Julian Chokkattu, writing for Wired: You can’t mount a cinema camera on a Formula One race car. These nimble vehicles are built to precise specs, and capturing racing footage from the driver’s point of view isn’t as simple as slapping a GoPro on and calling it a day. Tha...

Cynthia Littleton, in a long profile for Variety: When pressed about what Apple’s investments in movies and TV shows have meant for the company as a whole, Cook explains that Apple is at heart “a toolmaker,” delivering computers and other devices that enable creativity i...

“This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away — to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. What he was doing. Adventure. Heh! Excitement. Heh! A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless!” —Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back My b...

Peter Kafka: So in March, when Gruber announced that Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino — focusing on Apple’s botched plans to imbue its ailing Siri service with state-of-the-art AI — lots of people paid attention. Including, apparently, folks at the very top ...

Nicolas Lellouche, writing for the French-language site Numerama (block quote below is from Safari’s English translation) (via Joe Rossignol at MacRumors): What is the problem with Europe? Apple does not explain it very clearly, but suggests that the European Union’s req...

John Voorhees, writing at MacStories, regarding a new command-line transcription tool cleverly named Yap written by his son Finn last week during WWDC: On the way, Finn filled me in on a new class in Apple’s Speech framework called SpeechAnalyzer and its SpeechTranscribe...

Bungie: Through every comment and real-time conversation on social media and Discord, your voice has been strong and clear. We’ve taken this to heart, and we know we need more time to craft Marathon into the game that truly reflects your passion. After much discussion wi...

Apple executives were a little light on substantial interviews last week, but a good one dropped today — Craig Federighi talking to Federico Viticci on the vast Mac-style windowing overhaul in iPadOS 26: “We don’t want to create a boat car or, you know, a spork”, Federig...

You may recall from my “Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber” piece back in January that the Dickinson Public Schools District in North Dakota had the rather unfortunate nickname the “Midgets”. Back in March, the school district announced they’d be retiring the nickname, after nearly a century. Last month they announced their new name: the Mavericks. I’m going to call this the best rebranding of the year.

We still have the Estherville, Iowa Midgets to cheer for. But even better: the Yuma Criminals in Arizona. Now that’s a nickname.

Link: inforum.com/news/north-dakota/dickinson-high-to-retire…

Simon Willison, regarding the various rebuttals to “The Illusion of Thinking” research paper (which I linked to here) from Apple’s machine learning team: I thought this paper got way more attention than it warranted — the title “The Illusion of Thinking” captured the att...

WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, back in 2012 (two years before Facebook acquired them for $19 billion, 13 years before this week’s introduction of ads into WhatsApp): Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption...

These screens make for a useful overview of what Apple thinks the highlight features are in each OS.

Link: 512pixels.net/2025/06/wwdc25-the-bento-boxes/

Aric Toler, a visual investigations reporter for The New York Times, on X back in April:

For about a year, I worked with a retired British academic named Alasdair Spark to solve a mystery: where did the original photo from the end of The Shining come from, and where/when was it captured?

Last week, we finally found the answer.

See also: This post from 2012 about the original photograph, from (who else?) Lee Unkrich.

Link: x.com/AricToler/status/1908610058318991581

Fred Lambert, writing for Electrek: Bloomberg has just released an embarrassingly bad report about the self-driving space, in which it claimed Tesla has an advantage over Waymo by misrepresenting data. [...] The report compares Tesla’s and Waymo’s self-driving efforts, g...

Nice piece in Fast Company by Zachary Petit:

One critical moment came in February 2010, when J. Crew featured Field Notes in its catalog, alongside the retailer’s other “personal favorites from our design heroes.” There was a Timex watch, Ray-Bans, Sperry shoes — “and out of fucking nowhere, Field Notes,” Coudal says. “And when that happened, a lot changed for us.”

Coudal says it gave the brand instant credibility — after all, if it was good enough for J. Crew, it was good enough for your store. In time, friends began sending him screenshots of Field Notes in TV shows; he and Draplin would see people jotting notes in them in bars and elsewhere; on the design web, they became an obsession. By 2014, there was even a subreddit dedicated to them titled “FieldNuts.”

Link: fastcompany.com/91352848/field-notes-cult-notebook-started…

Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.

Link: drata.com/daring

Todd Spangler, Variety: Meanwhile, the Trump Mobile “47 Plan” is pricier than the unlimited plans from prepaid services operated by Verizon’s Visible, AT&T’s Cricket Wireless and T-Mobile’s Metro, which are each around $40 per month. The Trump T1 Phone, which runs G...

Eli Tan and Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times:

On Monday, WhatsApp said it would start showing ads inside its app for the first time. The promotions will appear only in an area of the app called Updates, which is used by around 1.5 billion people a day. WhatsApp will collect some data on users to target the ads, such as location and the device’s default language, but it will not touch the contents of messages or whom users speak with. The company added that it had no plans to place ads in chats and personal messages.

(a) I’ve never once looked at the Updates tab in WhatsApp; (b) does anyone believe they’re not going to put ads in the other tabs sooner or later?

Link: nytimes.com/2025/06/16/technology/whatsapp-ads.html…

My thanks to DetailsPro for sponsoring last week at DF — including being a sponsor on The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2025. DetailsPro is a designer/developer tool that lets you design with SwiftUI anytime, anywhere — from iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro, and, of course, Mac.

With WWDC 2025’s introduction of Liquid Glass, Apple has introduced the biggest design overhaul since iOS 7. DetailsPro is ready for it, enabling you to prototype new and updated interfaces fast. You can build real SwiftUI layouts directly on your iPhone — no code needed. Export clean SwiftUI code straight to Xcode when you’re ready.

While everyone else is still thinking about how to adapt to the Liquid Glass era, you can already be building. DetailsPro is free to use, with pro features if you need them — via subscription, or a one-time purchase.

Link: detailspro.app?utm_campaign=dfwwdc25/

Recorded in front of a live audience at The California Theatre in San Jose Tuesday evening, special guests Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel join me to discuss Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2025. 3D video with spatial audio: Coming soon, exclusively in Sandwich Vision’s Theate...

Amanda Silberling, writing at TechCrunch: When you ask the AI a question, you have the option of hitting a share button, which then directs you to a screen showing a preview of the post, which you can then publish. But some users appear blissfully unaware that they are s...

Kashmir Hill, reporting today for The New York Times: Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres’s sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool. That’s the lede to Hill’s piece, and I don’t think i...

Michael Tsai, “Apple’s Spin on AI and iPadOS Multitasking”: I do want to call out that, in multiple interviews, they are kind of setting up strawmen to knock down. They keep saying that people say Apple is behind in AI because it doesn’t have its own chatbot. To me, Appl...

Dan Moren, writing this week at Six Colors:

But you’ve heard about all of that, I’m sure, so we’re not going to rehash it. Instead, let’s get personal: I’m picking out, in my opinion, the best and worst new features of each of Apple’s platforms. To be clear, these are my completely scientific and totally well-reasoned expert opinions on the features that were announced, not just some off-the-cuff reactions less than a day later.

Link: sixcolors.com/post/2025/06/the-good-bad-and-weird-of-apples…

Fun episode of Tested with Adam Savage and Norman Chan. The first segment goes deep on what’s new in VisionOS 26. Apple is ignoring the jokes about the platform’s relative obscurity and has obviously been heads-down on building the platform out and up. VisionOS 26 is a huge ...

MG Siegler:

The underlying message that they’re trying to convey in all these interviews is clear: calm down, this isn’t a big deal, you guys are being a little crazy. And that, in turn, aims to undercut all the reporting about the turmoil within Apple — for years at this point — that has led to the situation with Siri. Sorry, the situation which they’re implying is not a situation. Though, I don’t know, normally when a company shakes up an entire team, that tends to suggest some sort of situation. That, of course, is never mentioned. Nor would you expect Apple — of all companies — to talk openly and candidly about internal challenges. But that just adds to this general wafting smell in the air.

The smell of bullshit.

Link: spyglass.org/spyglasslighting/

Jason Snell:

After last year, Apple could’ve been forgiven for wanting to soft-pedal this year’s Apple Intelligence announcements and regroup. It didn’t do that, nor did it double down on last year. Instead, it’s chosen a middle ground — a bit safe and familiar but also a place where Apple can feel a bit more like itself. In the long run, it needs to get this right. In the short term, maybe it should focus on meeting its users where they are, rather than pretending to be something it’s not.

Agree with Snell’s take completely, I do.

Link: sixcolors.com/post/2025/06/apple-intelligence-shifts-gears/

Stephen Hackett has a list of the Intel Macs that MacOS 26 Tahoe supports, and the ones they’re dropping support for this year. Apple has gone through three CPU architecture transitions in the Mac’s history: 68K to PowerPC starting in 1994 PowerPC to Intel starting in 20...

Tight 7-minute video at the WSJ (and also at YouTube):

Apple’s AI rollout has been rocky, from Siri delays to underwhelming Apple Intelligence features. WSJ’s Joanna Stern sits down with software chief Craig Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak to talk about the future of AI at Apple — and what the heck happened to that smarter Siri.

Update: Here’s the full 24-minute interview. Just an excellent job by Stern.

Link: wsj.com/video/series/joanna-stern-personal-technology/apple…

Ben Thompson:

To that end, while I understand why many people were underwhelmed by this WWDC, particularly in comparison to the AI extravaganza that was Google I/O, I think it was one of the more encouraging Apple keynotes in a long time. Apple is a company that went too far in too many areas, and needed to retreat. Focusing on things only Apple can do is a good thing; empowering developers and depending on partners is a good thing; giving even the appearance of thoughtful thinking with regards to the App Store (it’s a low bar!) is a good thing. Of course we want and are excited by tech companies promising the future; what is a prerequisite is delivering in the present, and it’s a sign of progress that Apple retreated to nothing more than that.

Link: stratechery.com/2025/apple-retreats/