Great roundup from The Verge: While Nintendo told us very little in the official reveal of the console in January, now we know when the Switch 2 is coming and how much it will cost at launch: June 5th and $449.99. We also have more hardware details and specs to pore over...

Stephen Battaglio, reporting for the LA Times:

MSNBC viewers have seen the last of Steve Kornacki’s big board.

The popular data maven has signed a deal with NBC that will expand his presence across the network’s news and sports divisions. But the new contract does not include working for MSNBC, which is being spun off into a new corporate entity formed by parent company Comcast.

They might as well just switch off the lights and lock the doors at MSNBC.

Watts Martin:

If we hold things to this list, programs like Nova, MarsEdit, and Apple Pages — canonical Mac-assed Mac apps — all do unsurprisingly smashingly. But Obsidian, the Electron-based program I’m writing in right now, does shockingly well, too. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code doesn’t do quite as well (most notably, it opens its settings “window” as an editor tab), but it does better than Sublime Text (which opens a text file for settings), and much better than the banana crazypants menu and icon design of the cross-platform e-book management program Calibre.

Martin has a good list here of fundamentals, but ultimately, you know it when you see it.

Jason Snell:

While the ads played on, I began creating a thought experiment: There’s a $10 difference between the ad and ad-free plans. If Mr. Netflix (he wears a top hat) came to my house and said, “Jason, I’ve got a great deal for you. I’m going to pay you $120 a year, and all you have to do is watch ads while you watch Netflix,” what would I do? When I started thinking about it, I thought it might be an interesting intellectual question. What would I accept in exchange for having Mean Mr. Netflix beam ads into every show I watch?

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

These are not just words, they are a pact. A civil contract. Not to party, not to policy, not to an ideology or an individual. It is a compact between a people, our people, and it is under threat. A democracy is a government of collective action by the people. Let this be a reminder, it is time to do more … before it is no more.

Daring Fireball is brought to you this week by the enduring and aspirational project that is democracy.

It’s like a consortium of sketchy pawn shops complaining to the authorities after a retailer successfully cracked down on an organized shoplifting/pickpocketing ring, and the authorities then fining the retailer for the damage to the pawnbrokers’ business fencing stolen goods — and for exposing the police as ineffective.

All out today:

• iOS 18.4 (priority notifications, lots of new languages and EU support for Apple Intelligence).
• MacOS 15.4 (AI message categorization in Apple Mail, Quick Start for setting up a new machine).
• VisionOS 2.4 (Apple Intelligence, new Spatial Gallery app, new Vision Pro sibling app for iPhone).
• WatchOS 11.4 (new Sleep Wake Up alarm option that will emit sound even when the watch is in silent mode).
• tvOS 18.4 (UI tweaks to TV app).

And the big new feature across all OSes: eight new emoji. Also, lots of new WebKit features.

Brian Steinberg and Pat Saperstein, reporting for Variety over the weekend: The White House Correspondents’ Association has canceled plans to have comedian Amber Ruffin perform at its annual dinner on April 26, a new sign of the pressures being brought to bear on news or...

My thanks to Lex Friedman for sponsoring this past week at DF to promote Lex.Games, a collection of eight daily word games. Quoting from Friedman’s own description in the sponsored RSS entry at the start of the week: I paid Gruber many thousands of dollars to run this ad...

Calfskin for $1,500, flip-foldables for $5,000, and whatever these are for a lot more. Who needs any sense (or a spelling checker) when you’ve got “elesant charisma / heroic essence”?

Or as I cited Andy Warhol back in 2012:

A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

See Also: This 2023 investigation by Andrew Williams for Wired, that more or less uncovers that today’s Vertu is just a brand snapped onto white-label phones made by ZTE: “Never before have I used a phone where I felt so unsafe, one that feels like it could be used to scam me — though, to be clear, I have no evidence that it is.”

Interesting excerpt at the WSJ from Keach Hagey’s upcoming book The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. (Main link is a gift link, but also here’s a News+ link.)

Perhaps Apple’s leadership simply believes, as I do, that cinema is the grandest and greatest form of art the world has ever seen — one that encompasses acting, writing, photography and/or illustration, and music — and but that great cinema is expensive and delicate and needs, from deep-pocketed studios and their deeper-pocketed corporate parents, more than patrons, but *champions*.

Matt Birchler:

I really thought that the screen recording notifications in macOS Sequoia would be the bane of my existence, but thankfully those have been changed quite a bit from the early betas last summer and they’re totally a non-issue in my book today. However, these god damned “turn on reactions” alerts have got to die in a fire, and they need to have done it yesterday.

I understand why Apple decided to show this once. Why though, is it seemingly designed to reappear every time I start a video call? Who is not annoyed by this?

MG Siegler: I’m not even talking about Apple and AI here. We’ve done that, a lot. Probably enough — for now (famous last words). I’m talking about Apple in general. Watching this OpenAI video — again, not an event, just a product walk-through with various team members (t...

You’ll never guess what cohosts Andru Edwards and Jon Rettinger talked to me about on their Geared Up podcast this week. OK, fine, you guessed it. But I bet you didn’t guess that Flash on iPhone came up. Very fun show — I think you’ll enjoy it.

“Flagging” isn’t what I was writing about yesterday, with regard to Daring Fireball’s unexplained ghosting at Hacker News in recent years. If you look at the list of recent DF articles at HN, only one is explicitly “flagged”. Whoops, now it’s two, but they’re both the same a...

What bothers me isn’t so much that Daring Fireball is shitlisted at Hacker News. What bothers me is that it’s unexplained.

Oliver Darcy, writing at Status (paywalled — great content, terrible CMS experience that keeps logging me out on all my devices and requires a stupid email magic link to get back in), in a brief interview with Atlantic editor-in-chief and man of the moment Jeffrey Goldberg: ...

The work remains mysterious and important.

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors: Apple’s next-generation CarPlay experience is still nowhere to be seen following Porsche’s announcement of a major upgrade of its infotainment system for 2026. The upcoming 2026 model year Porsche Taycan, 911, Panamera, and Cayenne feature a...

Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris, reporting once again for The Atlantic: Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.” President Donald Trump,...

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Eight years of Trump was going to be eight years too many no matter how it worked out, but the four year Biden term between Trump terms makes the difference clear. Trump corrected what he perceived as a lack of loyalty/fealty in his first term by surrounding himself with nothing but morons this time.

Paul Kafasis: Since they were first enabled last year, I have frequently found Apple Intelligence’s notification summaries for emails to be something less than helpful. Here are some I spotted in just the past few days. The first one of these is particularly interestin...

Josh Marshal, writing at Talking Points Memo: Especially in the national security domain, many things the government does have to remain secret. Sometimes those things remain secret for years or decades. But they’re not secrets from the U.S. government. The U.S. governme...

Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel, reporting for Politico: The app’s security is viewed as fairly strong due to its robust privacy features and minimal data collection, as well as default end-to-end encryption of all messages and voice calls. The app also includes a function...

NPR: Several days after top national security officials accidentally included a reporter in a Signal chat about bombing Houthi sites in Yemen, a Pentagon-wide advisory warned against using the messaging app, even for unclassified information. “A vulnerability has been i...

Thomas Barrabi, reporting for The New York Post: The European Union is set to slap Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta with a fine that could stretch to $1 billion or more for allegedly violating its strict antitrust rules, The Post has learned — setting up a possible showdown with P...

Foo Yun Chee, reporting for Reuters under the headline “Exclusive: Apple Set to Stave Off EU Fine Into Browser Options, Sources Say”: Apple is set to stave off a possible fine and an EU order over its browser options on iPhones after it made changes to comply with landma...

Apple Newsroom:

To celebrate the start of WWDC, Apple will also host an in-person experience on June 9 that will provide developers with the opportunity to watch the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union at Apple Park, meet with Apple experts one-on-one and in group labs, and take part in special activities. Space will be limited; details on how to apply to attend can be found on the WWDC25 website.

Right on time: in recent years, WWDC dates have been announced on:

• Tuesday 30 March 2021
• Tuesday 5 April 2022
• Wednesday 29 March 2023
• Tuesday 26 March 2024

and now today, Tuesday 25 March 2025. Last Tuesday in March next year is March 31 — that’s my guess for next year’s announcement.

And, yes, the “25” in the logo has a decidedly glassy look and some animation that’s just plain fun.

Bluesky is what Twitter of yore aspired to be.