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.

With WorkOS you get all of it. One platform for auth, identity, and security. Infrastructure for teams that ship fast and stay fast.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity already chose WorkOS over building it themselves.

Build faster with WorkOS →

Link: workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter…

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.

Link: daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

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.

Link: theverge.com/podcast/917965/apple-ceo-cook-ternus…

The New York Times PR account, on Twitter/X a week ago: Sunday’s crossword puzzle in the print edition of The New York Times Magazine contains a grid that does not match the clues. The correct version of the puzzle can be found in the news section of Sunday’s print editi...

[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...

In May 2024, Bloomberg ran a feature story by Mark Gurman under the headline, “Tim Cook Can’t Run Apple Forever. Who’s Next?” The subhead: “John Ternus, the head of hardware engineering, is emerging as a potential successor to the CEO.” The nut grafs from that piece: The...

The Norwegian Maritime Authority: If you were born in 1980 or later and plan to operate a recreational craft of more than 8 metres in length or with an engine power of more than 25 hp, you need a boating licence. The boating licence is a certificate permitting you to ope...

George Lucas got so many nuances right in Star Wars. Little touches that said so much. One of the most overlooked is a moment that I vividly remember from first seeing it, on the big screen, as a kindergartener or thereabouts. It’s during the scene where Luke enters the Mos ...

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)

Link: mastodon.social/@Cdespinosa/116439702239797827

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.

Link: store.daringfireball.net/

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.

Link: nytimes.com/2026/04/21/nyregion/mets-mamdani-curse.html…

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.

Link: recleague.com/?lyr_campaign=df

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...

It’s a profoundly different feeling today than the last time Apple’s CEO announced his transition to chairman of the board, and his chosen successor was promoted to replace him as CEO. In August 2011, Steve Jobs was sick. For years he’d managed to stay a step, sometimes two...

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.

Link: store.daringfireball.net/

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.

Link: variety.com/2026/tv/columns/jessica-chastain-apple-tv…