Here’s a spoof commercial from the 1990 movie Crazy People, starring Dudley Moore and Daryl Hannah, which TMDB synopsizes:

A bitter ad executive, who has reached his breaking point, finds himself in a mental institution, where his career actually begins to thrive with the help of the hospital’s patients.

The New York Times would have you believe this is relevant to Apple’s supply chain reliance on China.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=96iJsdGkl44

David Heinemeier Hansson (last week): Thanks to their fight for Fortnite, app developers everywhere are now allowed to link out of apps to their own web-based payment system in the US store (but, sadly, nowhere else yet). This is all we ever wanted from Apple: to have a...

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring this last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.

Link: drata.com/daring

The New York Times ran a really dumb Tripp Mickle piece yesterday under the headline “Is Trump’s ‘Made in America’ iPhone a Fantasy?” The answer should have simply been “Yes, it’s sheer fantasy”, perhaps with explanations why. Instead, Mickle twists the piece into pretzels t...

Emma Roth, The Verge: Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, the handy bookmarking tool used to save articles and webpages for later. The organization announced that Pocket will stop working on July 8th, 2025, as Mozilla begins concentrating its “resources into projects that b...

The president of the United States on his blog: I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s [sic] that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else. If that is no...

Here’s a bit of an eye-opener from Anthropic’s “System Card” for its new Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet models: We conducted testing continuously throughout finetuning and here report both on the final Claude Opus 4 and on trends we observed earlier in training. We found: Li...

Anthropic: Today, we’re introducing the next generation of Claude models: Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, setting new standards for coding, advanced reasoning, and AI agents. Claude Opus 4 is the world’s best coding model, with sustained performance on complex, long-...

Juli Clover at MacRumors: To change your default app, you’ll need to install the latest version of the Google Translate app, which was released today. From there, you can open up the Settings app, select the Apps section, tap on Default Apps, tap Translation, and choose ...

Mark Gurman and Shirin Ghaffary, reporting yesterday for Bloomberg: Billionaire philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs is an io backer as well, through her firm the Emerson Collective. Other investors include Sutter Hill Ventures, Thrive Capital, Maverick Ventures and SV Ang...

MG Siegler, back on Sunday, before Judge Gonzales Rogers’s “settle this between yourselves or I’ll see you in court next week” order on Monday: Again, Sweeney is not a moron, he has to know all of this. But why simply sit quietly when you have an excuse to poke the bear...

PJ Vogt, in a very fun episode of his podcast, Search Engine:

A small group of Americans becomes convinced they’ve discovered something strange about their iPhones: a forbidden phrase the phone will refuse to transmit. A crack podcasting team searches for answers, wherever they may lead.

The bug is that if you send an audio voice message in Apple Messages, and mention the name “Dave & Busters”, the recipient will never receive the message. I had a good guess, right away, what was happening. But I don’t want to spoil it — it’s a fun listen.

But when you’re done listening, and you want a thorough explanation, check out Guilherme Rambo’s thorough investigation. So good.

Link: searchengine.show/the-dave-and-busters-anomaly/

The Daily Show:

Award-winning journalist Patrick McGee joins Jon Stewart to discuss how Apple built China in his new book Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. They talk about Apple “sleepwalking” into this crisis, building a competitive market in Xi Jinping’s authoritarian state, the vocational training that boosted rivals, how Trump’s attempted Apple boycott backfired, and whether investments may be facilitating the annexation of Taiwan.

Terrific interview. I’m a few chapters into the book, and it’s good. McGee’s a good writer and a serious reporter — the depth of his research shows. It feels not like a few stories padded out to book length, but instead the distillation of a complex story that demands an entire book to tell.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=NAj9zB4vaZc

The Sunday Times of London ran a good excerpt from Patrick McGee’s Apple in China (News+ link, in case you need it): The ripple effect from Apple’s investments across Chinese industry was accelerated by a rule imposed by Apple that its suppliers could be no more than 50 ...

Barry Ritholtz, in an excerpt from his brand-new book, How Not to Invest, marking the occasion of the 24th anniversary of Cliff Edwards’s claim chowder hall of famer, predicting doom for Apple’s then-new foray into its own chain of retail stores: There are many genuinely...

No details on what yet, but a lovely little 9-minute video on why. Sam Altman: “What it means to use technology can change in a profound way. I hope we can bring some of the delight, wonder and creative spirit that I first felt using an Apple Computer 30 years ago.” J...

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: After a nearly five-year hiatus, Fortnite is back on the App Store for iPhone and iPad users in the United States. Epic Games announced the return of the battle royale gaming app this afternoon, and you can head to the App Store now to download it...

Taegan Goddard:

When Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem for the definition of “habeas corpus,” Noem incorrectly described it as a right that the President of the United States has to deport people.

You can go the Latin route (“produce the body”) or the English common-law route (the accused have a right to be shown the evidence against them and defend themselves in court). Noem went the “biggest clown of the clown-car Trump 2.0 administration” route.

Link: politicalwire.com/2025/05/20/kristi-noem-doesnt-know-what…

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

With Apple blocking Fortnite from returning to the U.S. App Store, Epic Games told the court that Apple was violating the injunction and asked that Apple be forced to approve the app. The judge overseeing the case responded to Epic’s request today, and she is sounding more and more fed up with Apple’s continued defiance and Epic’s grousing.

“More and more fed up” is perhaps euphemistic, given Gonzalez Rogers’s tone today.

Link: macrumors.com/2025/05/19/apple-fortnite-us-app-store…

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

Link: drata.com/daring

John Siracusa, in a piece that, in a bit of rhetorical deftness, only mentions Tim Cook by name once: What should be motivating Apple to make improvements — the desire to make great products — seems absent. What should not be motivating Apple — the desire for power, cont...

The reader who sent me this video said, “I’ve never seen a more Star Wars + Gruber combo on Instagram” and — right down to the profanity — I have to agree.

Link: instagram.com/reel/DJZ7uYbvN_O/?igsh=aWZhaGZham1zNWlp

The president of the United States, on his blog: Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT...

Rolfe Winkler and Yang Jie, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link, but also here’s a News+ link): Apple is weighing price increases for its fall iPhone lineup, a step it is seeking to couple with new features and design changes, accord...

Some “thank god some of you remembered because I thought I was going nuts” follow-up regarding my remembrance the other day, “15 Years Later: ‘Very Insightful and Not Negative’”. I wrote: So, what would you do if Steve Jobs was quoted in a viral blog post saying, “We thi...

My thanks to Bolt for sponsoring last week at DF. You can prompt, run, edit, and deploy full-stack web and mobile apps with Bolt, the AI-powered web development agent that brings coding to your browser.

Bolt lets you build, edit, and test web applications in real time with simple, chat-based prompts. No experience needed.

Super-simple, super-fun. Try it yourself at Bolt.new.

Link: srv.buysellads.com/ads/long/x…

Month-old news but I’m cleaning up tabs today. I love everything about this pickup except the fact that it doesn’t have a speaker system built-in. No one wants to put a Bluetooth boombox in their cabin and, worse, isn’t that sort of an obvious safety hazard? You get in a cra...

Tyler Pager, The New York Times: Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was diagnosed Friday with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his office said in a statement on Sunday. The diagnosis came after Mr. Biden reported urinary symptoms, wh...

There’s an accompanying blog post too, but the video (around 18 minutes) is (unsurprisingly, from Top Gear) better. It’s just a great tour of everything from how you set it up to what it offers, and what the various “themes” look like — and how you switch between them. The ...

Scheduled to drop Monday, but you can click-through to pre-download it now. If you’re not familiar, Puzzmo is sort of a collection of “newspaper puzzle games for the online age”. (Which is also a good description for recent DF sponsor Lex.Games.) One of Puzzmo’s cofounders i...