Tom Warren, The Verge (gift link):
“Many of these employees have spent years, and in some cases,
decades, shaping Microsoft into what it is today,” says
Microsoft’s HR chief Amy Coleman in a memo seen by The Verge. “For
those who may be considering their next chapter, we...
Rachel Metz, reporting for Bloomberg:
A small group of unauthorized users have accessed Anthropic PBC’s
new Mythos AI model, a technology that the company says is so
powerful it can enable dangerous cyberattacks, according to a
person familiar with the matter and documen...
Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week and shipping them out next week. The hoodies are a new model from Bella Canvas, the manufacturer. Our previous hoodies were “heather gray” and the fabric was a blend of 50% polyester, 37.5% cotton, and 12.5% rayon. That model is being phased out. So we’ve switched to a new model that’s 85% cotton, 15% polyester, and a darker “heather black” color. The old ones were good, but the new ones feel even better.
The New York Times (gift link):
A correction was made on April 21, 2026: Because of an editing
error, an earlier version of this article misstated which day the
New York Mets suffered their 11th straight loss. It was on Sunday,
not Monday. Even the Mets cannot lose on an off day.
This is to New York Times corrections what “Headless Body in Topless Bar” was to New York Post headlines — perfection.
Ben Thompson at Stratechery, “Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing”:
Cook was, without question, an operational genius. Moreover, this
was clearly the case even before he scaled the iPhone to
unimaginable scale. When Cook joined Apple in 1998 the company’s
operations — centered ...
Rec League is a new app for sharing what you’re into. Catalog recommendations into tidy collections: your guide to Rome, your open tabs, your bookshelf. Follow people whose perspectives you trust, and discover brilliant, unexpected intel. Recently featured as the “Best New App” in the App Store. One user calls it “the only social media I feel better after using.” Download now to share what you love.
The president of the United States, on his blog this morning (all capitalization, punctuation, and missing/wrong words verbatim):
I have always been a big fan of Tim Cook, and likewise, Steve
Jobs, but if Steve was not taken from the Planet Earth so young,
and ran the co...
If you agree that Apple itself was It’s hard to imagine a more orderly, confidence-inspiring, exciting-but-not-at-all-surprising, this-feels-right way to do this.
Tim Cook, in a letter addressed, simply, “To the Apple community”:
For the past 15 years I’ve started just about every morning the
same way. I open my email and I read notes I received the day
before from Apple’s users all over the world.
You share little pieces of your...
Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week and shipping them out next week. Go ahead and place your order now, while I gather my thoughts about today’s Apple leadership news.
Apple Newsroom, with a veritable “boom”:
Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of
Apple’s board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president
of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive
officer effective on September 1, ...
Apple Newsroom:
In its annual Environmental Progress Report released today,
Apple marked progress toward Apple 2030, the company’s
ambitious goal to be carbon neutral across its entire footprint
by the end of this decade. Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions in
2025 remain d...
Marc Malkin, Variety:
Jessica Chastain says Apple TV is finally going to release her
political thriller series “The Savant.” [...]
“Before it was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to see it,’ but
now I can say, ‘We’re going to see it,’” Chastain told me
exclusively on Saturday at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in
Santa Monica.
As for when, sources tell me that Apple is planning for a July
release.
Previously, re: The Savant’s limbo release date.
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius.
The winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features. They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions, and read their deep dive for more.
Photos from the New York Subway in the 1940s, by teenage Stanley Kubrick.
Nicole Nguyen, writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
Mac Minis with larger-capacity RAM chips — a base M4 model with
32GB of RAM, starting at $999, and the M4 Pro models with 64GB of
RAM, starting at $1,999 — are “currently unavailable” on
Apple.com. And estim...
Apple Design:
Avoid pestering people. Repeated rating requests can be
irritating, and may even negatively influence people’s opinion of
your app. Consider allowing at least a week or two between
requests, prompting again after people demonstrate additional
engagement wit...
I wrote yesterday:
And the apps that do the right thing — like Godier’s Current — and never solicit a review like a needy hustler are penalized.
On Mastodon, Steven Troughton-Smith responded:
Review prompts are the difference between a great app getting five
positi...
Terry Godier:
For example, if you have a 4.1 star rating in the App Store, any 4
star review is going to decrease that average. In other words,
leaving a 4 star review is essentially leaving a negative
review. [...]
You will see a lot of 4 star reviews that say things l...
Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:
If you’ve been on TikTok this year, you’ve more than likely
encountered ads for Freecash. The app has been marketed as
a way to make money just by scrolling TikTok — and jumped to the
top of the app stores in recent months, peaking at...
Anton Troianovski, reporting for The New York Times under the headline “Trump’s Portrayal of the War in Iran Collides With Reality”:
President Trump is trying to cast his Iran war as all but over, a
done-and-dusted success.
But after years of trying to impose his own re...
The Associated Press Stylebook, on Threads:
We updated our style for telephone numbers in 2024 to drop
parentheses. We now recommend the form: 212-621-1500.
For international numbers use 011 (from the United States), the
country code, the city code and the telephone num...
Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:
The change began rolling out a few weeks ago, and user frustration
is mounting. On Reddit, there’s a growing thread of Netflix
subscribers saying they are canceling their subscription
because of this change to the Apple TV app. [...]
The change a...
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
The process requires the victim to have Express Transit Mode
enabled for payments, and a Visa card linked for those payments,
among other steps. As it turns out, it’s a Visa-related security
loophole rather than an iPhone issue, and it doesn’t wor...
One more thought re: the item I posted this week speculating on what Apple will name their much-rumored two-screen folding iPhone this year. If they do name it “iPhone Ultra”, I think Apple using that name for the folding iPhone will imply that they have no plans whatsoever ...
Feature story and short film, well worth watching, from Apple:
One winter day in January 2024, 16‑year‑old Rory Goss experienced
something jarring while in construction class at Abbey Christian
Brothers’ Grammar School in Newry, Northern Ireland. He could no
longer see t...
David Pierce, last week in his Installer column/newsletter for The Verge, singing the praises of the version 5.0 update to Sofa (the praises of which I just sang):
Sofa 5. A huge update to an Installerverse favorite, this app is
now a great way to manage everything you w...
Shawn Hickman:
A show you started last month. A book on your nightstand. A game
you keep meaning to get back to. Finding something new is easy.
Remembering where you left off is the hard part.
Sofa 5 helps you keep track of this stuff. Progress rings show up
on covers t...
Lisa Melton, who ran the team that created Safari, regarding her interactions with Steve Jobs:
When Steve asked you a question? You didn’t ramble and, whatever
you did, you didn’t make up an answer. If you didn’t know, you
just said that you didn’t know. But then you tol...
The real goldmine isn’t that Apple gets a cut of every App Store transaction. It’s that Apple’s platforms have the best apps, and users who are drawn to the best apps are thus drawn to the iPhone, Mac, and iPad.
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