Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire regarding pollster David Shor’s appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast: His surveys indicate a clear causal relationship: People who relied on TikTok for news were much more likely to swing toward Trump than those who got their infor...

Random Augustine has written a splendidly nerdy but very approachable overview of the evolution of Apple’s XNU kernel over the last decade: 2017 — Page Protection Layer With the release of the iPhone 8 and iPhone X containing the A11 processor, Apple introduced a securi...

Nick Heer: They are impressive, but my interpretation of statistics like these is that one often finds percentages used like this when neither actual number is very large. Nevertheless, another indication that browser choice screens can have a positive effect for smaller...

Ten years ago I bought a pair of Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro headphones for use while podcasting. My product research was rigorous and exhaustive: I asked Marco Arment which headphones I should buy, he said these, so I bought them. They’re offered in three impedance variants: 32...

Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC.

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New (well, newish) Mac app from John Siracusa: Hyperspace searches for files with identical contents within one or more folders. If it finds any, it can then reclaim the disk space taken by all but one of the identical files — without removing any of the files! You can ...

Not new, but new to me, is this delightful 7-minute short with a behind-the-scenes look at SNL’s cue card team, led by longtime main cue card guy Wally Feresten. Sometimes you just can’t beat analog.

As a kid I loved Richard Scarry’s books. As an adult I loved (and love) Chris Ware’s graphic novels. As a parent I loved reading Scarry’s books, again, with my son. So of course this essay from Ware, commemorating the 50th anniversary edition of Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, hit hard for me. Bet it will for you too.

Om Malik: I have my own explanation, something my readers are familiar with, and it is the most obvious one. Just as Google is trapped in the 10-blue-link prison, which prevents it from doing something radical, Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company weighed d...

Tesla’s share price has been having a hard time of it lately. The stock has lost about half its value since its all-time high back in December, and, since Musk took office alongside Donald Trump in January, dropped for 7 consecutive weeks, rebounding only ever-so-slightly la...

I’ve been commenting and expanding upon some of the commentary my piece prompted, and I have a few more coming, but it’s good to have Tsai collect a comprehensive overview.

Ray Maker, writing at DC Rainmaker: This would not only be the first time Apple has created a non-watch heart rate sensor, but even more notably, the first time the company has enabled heart rate broadcasting over existing Bluetooth heart rate standards. The question th...

I’m a month late linking to it, but Chance Miller wrote a terrific review for 9to5Mac: The last several releases from Beats, such as the Studio Buds Plus and Solo 4 headphones, have been powered by a custom Beats chip rather than an Apple-designed chip like what’s used i...

Sebastiaan de With, on X, linking to my “Something Is Rotten” piece last week: Ex-MobileMe team here. This was a brutal time. It was so bad that when he presented iCloud onstage, Steve said “I know what you’re thinking: why should I trust them? They’re the ones who gave...

From Drexel’s YouTube channel: But far less recognized is that Drexel made the very bold decision of committing all students to purchase a previously unreleased and untested computer from Apple. This was, of course, the Macintosh (introduced in January 1984), which was u...

Alissa Falcone, in a good piece looking back at (my alma mater) Drexel University’s groundbreaking deal with Apple 40 years ago to provide deeply discounted Macintoshes to all students, and integrate them throughout the campus and curriculums: Drexel was prepared to buy ...

Ten years ago I played two small roles in the release of the aforelinked Becoming Steve Jobs. First, I got to announce the book here at Daring Fireball, after having been sent an advance copy a few weeks earlier. My praise for the book then was glowing, but in hindsight, I think I undersold just how good — and how essential — it is. At the time of its launch, the book remained in the shadow of Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography. Ten years later, I refer back to Becoming Steve Jobs regularly; Isaacson’s book almost never.

Second, the SoHo Apple Store in New York hosted a “Meet the Authors” event, and I had the pleasure of playing host for the interview. It’s still available, both as video and audio. And as I wrote at the time, “I’m kind of proud that it got flagged as ‘explicit’ — but that was Bill Gates’s fault.”

During Friday’s episode of Dithering — a free listen — Ben Thompson reminded me that my headline reference last week, alluding to the well-known line from Hamlet, had been used, to great effect, once before. Brent Schlender wrote a crackerjack piece for Fortune in March 1997...

A new feature in our membership CMS (Passport — check it out) lets us make individual episodes of Dithering free for everyone to listen to (on the web). I can’t think of a better way to first use this new capability than to open up Friday’s episode, recapping my “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” article, and the resonance with which it hit. Even the cover art — selected weeks ago — captures how I’ve felt this week.

Give it a listen. Subscribe if you enjoy it.

But I’d feel a lot better about our collective conventional wisdom regarding the nature of this particular all-hands Siri meeting if it had leaked to, and been reported on, by more than one reporter at more than one publication.

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring this week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC.

Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales. Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel. Upgrade your auth today.

From Apple’s support documentation: You can generate a report of requests your iPhone has sent to Private Cloud Compute. Go to Settings, then tap Privacy & Security. Tap Apple Intelligence Report, then choose a report duration for the last 15 minutes (default) or ...

Jess Weatherbed, reporting for The Verge: iPhone and Android users will be able to exchange end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) RCS messages in the near future thanks to newly updated RCS specifications. The GSM Association announced that the latest RCS standard includes E2EE ba...

In an item earlier this week observing that Swift Assist, the most ambitious Xcode-related Apple Intelligence feature shown at WWDC last year, not only hasn’t yet shipped but still is not in beta, I wondered whether Apple actually demoed it live last year. John Voorhees, wri...

Katie Notopoulos, writing at Business Insider (Apple News+ link): It’s possible that this strident defense is backfiring — creating a “Streisand Effect” that’s publicizing the book even more. Notopoulos isn’t one to pull punches or hedge, normally, but there’s no quest...

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter:

After more than a year of speculation, Apple TV+ has ordered a fourth season of its Emmy-winning comedy Ted Lasso. The pickup comes after co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis closed a deal to reprise his role as the title character, the manager of the fictional AFC Richmond soccer club in London.

I dig Ted Lasso but this is like 0.1 percent as interesting as When are we going to get Severance season 3?! Gimme gimme gimme. And we haven’t even gotten to next week’s season 2 finale yet.

CNBC story from 2016: At a recent public appearance at the Utah Tech Tour, in a conversation moderated by Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch, Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out that Microsoft had tablets on the market decades before Apple. Cook emphasized his company’s timing comin...

Jay Peters, last month for The Verge: Google’s next I/O developer conference will take place on May 20th and May 21st, the company announced today. The event will be “open to everyone online” and will include “livestreamed keynotes and sessions,” according to an FAQ. Lik...

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg today: Apple Inc.’s top executive overseeing its Siri virtual assistant told staff that delays to key features have been ugly and embarrassing, and a decision to publicly promote the technology before it was ready made matters worse. ...

As a postscript to that last item, it occurred to me that because we’re close friends, I have a lot of photos of Paul Kafasis in my library. Here’s one from a year ago you can use as a reference. I wondered how Genmoji would do with “An owl who looks like Paul Kafasis, wearing a Celtics jersey, holding a basketball.” Here’s the best one, from my Mac running MacOS 15.3.1 Sequoia.

It does resemble Paul. Not sure about how owl-like it is, the “holding” part, the slopping of “Celtics”, or the quality of orthodontia over in Genmojiworld.