Not new, but new to me, is this delightful 7-minute short with a behind-the-scenes look at SNL’s cue card team, led by longtime main cue card guy Wally Feresten. Sometimes you just can’t beat analog.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=3djg59JUrmc

As a kid I loved Richard Scarry’s books. As an adult I loved (and love) Chris Ware’s graphic novels. As a parent I loved reading Scarry’s books, again, with my son. So of course this essay from Ware, commemorating the 50th anniversary edition of Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, hit hard for me. Bet it will for you too.

Link: yalereview.org/article/chris-ware-richard-scarry

Om Malik: I have my own explanation, something my readers are familiar with, and it is the most obvious one. Just as Google is trapped in the 10-blue-link prison, which prevents it from doing something radical, Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company weighed d...

Tesla’s share price has been having a hard time of it lately. The stock has lost about half its value since its all-time high back in December, and, since Musk took office alongside Donald Trump in January, dropped for 7 consecutive weeks, rebounding only ever-so-slightly la...

I’ve been commenting and expanding upon some of the commentary my piece prompted, and I have a few more coming, but it’s good to have Tsai collect a comprehensive overview.

Link: mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/13/rotten/

Ray Maker, writing at DC Rainmaker: This would not only be the first time Apple has created a non-watch heart rate sensor, but even more notably, the first time the company has enabled heart rate broadcasting over existing Bluetooth heart rate standards. The question th...

I’m a month late linking to it, but Chance Miller wrote a terrific review for 9to5Mac: The last several releases from Beats, such as the Studio Buds Plus and Solo 4 headphones, have been powered by a custom Beats chip rather than an Apple-designed chip like what’s used i...

Sebastiaan de With, on X, linking to my “Something Is Rotten” piece last week: Ex-MobileMe team here. This was a brutal time. It was so bad that when he presented iCloud onstage, Steve said “I know what you’re thinking: why should I trust them? They’re the ones who gave...

From Drexel’s YouTube channel: But far less recognized is that Drexel made the very bold decision of committing all students to purchase a previously unreleased and untested computer from Apple. This was, of course, the Macintosh (introduced in January 1984), which was u...

Alissa Falcone, in a good piece looking back at (my alma mater) Drexel University’s groundbreaking deal with Apple 40 years ago to provide deeply discounted Macintoshes to all students, and integrate them throughout the campus and curriculums: Drexel was prepared to buy ...

Ten years ago I played two small roles in the release of the aforelinked Becoming Steve Jobs. First, I got to announce the book here at Daring Fireball, after having been sent an advance copy a few weeks earlier. My praise for the book then was glowing, but in hindsight, I t...

During Friday’s episode of Dithering — a free listen — Ben Thompson reminded me that my headline reference last week, alluding to the well-known line from Hamlet, had been used, to great effect, once before. Brent Schlender wrote a crackerjack piece for Fortune in March 1997...

A new feature in our membership CMS (Passport — check it out) lets us make individual episodes of Dithering free for everyone to listen to (on the web). I can’t think of a better way to first use this new capability than to open up Friday’s episode, recapping my “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” article, and the resonance with which it hit. Even the cover art — selected weeks ago — captures how I’ve felt this week.

Give it a listen. Subscribe if you enjoy it.

Link: dithering.passport.online/member/episode/being-real-points

My post Friday commenting (read: wise-cracking) on Mark Gurman’s explosive report on an all-hands Siri team meeting at Apple was begging for a bit of meta commentary on the reporting itself. But I’ve been doing so much of that regarding Gurman lately that I thought it best t...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring this week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC.

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

From Apple’s support documentation: You can generate a report of requests your iPhone has sent to Private Cloud Compute. Go to Settings, then tap Privacy & Security. Tap Apple Intelligence Report, then choose a report duration for the last 15 minutes (default) or ...

Jess Weatherbed, reporting for The Verge: iPhone and Android users will be able to exchange end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) RCS messages in the near future thanks to newly updated RCS specifications. The GSM Association announced that the latest RCS standard includes E2EE ba...

In an item earlier this week observing that Swift Assist, the most ambitious Xcode-related Apple Intelligence feature shown at WWDC last year, not only hasn’t yet shipped but still is not in beta, I wondered whether Apple actually demoed it live last year. John Voorhees, wri...

Katie Notopoulos, writing at Business Insider (Apple News+ link): It’s possible that this strident defense is backfiring — creating a “Streisand Effect” that’s publicizing the book even more. Notopoulos isn’t one to pull punches or hedge, normally, but there’s no quest...

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter:

After more than a year of speculation, Apple TV+ has ordered a fourth season of its Emmy-winning comedy Ted Lasso. The pickup comes after co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis closed a deal to reprise his role as the title character, the manager of the fictional AFC Richmond soccer club in London.

I dig Ted Lasso but this is like 0.1 percent as interesting as When are we going to get Severance season 3?! Gimme gimme gimme. And we haven’t even gotten to next week’s season 2 finale yet.

Link: hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/ted-lasso-renewed-season-4…

CNBC story from 2016: At a recent public appearance at the Utah Tech Tour, in a conversation moderated by Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch, Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out that Microsoft had tablets on the market decades before Apple. Cook emphasized his company’s timing comin...

Jay Peters, last month for The Verge: Google’s next I/O developer conference will take place on May 20th and May 21st, the company announced today. The event will be “open to everyone online” and will include “livestreamed keynotes and sessions,” according to an FAQ. Lik...

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg today: 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. ...

As a postscript to that last item, it occurred to me that because we’re close friends, I have a lot of photos of Paul Kafasis in my library. Here’s one from a year ago you can use as a reference. I wondered how Genmoji would do with “An owl who looks like Paul Kafasis, wearing a Celtics jersey, holding a basketball.” Here’s the best one, from my Mac running MacOS 15.3.1 Sequoia.

It does resemble Paul. Not sure about how owl-like it is, the “holding” part, the slopping of “Celtics”, or the quality of orthodontia over in Genmojiworld.

Link: daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/14/the-legend-of-larry…

Paul Kafasis, on a seemingly local-to-Boston Genmoji billboard from Apple: Eventually, though, the penny dropped. After my umpteenth time passing the billboard, while trying to distract myself from the single-digit temperatures and the brutal wind chill, I realized what ...

Zack Whittaker, reporting for TechCrunch: A group of bipartisan U.S. lawmakers are urging the head of the U.K.’s surveillance court to hold an open hearing into Apple’s anticipated challenge of an alleged secret U.K. government legal demand. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, alon...

Michael Tsai: Swift Assist was supposed to arrive in 2024, but it never even appeared in a beta. Apple hasn’t announced that it’s postponed or cancelled. It’s not even mentioned in the release notes. Apple announced two AI-powered features for Xcode last year: predicti...

In the two decades I’ve been in this racket, I’ve never been angrier at myself for missing a story than I am about Apple’s announcement on Friday that the “more personalized Siri” features of Apple Intelligence, scheduled to appear between now and WWDC, would be delayed unti...

Filipe Espósito, reporting last week for 9to5Mac: As reported by Brazilian newspaper Valor Econômico (via O Globo), a federal judge in Brazil ruled on Wednesday that Apple will have to open up the iOS ecosystem to third-party apps in Brazil just like the company did in t...

Benjamin Mayo 9to5Mac:

Apple is still reeling from the last-week’s news that the most compelling new Apple Intelligence features for Siri have been indefinitely delayed. Over the weekend, it pulled a YouTube ad showcasing personal context running on the iPhone 16. Now, it has updated the Apple website with a new disclaimer wherever the unreleased Siri features are mentioned on the iPhone marketing pages. [...]

The new message to customers found on Apple’s website is different, but equally as vague. It reads:

Siri’s personal context understanding, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions are in development and will be available with a future software update.

Link: 9to5mac.com/2025/03/12/apple-adds-new-disclaimer-on-its…