Eshu Marneedi

Mark Gurman, Leah Nylen, and Stephanie Lai, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is “actively looking at” revamping the Safari web browser on its devices to focus on AI-powered search engines, a seismic shift for the industry hastened by the potential end of a longtime partnership with Google.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, made the disclosure Wednesday during his testimony in the US Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alphabet Inc. The heart of the dispute is the two companies’ estimated $20 billion-a-year deal that makes Google the default offering for queries in Apple’s browser…

“We will add them to the list — they probably won’t be the default,” he said, indicating that they still need to improve. Cue specifically said the company has had some discussions with Perplexity.

“Prior to AI, my feeling around this was, none of the others were valid choices,” Cue said. “I think today there is much greater potential because there are new entrants attacking the problem in a different way.”

There are multiple points to Cue’s words here:

• Cue ultimately intended for his testimony to prove that Google faces competition on iOS, and that artificial intelligence search engines complicate the dynamic, thus negating any anticompetitive effects of the deal. I’m skeptical that argument will work. It sounds like a joke. “This deal does nothing, so you should ignore it and let us get our $20 billion.” Convincing!

• Implicitly, Cue is describing a future for iOS where more search engines will be added to Safari, but he also rules out the possibility that Safari allows any developer to set their search engine as the default. When someone types a query into the “Smart Search” field in Safari, it creates a URL with custom parameters. For example, if I typed “hello” into Safari with Google as my default search engine, Safari would just navigate to the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=hello, perhaps with some tracking parameters to let Google know Safari is the referrer. Apple could let any developer expose their own parameters to Safari to extend this to any search engine (like Kagi), but if Cue is to be believed, it probably doesn’t have any plan to because it makes a small commission on the current search engines’ revenue¹.

• Cue seems disinterested in describing how Apple would handle a scenario where its search deal with Google is thrown away. There was no mention of choice screens.

Bloomberg’s framing of the new search engines as a “revamp” is disingenuous. From Cue’s testimony, Apple seems to be in talks with Perplexity to add it to the model picker, presumably with some revenue-sharing agreement like it has with DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yahoo. This is, however, different from a potential deal to integrate Gemini, Claude, and any other models into Siri and Apple Intelligence’s Writing Tools suite, which Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, is eager to do. I presume Cue is weary of discussing those potential deals in court because the judge might shut them down, too. While OpenAI didn’t pay Apple anything to be placed in iOS (and vice versa), I think Apple would demand something from Google, or perhaps the opposite. Google is a very different company from OpenAI.

Technology is changing fast enough that people may not even use the same devices in a few years, Cue said. “You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now as crazy as it sounds,” he said. “The only way you truly have true competition is when you have technology shifts. Technology shifts create these opportunities. AI is a new technology shift, and it’s creating new opportunities for new entrants.”

Cue said that, in order to improve, the AI players would need to enhance their search indexes. But, even if that doesn’t happen quickly, they have other features that are “so much better that people will switch.”

Of course Cue would be the one to say this, as Apple’s services chief, but I just don’t buy it. Where is this magical AI supposed to run — in thin air? The iPhone is a hardware product and AI — large language models or whatever comes out in 10 years — is software. Apple must make great hardware to run great software, per Alan Kay, the computer scientist Steve Jobs quoted onstage during the evergreen 2007 iPhone introduction keynote. Maybe Cue imagines people will run AI on their Apple Watches or some other wearable device in the distant future, but those will never replace the smartphone. Nothing will ever beat a large screen in everyone’s pocket.

Cue is correct to assert that AI caused a major shakeup in the search engine and software industry. He should know that because Apple is arguably the only laggard in the industry — Apple Intelligence, which Cue is partially responsible for, is genuinely some of the worst software Apple has shipped in years. But the reason Apple is even floated as a possible entrant in the race to AI is because of the iPhone, a piece of hardware over a billion people carry with them everywhere. Jobs was right to plan iOS and the iPhone together — software and hardware in Apple products are inseparable, and the iPhone is Apple’s most important hardware product. The iPhone isn’t going anywhere.

Some pundits have brushed off Cue’s words as speculation, which is naïve. If this company is sending senior executives to spitball in court, it really does deserve some of its employees going to jail for criminal contempt. I think Apple is done lying to judges and this is indicative of some real conversations happening at Apple. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, is eager to find a way to close his stint at Apple out with a bang, and it appears his sights are set on augmented reality, beginning with Apple Vision Pro and eventually extending with some form of AR glasses powered by AI. That’s a long shot, and even if it succeeds, it won’t replace the iPhone. There’s something incredibly attractive to humans about being lost in a screen that just isn’t possible with any other form of auxiliary technology. Pocket computers are the future of AI.

For a real-life testament to this, just look at the App Store’s Top Apps page. ChatGPT is the first app on the list. While Apple the company and its software division is losing the race to AI, the iPhone is winning. People are downloading the ChatGPT app and subscribing to the $20 monthly ChatGPT Plus tier, giving 30 percent to Apple on every purchase without Apple lifting a finger. The most powerful AI-powered device in the world is the iPhone (or maybe the Google Pixel).

Andrew Liszewski, reporting for The Verge:

Contrary to prior limitations, there is now a prominent orange “Get book” button on Kindle app’s book listings…

Before today’s updates, buying books wasn’t a feature you’d find in the Kindle mobile app following app store rule changes Apple implemented in 2011 that required developers to remove links or buttons leading to alternate ways to make purchases. You could search for books that offered samples for download, add them to a shopping list, and read titles you already own, but you couldn’t actually buy titles through the Kindle or Amazon app, or even see their prices.

To avoid having to pay Apple’s 30 percent cut of in-app purchases, and the 27 percent tax on alternative payment methods Apple introduced in January 2024, Amazon previously required you to visit and login to its online store through a device’s web browser to purchase ebooks on your iPhone or iPad, which were then synchronized to the app. It was a cumbersome process compared to the streamlined experience of buying ebooks directly on a Kindle e-reader.

Further commentary from Dan Moren at Six Colors:

How long this new normal will last is anyone’s guess, but again, though Apple has already appealed the court’s decision, it’s hard to imagine the company being able to roll this back—the damage, in many ways, is already done and to reverse course would look immensely and transparently hostile to the company’s own customers: “we want your experience to be worse so we get more of the money we think we deserve.” Not a great look.

Just as Moren writes, if Apple really does win on appeal and gets to revert the changes it made last week, there should be riots on the streets of Cupertino. Apple’s primary argument for In-App Purchase, its bespoke system for software payments, is that it’s more secure and less misleading than whatever dark patterns app developers may try to employ, but that argument is moot because developers have always been able to (exclusively) offer physical goods and services via their own payment processors. Uber and Amazon, as preeminent examples, do not use IAP to let users book rides or order products. That doesn’t make them any less secure or more confusing than an app that does use IAP.

No matter how payments are collected, the broad App Store guidelines apply: apps cannot promote scams or steal money from customers. That’s just not allowed in the store, regardless of whether a developer uses IAP or their own payment processor. The processor and business model are separately regulated parts of the app and have been since the dawn of the App Store. That separation should extend to software products, like e-books or subscriptions, too. If an app is promoting a scam subscription or (lowercase) in-app purchase, it should be taken down, not because it didn’t use IAP, but because it’s promoting a scam. I don’t trust Apple with my credit card number any more than I do Amazon.

If Apple reverses course and decides to kill the new Kindle app (among many others) if it wins on appeal, it will probably be the stupidest thing Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, will ever do. The worst part is that I wouldn’t even put it past him. Per the judge’s ruling last week, Cook took the advice of a liar who’s about to be sent to prison for lying under oath and Luca Maestri, his chief financial officer, over Phil Schiller, the company’s decades-long marketing chief and protégé of Steve Jobs. Schiller is as smart an Apple executive as they come — he’s staunchly pro-30 percent fee and anti-Epic Games, but he follows the law. He knows when something would go too far, and he’s always aware of Apple’s brand reputation.

When Cook threw the Mac into the garbage can just before the transition to Apple silicon, Schiller invited a group of Mac reporters to all but state outright that Pro Macs would come. The Mac Pros were burning up, the MacBook Pros had terrible keyboards, and all of the iMacs were consumer-grade, yet Schiller successfully convinced those reporters that new Pro Macs would exist and that the Mac wasn’t forgotten about. Schiller is the last remaining vestige of Jobs-era Apple left at the company, and it’s so disheartening to hear that Cook decided to trust his loser finance people instead of someone with a genuine appreciation and respect for the company’s loyal users.

All of this is to say that Cook ought to get his head examined, and until that’s done, I have more confidence in the legal system upholding what I believe was a rightful ruling than Apple doing what’s best for its users. It’s a sad state of affairs down there in Cupertino.

Josh Sisco, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. violated a court order requiring it to open up the App Store to outside payment options and must stop charging commissions on purchases outside its software marketplace, a federal judge said in a blistering ruling that referred the company to prosecutors for a possible criminal probe.

US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers sided Wednesday with Fortnite maker Epic Games Inc. over its allegation that the iPhone maker failed to comply with an order she issued in 2021 after finding the company engaged in anticompetitive conduct in violation of California law.

Gonzalez Rogers also referred the case to federal prosecutors to investigate whether Apple committed criminal contempt of court for flouting her 2021 ruling…

Epic Games Chief Executive Officer Tim Sweeney said in a social media post that the company will return Fortnite to the US App Store next week.

The order is a bloodbath:

To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly.

The Wednesday order by Judge Gonzalez Rogers undoes essentially every triumph Apple had in the 2021 case, which ended early last year after the Supreme Court said it wouldn’t hear Epic’s appeal. The judge sided with Apple on practically every issue Epic sued over and only ordered the company to make one change: to allow external payment processors in the App Store. Apple begrudgingly applied in the most argumentative way possible: by charging a 27 percent fee on transactions made outside the App Store and forcing developers who used the program to report their sales to Apple every month to ensure they were following the rules. Epic didn’t like that — because it’s purely nonsensical — so it took Apple back to court, alleging it violated the court order. Judge Gonzalez Rogers agrees.

The judge’s initial order allowed Apple to keep Epic off the App Store by revoking its developer license and even forced Epic to pay Apple millions of dollars in legal fees because she ruled Epic’s lawsuit was virtually meritless. That case was a win for Apple and only required that it extend its reader app exemption — which allows certain apps to use external payment processors without any fees — to all apps, including games. The court found that Apple only providing that exemption to reader apps is anticompetitive and forced Apple to open it up to everyone, which it didn’t. It’s a frustrating own-goal self-inflicted by Apple and nobody else.

For the record, I still think Apple shouldn’t legally be compelled to allow external payment processors, but I also think they ought to do it, as it’s a small concession for major control over the App Store. Forcing developers to use Apple’s in-house payment processing system, In-App Purchase, is called “anti-steering,” and both the European Union and the United States have litigated it extensively. The optics of it are terrible: There’s sound business reasoning that Apple should be able to charge 15 to 30 percent per sale when developers use IAP, but if a developer doesn’t want to pay the commission, it should be able to circumvent it by using an external payment processor moderated by Apple. I really do understand both sides of the coin here — Apple thinks external payment processors are unsafe while developers yearn for more control — but I ultimately still think Apple should let this slide.

I’m not saying Apple shouldn’t regulate external processors in App Store apps. It should, but carefully. Many pundits, including Sweeney himself, have derided Apple’s warnings when linking to an external website as “scare screens,” but I think they’re perfectly acceptable. It’s Apple’s platform, and I think it should be able to govern it as it wants to protect its users. There are many cases of people not understanding or knowing what they’re buying on the web, and IAP drastically decreases accidental purchases in iOS apps. But it should be a choice for every developer to make whether or not they use IAP and give 30 percent to Apple or make more money while running the risk of irritating users. The bottom line is that Apple can still continue to exert control over how those payment processors work and how they’re linked to just by giving up the small financial kickback.

Apple last year got to make a choice: It could either cede control over payment processors and continue the rent-seeking behavior, or it could keep the rent and lose control. It chose the latter option, and on Wednesday, it lost its control. What a terrible own-goal. It lost the legal fight, lost its control, lost its rent, and now has to let its archenemy back on its platform. This is false; read the update for more on this. This is the result of years of pettiness, and while I could quibble about Judge Gonzalez Rogers’ ruling and how it might be too harsh — I don’t think it is — I won’t because Apple’s defiance is petulant and embarrassing.

Update, May 1, 2025: I’m ashamed I didn’t realize this when I wrote this post on Wednesday, but Apple is under no obligation to let Epic or Fortnite back on the App Store. John Gruber pointed this oversight out on Daring Fireball:

None of this, as far as I can see, has anything to do with Epic Games or Fortnite at all, other than that it was Epic who initiated the case. Give them credit for that. But I don’t see how this ruling gets Fortnite back in the App Store. I think Sweeney is just blustering — he wants Fortnite back in the App Store and thinks by just asserting it, he can force Apple’s hand at a moment when they’re wrong-footed by a scathing federal court judgment against them.

Sweeney is a cunning borderline criminal mastermind, and I’m embarrassed I didn’t catch this earlier. Of course he’s blustering — the ruling says nothing about Epic at all, only that Apple violated the court’s first order in 2021. I read most of the ruling Wednesday night as it came out, but seemingly overlooked this massive detail and took Sweeney at his word after I read his post on X. I shouldn’t have done that. Apple is still under no obligation to bring Epic back on the store, it hasn’t said anything about reinstating Epic’s developer license in its statement after the ruling, and Sweeney’s “We’re bringing Fortnite back this week” statement is a fantastical (and apparently successful) attempt to get in the news again and offer Apple a “peace deal.”

I think it’s also a failure on journalists’ part not to report this blatant mockery of the legal system. Yes, Apple was admonished severely by the court on Wednesday, absorbing a major hit to its reputation, but that shouldn’t distract from the fact that Sweeney is a liar and always has been. His own company got caught flat-footed by the Federal Trade Commission years ago for tricking people into buying in-game currency. Sweeney’s words shouldn’t be taken at face value, especially when he’s got nothing to prove his far-fetched idea that “Fortnite” somehow should be able to return to the App Store “next week.” Seriously, this post is so brazen, it makes me want to bleach my eyes:

We will return Fortnite to the US iOS App Store next week.

Epic puts forth a peace proposal: If Apple extends the court’s friction-free, Apple-tax-free framework worldwide, we’ll return Fortnite to the App Store worldwide and drop current and future litigation on the topic.

I can’t believe I fell for this. I can’t believe any journalist fell for this.

Monopolies aren’t illegal. Anticompetitive business conduct is.

It seems like everyone and their dog wants to buy Google Chrome after Google lost the search antitrust case last year and the Justice Department named a breakup as one of its key remedies. I wrote shortly after the company lost the case that a Chrome divestiture wouldn’t actually fix the monopoly issue because Chrome itself is a monopoly, and simply selling it would transfer ownership of that monopoly to another company overnight. And if Chrome spun out and became its own company, it wouldn’t even last a day because the browser itself lacks a business model. My bottom line in that November piece was that Google ultimately makes nothing from Chrome and that the real money-maker is Google Search, which everyone already uses because it’s the best free search engine on the web. The government, and Judge Amit Mehta, who sided with the government, disagree with the last part, but I still think it’s true.

Of course, everyone wants to buy Chrome because everyone wants to be a monopolist. OpenAI, in my eyes, is perhaps the most serious buyer, knowing the amount of capital it has and how much it has to gain from owning the world’s most popular web browser. Short-term, it would be marvelous for OpenAI, and that’s ultimately all it cares about. OpenAI has never been in it for the long run. It isn’t profitable, it isn’t even close to breaking even, and it essentially acts as a leech on Microsoft’s Azure servers. Sending all Chrome queries through ChatGPT would melt the servers and probably cause the next World War because of some nonsense ChatGPT spewed, but OpenAI doesn’t care. Owning Chrome would make OpenAI the second-most important company on the web, only second to Google, which would still control Google Search, the world’s most visited website. The latter half is exactly why it doesn’t make a modicum of logical sense to divest Chrome.

What would hurt Google, however, would be forcing a divestiture of Google Search, or, in a perhaps more likely scenario, Google Ads, which also works as a monopoly over online advertising. I think eliminating Google’s primary source of revenue overnight would be extremely harsh, but maybe it’s necessary. Google Search has become one of the worst experiences on the web recently, and I wouldn’t mind if it became its own company. I think it would be operated better than Google, which seems aimless and poorly managed. It could easily strike a deal with the newly minted ad exchange and platform that would also be spun off into an attractive place to sell ads while breaking free from the chains of Google’s charades. That’s good antitrust enforcement because it significantly weakens a monopoly while allowing a new business to thrive independently. Sure, Search would still be a monopoly when spun off by itself, but it would have an incentive to become a better product. Google is an advertising company, not a search company, and that allowed Search to stagnate. This is why monopolies are dangerous — because they cause stagnation and eliminate competition simultaneously.

I’m conflating both of these Google cases intentionally because they work hand in hand. Google Search is profitable because of Google’s online advertising stronghold; Google can sell ads online thanks to the popularity of Search. The government could either force Google to sell one or both of these businesses. Both might be too excessive, but I think it still would be viable because it would force Google to begin innovating again. Its primary revenue streams would be Google Workspace, YouTube, Android, and Google Cloud, and those are four very profitable businesses with long-term success potential, even without the ad exchange. Google would be forced to do what every other company on the web has been doing for decades: buy and sell ads. While it wouldn’t own the ad exchange anymore, it could still sell ads on YouTube. It’s just that those ads would have to be a good bang for the buck because they wouldn’t be the only option anymore. If an advertiser didn’t like the rates YouTube was charging, they could go spend their money on the newly spawned independent search engine. This way, Google could no longer enrich its other businesses with one monopoly.

All of this brainstorming makes it increasingly obvious that forcing Google to sell Chrome does nothing to break apart Google’s monopoly. It only punishes the billions of people who use Chrome and gets a nice dig in at Google’s ego. I’m hard pressed to see how those are “remedies” after the most high-profile antitrust lawsuit since United States v. Microsoft decades earlier. Chrome acts as a funnel for Google Search queries, and untying those is practically impossible. This is where the Justice Department’s logic falls apart: It thinks Search is popular because of some shady business tactics on Google’s part. While those shady practices — that Google definitely indeed did, according to the court — may have contributed to Search’s prominence, they don’t account for the successes of Google’s search product. For years, it really did seem like magic. The issue now is that it doesn’t, and that nobody else can innovate anymore because of Google’s restrictive contracts. The culprit has never been that Google Search is popular, Google Chrome is popular, or that Google makes too much money; the issue is that Google blocks competition from entering the market via lucrative search exclusivity deals.

Breaking up Google is a sure-fire way to eliminate the possibility of these contracts, but bringing Chrome up in the conversation ignores why Google lost this case in the first place. While Chrome might have once been how Search got so popular, it isn’t anymore. People use Google Search in Safari, Edge, Firefox — every single browser. If Chrome was a key facet of Search’s success, that isn’t illegal, monopolistic, or even anti-consumer. It’s just making a good product and using the success of that product to help another one grow, also known as business. Crafting a search engine and a cutting-edge browser to send people to that search engine isn’t an exclusivity contract that prevents others from gaining a competitive advantage, and forcing Google to sell Chrome off is a nonsensical misunderstanding of the relationship between Google’s products. The core problem here is not Chrome, it’s Google Search, and the Justice Department needs to break Search’s monopoly in some meaningful way that doesn’t hurt consumers. That could be calling off contracts, forcing Google to sell Search, or forcing it to open up its search index to competitors. Whatever it is, the remedy must relate to the core product.

The Justice Department, or really anyone who cares about this case, must understand that Google Search is overwhelmingly popular because it’s a good product. The way it bolstered that product is at the heart of the controversy, and eliminating those cheap-shot ways Google continues to elevate itself in the market is the Justice Department’s job, but ultimately, nobody will stop using Google. Neither should anyone stop using it — people should use whatever search engine they like the most, and boosting competitors is not the work of the Justice Department. Paving the way for competition to exist, however, is, and the current search market significantly lacks competition because Google prevents any other company from succeeding. That is what the court found. It (a) found that Google is a monopolist in the search industry, but (b) also found Google has illegally maintained that monopoly and that remedies are in order to prevent that illegal action. It isn’t illegal to be a monopolist in the United States, unlike some other jurisdictions. It is illegal, however, to block other companies from fairly competing in the same space. The Justice Department is regulating like being a monopolist is illegal, when in actuality, it should focus its efforts on ensuring that Google’s monopoly is organically built from now on.

Part of the blame lies on Google’s lawyers, but it isn’t too late for them to pick up the pace. They can’t defend their ludicrous search contracts anymore, but they can make the case for why they shouldn’t exist anymore. If we’re being honest, the best possible outcome for Google here is if it just gets away with ending the contracts and is allowed to keep all of its businesses and products. That’s because it doesn’t rely on those contracts anymore to stay afloat. Google’s legal strategy in this case — the one that led to its loss — is that it tried to convince the court that its search contracts were necessary to continue doing business so competitively, when that’s an absolutely laughable thing to say about a product that owns nearly 90 percent of the market. Judge Mehta didn’t buy that argument because it’s born out of sheer stupidity. Instead, its argument should’ve begun by conceding that the contracts are indeed unnecessary and proving over the trial that Google Search is widespread because it’s a good product. It could point to Bing’s minuscule market share despite its presence as the default search engine on Windows. That’s a real point, and Google blew it.

If Google offers the ending of these contracts as a concession, that would be immensely appealing to the court. It might not be enough for Google to run away scot-free, but it would be something. If it, however, continues to play the halfwitted game of hiding behind the contracts, it probably will lose something much more important. As for what that’ll be, my guess is as good as anyone else’s, but I find it hard to imagine a world where Judge Mehta agrees to force Google to sell Chrome. That decision would be purely irrational and wouldn’t jibe with the rest of his rulings, which have mainly been rooted in fact and appear to have citizens’ interests first. Moreover, I don’t think the government has met the burden of proving a Chrome divestiture would make a meaningful dent in Google’s monopoly, and neither do I believe it has the facts to do so.

The contracts are almost certainly done for, though, and for good reason. In practice, I think this will mean more search engine ballots, i.e., choice screens that appear when a new iPhone is set up or when the Safari app is first opened, for example. Most people there will probably still pick Google, just like they do on Windows, much to Microsoft’s repeated chagrin, and there wouldn’t be anything stopping Apple and other browser makers from keeping Google as the default. I wouldn’t even put it past Apple, which I still firmly believe thinks Google Search is the best, most user-intuitive search engine for Apple devices. If Eddy Cue, Apple’s services chief, thought Google wasn’t very good and was only agreeing to the deal for the money, I believe he would’ve said so under penalty of perjury. He didn’t, however — he said Google was the best product, and it’s tough to argue with him. And for the record, I don’t think Apple will ever make its own search engine or choose another default other than Google — it’ll either be Google or a choice screen, similar to the European Union. (I find the choice screens detestable and think every current browser maker should keep Google as the default for simplicity’s sake, proving my point that the contracts are unneeded.)

I began writing this nearly 2,000 words ago to explain why I think selling Chrome is a short-sighted idea that fails to accomplish any real goals. But more importantly, I believe I covered why Google is a monopolist in the first place and how it even got to this situation. My problem has never been that Google or any other company operates a monopoly, but rather, how Google maintained that stronghold is disconcerting. Do people use Google Search of their own volition? Of course they do, and they won’t be stopping anytime soon. But is it simultaneously true that the search stagnation and dissatisfaction we’ve had with Google Search results over the past few years is a consequence of Google’s unfair business practices? Absolutely, and it’s the latter conclusion the Justice Department needs to fully grok to litigate this case properly. Whatever remedy the government pursues, it needs to make Google feel a flame under itself. Historically, the most successful method for that has been to elevate the competition, but when the others are so far behind, it might just be better to weaken the search product temporarily to force Google to catch up and innovate along the way.

Michael Acton, Stephen Morris, John Reed, and Kathrin Hille, reporting for the Financial Times:

Apple plans to shift the assembly of all US-sold iPhones to India as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the matter, as President Donald Trump’s trade war forces the tech giant to pivot away from China.

The push builds on Apple’s strategy to diversify its supply chain but goes further and faster than investors appreciate, with a goal to source from India the entirety of the more than 60mn iPhones sold annually in the US by the end of 2026.

The target would mean doubling the iPhone output in India, after almost two decades in which Apple spent heavily in China to create a world-beating production line that powered its rise into a $3tn tech giant.

This is really important news and I’m surprised I haven’t heard much chatter about it online. China is the best place to manufacture iPhones en masse because the country effectively has an entire city dedicated to making them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Replicating that supply chain anywhere else has been extremely difficult for Apple for obvious reasons — it’s nearly impossible to find such a dedicated workforce anywhere else in the world. American commentators usually frame things in terms of five-day work weeks or eight-hour shifts, but in China, they just don’t have limits. This system is so bad that Foxconn, Apple’s manufacturer, resorts to putting anti-suicide nets around the buildings that house these poor workers, but this isn’t an essay on how the marriage between capitalism and communism is used for human exploitation.

Building the iPhone infrastructure in India is a monumental task. Apple has already gotten started, but it isn’t good enough for peak iPhone season, i.e., when the phones first come out in September. Anyone who buys an iPhone in the United States on pre-order day will see a shipping notification from China, not Brazil or India. Apple begins manufacturing phones in other countries months later because they’re not equipped to handle the demand of American consumers leading up to the holidays. I’m not saying Apple hasn’t built up infrastructure to handle this demand in the past few years — it has — but there’s still a lot of work to be done, and I’m not sure how it will do it in a year. Either way, this is perfectly suited for Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, who is one of the few people with the operational prowess to handle complexities like this.

As I said when I wrote about Trump’s tariffs earlier in April, the most alarming danger remains the prospect of a war between China and Taiwan. Apple can pay tariffs by raising prices or playing politics in Washington — it’s simply not as much of a pressing issue as the company’s entire supply chain being put on hold for however many years. Apple still relies on Taiwan’s factories for nearly all of its high-end microprocessors. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s Arizona plant isn’t good enough and won’t be for a while. Apple is still heavily reliant on China for final assembly, and the sooner it can get out of these two countries, the better it is for Apple’s long-term business prospects.

Moving iPhone assembly to India, Mac and AirPods manufacturing to Vietnam, etc., is one large step to shielding Apple’s business from global instability. (With the possibility of a war in India looming, I’m not sure how large of a step it is.) But Apple’s dependence on Taiwan for nearly all of its processors is even more concerning. We can build microprocessors in the United States — we can’t build iPhones here. They’re different kinds of manufacturing. The quicker Apple gets the Trump administration to bless the Chips and Science Act, the better it is for Apple’s war preparedness plan, because I fully believe Apple’s largest manufacturing vulnerability is Taiwan, not China. (China was the biggest concern two years ago, but from this report, it’s not difficult to assume Apple is close to significantly decreasing its reliance on China.)

Hey ChatGPT, help me name my models

Good to see you too, ChatGPT.

Last week, OpenAI announced two new flagship reasoning models: o3 and o4-mini, with the latter including a “high” variant. The names were met with outrage across the internet, including from yours truly, and for good reason. Even Sam Altman, the company’s chief executive, agrees with the criticism. But generally, the issue isn’t with the letters because it’s easy to remember that if “o” comes before the number, it’s a reasoning model, and if it comes after, it’s a standard “omnimodel.” “Mini” means the model is smaller and cheaper, and a dot variant is some iteration of the standard GPT-4 model (like 4.5, 4.1, etc.). That’s not too tedious to think about when deciding when to use each model. If the o is after the number, it’s good for most tasks. If it’s in front, the model is special.

The confusion comes between OpenAI’s three reasoning models, which the company describes like this in the model selector on the ChatGPT website and the Mac app:

• o3: Uses advanced reasoning
• o4-mini: Fastest at advanced reasoning
• o4-mini-high: Great at coding and visual reasoning

This is nonsensical. If the 4o/4o-mini naming is to be believed, the faster version of the most competent reasoning model should be o3-mini, but alas, that’s a dumber, older model. o4-mini-high, which has a higher number than o3, is a worse model in many, but not all, benchmarks. For instance, it earned a 68.1 percent in the software engineering benchmark OpenAI advertises in its blog post announcing the new models, while o3 scored 69.1 percent. That’s a minuscule difference, but it still is a worse model in that scenario. And that benchmark completely ignores o4-mini, which isn’t listed anywhere in OpenAI’s post; the company says “all models are evaluated at high ‘reasoning effort’ settings—similar to variants like ‘o4-mini-high’ in ChatGPT.”

Anyone looking at OpenAI’s model list would be led to believe o4-mini-high (and presumably its not-maxed-out variant, o4-mini) would be some coding prodigy, but it isn’t. o3 is, though — it’s the smartest of OpenAI’s models in coding. o3 also excels in “multimodal” visual reasoning over o4-mini-high, which makes the latter’s description as “great at… visual reasoning” moot when o3 does better. OpenAI, in its blog post, even says o3 is its “most powerful reasoning model that pushes the frontier across coding, math, science, visual perception, and more.” o4-mini only beats it in the 2024 and 2025 competition math scores, so maybe o4-mini-high should be labeled “great at complex math.” Saying o4-mini-high is “great at coding” is misleading when o3 is OpenAI’s best offering.

The descriptions of o4-mini-high and o4-mini should emphasize higher usage limits and speed, because truly, that’s what they excel at. They’re not OpenAI’s smartest reasoning models, but they blow o3-mini out of the water, and they’re way more practical. For Plus users who must suffer OpenAI’s usage caps, that’s an important detail. I almost always query o4-mini because I know it has the highest usage limits even though it isn’t the smartest model. In my opinion, here’s what the model descriptions should be:

• o3 Pro (when it launches to Pro subscribers): Our most powerful reasoning model
• o3: Advanced reasoning
• o4-mini-high: Quick reasoning
• o4-mini: Good for most reasoning tasks

To be even more ambitious, I think OpenAI could ditch the “high” moniker entirely and instead implement a system where o4 intelligently — based on current usage, the user’s request, and overall system capacity — could decide to use less or more power. The free tier of ChatGPT already does this: When available, it gives users access to 4o over 4o-mini, but it gives priority access to Plus and Pro subscribers. Similarly, Plus users ought to receive as much o4-mini-high access as OpenAI can support, and when it needs more resources (or when a query doesn’t require advanced reasoning), ChatGPT can fall back to the cheaper model. This intelligent rate-limiting system could eventually extend to GPT-5, whenever that ships, effectively making it so that users no longer must choose between models. They still should be able to, of course, but just like the search function, ChatGPT should just use the best tool for the job based on the query.

ChatGPT could do with a lot of model cleanup in the next few months. I think GPT-4.5 is nearly worthless, especially with the recent updates to GPT-4o, whose personality has become friendlier and more agentic recently. Altman championed 4.5’s writing style when it was first announced, but now the model isn’t even accessible from the company’s application programming interface because it’s too expensive and 4.1 — whose personality has been transplanted into 4o for ChatGPT users — smokes it in nearly every benchmark. 4.5 doesn’t do anything well except write, and I just don’t think it deserves such a prominent position in the ChatGPT model picker. It’s an expensive, clunky model that could just be replaced by GPT-4o, which, unlike 4.5, can code and logic its way through problems with moderate competency.

Similarly, I truly don’t understand why “GPT-4o with scheduled tasks” is a separate model from 4o. That’s like making Deep Research or Search a new option from the picker. Tasks should be relegated to another button in the ChatGPT app’s message box, sitting alongside Advanced Voice Mode and Whisper. Instead of sending a normal message, task requests should be designated as so.

Of the major artificial intelligence providers, I’d say Anthropic has the best names, though only by a slim margin. Anyone who knows how poetry works should have a pretty easy time understanding which model is the best, aside from Claude 3 Opus, which isn’t the most powerful model but nevertheless carries the “best” name of the three (an opus refers to a long musical composition). Still, the hate for Claude 3.7 Sonnet and love for 3.5 Sonnet appear to add confusion to the lineup — but that’s a user preference unperturbed by benchmarks, which have 3.7 Sonnet clearly in the lead.

Gemini’s models appear to have the most baggage associated with them, but for the first time in Google’s corporate history, I think the company named the ones available through the chatbot somewhat decently. “Flash” appears to be used for the general-use models, which I still think are terrible, and “Pro” refers to the flagship ones. Seriously, Google really did hit it out of the park with 2.5 Pro, beating every other model in most benchmarks. It’s not my preferred one due to its speaking style, but it is smart and great at coding.

Kylie Robison and Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:

OpenAI is working on its own X-like social network, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

While the project is still in early stages, we’re told there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed. CEO Sam Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback about the project, our sources say. It’s unclear if OpenAI’s plan is to release the social network as a separate app or integrate it into ChatGPT, which became the most downloaded app globally last month. An OpenAI spokesperson didn’t respond in time for publication.

Only one thing comes to mind for why OpenAI would ever do this: training data. It already collects loads of data from queries people type into ChatGPT, but people don’t speak to chatbots the way they do other people. To learn the intricacies of interpersonal conversations, ChatGPT needs to train on a social network. GPT-4, and by extension, GPT-4o, was presumably already trained on Twitter’s corpus, but now that Elon Musk shut off that pipeline, OpenAI needs to find a new way to train on real human speech. The thing is, I think OpenAI’s X competitor would actually do quite well in the Silicon Valley orbit, especially if OpenAI itself left X entirely and moved all of its product announcements to its own platform. That might not yield quite as much training data as X or Reddit, but it would presumably be enough to warrant the cost. (Altman is a savvy businessman, and I really don’t think he’d waste money on a project he didn’t think was absolutely worth it.)

OpenAI might also position the network as a case study for fully artificial intelligence-powered moderation. If the site turns to 4chan, it really doesn’t benefit OpenAI unless it wants to create an alt-right persona for ChatGPT or something. (I wouldn’t put that past them.) Content moderation, as proven numerous times, is the most potent challenge in running a social network, and if OpenAI can prove ChatGPT is an effective content moderator, it could sell that to other sites. Again, Altman is a savvy businessman, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see the network be used as a de facto example of ChatGPT doing humans’ jobs better.

In a way, OpenAI already has a social network: the feed of Sora users. Everyone has their own username, and there’s even a like system to upvote videos. It’s certainly far from an X-like social network, but I think it paints a rough picture of what this project could look like. When OpenAI was founded, it was created to ensure AI is beneficial for all of humanity. In recent years, it seems like Altman’s company has abandoned that core philosophy, which revolved around publishing model data and safety information openly so outside researchers could scrutinize it and putting a kill switch in the hands of a nonprofit board. Those plans have evaporated, so OpenAI is trying something new: inviting “artists” and other users of ChatGPT to post their uses for AI out in the open.

The official OpenAI X account is mainly dedicated to product announcements due to the inherent seriousness and news value of the network, but the company’s Instagram account is very different. There, it posts questions to its Instagram Stories asking ChatGPT users how they use certain features, then highlights the best ones. OpenAI’s social network would almost certainly include some ChatGPT tie-in where users could share prompts and ideas for how to use the chatbot. Is that a good idea? No, but it’s what OpenAI has been inching toward for at least the past year. That’s how it frames its mission of benefiting humanity. I don’t see how the company’s social network would diverge from that product strategy Altman has pioneered to benefit himself and place his corporate interests above AI safety.

Mark Gurman, reporting just a tiny nugget of information on Sunday:

I’m told that this year’s upgrade will focus on productivity, multitasking, and app window management — with an eye on the device operating more like a Mac. It’s been a long time coming, with iPad power users pleading with Apple to make the tablet more powerful.

It’s impossible to make much of this sliver of reporting, but here’s a non-exhaustive timeline of “Mac-like” features each iPadOS version has included since its introduction in 2019:

• iPadOS 13: Multiple windows per app, drag and drop, and App Exposé.
• iPadOS 14: Desktop-class sidebars and toolbars.
• iPadOS 15: Extra-large widgets (atop iOS 14’s existing widgets).
• iPadOS 16: Stage Manager and multiple display support.
• iPadOS 17: Increased Stage Manager flexibility.
• iPadOS 18: Nothing of note.

Of these features, I’d say the most Mac-like one was bringing multiple window support to the iPad, i.e., the ability to create two Safari windows, each with its own set of tabs. It was way more important than Stage Manager, which really only allowed those windows to float around and become resizable to some extent, which is negligible on the iPad because iPadOS interface elements are so large. My MacBook Pro’s screen isn’t all that much larger than the largest iPad (1 inch), but elements in Stage Manager on the iPad feel noticeably more cramped on the iPad thanks to the larger icons to maintain touchscreen compatibility. From a multitasking standpoint, I think the iPad is now as good as it can get without becoming overtly anti-touchscreen. The iPad’s trackpad cursor and touch targets are beyond irritating for anything other than light computing use, and no number of multitasking features will change that.

This is completely out on a whim, but I think iPadOS 19 will allow truly freeform window placement independent of Stage Manager, just like the Mac in its native, non-Stage Manager mode. It’ll have a desktop, Dock, and maybe even a Menu Bar for apps to segment controls and maximize screen space like the Mac. (Again, these are all wild guesses and probably won’t happen, but I’m just spitballing.) That’s as Mac-like as Apple can get within reason, but I’m struggling to understand how that would help. Drag and drop support in iPadOS is robust enough. Context menus, toolbars, keyboard shortcuts, sidebars, and Spotlight on iPadOS feel just like the Mac, too. Stage Manager post-iPadOS 17 is about as good as macOS’ version, which is to say, atrocious. Where does Apple go from here?

No, the problem with the iPad isn’t multitasking. It hasn’t been since iPadOS 17. The issue is that iPadOS is a reskinned, slightly modified version of the frustratingly limited iOS. There are no background items, screen capture utilities, audio recording apps, clipboard managers, terminals, or any other tools that make the Mac a useful computer. Take this simple, first-party example: I have a shortcut on my Mac I invoke using the keyboard shortcut Shift-Command-9, which takes a text selection in Safari, copies the URL and author of the webpage, turns the selection into a Markdown-formatted block quote, and adds it to my clipboard. That automation is simply impossible on iPadOS. Again, that’s using a first-party app. Don’t get me started on live-posting an Apple event using CleanShot X’s multiple display support to take a screenshot of my second monitor and copy it to the clipboard or, even more embarrassingly for the iPad, Alfred, an app I invoke tens of times a day to look up definitions, make quick Google searches, or look at my clipboard history. An app like Alfred could never exist on the iPad, yet it’s integral to my life.

Grammarly can’t run in the background on iPadOS. I can’t open ChatGPT using Option-Space, which has become engrained into my muscle memory over the year it’s been available on the Mac. System-wide optical character recognition using TextSniper is impossible. The list goes on and on — the iPad is limited by the apps it can run, not how it displays them. I spend hours a day with a note-taking app on one side of my Mac screen and Safari on the other, and I can do that on the iPad just fine. But when I want to look up a definition on the Mac, I can just hit Command-Space and define it. When I need to get text out of a stubborn image on the web, there’s an app for that. When I need to run Python or Java, I can do that with a simple terminal command. The Mac is a real computer — the iPad is not, and some dumb multitasking features won’t change that.

There are hundreds of things I’ve set up on my Mac that allow me to do my work faster and easier than on the iPad that when I pick up my iPad — with a processor more powerful than some Macs the latest version of macOS supports — I feel lost. The iPad feels like a larger version of the iPhone, but one that I can’t reach all the corners of with just one hand. It lives in this liminal space between the iPhone and the Mac, where it performs the duties of both devices so poorly. It’s not handheld or portable at all to me, but it is absolutely not capable enough for me to do my work. The cursor feels odd because the interface wasn’t designed to be used with one. The apps I need aren’t there and never will be. It’s not a comfortable place to work — it’s like a desk that looks just like the one at home but where everything is just slightly misplaced and out of proportion. It drives me nuts to use the iPad for anything more than scrolling through an article in bed.

No amount of multitasking features can fix the iPad. It’ll never be able to live up to its processor or the “Pro” name. And the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I’m fine with that. The iPad isn’t a very good computer. I don’t have much to do with it, and it doesn’t add joy to my life. That’s fine. People who want an Apple computer and need one to do their job should go buy a Mac, which is, for all intents and purposes, cheaper than an iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard. People who don’t want a Mac or already have their desktop computing needs met should buy an iPad. As for the iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard, it sits in a weird, awful place in Apple’s product lineup where the only thing it has going for it is the display, which, frankly, is gorgeous. It is no more capable than a base-model iPad, but it certainly is prettier.

It’s time to stop wishing the iPad would do something it just isn’t destined to do. The iPad is not a computer and never will be.

The Times of India:

Apple transported five planes full of iPhones and other products from India to the US in just three days during the final week of March, a senior Indian official confirmed to The Times of India. The urgent shipments were made to avoid a new 10% reciprocal tariff imposed by US President Donald Trump’s administration that took effect on April 5. Sources said that Apple currently has no plans to increase retail prices in India or other markets despite the tariffs.

To mitigate the impact, the company rapidly moved inventory from manufacturing centres in India and China to the US, even though this period is typically a slow shipping season.

“Factories in India and China and other key locations had been shipping products to the US in anticipation of the higher tariffs,” according to one source.

The stock market made a return to normalcy on Wednesday afternoon after Trump postponed the tariffs for 90 days, but even though Apple is up 15 percent, it’s far from out of the water. Trump only canceled his latest round of reciprocal tariffs, but the Chinese ones don’t count under the same plan. Chinese imports are tariffed at 125 percent as of Wednesday morning. India, by comparison, is only tariffed at a measly 10 percent, which is much more palatable for Apple, which probably couldn’t afford to lose so much on iPhone imports into the United States, a market that accounts for nearly half of its revenue. So the plan makes sense, and Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, is once again flexing his supply chain prowess built up during his time as Apple’s chief operating officer. While smaller companies have been flat-out calling off imports into the United States, Apple just did a clever reroute. Nice.

This plan, however, begins to fall apart in the long term. It’s untenable for Apple to ship all of its iPhones from China to India and then back to the Americas. That’s too expensive at Apple’s scale, even if it’s able to fit 350,000 iPhones on each plane, per Ryan Jones’ math. So Apple has two short-term options: either raise prices on this year’s iPhone 17 models and continue shipping them from China to the United States directly or focus its efforts extensively on ramping up manufacturing in India and Brazil. Both are viable strategies, but one is a lot harder than the other. One thing is for certain, though: If Apple does raise prices, they won’t go back down again. That might be a compelling reason to go with the first option and put on a little display for the Trump people by pretending to bring manufacturing to America for the next four years.

Apple wants to expand supply chain diversity. Its biggest problem historically with China (and Taiwan) has been a possible war between the two nations, which could wreak havoc. What Apple hasn’t accounted for, however, is a trade war between the United States and the rest of the world — a trade war so bad that China and South Korea drafted a plan to deter the Trump administration. The war between China and Taiwan obviously wasn’t imminent, so Apple planned to gradually increase iPhone and Mac manufacturing in Vietnam, Brazil, India, and so on through the decade. But now that plan is worthless because the more pressing issue is the war between China and the United States. The flying-phones-to-India plan is a stopgap solution until Apple can figure out how to navigate the trade war.

For the record, I don’t think Apple will increase any product prices before it announces the next models because that would be an absolute disaster. People are already rushing to Apple stores to purchase current-generation products because they’re afraid prices will go up. If Apple actually comes out and says Macs are going up by x dollars tomorrow, they just won’t have enough Macs for everybody. It would be an unforced error at a time when transcontinental imports are already in jeopardy. I find it incredibly likely, though, that Apple increases iPhone prices by at least $100 across the board in September and Mac prices by some percentage amount per upgrade in October because of what I wrote earlier: Apple wasn’t prepared for this. Apple prepared for an eventual war between China and Taiwan; it did not prepare for the Trump administration to strut in and destroy the economy in three months.

On the topic of exemptions: I find them unlikely. Trump says he’s thinking about them, but if there’s one media lesson to learn from the Trump years, it’s to never trust the White House’s public comments. A more reliable indicator of actual action in the Trump orbit is when something leaks to the media, such as when the news said on Monday that Trump would issue a 90-day relief period. The White House quickly responded by calling the reporting “fake news,” but it certainly wasn’t fake. When an Elon Musk-led group halted all federal grants a few months ago, the White House said it wouldn’t backtrack. It did just days later. I don’t think exceptions will ever come and the nonsense coming from Trump’s public relations side is mostly to stabilize the stock market.

The more likely scenario is that Trump calls off the reciprocal tariffs altogether and they don’t come to light in 90 days. I also think this is unlikely, but it’s more possible than exemptions. Trump, above all else, cares about his public image and wants to look like a genius hero all the time. He still can save face among the Make America Great Again crowd, cancel the tariffs entirely, and stabilize the stock market. That would fix Apple’s problem for now, but I don’t think it would make Cook sweat any less. The markets hate uncertainty, but that’s all they have to contend with currently because there’s no concrete reporting from within the White House on when this is coming to an end. Trump wants everyone to believe he’ll just work out a deal with certain nations and that’ll make trade easier, but no deals have been made.

One deal has already blown up, though: TikTok. The plan before “Liberation Day” was to cut China a deal in exchange for a majority stake in TikTok and a license to its algorithm, which China would still control. (“The Art of the Deal,” it seems.) But once the new tariff plan hit Beijing, it retaliated and threw away the deal. Clearly, de-escalation isn’t happening and the trade war will only intensify between the two nations, which not only places a big question mark over TikTok but also causes trade uncertainty. With this deal-making genius in the Oval Office, I highly doubt deals are actually the end goal and it’s more likely Trump will kill his plan and proclaim himself a winner. Either that, or he’ll go with them in three months and throw the economy into shambles.

As for Cook, it’s $1 million well spent.

Casey Newton, writing at his Platformer newsletter:

As I write this, a Meta model named Llama-4-Maverick-03-26-Experimental indeed has a score of 1417 on LMArena, which is enough to put it at second place —just behind Google’s highly regarded Gemini Pro 2.5 model, and just ahead of ChatGPT 4o. It’s an impressive showing that lends credence to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s core belief in more open development, which is that it can improve upon the performance of closed models by crowdsourcing its development from many more contributors. And it’s no wonder the company promoted it in its announcement materials.

Within a day, though, observers were pointing out that there is something misleading about Meta’s announcement. Namely, the version of Maverick that nearly topped LMArena isn’t the version you can download — rather, it’s a custom version of Llama that Meta seemingly developed with the express purpose of excelling at LMArena…

Meta, for its part, denies the “teaching to the test” allegations.

“We’ve also heard claims that we trained on test sets – that’s simply not true and we would never do that,” said Ahmad Al-Dahle, who leads generative AI at Meta, in a post on X. “Our best understanding is that the variable quality people are seeing is due to needing to stabilize implementations.”

I don’t know what it means to “stabilize an implementation,” or how it might relate to any of the above. When I asked Meta for further explanation, it suggested that its experimental version of Llama 4 just happened to be really good at LMArena, and was not expressly designed for that purpose.

Meta is clearly lying and its statement is hands-caught-in-the-cookie-jar-level embarrassing. I mean this genuinely: I blurted out laughing at Newton writing that Meta suggested the experimental Llama 4 model was just “really good” at LMArena. Al-Dahle claims that the specialized version of Llama wasn’t trained on test sets, which I’m sure is true, but it entirely ignores that the “experimental” Llama model could’ve been trained to be better at LMArena. This particular line really stood out to me in Meta’s comment to Platformer: “We’re excited to see what they will build and look forward to their ongoing feedback.”

Sounds like something Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, would say. I can’t emphasize how bad Meta is at public relations — it wants to be treated with respect so badly yet resorts to silly marketing gimmicks like proactively reaching out to journalists to slander a book it so desperately wants out of circulation or outfitting Zuckerberg with a new hairstyle and bronzer to appeal to the Make America Great Again squad of broccoli-cut Generation Z boys. What a series of unforced errors: It’s already bad enough to create a fake large language model to look good on benchmarks that most normal people don’t even care about, but it’s even worse to put out a hysterically bad statement when confronted about it by a journalist with a knack for this kind of tomfoolery.

Either way, the “experimental” Llama 4 Maverick model still remains on LMArena’s leaderboard just below Gemini 2.5 Pro. But this leaderboard, in general, is fascinating to me, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while. (Thanks, Meta, for providing a convenient time for me to do so.) In the overall rankings, Grok 3 beats DeepSeek R1, which threw the generative artificial intelligence grifters of Silicon Valley into a frenzy in the hopes it would spark a war with China. But even Google’s open-source Gemma model beats Anthropic’s finest reasoning model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which I find to be one of the most intelligent models out there. Even GPT-4.5, which OpenAI claims isn’t smarter than GPT-4o, does better than Claude.

In coding performance, the fake version of Llama 4 Maverick takes the lead, but GPT-o3-mini high — OpenAI’s fanciest reasoning model it touts as “great for coding and logic” — underperforms the vanilla GPT-4o version by 61 points. OpenAI is so proud of o3-mini-high that it incessantly upsells people who use GPT-4o for programming questions to switch to the higher-end model, which has tight usage limits. But from the benchmark, it seems people don’t prefer it over the standard model, and they think responses from the latter are markedly better. The whole thing seems suspicious to me.

This is because LMArena is practically useless, thus making Meta’s little game of deception even more embarrassing. The benchmark allows users — mainly nerds who have nothing better to do than play with LLMs all day, and I say this as a nerd who loves toying with LMArena — to enter prompts, then compare the responses from two randomly selected models in a side-by-side blind competition. They then pick which one they like better before the names are revealed. The more users prefer an LLM response, the higher it moves in the ranks. The problem is that people don’t necessarily evaluate the models for thoroughness or accuracy in these tests — they’re more focused on how the model answers the question. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s far from a well-rounded evaluation.

GPT-4o is really nice to talk to — especially the latest one published late in March. It asks questions back, speaks less robotically, and has a sense of emotion palpable in its responses. When it works through a complicated problem, it explains things like a teacher rather than a robot and is generally quite pleasant in its word choice and demeanor. The more advanced o3 models, however, are more cold in their answers. They often get straight to the point, use too many bullet points and ordered lists, are reluctant to explain their thoughts outside of the chains of thought (which are condescending and sometimes even rude), and aren’t conversational in the slightest. What separates OpenAI’s reasoning models and Gemini 2.5 Pro is how they speak. While OpenAI’s reasoning models would probably score quite low on an emotional quotient test, Gemini tries to sound friendly and thorough. That explains the LMArena score.

I don’t think Gemini 2.5 Pro is the smartest reasoning model. I’d probably hand that award to either o3-mini-high or Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which falls behind considerably in the explanation department. But I generally prefer Claude’s answers the most of the three models when my question doesn’t require a large context window (Gemini) or real-time web search (ChatGPT). Its responses are so neatly formatted and not confusing to read. Gemini prefers long paragraphs in my experience while ChatGPT is way too reliant on nested lists and headers. Claude speaks in bullet points, too, but they actually make sense and are easy to skim while ChatGPT’s are all over the place, using numbered lists, bullet points, and paragraphs of text all under one heading. If there’s anything I hate about ChatGPT, it’s how it formats its responses.

All of this is to say I can see why Gemini and Llama 4 Maverick — some of the chattiest, friendliest models — take the top spots on LMArena while the smarter models fall behind. I take these benchmarks with a grain of salt and usually recommend models depending on what I think they’re best at:

• GPT-4o: Everyday use with real-time knowledge and decent coding and writing skills.
• Claude 3.7 Sonnet: Math and coding, especially when straightforward answers are the goal.
• GPT-o3-mini: ChatGPT but less chatty and better at programming and logic.
• Gemini: Exceptional in situations when a large context window is needed.
• Llama 4: Great for interrupting your Instagram scrolling experience.

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge:

Nintendo is pushing back preorders for the Switch 2 due to concerns about Donald Trump’s newly announced tariffs. According to a statement sent to The Verge by Eddie Garcia on behalf of Nintendo, it says preorders will no longer begin on April 9th:

Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.

There’s still no word on when preorders will begin, as Nintendo says it will “update timing at a later date.” Nintendo still plans to launch the Switch 2 on June 5th.

One critical bit of news that was the impetus for this piece is that this only affects U.S. pre-orders; the date remains unchanged in other countries, including Japan, Nintendo’s home country. I’d imagine we’ll be seeing much more of this in the coming months: Most companies won’t announce prices as soon as they can because they don’t know when those prices will have to increase. There’s too much volatility.

This is all just psychotic. Here are Eshe Nelson and Keith Bradsher, reporting for The New York Times on the situation as of Friday afternoon:

The global rout in stock markets continued on Friday as worries deepened about a trade war, after China retaliated against President Trump’s sweeping tariffs with steep levies of its own on U.S. goods.

The S&P 500 fell 4.7 percent by midday Friday. The benchmark U.S. index on Thursday posted its worst daily loss since 2020, plunging 4.8 percent.

Losses were widespread, hitting technology companies as well as firms that rely on Chinese manufacturing in their supply chains. Apple shares dropped 5 percent. Shares in Caterpillar, which makes construction equipment, tumbled more than 5 percent.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index fell nearly 5 percent, pushing it into a bear market, Wall Street’s term for a decline of more than 20 percent from its previous peak.

There’s a reason tech stocks are dropping considerably higher than the rest of the market at large, at least from my non-economist, tech-journalistic perspective: Trump’s latest round of tariffs hit technology more than perhaps any other sector because tech manufacturing is heavily reliant on international affairs. Most high-end processors — Nvidia, Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm — are made in Taiwan by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Trump tariffed the nation by 32 percent yesterday. Those chips are then packaged and shipped to China — Chinese imports are tariffed 54 percent according to Trump’s plan. Macs and AirPods are made in Vietnam, where Trump’s tariff rate is 46 percent.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg’s star Apple reporter, said that without question, Apple would raise the prices of all of its products later this year. The math checks out: A 54 percent increase in taxes is just unfathomable for business. Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, believes iPhones could soon rise to $3,500 from $1,000, with a more realistic expectation being $2,300 for the upcoming models. The former prediction accounts for an emergency situation, but it illustrates what we could see when new Macs ship later this year. Macs are much more complex and have a variety of configuration options, and higher-priced models will undoubtedly get more expensive because of the tariffs. This isn’t economic rocket science — it’s basic economics backed up by actually smart people. Don’t believe me, believe the economists.

Even Meta was hit by the tariffs because physical goods retailers are anxious about consumer spending. Here’s Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times:

Apple, Dell, Oracle — which rely on hardware and global supply chains that are in the direct line of fire from tariffs — saw their shares go into free-fall. But there was another big tech company whose stock took a pummeling even though its core business has little to do with hardware: Meta.

Shares of the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, fell $52 to $531.62 on Thursday and were down again on Friday. In total, Meta shed a whopping 9 percent of its market capitalization on Thursday…

Those companies buy a different kind of ad called “direct response advertising.” These ads typically encourage an action of some sort, like downloading a company’s app or buying a kitchen gadget featured on an Instagram video…

The effect of tariffs on Meta’s ad business is simple. Many of its small and medium-sized advertisers are from all across the world. President Trump’s tariffs will instantly make it more expensive for them to sell their products to customers in the United States.

Again, I’m not an economist and have no intention of explaining the current situation. I don’t write about the economy — I write about technology. But Americans, come this fall, will no longer be able to afford most consumer electronics, which is pretty bad for the world at large. The artificial intelligence industry will come to a screeching halt because importing expensive processors from Taiwan will be impossible. Investors who gamble on the success of AI start-ups like OpenAI or Anthropic will no longer be incentivized to spend their fortunes on a volatile market.

Perhaps the irony in the whole situation is that the people who are set to suffer the most because of the tariffs are the ones who spent the most getting Trump elected. The David Sacks, Andreessen-Horowitz, Y Combinator gang gave it their all to get Trump in the Oval Office, and now, they’re reaping what they sowed — higher prices for expensive chip imports. I couldn’t care less about whatever happens to Mark Andreessen’s millions — I wish him and his Silicon Valley psychopaths the absolute worst — but the small firms he invests in will undoubtedly ache thanks to his political antics. I care about them because their contributions shape the future of technology. (See: OpenAI and Anthropic.) Same for Elon Musk, whose companies (chiefly Tesla) are undeniably important in accelerating the transition to clean energy. And don’t even get me started on Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive.

American voters are truly a brain-dead species. They’re complete puppets to whoever they idolize. The ultra-rich have spent every waking second of the last four years idolizing Trump to get tax breaks. Naturally, the median American voter fell into that trap and either voted for Trump or stayed home. The plan worked, and now the whole country’s in jeopardy. That was the plan from the hardcore Make America Great Again zealots (Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, the Heritage Foundation, et al.) all along: to elevate Russia and relegate the United States to essentially a third-world nation. They got exactly what they wanted and played the rest of the country like pawns.

So, yes, it’s liberation week in America. Liberation from doing anything anyone loved before April 9. Nice work, morons.

Jay Peters, reporting for The Verge:

Nintendo has finally shared many of the key specs about the Nintendo Switch 2 as part of its Switch 2-focused Direct and said the system will launch on June 5th.

The device has a 7.9-inch screen, but it’s still 13.99mm thick, like the first Switch. The LCD screen has a 1080p resolution and supports HDR and up to a 120fps refresh rate (with variable refresh rate). The Joy-Con controllers are bigger, too, and as hinted at, they can be used similarly to a mouse. (Though a footnote says that mouse mode will only work with compatible games.) And they stay connected to the Switch 2 via magnets.

The new “C” button on the controllers can also be used to activate a chat menu that lets you access controls like muting your voice during the Discord-like GameChat calls.

The specifications are relatively unimpressive for a 2025 game console, but that’s not really the point. Anyone interested in a truly powerful, overkill handheld PC should buy a Steam Deck. The Nintendo Switch 2 just seems like a lot of fun. It’s not for streamers, power users, or anyone who’d notice the LCD screen as opposed to organic-LED or lackluster processor. It’s just for people who want to have fun playing video games. Personally, I don’t find the omission of an OLED screen too offensive, though I still wonder why it was omitted; the Switch OLED costs $350 and has a great display. The 120-hertz refresh rate is a nice touch, but I think fewer people will notice it than if Nintendo used an OLED display. But as Quinn Nelson writes on X, the Nintendo Switch got a high-refresh-rate display before the base-model iPhone.

About that price: I don’t blame Nintendo. There’s no chance it wanted the Switch 2 to cost $450, but it was probably forced to thanks to the Trump administration’s tariffs. But still, it’s going to sting, though I can’t imagine it’ll stymie sales because demand is purported to be very high. (As I’ve been saying for years, Americans’ disposable income still remains high post-pandemic, despite the sob story Republicans try to paint.) As outlandish as the price tag is, Nintendo doesn’t come out with game consoles very often, and I’d imagine an OLED version would come out in half a decade (or longer) for cheaper than the Switch 2’s starting price — hopefully when the tariffs are gone. Pundits will quibble over the price for a while — and they should — but I don’t think it matters too considerably.

My favorite part of the announcement is the anti-scalper pre-ordering system. Buyers need at least 50 hours of first-generation Switch gameplay associated with their account and must be Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, which costs $20 a year. I don’t think those restrictions are too onerous, especially for first-generation Switch owners, who are probably the most interested in the new one. Those rules, however, effectively kill scalping (from Nintendo’s website, at least; pre-orders are still available on third-party retailers’ websites), a problem that has persisted since the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X pre-orders from 2020. One console per household, limited only to people who already play the Switch. Great system.

Other than that, the rest of the announcement was just filled with treats. For instance, a new GameChat button, improved cartridges, backward compatibility, more games on Switch Online, and new Joy-Cons, which now attach magnetically. (And everyone assumes Nintendo fixed the Joy-Con drift problem that plagues the first-generation Switch.) It’s a fun, exciting console that just adds a bit of joy to the bleak, depressing world.

Mark Gurman, reporting Sunday in his Power On newsletter for Bloomberg:

Against that backdrop, Apple’s health team is working on something that could have a quicker payoff — and help the company finally deliver on Cook’s vision. The initiative is called Project Mulberry, and it involves a completely revamped Health app plus a health coach. The service would be powered by a new AI agent that would replicate — at least to some extent — a real doctor.

The idea is this: The Health app will continue to collect data from your devices (whether that’s the iPhone, Apple Watch, earbuds, or third-party products), and then the AI coach will use that information to offer tailor-made recommendations about ways to improve health.

Gurman says two things of note in this story:

1. This product will ship in iOS 19.4 with a “Coming Next Year” badge on Apple’s website. We all know how that goes.
2. The agent is “doctor-like” and I would assume provides some kind of important medical advice.

What a terrible idea. Apple’s business is predicated on an astonishing level of trust between it and its customers. As an off-topic example, when Apple says it’s handling user data securely, we’re inclined to believe it. But if Google said the same thing using the same phrasing as Apple, hardly anyone would trust the claims. We just trust Apple runs its artificial intelligence servers on 100 percent renewable energy. We trust Apple isn’t spying on us with Siri. We trust Apple devices don’t lead us astray and give us factually incorrect information. We trust Apple’s product timelines are accurate: software announcements in June, iPhones in September, and Macs in October.

But slowly, that reputation has been crumbling. Siri can’t even get the month of the year right. The more contextual version of the voice assistant is gone, even though it was supposed to be here weeks ago. Apple Intelligence prioritizes and summarizes scam emails and text messages. Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, is betraying every value Apple has to donate to a fascist for a quick buck. The trust Apple customers have in Apple is eroding quickly and Apple has done nothing to get it back.

Medical data is particularly sensitive. Apple users trust the medical records collected by their Apple Watches are end-to-end encrypted and stored in their iCloud accounts, shared with nobody without prior consent. Millions of women around the world — including in authoritarian, anti-freedom regimes like the Southern United States — trust Apple to keep their period tracking data safe and away from the eyes of their governments, who wish to punish women for exercising the basic freedom to control their own bodies. And perhaps most importantly, every Apple Watch user trusts that the data coming out of their devices is mostly accurate. If their Apple Watch says they need to see a doctor because an irregular heart rhythm was detected, people go. That feature has saved lives because it’s accurate. Just a few false positives and people will begin to ignore it, but that hasn’t happened for a reason: Apple products are reliable and nearly always accurate.

But if Project Mulberry gives a factually inaccurate answer just once, Apple’s storied brand reputation is gone for good. And that’s just from the standpoint of a business executive; people could die from this technology. Sure, the latter concern hasn’t stopped other cheap Silicon Valley start-ups, but nothing really deters them from ugly business practices. Apple, on the other hand, is trusted by hundreds of millions of people to track their medical history. People will trust the Apple Health+ AI — especially elderly users who haven’t been given the media literacy training to function in the 21st century. The people most likely to trust Apple are also those who could suffer the most because of it.

I don’t trust Apple anymore. Apple Intelligence content summaries are the worst AI content I’ve seen since that AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. I’ve never once intentionally tapped on an Apple Intelligence autocorrect suggestion in Messages. Writing Tools still removes my Markdown syntax for no apparent reason and lacks considerably compared to Grammarly. (It also crashes constantly.) Siri can’t even perform web calls to ChatGPT correctly — forget about it telling me when my mom’s flight will land. Can this company’s AI be trusted with medical data? What’s the rationale for doing so? Who’s to say it won’t mix numbers up or be susceptible to prompt injection?

People go to school for decades to become doctors; it’s not an easy career. But even if Health+ is trained by real doctors, there’s no guarantee it won’t mix up the information it’s given. This is an inherent weakness of large language models and it can’t be mitigated by just giving the AI high-quality training data. And if these models are to be run on personal computers like the iPhone, they probably won’t even be that good. Local AI models aren’t trustworthy; the ones run in massive data centers themselves tend to get things wrong. If this feature even comes out at all, Apple will tout how the training data was vetted a million times over by the best doctors to ever exist on the planet. But LLM performance doesn’t necessarily correlate with training data quality. Model performance is contingent on its size, i.e., how many parameters it has.

My guess is that Apple Health+ will probably run using Private Cloud Compute just to alleviate some of the stress that comes with factual inaccuracies, but even so, it’s still not guaranteed to provide good results. NotebookLM, Google’s AI research product, only relies on source data uploaded by a user, and it also occasionally gets things wrong. The point is that there’s no way to solve the problem of AI hallucinations until they understand their words — a technology that plainly hasn’t been invented yet. Today, LLMs think in tokens, not English. They do complex math problems to synthesize the next word in a sentence. They don’t think in words yet, and until they do, they’ll continue to make mistakes.

No matter how much work and training Apple puts into this AI doctor, it’ll never be as trustworthy as a real health professional. It’ll throw Apple’s reputation in the toilet, which, if we’re being honest, is probably where it belongs.

Kylie Robison, reporting for The Verge:

The trend kicked off pretty wholesomely. Couples transformed portraits, pet owners generated cartoonish cats, and many people are busily Ghibli-fying their families (I’ve stuck to selfies, not wanting to share with OpenAI my siblings’ likenesses). It’s an AI-generated version of the human-drawn art commissions people offer on Etsy — you and your loved ones, in the style of your favorite anime.

It didn’t take long for the trend to go full chaos mode. Nothing is sacred: the Twin Towers on 9/11, JFK’s assassination, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang signing a woman’s chest, President Donald Trump’s infamous group photo with Jeffrey Epstein, and even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s congressional testimony have all been reimagined with that distinctive Ghibli whimsy (it’s not clear whether these users transformed uploaded images, or prompted the system to copy them). Altman has played into the trend too — he even changed his X profile picture into a Ghibli rendering of himself and encouraged his followers to make him a new one.

I’ve expressed disgust at artificial intelligence-generated images before, most notably in my Apple Intelligence article last June, so when people started posting stills from “Severance” styled like art from Studio Ghibli, the famous Japanese animation studio, I felt some mild discomfort but most left the dust to settle. And it really did settle — the craze ended less than 24 hours after ChatGPT 4o’s new image generation tool rolled out to paid subscribers because OpenAI pulled the plug on generating characters resembling copyrighted work overnight, at least for free users.

But nothing really stuck out as truly repulsive to me. It didn’t even seem worthy to write about. That was until the White House posted an image of a woman — seemingly a fentanyl dealer — being deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the style of Studio Ghibli art, apparently created using GPT-4o. Detestable. The post is still up on Elon Musk’s 4chan knockoff, X, and I highly doubt it’ll be deleted after the same account posted an ASMR — autonomous sensory meridian response; a quiet piece of content meant to be relaxing — video of migrants being loaded on planes and deported a few months ago. But while that video was also vile, it didn’t strike me the same way the AI-generated image did.

I’ve been trying to piece together why I was so viscerally taken aback by the image. I know the White House. I know about the detestable Nazis who work there. Nothing they do surprises me even in the slightest. If Stephen Miller, the administration’s “border czar,” started belting out the N-word tomorrow, I wouldn’t even bat an eye. (For clarification, that doesn’t mean I agree with them — it’s that I wouldn’t be shocked.) Slowly, the realization kicked in: I’m disgusted that OpenAI, a company made to create AI that benefits all of humanity, let this slide. It’s impossible to ask ChatGPT to generate something as harmless as erotica or a violent fictional story, but it’s OK to create images that depict humans as livestock? How does this technology benefit humanity?

Worse of all, the image was generated in the style of real artists. It models the work of a real studio. OpenAI is profiting off the Adolf Hitler fanboy club’s wet dreams about beating up migrants while stealing the work of real artists. This dehumanizing, animalistic post looks like an endorsement of the Trump administration by Studio Ghibli itself, but it isn’t. It’s far from one. It’s an endorsement by Altman and his cadre of Silicon Valley extremists. We’ve reached a new low in the human race where it’s acceptable to steal a studio’s hard work and use it to depict humans like animals, all while making billions of dollars in revenue. Where is the “open” in OpenAI? How does this adhere to the company’s mission statement? From OpenAI’s charter:

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.

Again, how does creating Nazi propaganda posters benefit humanity? Who is this benefiting? How does stealing the work of artists benefit humanity, let alone all of it? How does blatant copyright infringement get us any closer to AGI? Nobody’s answering these questions. Nobody’s answering how ChatGPT is perfectly fine generating images of people being dehumanized. There’s no safety at OpenAI anymore — it’s just a group of low-life grifters with no spine. Need proof? Why is the company’s head encouraging users to generate more copyright infringement slop through his product? Even Musk, a person truly a waste of this planet’s natural resources, shut down the Twitter verification system temporarily in November 2022 after people made images of Mario giving the middle finger. But Altman has no shame, and he’ll do anything to get in Musk’s position for the money.

It was a mistake to lift the safety nets over ChatGPT’s image generation. The new version of GPT-4o has nearly none of the guardrails first introduced with DALL-E, OpenAI’s first image generator. That’s because when DALL-E first came to market, OpenAI had morals. Joe Biden was still president. Altman hadn’t been fired and rehired, causing a revolt in the company and boosting his ego beyond proportion. GPT-4o now generates indiscernible images of people, engages in blatant copyright infringement, and has no regard for humanity’s benefit whatsoever. It’s just like Grok’s image generator, only used by hundreds of millions of people around the globe. Forget the purported dangers of generative artificial intelligence, which I’m still skeptical about: this is Step 1 in AI accelerationists’ plan to devalue humanity, creative expression, and morality.

AI won’t revolt against humans or take everyone’s jobs. No stupid computer will ever steal a single Studio Ghibli artist’s job. Not now, not ever. This is not the movie “Her.” AI, however, will make the world a deeply immoral place. It’s the modern equivalent of sea pirates, where the laws are controlled by self-proclaimed monarchs, the courts don’t exist, and the oligarchy rules the poor schmucks doing the work. This is happening in the United States right now, and there’s nobody to stop it. Pointless slop image generators are the beginning of an era of moral bankruptcy.

And while the moral bankruptcy certainly lies in part within the people who use AI image generators for nefarious reasons, like the White House, it’s even more the fault of the AI companies themselves for failing to create safeguards. We have no meaningful AI regulation — not in the United States or the world at large — so it’s up to the AI industry to self-regulate. But no business on planet Earth regulates itself, no matter how humane or ethical it might purport to be. It’s akin to school shootings in America: the gun lobby will never advocate for a law that bans assault rifles because that would be against its bottom line. Shooting up an elementary school is already illegal, and so is copying another artist’s style and selling it for $20 a month. Making the user’s action illegal won’t solve the problem because it’s already illegal and nobody cares.

Regulate the AI image generators before it’s too late.

Hartley Charlton, reporting for MacRumors:

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

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

When it unveiled next-generation CarPlay in 2022, Apple said committed automakers included Acura, Audi, Ford, Honda, Infiniti, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lincoln, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Polestar, Porsche, Renault, and Volvo. Nearly three years have gone by since Apple shared that list, however, so it is unclear if it remains entirely accurate.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a few months now but just haven’t found enough to say about it. That changes today. This “next-generation CarPlay” feature was built by the Project Titan group at Apple, which also was responsible for the now-defunct Apple Car concept. As Charlton writes, next-generation CarPlay isn’t available in a single vehicle, despite it being announced three Worldwide Developers Conferences ago. Apple even said it would be coming “later in 2024” for the entirety of last year but just recently changed the webpage to display no estimated time of arrival.

Something is rotten in the state of Cupertino. This is the second major feature in a few years that Apple has failed to ship. But this time, I don’t actually think it’s because Apple hasn’t made the next-generation CarPlay features yet. I think they exist and work perfectly fine. Instead, the blame probably lies within Apple’s CarPlay sales department, or whatever it’s called. Forget General Motors — BMW, Porsche, and Aston Martin have been some of the most steadfast purveyors of CarPlay. The fact that none of them have integrated it into their latest models indicates something Apple isn’t telling us. Maybe Apple is exerting too much control over the design of the software. Luxury carmakers tend to want to tweak designs to fit their general aesthetic, so maybe that’s the catch.

But Porsche already announced next-generation CarPlay would be coming to their latest cars. So what’s the holdup? I’ve seriously been pondering this for hours — why hasn’t next-generation CarPlay shipped when the designs were apparently good enough for Porsche to publish on its own? Again, my mind goes to control — Apple wants carmakers to give up control over some key facet of the car, whether it be software updates, connection to an iPhone, or something related to the carmakers’ own software. Maybe Apple doesn’t want users to have a way to switch back and forth between its interface and the native one — I couldn’t find a “Porsche” or “Aston Martin” button in the next-generation CarPlay images, unlike the current CarPlay experience.

Whatever the bottleneck is, Apple needs to stop promising dates for features that simply don’t exist yet. As WWDC approaches, it’s hard to believe any dates the company gives during the keynote. “Coming later this year” should set off alarm bells in any Apple reporter’s head, and now that Apple has consistently shown it can’t deliver pre-announced products on time, its deadlines should be taken with a grain of salt. I’m not suggesting it can’t repair this reputation, but it’s going to be difficult. In the meantime, it should be known that Apple threw away one of its most prized possessions: the trust people have in it to ship products on time.

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.