My sincere thanks to The Ole Independence Hall Hooligans for sponsoring this past week at DF to promote democracy. That’s it. A real sponsorship, real money, raised by a group of readers who simply wanted the ad space on DF to promote, as they described it, “the enduring and...
David Remnick, in a fine short piece for The New Yorker on Signalgate:
This is an Administration that does not have to slip on a Signal
banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful
incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn little if we
were...
Terrific photos and summary coverage from The Guardian. Additional coverage from The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN. Update: The Atlantic has a great collection of photos from dozens of cities.
There’s something so bizarrely asymmetrical about Trump’s political su...
Joanna Stern, Adrienne Tong, and Nicole Nguyen, writing for The Wall Street Journal (News+):
Take a look at this iPhone 16 Pro. Your cost, for the 256GB
version, is $1,100. The cost of all the hardware inside — aka the
bill of materials — was about $550 to Apple when the...
Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:
In his piece, Gruber particularly calls out the trashcan Mac Pro
sticking at $2999 throughout its existence, but I think an even
more striking example is the iMac. Introduced in 1998 at a base
price of $1299, today’s infinitely more powe...
Barbara Moens and Henry Foy, reporting from Brussels for the Financial Times last Friday, March 28:
The EU is set to impose minimal fines on Apple and Facebook owner
Meta next week under its Digital Markets Act, as Brussels seeks to
avoid escalating tensions with US Pres...
Thanks to Microsoft for 50 years of being awesome to developers!
Some years the software was great. Some years the software sucked.
Every year the company and its ecosystem has stood with and
supported developers.
I pity the man who doesn’t have enough fingers to count the number of game stores available on Xbox.
Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge:
Microsoft held a special 50th anniversary event at its
headquarters earlier today. During Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa
Suleyman’s presentation, a Microsoft employee interrupted the
event to protest the use of Microsoft’s technologies in
I...
Susan Glasser, writing for The New Yorker, “Donald Trump’s Ego Melts the Global Economy”:
In this new political moment of the unthinkable made manifest, the
sheer power rush for Trump should also not be underestimated.
Imagine his joy as he sat down to sign an executive ...
CNBC:
President Donald Trump on Friday extended a deadline requiring China-based ByteDance to sell the U.S. operations of TikTok or face an effective ban in the country, marking the second time he has taken such action.
Trump, on Truth Social, which is by far the most ...
From that same Reuters report by Akash Sriram that I just wrote about, speculating that iPhone prices might rise dramatically under Trump’s tariffs:
However, other analysts noted that iPhone sales have been
floundering in the company’s major markets, as Apple
Intelligenc...
Akash Sriram, reporting for Reuters under the headline “A $2,300 Apple iPhone? Trump Tariffs Could Make That Happen.”:
Most iPhones are still made in China, which was hit with a 54%
tariff. If those levies persist, Apple has a tough choice: absorb
the extra expense or pa...
Akash Sriram, reporting for Reuters:
Most iPhones are still made in China, which was hit with a 54%
tariff. If those levies persist, Apple, opens new tab has a tough
choice: absorb the extra expense or pass it on to customers.
Shares of the company closed down 9.3% on T...
Mike Isaac, writing for The New York Times:
Apple, Dell, Oracle — which rely on hardware and global supply
chains that are in the direct line of fire from tariffs — saw
their shares go into free-fall. But there was another big tech
company whose stock took a pummeling ev...
Nintendo is pushing back preorders for the Switch 2 due to
concerns about Donald Trump’s newly announced tariffs. According
to a statement sent to The Verge by Eddie Garcia on behalf of
Nintendo, it says preorders will no longer begin on April 9th:
Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April
9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and
evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a
later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.
Allison McDaniel, writing for 9to5Mac back in 2022:
Apple Cash is a virtual debit card where you can send and
receive money through iMessage. Stored in your Wallet, you can
make secure and contactless payments with Apple Pay from your
iPhone or Apple Watch. It’s also a w...
I observed yesterday that, in general, Visa and Mastercard credit cards are both accepted at the same locations. The most notable exception is Costco, which, as part of the deal to make its own credit card a Visa (after long partnering with Amex), only accepts Visa credit ca...
Bill Gates, commemorating Microsoft’s 50th anniversary:
The story of how Microsoft came to be begins with, of
all things, a magazine. The January 1975 issue of
Popular Electronics featured an Altair 8800 on the
cover. The Altair 8800, created by a small electronics
compa...
Wonderfully detailed write-up of a perfect prop from Make3:
Repurposed Nagra Knobs & Switches — To ground the device in a
tangible, vintage aesthetic, we salvaged original knobs and
switches from a 1990s Nagra IV-D recorder, seamlessly integrating
them into our desig...
Jason Snell, last month:
The new M4 MacBook Air is the Mac most people should buy. [...]
That’s why perhaps the most important change in the M4 MacBook Air
is its base configuration, which starts at $999. When Apple
introduced a winning new flat-with-rounded-corners Air...
Following up on the previous item, here’s a WSJ report from October on Visa’s dominant position in the payments industry:
Visa, based in San Francisco, has built its network over more than
60 years — going back to clunky manual credit-card readers and
carbon-paper copies...
AnnaMaria Andriotis, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):
The Apple card is up for grabs because Goldman Sachs, the bank
behind it, is getting out of the consumer lending world. For
months, big banks including JPMorgan Chase and Synchrony Financial
have be...
Mike Masnick has a great piece at TechDirt running down just how stupid everything about Trump’s tariff trade war is:
Whoever on the Council of Economic Advisers used this formula should turn in their econ degree, because this is not how anything works. Even if they then...
The Economist:
On economics Mr Trump’s assertions are flat-out nonsense. The
president says tariffs are needed to close America’s trade
deficit, which he sees as a transfer of wealth to foreigners. Yet
as any of the president’s economists could have told him, this
overal...
CNBC:
Markets plunged the day after President Donald Trump
imposed a far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy, including a
10% baseline tariff on almost every country on earth.
The plan slaps much steeper tariff rates on many countries,
including 34% on China, 20% on th...
Great roundup from The Verge:
While Nintendo told us very little in the official reveal of
the console in January, now we know when the Switch 2 is
coming and how much it will cost at launch: June 5th and
$449.99. We also have more hardware details and specs to
pore over...
MSNBC viewers have seen the last of Steve Kornacki’s big board.
The popular data maven has signed a deal with NBC that will expand
his presence across the network’s news and sports divisions. But
the new contract does not include working for MSNBC, which is
being spun off into a new corporate entity formed by parent
company Comcast.
They might as well just switch off the lights and lock the doors at MSNBC.
If we hold things to this list, programs like Nova, MarsEdit, and
Apple Pages — canonical Mac-assed Mac apps — all do
unsurprisingly smashingly. But Obsidian, the Electron-based
program I’m writing in right now, does shockingly well, too.
Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code doesn’t do quite as well (most
notably, it opens its settings “window” as an editor tab), but it
does better than Sublime Text (which opens a text file for
settings), and much better than the banana crazypants menu and
icon design of the cross-platform e-book management program
Calibre.
Martin has a good list here of fundamentals, but ultimately, you know it when you see it.
While the ads played on, I began creating a thought experiment: There’s a $10 difference between the ad and ad-free plans. If Mr. Netflix (he wears a top hat) came to my house and said, “Jason, I’ve got a great deal for you. I’m going to pay you $120 a year, and all you have to do is watch ads while you watch Netflix,” what would I do? When I started thinking about it, I thought it might be an interesting intellectual question. What would I accept in exchange for having Mean Mr. Netflix beam ads into every show I watch?
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
These are not just words, they are a pact. A civil contract. Not to party, not to policy, not to an ideology or an individual. It is a compact between a people, our people, and it is under threat. A democracy is a government of collective action by the people. Let this be a reminder, it is time to do more … before it is no more.
Daring Fireball is brought to you this week by the enduring and aspirational project that is democracy.
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