Jay Peters, The Verge, under the headline “Epic Says Fortnite Is Coming Back to iOS in the US”: Following a court order that blocks Apple from taking a commission on purchases made outside the App Store, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says on X that the company plans to brin...

Are the results of this disastrous for Apple’s App Store business? I don’t think so at all. Gonzales Rogers is demanding that Apple ... do what Phil Schiller recommended they do all along. But are the results of this disastrous for Apple’s reputation and credibility? It sure seems like it.

Craig Mod returns to the show to discuss his splendid new book, Things Become Other Things. Other topics include creating with AI tools (including programming), social media permanence vs. ephemerality, and more.

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Mark Wilson, writing for Fast Company:

Pope Francis’s tomb is simple by design. Francis — a modest man who opted to live in humble quarters alongside his peers rather than in the Vatican’s official housing for the leader of the church — requested nothing more than his name and a cross to adorn regional marble (“the stone of Liguria, the land of his grandparents”). Vatican News goes as far as to position this stone, not the most premium, as “the people’s stone.”

It really is quietly beautiful. But atop that marble is a tomb inscribed with the name “Franciscus.” Or what — due to terrible spacing between letters, known as kerning — reads something more like “F R A NCIS VS.”

Fast Company’s headline reads “The Kerning on the Pope’s Tomb Is a Travesty”, but travesty is not the right word. The right word is sin.

Jeff Horwitz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link): To boost the popularity of these souped-up chatbots, Meta has cut deals for up to seven-figures with celebrities like actresses Kristen Bell and Judi Dench and wrestler-turned-actor John Cena for the right...

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It’s hard to come up with a buyer who could afford to pay a high price for Chrome and who would pass regulatory muster as its new owner. And if Chrome is not worth a high price, or simply isn’t sellable at one, then why is the DOJ trying to force Google to sell it? They might as well try to force Google to sell the two o’s from its name.

Om Malik: Some of us are old enough to remember that the reason Mark renamed the company is because the Facebook brand was becoming toxic, and associated with misinformation and global-scale crap. It was viewed as a tired, last-generation company. Meta allowed the compan...

Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:

Meta has laid off an unspecified number of employees in its Reality Labs division, a company spokesperson confirmed. The cuts affected teams working in Oculus Studios, Meta’s in-house games division for Quest headsets, as well as some employees involved in the company’s hardware efforts, according to people familiar with the matter.

According to Bloomberg it was “more than 100”.

I’m so old I remember when Facebook renamed itself Meta because the “metaverse” was supposedly the future of the company and, so said Mark Zuckerberg, the future of computing itself. Now, when Zuck goes on Joe Rogan’s podcast and chats for three hours, the metaverse thing doesn’t come up once, not even once, even in passing.

It’s enough to make one suspect Zuck isn’t a straight shooter.

Paying for Kagi today feels a *lot* like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday.

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, in last night’s closing statement:

“Stories we’ve pursued for 57 years are often controversial: lately, the Israel-Gaza war and the Trump administration. Bill made sure they were accurate and fair. He was tough that way.”

“But our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”

“No one here is happy about it. But in resigning, Bill proved one thing: He was the right person to lead ‘60 Minutes’ all along.”

Every single executive at Paramount should be ashamed, starting at the top, with the loathsome and cowardly Shari Redstone.

Airbnb CEO (and founder) Brian Chesky, back in October in an interview with Nilay Patel, regarding Tim Cook’s eventual successor: This goes to the very awkward thing that no one wants to talk about. Succession planning is hard because the people that are great product vi...

Majin Bu: According to my source, Apple is gearing up for another major leap forward. With iPadOS 19 and iOS 19, expected in 2025, the gap between iPad, iPhone, and Mac continues to shrink. [...] One of the most exciting changes will benefit those using the iPad with a M...

The Financial Times:

Apple plans to shift the assembly of all US-sold iPhones to India as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the matter, as President Donald Trump’s trade war forces the tech giant to pivot away from China.

The push builds on Apple’s strategy to diversify its supply chain but goes further and faster than investors appreciate, with a goal to source from India the entirety of the more than 60mn iPhones sold annually in the US by the end of 2026.

The target would mean doubling the iPhone output in India, after almost two decades in which Apple spent heavily in China to create a world-beating production line that powered its rise into a $3tn tech giant.

Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas): Earlier this year, Chinese authorities refused to allow one of Apple’s Chinese equipment suppliers to export machinery to India that Apple needed for the upcoming iPhone 17’s trial production, according to two pe...

Andrew Leonard, writing for Salon back in 2013: The first thing wrong with the stupidest article to be posted to the Internet in the year 2013 — and possibly the entire century — is the title: “I Was Quite Surprised By Some Things On My American Airlines International ‘E...

Henry Blodget, who sold Business Insider to German publishing giant Axel Springer for $340 million a decade ago, has supposedly launched a new site, Regenerator, built on Substack. I was going to tack on an “alas” re: building on Substack, but maybe this is the sort of thin...

From the European Commission’s announcement today, “Commission closes investigation into Apple’s user choice obligations and issues preliminary findings on rules for alternative apps under the Digital Markets Act”: Under the DMA, Apple is required to allow for the distri...

Reuters:

“This novel form of economic extortion will not be tolerated by the United States,” a White House spokesperson said. “Extraterritorial regulations that specifically target and undermine American companies, stifle innovation, and enable censorship will be recognized as barriers to trade and a direct threat to free civil society.”

Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, reporting for The New York Times: CBS News entered a new period of turmoil on Tuesday after the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, said he would resign from the long-running Sunday news program, citing encroachments o...

The European Commission: Today, the European Commission found that Apple breached its anti-steering obligation under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and that Meta breached the DMA obligation to give consumers the choice of a service that uses less of their personal data. ...

Kalley Huang and Erin Woo, reporting for The Information (via Ed Zitron, who summarized it on Bluesky): Meta Platforms over the past year asked Microsoft, Amazon and others to help pay the costs of training Meta’s flagship large language model, Llama, according to four p...

Just in case you haven’t had enough of me on various recent podcasts, I had the pleasure of joining hosts Dan Barbera and Hartley Charlton on The MacRumors Show, talking mostly about Apple Intelligence and the future of the Vision platform. Fun!

Larry David, in a column for The New York Times:

He loved that story, especially the part where Hitler shot the dog before it got back into the car. Then a beaming Hitler said, “Hey, if I can kill Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, I can certainly kill a dog!” That perhaps got the biggest laugh of the night — and believe me, there were plenty.

I have been reliably informed that, having linked approvingly to Bill Maher’s “book report” on his dinner with Trump, I must also link to David’s report of dinner with Adolf.

Radek Sienkiewicz:

If you pay attention to AI company branding, you’ll notice a pattern:

1. Circular shape (often with a gradient)
2. Central opening or focal point
3. Radiating elements from the center
4. Soft, organic curves

Sound familiar? It should, because it’s also an apt description of ... well, you know.

A butthole.

Jeff Stein, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Cat Zakrzewski, reporting for The Washington Post: As President Donald Trump’s enormous new tariffs on China rippled through global supply chains, Apple CEO Tim Cook went to work behind the scenes. Cook spoke to Commerce Secretary Howa...

Special guest Glenn Fleishman returns to the show for episode 420 on 4/20, but everyone’s sober, I swear. Topics include Trump’s dumb tariffs and Glenn’s smart new edition of his book Six Centuries of Type & Printing.

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My thanks to Dekáf Coffee Roasters for sponsoring last week at DF. Dekáf started with a simple question over a late-night cup of decaf: why do coffee lovers who skip the caffeine have to skip the craft too? Dekáf believes those who drink coffee purely for its flavor are the...

CNN: A federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s request that it halt the next steps Judge Paula Xinis is seeking to take in the case concerning a migrant who was wrongly deported to El Salvador, with a strident warning about the rule of law and the possi...

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

I’ve got three openings left through the end of June:

• April 21–27 (next week)
• May 12–18
• May 26–June 1

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.