Chinese AI lab DeepSeek made waves last week when they dropped their new “open reasoning” LLM named R1. But over the weekend the full repercussions of their achievements (plural) began to sink in across the industry. My partner-in-Dithering Ben Thompson has written an extrao...

Joe Rossignol, writing at MacRumors on Thursday:

Apple’s website said the first vehicle models with support for next-generation CarPlay would “arrive in 2024,” but that did not happen. A little more than three weeks into 2025, Apple has now updated its website in the U.S. to remove that 2024 timeframe from the next-generation CarPlay section of its overall CarPlay page.

It’s good that they updated this page last week, because it really was starting to look unlikely they’d hit their 2024 ship date.

Link: macrumors.com/2025/01/23/apple-removes-2024-from-next-gen…

10 years ago I ran a sponsorship from Meh, a then-new daily deals site from the founders of Woot (the OG daily deals site). In my thank-you post to Meh a decade ago, “I’ve been selling weekly DF RSS feed sponsorships since 2007 — just a hair under 400 consecutive weeks. I’ve...

Ben Stiller, on X, posted a short video with Tim Cook as a severed employee at Lumon Industries. Very fun, and it’s really the only thing on people’s minds about Tim Cook lately — that he’s a fun guy. Definitely the only thing people are thinking about him lately.

Sebastiaan de With, on Threads:

The Tim Cook Severance promo is wild because I always felt like the show could be about Apple - a company with such a deep, crazy culture of secrecy that they’d be the first to opt for severed employees in the workforce.

Also, my work there was always mysterious and important.

Update: Also, pitch-perfect aesthetic and tone on this video Lumon Industries posted to LinkedIn. LinkedIn is definitely the Lumon-iest social network.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=wA75GsU4Neg

Dominic Preston, writing for The Verge, “Oppo’s Next Foldable Is About as Thin as USB-C Allows”: Oppo has been steadily teasing the Find N5 on Chinese social network Weibo for the past week. Find series product manager Zhou Yibao has now shared photos that highlight its ...

Jessica Lessin, writing for The Information back in 2014: Ms. Vorrath, who has worked on all seven iOS releases, generally operates by asking lots of questions of engineers, sticking to the facts and getting them to explain in plain English why a particular feature shoul...

Mark Gurman has an interesting scoop at Bloomberg: Apple Inc. executive Kim Vorrath, a company veteran known for fixing troubled products and bringing major projects to market, has a new job: whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape. Vorrath, a vice presiden...

Sareen Habeshian and Russell Contreras, reporting for Axios, “Mayor Accuses ICE of Detaining Vet, U.S. Citizens in N.J. Immigration Raid”: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided a Newark, New Jersey, business venue on Thursday and detained undocumented i...

If you’re the sort of reader who reads new articles here as soon as they’re posted, you might have missed footnote 4 today. I’ll delete this post in a few hours, but for now here’s the footnote for your convenience: When this Apple-OpenAI partnership was announced, there...

Writing about the current state of Apple Intelligence yesterday, I mentioned how utterly stupid and laughably wrong Siri is when asked the simple question, “Who won Super Bowl 13?”, and mentioned that that particular example came from a friend. That friend was Paul Kafasis, ...

I sold Woot to Amazon and they made it shitty. So I quit. Then I got bored.

I started A Mediocre Corporation with a few others from Woot. We just launched a classic daily deal site — only one thing for sale each day. Meh.

Oh, and since you seem to be into RSS, we put one together just for you, at meh.com/deals.rss. Of course you can also just go to meh.com.

Link: meh.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=rss&utm…

Apple: Click the amount you wish to contribute, then click Donate and Apple will transfer 100% of your contribution to the American Red Cross in support of people impacted by the 2025 Southern California wildfires. Apple has prominent links to its Red Cross donation fo...

From a multi-byline profile of Stephen Miller in The New York Times last week: Mr. Miller told Mr. Zuckerberg that he had an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s terms. He made clear that Mr. Trump would crack down on i...

Alan Rozenshtein, writing for Lawfare: While Apple and Google maintained their compliance, Oracle and Akamai made the remarkable decision to resume services, despite facing potentially catastrophic liability rates. Shortly after his inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump followe...

From Apple’s developer release notes for iOS 18.3, now at release candidate (RC) status: For users new or upgrading to iOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during iPhone onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting...

Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR, under the dreadfully incorrect headline “Trump Signs Executive Order to Pause TikTok Ban, Provide Immunity to Tech Firms”: According to the order, the law will be paused for 75 days and companies that work with TikTok will not be liable fo...

Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR: According to the order, the law will be paused for 75 days and companies that work with TikTok will not be liable for doing so. I take issue with this framing. The order does not pause the law, because executive orders can’t “pause” laws...

Apple Support document, which is linked from the App Store if you search for any of the apps from ByteDance: Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates. Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications ...

Good takes on some unpleasant current events, and one of the best brief eulogies for Jimmy Carter I’ve heard.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=57pGarTBJrU

Wesley Hilliard, writing for AppleInsider regarding Edits, Meta’s pre-announced mobile-first video editing app: Despite that, many apps and features on iPhone toe the line between fun tool and social platform. One of those tools was Clips, which arrived in 2017 to little...

Wes Davis, writing at The Verge, under the headline “Instagram Announces a Blatant CapCut Clone”: Instagram head Adam Mosseri just announced a video editing app called Edits. Mosseri said the app is meant to rival CapCut, a video editing app that went offline along with ...

Interesting selection of Martin Luther King Jr. quotes they’ve chosen for the homepage (PDF archive for posterity):

• “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.”
• “You must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.”
• “We cannot preserve self without being concerned about preserving other selves.”

Read into those quotes what you will, given today’s other national significance. I think there’s an implied message here, but it’s subtle. I’ll pick a different quote from King, one that I believe better speaks to the current moment:

“The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.”

Link: apple.com/

Tim Cook on X: Dr. King once said, “Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.” True greatness lies in lifting others, making a difference, and serving with purpose. Let’s honor his legacy by finding ways to serve and create a better world together. Curious t...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bots attacks and brute force attempts?

WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. Their simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior.

Your users trust you. Keep it that way. Check out WorkOS Radar today.

Link: workos.com/radar?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=RSS…

Unsurprisingly, time expired without ByteDance selling TikTok, so the U.S. ban went into effect last night at midnight and (also unsurprisingly) it’s been chaotic and confusing. TikTok was down, but now (as I type this Sunday afternoon) it’s back. Sort of. First, the whole ...

Tom Warren, The Verge: Earlier this month you could search for “Google” on Bing and get a page that looked a lot like Google, complete with a special search bar, an image resembling a Google Doodle, and even some small text under the search bar just like Google search. ...

Tim Hardwick, last week for MacRumors, “Apple Smart Home Hub Launch Possibly Delayed Until Later in Year”: Apple’s long-rumoured smart home hub or “command center” may not arrive in the spring as previously expected, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. [...] Apple ori...

Joanna Stern, in her weekly Tech Things newsletter for the WSJ:

Despite what my iPhone’s frequent notification summaries report, my husband isn’t messy, he isn’t sad and he definitely didn’t take out the garbage — because, again, I don’t have one. Wife? Yes. Husband? No.

As part of Apple Intelligence, the company rolled out these AI-powered summaries. Instead of scrolling through a mountain of missed alerts, you get little condensed summaries, grouped by app. Great concept, not quite “intelligent” execution.

Link: techthings.cmail20.com/t/d-e-sjrttn-dykjyuhruh-r/

A few days ago Nokia unveiled their Design Archive at Aalto University in Finland. Fahad X spotted a real gem — an internal confidential slide deck shared within the company the day after Apple had introduced the original iPhone at Macworld Expo in January 2007. To the credi...

Kyle Wiggers, writing at TechCrunch: Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the chan...