AnnaMaria Andriotis, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link): The Apple card is up for grabs because Goldman Sachs, the bank behind it, is getting out of the consumer lending world. For months, big banks including JPMorgan Chase and Synchrony Financial have be...

Mike Masnick has a great piece at TechDirt running down just how stupid everything about Trump’s tariff trade war is: Whoever on the Council of Economic Advisers used this formula should turn in their econ degree, because this is not how anything works. Even if they then...

The Economist: On economics Mr Trump’s assertions are flat-out nonsense. The president says tariffs are needed to close America’s trade deficit, which he sees as a transfer of wealth to foreigners. Yet as any of the president’s economists could have told him, this overal...

CNBC: Markets plunged the day after President Donald Trump imposed a far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy, including a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country on earth. The plan slaps much steeper tariff rates on many countries, including 34% on China, 20% on th...

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.

Link: latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2025-04-01…

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.

Link: coyotetracks.org/blog/app-feel-on-mac/

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?

Link: sixcolors.com/post/2025/04/my-unsuccessful-journey-into…

“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.

Link: protectdemocracy.org/

Jon Brodkin, reporting for Ars Technica, “France Fines Apple €150M for “Excessive” Pop-Ups That Let Users Reject Tracking”: France’s competition regulator fined Apple €150 million, saying the iPhone maker went overboard in its implementation of pop-up messages that let u...

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.

Link: 9to5mac.com/2025/03/31/ios-18-4-now-available-heres-whats…

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...

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...

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.”

Link: vertu.com/product-category/phones/

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.)

Link: wsj.com/tech/ai/the-real-story-behind-sam-altman-firing…

With season 2 of Severance complete (with a remarkable bang), Apple TV+ has slid right into a new prestige series, The Studio, starring (and co-created by) Seth Rogen as the newly-appointed chief of the fictional and dysfunctional Continental Studios in Hollywood. Two episo...

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?

Link: birchtree.me/blog/this-alert-must-die/

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.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=O569FVCoPYc

“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...

Back in 2017, the iPhone X was announced alongside the iPhones 8 and 8 Plus in mid-September. The iPhones 8 shipped that month, and I published a review of the iPhones 8 on September 19. The iPhone X, though, wasn’t available to order until October 27, and didn’t start shipp...

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.

Link: apple.com/mac/lumon-terminal-pro/

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.

Link: goodreads.com/work/quotes/23497-the-origins-of…

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...