Regarding my earlier post about the cleverness of Tim Cook’s solution to Apple’s dilemma regarding how to apply for, and accept, a potential tariff refund check without drawing the ire of Donald “Tariff Is My Favorite Word” Trump, at least one reader asked why Tim Cook comm...

Remember the appalling but utterly-unsurprising story two months ago where a team of investigative reporters in Sweden uncovered a company in Kenya contracted by Meta to review video content captured by Meta’s “smart” glasses? They spoke to some of the workers, who told tale...

One more from Jason Snell, from his analysis of Apple’s quarterly results: During a complicated question from J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee about product margins, Parekh unusually half-answered the question and then stopped and “turned it over to Tim” so that Cook...

MG Siegler returns to the show to discuss Apple’s announcement that Tim Cook is stepping aside (into the role of executive chairman) and John Ternus will become CEO.

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Uwa Ede-Osifo, reporting for The Guardian: On any given day, Los Angeles’s Hollywood Boulevard teems with tourists and street performers clustered near the area’s many landmarks. But in recent months, the strip has been set abuzz for a new reason. Throngs of mostly adol...

Apple Newsroom: “Today Apple is proud to report our best March quarter ever, with revenue of $111.2 billion and double-digit growth across every geographic segment,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “iPhone achieved a March quarter revenue record, fueled by such extraordinary...

It’s certainly possible that this Vision thing isn’t going to work out and Apple *will* throw in the towel on it. But that hasn’t happened, and if it does, it’s not going to come out of nowhere as a story on MacRumors for the people in VPG working on it.

600 words from Hartley Charlton at MacRumors expounding upon a wacko post on Weibo suggesting that Apple is debating dropping MagSafe from all iPhones (which post, translated to English, is only 70-some words). Given that last year’s 16e didn’t have MagSafe and this year’s 17e does, you don’t need a pseudonymous Chinese weatherman to know which way the MagSafe wind is blowing in Cupertino.

Brilliant statue, hilarious intro video. The greatest artist of our age.

Max Harrison-Caldwell, reporting for The San Francisco Standard: In 2024, the port — which manages the Oakland airport — changed the name from Oakland International Airport to San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport, hoping to entice travelers by emphasizing the ...

Elizabeth Lopatto, reporting on Musk v. Altman from the courtroom in Oakland (gift link): Today the first witness was sworn in in Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk. I was surprised by how flat he seemed. This is not the first time I’ve seen Musk in court. During his defamation ...

Matteo Wong, covering Musk v. Altman for The Atlantic (gift link): Musk is asking that Altman be removed from OpenAI’s board, that the company convert back to a nonprofit, and for the return of allegedly “ill-gotten gains” — some $150 billion — which Musk says would go t...

Cade Metz and Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times from the Ronald V. Dellums U.S. Courthouse in Oakland (gift link): On the first day of testimony in a landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, two notably different tales were offered of how Open...

Jer Crane, in an article earlier this week posted on Twitter/X: I’m Jer Crane, founder of PocketOS. We build software that rental businesses — primarily car rental operators — use to run their entire operations: reservations, payments, customer management, vehicle tracki...

Every B2B company hits the same inflection point — enterprise customers show up and they need SSO, directory sync, audit logs, and role-based access before they’ll move forward. Most teams lose months building that infrastructure. It doesn’t have to be that way.

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My thanks to Rec League for sponsoring last week at DF. Rec League is a new app/social network for sharing what you’re into. (Get it? The “rec” in “Rec League” is for recommendations. It’s a damn clever name, and sometimes a clever name is half the battle.) It’s really well ...

Weekly “sponsor the whole week at DF” spots are sold out until August 24. That’s a great sign that sponsorships here work. But it’s not so great if you have a product or service that you’d like to promote now, or soon, to the DF audience — savvy listeners and readers obsessed with high quality and good design.

The good news on that front is that the sponsorship schedule for The Talk Show has openings, including for the next few episodes, starting this week and into next month. The general rule of thumb is that sponsorship spots on The Talk Show cost one-third the rate for the weekly spots on DF. I’m happy to work out deals a little lower than that for first-time sponsors. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to hear pitched on America’s favorite three-star podcast, get in touch.

David Pierce:

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay are joined by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber to talk about their reactions to the news, the (mostly) smooth transition Apple seems to have pulled off, and what we should really make of Tim Cook’s legacy as a product person. Really, the question is: Do we blame Cook for the Touch Bar, or do we blame him for not trying hard enough to make the Touch Bar great?

I know that sounds like a joke but I really do think the biggest problem with the Touch Bar wasn’t that the first crack at it wasn’t good enough, but that they never took a second crack at it. Going back to dumb fiddly F-keys with functional icons printed on them was uncharacteristically lazy for Apple.

Software brain says *Go faster; do more; the only mistake you can’t fix is having gone too slow.* Hardware brain says *Slow down; do less; focus; strive for perfection and never settle for less than excellence; mistakes are forever.*

[Update: The store is now closed. Thanks to everyone who ordered — you should start getting shipping notices very soon.] It’s really just a coincidence, but it was 20 years ago this week that I went full-time writing Daring Fireball (after writing the site in my spare time ...

Ben Schoon, 9to5Google: In March, a report revealed some of the internal cuts Samsung has been making for its mobile division, with the company initially concerned it could post an operating loss for the first time ever. It’s a big deal, as Samsung’s mobile (MX) division...

Every single word of the November 2025 Financial Times report, which Mark Gurman derided as “simply false”, was, in fact, exactly correct.

My spitball idea for a generational law to keep more young people from ever starting a tobacco habit — and thus, nicotine addiction — would be through scaled taxation.

I think about this scene more and more lately.

Andy McMillan and Andy Baio: Today, over 10 years later, and almost two full years after we retired the festival for good, we’re finally launching that website. Named after what we thought would be a throwaway title for a short-lived GitHub repo, allow us to introduce XO...

Eva Corlett, reporting for The Guardian in 2023: New Zealand’s new government will scrap the country’s world-leading law to ban smoking for future generations to help pay for tax cuts — a move that public health officials believe will cost thousands of lives and be “cata...

Ephrat Livni, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): Britain aims to raise a “smoke-free generation” by permanently banning the sale or supply of tobacco to anyone born in 2009 or after, with a bill that was approved by Parliament on Tuesday. The bill applies to ...

Russ Choma, reporting for Mother Jones: Devin Nunes was not an obvious choice to run a fledgling social media network, but after $1.1 billion in losses, the former dairy farmer and congressman is out as the head of Truth Social. Donald Trump Jr., a board member at Trump...

Nilay Patel, in a terrific essay (and Decoder one-sider) at The Verge: In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI, and that Gen Z in particular seems to hate AI more and more as they encounter it. There’s that NBC New...

Speaking of Chris Espinosa, this is pretty neat:

On September 1 I’ll join the elite club (members Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Mike Markkula, and Bill Fernandez) who have worked under a number of Apple CEOs ≥ our employee number:

Woz: 1 (Scott)
Jobs: 2 (Scott, Markkula)
Markkula: 3 (Scott, Sculley, Spindler)
Fernandez: 4 (Scott, Markkula, Sculley, Spindler)
Espinosa: 8 (Scott, Markkula, Sculley, Spindler, Amelio, Jobs, Cook, Ternus)