Who better to join the show to commemorate Apple’s 50th anniversary than John Siracusa?

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Lex Friedman (with an embedded video to prove it):

If you reverse the new Apple video that plays in “rewind,” it’s the Think Different ad music, pitched up.

Of course it is.

And, regarding that “◀︎◀︎ REW” button where the “REW” was set in bitmapped Chicago 12” but the “◀︎◀︎” was modern, Craig Hockenberry fixed it:

I pretended to be Susan Kare and fixed it, bottom is the original, top is my interpretation.

Lots of fun things I’ve never seen before in this 7-minute video. Best not to spoil them.

By far the dumbest Internet Jackass Day “joke” I’ve seen so far is this one from the official New Jersey state account on Twitter/X, claiming that effective immediately, they’re lifting the statewide ban on self-service gasoline. For those of you who’ve never been there, I swear, you cannot pump your own gas anywhere in the state. It’s so ridiculous — and the historical reason so crooked — that people have a hard time believing it. You have to wait for an attendant, who is generally rude and almost always slow. Back in the day, they were extra slow returning with change when you paid in cash, hoping you’d just give up and leave. I’d rather run out of gas and just abandon my car on the side of the road than buy a single gallon of gas in New Jersey. And yet here’s the official state Twitter account yucking it up like the joke isn’t on them.

Ryan D’Agostino, writing at Esquire (News+ link, in case Esquire stiffs you with their paywall): Cook was at Jobs’s house the day he died. As he drove back to the office to announce it to the employees and, in so doing, to the world, he felt a strange kind of shock — str...

Jacob Krol, writing at TechRadar: To understand exactly what that means five years on, TechRadar sat down with Apple VP of Platform Architecture Tim Millet and Director of Audio Product Marketing Eric Treski to unpack how AirPods Max 2 is finally catching up to its own a...

The AP:

Hershey said Wednesday it will use classic recipes for all Reese’s products starting next year, a change that comes after the grandson of Reese’s founder criticized the company for shifting to cheaper ingredients.

Running to the press never works.

(Stick to Trader Joe’s, I say.)

The Apple.com homepage has a nice little animation showing sketches of the company’s most iconic products. The video file itself is hosted here, but I’m not sure how permanent that link is. Tim Cook posted a different video on Twitter/X, a VHS-style “rewind” through Apple p...

Grace Kay, Ashley Stewart, and Pranav Dixit, writing for Business Insider (News+): “Part of bringing me on, and giving me the responsibilities of a CEO, was to make sure that I could really run that part of the company with autonomy,” Simo, whose title is CEO of applicat...

Hana Kiros, writing for The Atlantic: Recently, a Costco in Florida instituted a new store policy. An employee told me that he was asked to open up every desktop computer displayed in the electronics section and remove the memory chips. Otherwise, the RAM harvesters woul...

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, during an on-stage interview at The Hill & Valley Forum last week, was asked “What do you see as America’s unique advantages that other countries don’t have?”

His answer, after taking a moment to think, “America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump.”

Huang, newly appointed to the aforelinked President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, seemingly doesn’t smell the growing stink.

The White House: The Council will be co-chaired by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios. The following individuals have been appointed: Marc Andreessen Sergey Brin Safra Catz Michael Dell Jacob DeWitte Fred Ehrsam Larry Ellison David Friedberg Jensen Huang John Mar...

Thereallo, after spelunking inside the APK bundle for the Android version: Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal’s servers. Loads Jav...

Stop scaling headcount. Scale your workspace.

Most security teams don’t have a talent problem, they have a noise problem. Manual phishing remediation, chasing risky OAuth permissions, and auditing file shares shouldn’t be a full-time job.

Material Security unifies your cloud workspace, bringing detection and response for email, files, and accounts into one place. It’s security that actually works: augmenting the native gaps in Google and Microsoft without the usual enterprise bloat.

Stop fighting fragmented consoles and start focusing on strategy. It’s time to simplify your SecOps.

See how Material scales.

Paul Graham:

So when you have a world defined only by brand, it’s going to be a weird, bad world.

Graham’s thoughtful essay focuses on the mechanical watch industry. But I disagree with his conclusion. I think the market for mechanical watches has never been more fun or vibrant than it is today. The action, for me at least, isn’t with the high-end luxury Swiss brands. It’s with the indies, from companies like Baltic and Halios.

It’s also interesting to ponder Graham’s essay in the context of other industries. I think it’s self evident that the entire market for phones — the most popular and lucrative consumer devices in the world — is defined by a single brand, and every competitor just copies that one brand with varying degrees of shamelessness. That’s bad and weird.

Scott Knaster:

The Big Mac is about 22 times the size of the little Mac.

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring the week at DF. Their latest is a CLI that launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration into your codebase. No signup required. It creates an env...

For your weekend viewing enjoyment: But in almost every way that mattered, the Macintosh was right. Right about how we’d use computers going forward. Right about the idea that computers needed to be less complicated. Right about the fact that caring this deeply about bot...

Look, I’m all for democracy, but a poll whose results currently have the Extended Keyboard II down at #47 is a poll that makes me angry.

For your weekend listening enjoyment: Christina Warren returns to the show to discuss Apple big month of product announcements — in particular, the iPhone 17e and MacBook Neo. And we pour one out for the Mac Pro.

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Stephen Hackett, at 512 Pixels: I’ve thought a lot about the bad timing Jones mentions. Had Apple stuck to the original timeline, and killed off the 2013 Mac Pro in favor of an iMac “specifically targeted at large segments of the pro market,” back in 2017, Apple could ha...

While I’m bitching about Netflix’s craptacular new video player on Apple TV, let me quote from a piece I wrote two years ago (also complaining about Netflix’s tvOS app): Turns out there are two better ways: If you use the Control Center Apple TV remote control on your ...

This feature from Harry McCracken is just spectacularly good. (And it’s a gift link that’ll get you past Fast Company’s paywall.) 50 years is a long time and there are some key players in Apple’s origin story who are gone — but because everyone was so young at the time, it’s...

Amanda Kondolojy, writing for Pocket-lint: Though the Netflix app is largely the same on most platforms, over the weekend several Apple TV users on the unofficial Apple TV Reddit noticed some small changes to the tvOS version of the app that are making the app harder to ...

Alan Rappeport, reporting for The New York Times: President Trump’s signature will appear on U.S. dollars later this year, the Treasury Department said on Thursday. The decision to have Mr. Trump’s John Hancock on America’s paper currency represented an unprecedented cha...

The New York Post (I’m not sure if I should tell you to take this with a grain of salt, because it’s the Post and their journalistic standards are low, or, to assign this extra credibility because it’s the Post, a right-wing Murdoch rag that Trump lackeys actually talk to): ...

Oliver Darcy, reporting for Status (paywalled, alas):

According to the data obtained by Status, BI ended 2023 with roughly 160,000 paid subscribers, a drop of about 14 percent from the prior year when it boasted about 185,000 subscribers. The slide did not stop there, however. In 2024, it closed the year with roughly 150,000 subscribers, a further six percent decline. And in 2025, the number fell again, to about 135,000 paid subscribers — another 10 percent drop.

All told, over roughly three years, BI saw its subscription base plummet by about 50,000, or a jarring 27 percent.

Not the sort of momentum you want.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for TechCrunch:

Almost four years after launching a security feature called Lockdown Mode, Apple says it has yet to see a case where someone’s device was hacked with these additional security protections switched on.

“We are not aware of any successful mercenary spyware attacks against a Lockdown Mode-enabled Apple device,” Apple spokesperson Sarah O’Rourke told TechCrunch on Friday.

Apple Newsroom: Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on r...

Todd Spangler, Variety:

Under the new pricing, effective March 26 for new users and rolling out to current customers depending on their billing cycle, Netflix’s Standard plan (which has no ads and provides streaming on two devices simultaneously) is rising by $2, from $17.99 to $19.99/month. The ad-supported plan is going up a buck, from $7.99 to $8.99/month, and the top-tier Premium plan (no ads, streaming on up to four devices at once, Ultra HD and HDR) is increasing from $24.99 to $26.99/month.

I pay the full $27/month because I’d rather cancel Netflix than watch ads, and I suspect I’d notice the difference between 4K and 1080p. But also because money runs through my fingers like water.