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…

Jay Peters, The Verge:

Google has updated its affiliate ads policy for Chrome extensions after creators accused PayPal’s popular Honey browser extension of being a “scam.”

Honey was accused of taking affiliate revenue from the same influencers it paid for promotion by using its Chrome extension to swap in its own affiliate link before you checked out. According to the updated Google policy posted today, this isn’t allowed in most cases

I wouldn’t say they were merely accused — they were caught, red-handed.

Link: theverge.com/news/627940/google-chrome-extensions-paypal…

Ben Lovejoy, writing at 9to5Mac: Our editor-in-chief Chance Miller wryly commented that a radical new look would serve as a great way to distract from the ever-slowing progress on the new Siri. But in truth, I think many more Apple users will be wowed by a new look than ...

Last week The Wall Street Journal laid off about a dozen tech reporters and editors — not on the fun side, where folks like Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen work, but on the straight news side. Chris Roush at Talking Biz News obtained a memo sent to the staff from WSJ editor-i...

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A clip from this 2016 interview with Marco Rubio — then a candidate for the Republican presidential primary, today Trump’s secretary of state — by CNN’s Jake Tapper is making the rounds on social media. It’s extraordinary. I’m linking here to the full video, hosted on Rubio’...

Andrew Boynton, head of copy at The New Yorker: Keen-eyed grammar fans may notice some changes in our pages — and in this newsletter. Last fall, David Remnick, the editor, suggested convening a group to talk about the magazine’s house style, to see if any rules might bea...

If these caps were a student project it’d get an F. Who thinks you can print one logo on top of another? They look like mistakes, like caps that got run through the embroidery machine twice. The only good one is for the “ASHOS”, which comes close to the actual word everyone uses for that team of cheaters.

Update, 3pm ET: It looks like maybe MLB and New Era (the hatmakers) have put the whole lineup of caps out of their misery.

Link: sbnation.com/mlb/2025/3/10/24382064/mlb-new-overlap-hats…

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Josh Marshall:

I think more than anything I admired Kevin’s restraint and his caution. Blogging is a hustle and the incentives for hyperbole and breathlessness are endless. That makes most people easy to ignore. But Kevin — who had a whole career in the normal-person rat race before he started this — sweated the details. He had a serious mind for facts and numbers and he knew how to work with data. His posts were always overflowing with numbers and charts and levels of detail and nitty gritty I couldn’t pile into my brain because I was too scattered and unfocused. When he said something, you had to take it seriously. When he disagreed with you, you knew it was time to re-check your work. Kevin was almost all signal and very little noise. That was his defining mark.

Link: talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/remembering-kevin-drum

Marian Drum, posting yesterday on Kevin Drum’s site: With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025. No public memorial services are planned. In lieu of flowers, please donate to th...

Jon Prosser, in a YouTube video with mocked-up animations showing exactly what he’s talking about, 51 days ago: Today we have your very first exclusive look at the changes coming to iOS 19 — with a redesigned camera app and possibly ... a redesigned iOS. Basic idea is ...

Upgrade:

It’s been a quiet week, so John Gruber briefly joins Jason to discuss Apple’s AI delay, new Macs, new iPads, and the future of Apple regulation worldwide.

Recorded earlier today, so it covers, somehow, all of last week’s Apple news — and last week was a kind of crazy week in Appletown. I even squeezed in some parenting advice for Myke Hurley, who’s out on paternity leave.

Link: relay.fm/upgrade/554

Craig Hockenberry returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s new hardware this week — M3 iPad Airs, A16 regular iPads, M4 MacBook Airs, and the M4 Max and surprising M3 Ultra Mac Studios. And we go deep on The Iconfactory’s years-in-the-making new app, Tapestry — a universal timeline for the Internet.

Exclusively sponsored by:

• Google Gemini: Chat to supercharge your ideas.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/03/08/ep-418

This whole 1989 profile of Albert “Cubby” Broccoli by John Culhane for the LA Times is full of enjoyable nuggets, but this fact blew my mind: Giovanni Broccoli and his brother emigrated to Long Island from Calabria at the turn of the century. According to research done i...

Pierce, David Pierce:

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about the future of Bond. (James Bond.) John Gruber, the author of Daring Fireball and a preeminent Bond expert, joins the show to talk about Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, its struggles with the Broccoli family over what to do with the Bond franchise, and why so many fans of the series are worried about what might happen when a company like Amazon takes over a beloved name. Will Bond turn out like Marvel, or Star Wars? Or something else entirely? We’ll see — but history suggests we shouldn’t be too optimistic.

I’m deeply pessimistic about the future of the Bond franchise, but I do love talking and thinking about it. Really enjoyed this chat.

Link: theverge.com/the-vergecast/623633/james-bond-amazon…

Simon Willison: These new Apple Intelligence features involve Siri responding to requests to access information in applications and then performing actions on the user’s behalf. This is the worst possible combination for prompt injection attacks! Any time an LLM-based s...

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac: Since last fall, Apple has been marketing the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence with an unreleased Siri feature. After confirming today that the more personal version of Siri isn’t coming anytime soon, Apple has pulled the ad in question. The commercia...

Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters: Some artificial intelligence improvements to Apple’s voice assistant Siri will be delayed until 2026, the company said on Friday. In a statement, Apple said it has “been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness...

Here’s a statement I got this morning from Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy, verbatim: “Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri a...

Nate Silver, writing at his Silver Bulletin: Last night, as President Trump delivered his State of the Union address, the Wall Street Journal reported that ABC News would lay off the remaining staff at 538 as part of broader cuts within corporate parent Disney. Having be...

Oliver Darcy, reporting at Status (paywalled, alas), on the sudden demise of FiveThirtyEight: On Wednesday morning, shortly after sending an all-staff memo announcing layoffs at ABC News, network president Almin Karamehmedovic joined a virtual meeting with the FiveThirty...

Jason Snell, at Six Colors: With the M4 Mac mini being powerfully tempting for desktop Mac users who crave power, Apple has upgraded the Mac Studio to blast past the mini in terms of performance. The base model, still starting at $1999, is powered by the M4 Max chip prev...

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: Let’s start with the surprises. Both M4 MacBook Air models are priced $100 less than their predecessors: $1199 for the 15-inch model and $999 for the 13-incher. If I’m not mistaken, this is the first time that the new-generation design...

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg on 6 December 2024, regarding Apple’s first in-house cellular modem, “Apple Plans Three-Year Modem Rollout in Bid to Top Qualcomm”: For now, the modem won’t be used in Apple’s higher-end products. It’s set to come to a new mid-tier iP...

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg, on January 12: The new entry-level iPads — J481 and J482 — will get faster processors and Apple Intelligence. The current models have the A14 chip and 4 gigabytes of memory. Look for the new versions to have the A17 Pro ...