked like normal glasses but include built-in displays and require a connection to a Mac, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work wasn’t public. An Apple representative declined to comment.

The project had been seen as a potential way forward after the weak introduction of the Apple Vision Pro, a $3,499 model that was too cumbersome and pricey to catch on with consumers. The hope was to produce something that everyday users could embrace, but finding the right technology — at the right cost — has proven to be a challenge…

The decision to wind down work on the N107 product followed an attempt to revamp the design, according to the people. The company had initially wanted the glasses to pair with an iPhone, but it ran into problems over how much processing power the handset could provide. It also affected the iPhone’s battery life. So the company shifted to an approach that required linking up with a Mac computer, which has faster processors and bigger batteries.

I was initially puzzled by this report until I read the paragraph about how the device was intended to be connected to an iPhone, similar to how Apple Vision Pro connects to an external battery back. That product has been rumored for years, and I remember briefly touching on it in an article before Apple Vision Pro launched in 2023. Apparently, Apple’s design crew decided to make it Mac-dependent later in the process, which Gurman cites as one of the key reasons the project was canceled. In that April 2023 article, I wrote:

This product feels like a stepping-stone to the future that Apple is actually working on and believes in, which is AR glasses. That product has real potential — potential where it’s the only product you’ll have to carry and potential for ambient computing. Imagine glasses with Apple’s own, in-house LLM built-in that can guide you throughout your day, wherever you are — essentially, an Apple Watch turned up to 11.

Until a few days ago, I was still under the assumption that Apple Vision Pro was a mere stepping stone for an eventual AR product that ran visionOS but was connected to either an iPhone or an external compute puck — and I was correct until Apple decided to can the project. I don’t think Apple will ever discontinue the Apple Vision Pro line of virtual reality headsets because AR glasses inherently can’t be immersive, and Apple has already invested time and money — though perhaps not enough — into creating 3D, 180-degree immersive experiences for visionOS. They won’t disappear, and there will be multiple generations of Apple Vision Pro.

But AR glasses could be what the iPad was to the iPhone. Initially, the iPad ran iOS, just like the iPhone, and the two products largely functioned the same. They were just meant for different circumstances: the iPad is a sit-on-the-couch kind of lounge computer, whereas the iPhone is fundamentally an on-the-go internet communicator. They’re not mutually exclusive purchases. I could see a future where people own both a pair of Apple AR glasses and an Apple Vision Pro for home use — they would serve separate markets but run the same operating system.

If Gurman is to be believed — and I’ve been burned by not trusting his reports before — all of this has gone with the wind. Apple is no longer working on any imminent AR product whatsoever and is instead focusing its extended reality efforts solely on a low-cost Apple Vision product. Gurman, in typical fashion, doesn’t explicitly say that, but it’s understood that the Mac- or iPhone-connected AR glasses are a predecessor to an independent set of eyewear, à la the Meta Ray-Ban specs. Nobody believes Apple Vision Pro will tote the battery pack forever; it’s just a temporary measure to reduce the headset’s weight until Apple can figure out how to bring it into the main computer.

Similarly, I don’t think the AR glasses will forever require being tethered to a Mac. Gurman likens Apple’s now-defunct project to the Xreal One, a set of clunky glasses that mirrors a Windows computer desktop in AR, but I think Apple’s product would’ve just relied on the powerful M-series processors of modern Macs to handle visionOS processing. It’s practically impossible to fit an M2-like chip in the frame of slim glasses, so Apple would have to outsource that computing somewhere to run a full-blown operating system. But while Gurman’s outlined challenges are mostly true — it’s unintuitive, requires the purchase of a separate device, etc. — I think it’s a good first step to ship by 2027.

Last September, Meta demonstrated its AR glasses prototype to select members of the media, called Orion. It, too, offloaded computing to a little compute puck tethered to the glasses and also required users to strap on a highly engineered wristband to detect hand and finger movements even when out of the cameras’ view. I brushed it off as impractical because that’s largely true, but more importantly, I said it didn’t matter what Meta showed in a highly controlled media environment because Apple was already at work on a real product that would ship soon. Now, I can’t make the same point. Apple is, once again, behind, and if it doesn’t ship something by the end of the decade — recall we’re already more than halfway through — its winning streak is over. Apple Vision Pro is undeniably an embarrassing flop, and it needs to catch up quickly.

I’m not saying Apple doesn’t have any plan to make AR glasses ever in its future — as indicated by Sunday’s Gurman report in which he said Apple “explored making smart glasses that would rival the digital Ray-Bans offered by Meta” — but the first stage in that journey has been canceled. It needs to move quickly instead of canceling projects that were already moving. The Mac-connected AR glasses would’ve been a great middle point and something to ship in just a few years. But now, Apple has no plans for real hardware, rather focusing its efforts on conceptual software. That’s a troubling development.

I’m quite frustrated with Apple as of late. Apple Intelligence is an abysmal disaster in the headlines for ridiculous summarizations of simple news stories. Apple Vision Pro, its product of the decade, is too heavy and has zero compelling content for users. The iPad’s software is still lackluster with no rumored improvements. The company has no plans for the future other than a midrange slim version of the next iPhone, and its chief executive is cozying up to fascists while still being faced with the wrath of a 10 percent tariff on all Apple products.

Here’s Apple’s situation as of February 2025: iPhone prices will increase by at least 10 percent in September, the last leg of Apple Intelligence in iOS 18 is still not even in beta, the full-blown large language model is set to come out in spring 2026, iOS users are lambasting Apple Intelligence summaries for being utterly laughable, there’s no plan to update Apple Vision Pro this year or make up for a lack of content, and all of this is happening in a pivotal time for world politics where the president of the United States is starting a trade war with our country’s allies. Who knows what happens to the Chips and Science Act in a few months? What happens to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s Arizona plant?

The only Apple product I truly find myself excited about is Apple TV+. The second seasons of “Shrinking” and “Severance” are incredible and Apple TV+ storytellers and filmmakers are being nominated for Emmy awards left and right. By contrast, every other product category Apple competes in is a disaster with more helplessness on the way. I’m not saying Apple is dying, but it needs to sort out a strategy for the next four years, after which Tim Cook, its chief executive, must retire to hell. Apple products will become more expensive in the coming months and the company is falling behind in an already bad technology market.

Apple’s three main goals for the Trump administration should be artificial intelligence, AR, and geopolitics. Currently, it’s finding itself falling behind in all three.

Samantha Rubin, reporting for CNBC:

Nvidia lost close to $600 billion in market cap on Monday, the biggest drop for any company on a single day in U.S. history.

The chipmaker’s stock price plummeted 17% to close at $118.58. It was Nvidia’s worst day on the market since March 16, 2020, which was early in the Covid pandemic. After Nvidia surpassed Apple last week to become the most valuable publicly traded company, the stock’s drop Monday led a 3.1% slide in the tech-heavy Nasdaq.

The sell-off was sparked by concerns that Chinese artificial intelligence lab DeepSeek is presenting increased competition in the global AI battle. In late December, DeepSeek unveiled a free, open-source large language model that it said took only two months and less than $6 million to build, using reduced-capability chips from Nvidia called H800s.

Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, dominate the market for AI data center chips in the U.S., with tech giants such as Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon spending billions of dollars on the processors to train and run their AI models.

DeepSeek’s mobile app launched earlier this month and quickly rose to the No. 1 place on the App Store in the United States. As John Gruber writes at Daring Fireball, it’s telling that this metric led to one of the biggest tech market crashes this decade. But, perhaps noticeably, Apple is not on the list of tech stocks that dropped on Monday; its stock is up by over 7 percent. I think the reason why is quite comical yet probably true: Wall Street doesn’t see Apple as an AI company. It wouldn’t be wrong — Apple Intelligence is a buggy beta mess making headlines for producing inaccurate summaries of important news notifications. I digress.

The panic over DeepSeek is largely psychotic on the tech “analyst” crowd’s part. Silicon Valley tech bros always panic about this kind of thing. As Casey Newton writes for his Platformer newsletter, the two main camps in the AI wars — accelerationists (e/acc) and effective altruists (doomers) — each have something to gain from causing turmoil. Venture capitalists often throw billions of dollars into various other industries that would benefit from a full-on trade war (or armed conflict) with China, and AI doomers are in it to sell solutions to halt the production of new AI. So when the stock market crashes, it’s probably not because everyone will die or Sputnik AI just happened.

I’m minimally concerned about DeepSeek’s impact on the American AI industry. The company’s latest model, R1, is free, open-source software and outperforms ChatGPT-4o, OpenAI’s finest. But that’s not a reason to worry, per se, because competition is always good and only pushes more innovation in capitalist countries. This isn’t a war yet, and I highly doubt it will turn into one anytime soon because China is significantly resource-limited. Nvidia’s stock went for a ride on Monday because Nvidia chips aren’t allowed anywhere near China per the Biden administration’s rules on chip exports — President Trump hasn’t rolled them back despite Nvidia asking him to — and investors who don’t know a thing about how neural processors work thought China did something incredible.

China, in fact, didn’t do anything worthy of awe. It did what it’s best at: propagandizing Americans. This stock market crash was Beijing’s plan all along. It worked for years post-ChatGPT to build a great large language model that would run on its own cheap chips and wow foreigners, causing them to panic-dump Nvidia stock long enough for the market to die and a new president to lift export restrictions in an attempt to salvage the economy. This is still a possibility because Trump is an oligarch-loving moron who knows less about AI chips than a second grader and would do anything to please billionaire donors, but the goal isn’t to outdo the United States in AI just yet. ChatGPT o3-mini, OpenAI’s next model rumored to be the best yet, isn’t even out until February at the earliest.

DeepSeek doesn’t have any juice. It can’t answer simple questions about President Xi Jinping of China or the Tiananmen Square massacre, and neither does it even allow sign-ups anymore because the Chinese state propagandists funding the project don’t know how to keep up with the massive influx of new users. DeepSeek’s models aren’t AI models — they’re state-funded media made to grab attention and headlines. (I guess it’s working.) DeepSeek doesn’t have to worry about pleasing investors or paying employees because the Chinese state takes care of the bill. It’s not a real company doing genuine business. I’m unsurprised Wall Street hasn’t caught on because only the world’s delinquents belong there, but it’s painfully obvious: no model of this caliber can run for free. Nothing is free in the world except when it’s being subsidized by one of the largest spreaders of propaganda in the world.

I’m sure the stock market will bounce back in a few days. But rich oligarchs, fearmongers, and Chinese propagandists will continue to have an uncanny amount of influence on our politics in the coming years. This is just Act 1 of that narrative.

OpenAI, in a blog post last week:

Today we’re releasing Operator, an agent that can go to the web to perform tasks for you. Using its own browser, it can look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking, and scrolling. It is currently a research preview, meaning it has limitations and will evolve based on user feedback. Operator is one of our first agents, which are AIs capable of doing work for you independently—you give it a task and it will execute it.

Operator can be asked to handle a wide variety of repetitive browser tasks such as filling out forms, ordering groceries, and even creating memes. The ability to use the same interfaces and tools that humans interact with on a daily basis broadens the utility of AI, helping people save time on everyday tasks while opening up new engagement opportunities for businesses.

To ensure a safe and iterative rollout, we are starting small. Starting today, Operator is available to Pro users in the U.S. at operator.chatgpt.com . This research preview allows us to learn from our users and the broader ecosystem, refining and improving as we go. Our plan is to expand to Plus, Team, and Enterprise users and integrate these capabilities into ChatGPT in the future.

One thing I noticed while watching OpenAI’s live stream announcing Operator is that the company truly thinks this is the next paradigm of artificial intelligence. I agree, to a certain extent, since the emphasis seems to be less on the large language models powering some of the optical character recognition and reasoning required to make decisions — i.e., where to click, how to click, and where to enter text, essentially how to use a computer — and more on the synchrony between the vision and reasoning aspects of the model. Operator needs to understand not only how a computer works but also the relationship between concepts, and that’s only possible with a natively multimodal model. It was obvious this was where ChatGPT 4o was headed when it was announced last spring.

To achieve true multimodality, OpenAI developed a new model that works with 4o: Computer-Using Agent. (Fire whoever named this.) I’m at least a little surprised GPT-o1 isn’t involved at all in this project, as I’d think that the LLM would require advanced reasoning capabilities to make decisions, but while o1 literally writes its thoughts out to provide an answer, CUA does the same through reinforcement learning — a technique in machine learning that trains a computer on how to do something by correcting its mistakes along the way and giving it rewards. It seems primal — like how someone would train a dog by giving it treats — but it works since humans also tend to perform better if given rewards. It’s reflected in the training data: when people compliment each other, the resulting outcome is almost always more favorable.

Instead of thinking through a problem by writing detailed explanations for each step of the process (o1), CUA does it natively since it’s been pre-trained on how to use a computer. The LLM does the work of reasoning through what a user means and how to get there, and the reinforcement-powered parts take over the rest. It’s a clever mechanism that perfectly articulates why AI scaling will never stop: LLMs aren’t the best of AI. LLMs are extremely proficient in manipulating prose since they have a lot. It’s like how traditional computers are fantastic calculators — they think in numbers and thus can compute even massive ones with ease. LLMs think in words (tokens, pedants) and can produce them the best. But when they’re given numbers — or worse, images — they fail spectacularly because they can’t put a picture or numbers into a black box and get another picture or calculation, like how they do for language. They need to convert that picture into words they can understand first.

Words make up a substantial portion of humans’ communication and work. Writing emails, sending text messages, producing reports and slides, and reading the news all involve words and, for the most part, only words. But humans also work with their hands and use their eyes to help. That’s why graphical user interfaces came to be — not everyone knows how a command line works, but everyone can grok the basic idea that files are in folders. GUIs are a digital metaphor for the real world, and the world doesn’t use words — it’s heavily reliant on understanding the visual relationship between physical objects through our five senses. LLMs are atrocious at this, but vision models have potential.

Using a computer, a GUI, requires proficiency in both visual and text processing, and that’s where CUA shines. But OpenAI’s spiel about how Operator is the best thing since sliced bread ignores that using a literal GUI computer made for people isn’t the best way to do most things online. GUIs were made because they’re the easiest for humans — “GUIs are a metaphor for the real world” — to use, but they aren’t even nearly the most efficient way for computers to interact. Application programming interfaces are the way computers speak to other, unrelated machines, and they’re the best way to craft agentic experiences. If Operator could make an API call to Trivago, the travel-booking website, instead of navigating to its website and clicking buttons as a person would, it could probably set up a reservation in seconds. It would still require AI to choose what API calls to make based on a user’s request — weights! — but it wouldn’t require the technological prowess Operator possesses.

But, alas, Kayak doesn’t have an API, and neither do hundreds of thousands of internet services humans access online. So, we’re stuck with Operator doing computer-like things in a human-centric world. The idea reminds me of humanoid robots, an imperfect solution to completing real-world tasks. Ford doesn’t employ thousands of humanoid robots to build cars on an assembly line — it builds a robot for each part of the car-making process. Operator is a humanoid robot working an assembly line, making me believe its existence is rather short-lived. To do tons of things on the web, Operator needs to pass Captcha tests designed to keep robots off the internet. Operator passes them with ease, which is impressive on its own. But why are we implementing Captchas just for robots themselves to pass them? Robots passing Captchas aren’t the future, and neither is Operator, which is a (crucial) stepping-stone to something much, much bigger.

Maybe that explains the ridiculous, comical $200-a-month price for entry, which is too high for even me to be interested.

Wes Davis, reporting from Samsung Galaxy Unpacked for The Verge:

Samsung just teased the Galaxy S25 Edge — the new ultra-slim entry into the Galaxy S25 lineup. The phone isn’t out yet, and Samsung hasn’t provided any details, but now we know it’s real. And we have pictures.

Like pretty much every phone, it’s a thin silver slab. It’s got two cameras on the back, rather than the three cameras you’d get with other S25 phones. The Edge is rumored to measure just 6.4mm thick, but my colleagues Allison Johnson and Vjeran Pavic, who are on the ground at Galaxy Unpacked and took the below photos, weren’t able to actually hold or measure the device to confirm.

We’re trying to get closer so we can show perspective, but the place is mobbed with people. There’s a lot of excitement about this phone. By comparison, though, the regular Galaxy S25 is 7.2mm thick. So, it’s… even thinner.

So apparently, 2025’s overarching phone theme is thinness, which reminds me of 2014 when Apple debuted the easily-bendable-to-the-point-of-ridicule iPhone 6 Plus. News outlets (Bloomberg) have been pretty relentless in saying Samsung “beat Apple to the market” with the Galaxy S25 Edge, but the phone isn’t even out yet. Apple is rumored to announce a slim iPhone later this year at its annual September event, and Samsung provided no release date for its thin phone. If I had to guess, that’s because it doesn’t exist.

Each of The Verge’s shots in the article shows the phone with a beige, swirly (figure eight?) wallpaper and nothing else. There is no software interface or any other identifiable features, probably because it doesn’t even have a processor to run software on. From what I can tell, it’s just a plastic replica with a screen attached and connected to some computer in the back. The S25 Slim isn’t real — it’s just a publicity stunt to “beat Apple at its own game.” Research and development on the product has presumably started, but Samsung doesn’t have a single functioning prototype of it yet. Typical for Samsung.

Samsung always follows in Apple’s footsteps, almost to its own chagrin. The company rarely ever has new features that haven’t been blatantly copied off of some other company’s flagship product. So this time, it wanted the news cycle for itself — in other words, the marketing department got control over the reigns for a bit. There’s always been daylight between the Samsung engineering teams — who make the second-most popular smartphones in the world — and the marketing team, whose focus is solely on making a fool of itself every September. When Samsung ridiculed Apple for removing the power adapter from iPhone 12’s box, it did the same just a few months later with the Galaxy S21 line of phones. When it teased Apple for removing the headphone jack in 2016, it followed right along just a few years later. It’s constant.

Samsung’s marketing team is slowly coming around to realizing the world has caught on. I can’t believe it took so long after Samsung literally copied the orange accent of the Apple Watch Ultra on its high-end Galaxy Watch Pro last year. So this time, thin is in, and Samsung quickly whipped up a 3D-printed block of metallic-looking plastic to get ahead of the curve. It’s so unsurprising and yet so shockingly blatant — how the world’s No. 1 smartphone manufacturer can, time and time, get away with copying Apple to such a high degree. I can’t tell if it’s overconfidence, malicious intent, or both.

About the name: I would bet every dollar to my name that Samsung’s marketing executives mulled over calling it the S25 Air, mirroring Apple’s rumored name for its thin phone, but (rightfully) decided against it for copyright reasons. In haste, they came up with “Galaxy S25 Edge,” borrowing the “edge” moniker from the “waterfall edge”-style S7. “Edge” used to mean something — users would be able to swipe from the side of the phone up toward the main display to invoke a control panel of sorts, similar to the new Control Center in iOS 18, for easy access to certain apps. Samsung ditched the Edge a few years ago because people hated it, and it doesn’t look like the S25 Edge has one either. But, alas, the phone is still called the Edge. Never change, Samsung.