Paul Kafasis, on a seemingly local-to-Boston Genmoji billboard from Apple: Eventually, though, the penny dropped. After my umpteenth time passing the billboard, while trying to distract myself from the single-digit temperatures and the brutal wind chill, I realized what ...

Zack Whittaker, reporting for TechCrunch: A group of bipartisan U.S. lawmakers are urging the head of the U.K.’s surveillance court to hold an open hearing into Apple’s anticipated challenge of an alleged secret U.K. government legal demand. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, alon...

Michael Tsai: Swift Assist was supposed to arrive in 2024, but it never even appeared in a beta. Apple hasn’t announced that it’s postponed or cancelled. It’s not even mentioned in the release notes. Apple announced two AI-powered features for Xcode last year: predicti...

Who decided these personalized Siri features should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and advertise these features in a TV commercial, and promote them as a selling point of the iPhone 16 lineup?

Filipe Espósito, reporting last week for 9to5Mac: As reported by Brazilian newspaper Valor Econômico (via O Globo), a federal judge in Brazil ruled on Wednesday that Apple will have to open up the iOS ecosystem to third-party apps in Brazil just like the company did in t...

Benjamin Mayo 9to5Mac:

Apple is still reeling from the last-week’s news that the most compelling new Apple Intelligence features for Siri have been indefinitely delayed. Over the weekend, it pulled a YouTube ad showcasing personal context running on the iPhone 16. Now, it has updated the Apple website with a new disclaimer wherever the unreleased Siri features are mentioned on the iPhone marketing pages. [...]

The new message to customers found on Apple’s website is different, but equally as vague. It reads:

Siri’s personal context understanding, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions are in development and will be available with a future software update.

Jay Peters, The Verge:

Google has updated its affiliate ads policy for Chrome extensions after creators accused PayPal’s popular Honey browser extension of being a “scam.”

Honey was accused of taking affiliate revenue from the same influencers it paid for promotion by using its Chrome extension to swap in its own affiliate link before you checked out. According to the updated Google policy posted today, this isn’t allowed in most cases

I wouldn’t say they were merely accused — they were caught, red-handed.

You either have taste or you don’t, and most people don’t, at least for judging something new and unfamiliar.

Last week The Wall Street Journal laid off about a dozen tech reporters and editors — not on the fun side, where folks like Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen work, but on the straight news side. Chris Roush at Talking Biz News obtained a memo sent to the staff from WSJ editor-i...

New service for disgruntled/embarrassed Tesla owners:

Our team at Steal My Tesla has years of experience in the automotive industry, with a special focus on luxury vehicles, premium wheels and rims, catalytic converters, and driver assistance systems. Trust us to handle your Tesla acquisition with professionalism and discretion.

A clip from this 2016 interview with Marco Rubio — then a candidate for the Republican presidential primary, today Trump’s secretary of state — by CNN’s Jake Tapper is making the rounds on social media. It’s extraordinary. I’m linking here to the full video, hosted on Rubio’...

Andrew Boynton, head of copy at The New Yorker: Keen-eyed grammar fans may notice some changes in our pages — and in this newsletter. Last fall, David Remnick, the editor, suggested convening a group to talk about the magazine’s house style, to see if any rules might bea...

If these caps were a student project it’d get an F. Who thinks you can print one logo on top of another? They look like mistakes, like caps that got run through the embroidery machine twice. The only good one is for the “ASHOS”, which comes close to the actual word everyone uses for that team of cheaters.

Update, 3pm ET: It looks like maybe MLB and New Era (the hatmakers) have put the whole lineup of caps out of their misery.

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Josh Marshall:

I think more than anything I admired Kevin’s restraint and his caution. Blogging is a hustle and the incentives for hyperbole and breathlessness are endless. That makes most people easy to ignore. But Kevin — who had a whole career in the normal-person rat race before he started this — sweated the details. He had a serious mind for facts and numbers and he knew how to work with data. His posts were always overflowing with numbers and charts and levels of detail and nitty gritty I couldn’t pile into my brain because I was too scattered and unfocused. When he said something, you had to take it seriously. When he disagreed with you, you knew it was time to re-check your work. Kevin was almost all signal and very little noise. That was his defining mark.

Marian Drum, posting yesterday on Kevin Drum’s site: With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025. No public memorial services are planned. In lieu of flowers, please donate to th...

Jon Prosser, in a YouTube video with mocked-up animations showing exactly what he’s talking about, 51 days ago: Today we have your very first exclusive look at the changes coming to iOS 19 — with a redesigned camera app and possibly ... a redesigned iOS. Basic idea is ...

Upgrade:

It’s been a quiet week, so John Gruber briefly joins Jason to discuss Apple’s AI delay, new Macs, new iPads, and the future of Apple regulation worldwide.

Recorded earlier today, so it covers, somehow, all of last week’s Apple news — and last week was a kind of crazy week in Appletown. I even squeezed in some parenting advice for Myke Hurley, who’s out on paternity leave.

Craig Hockenberry returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s new hardware this week — M3 iPad Airs, A16 regular iPads, M4 MacBook Airs, and the M4 Max and surprising M3 Ultra Mac Studios. And we go deep on The Iconfactory’s years-in-the-making new app, Tapestry — a universal timeline for the Internet.

Exclusively sponsored by:

• Google Gemini: Chat to supercharge your ideas.

This whole 1989 profile of Albert “Cubby” Broccoli by John Culhane for the LA Times is full of enjoyable nuggets, but this fact blew my mind: Giovanni Broccoli and his brother emigrated to Long Island from Calabria at the turn of the century. According to research done i...

Pierce, David Pierce:

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about the future of Bond. (James Bond.) John Gruber, the author of Daring Fireball and a preeminent Bond expert, joins the show to talk about Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, its struggles with the Broccoli family over what to do with the Bond franchise, and why so many fans of the series are worried about what might happen when a company like Amazon takes over a beloved name. Will Bond turn out like Marvel, or Star Wars? Or something else entirely? We’ll see — but history suggests we shouldn’t be too optimistic.

I’m deeply pessimistic about the future of the Bond franchise, but I do love talking and thinking about it. Really enjoyed this chat.

Simon Willison: These new Apple Intelligence features involve Siri responding to requests to access information in applications and then performing actions on the user’s behalf. This is the worst possible combination for prompt injection attacks! Any time an LLM-based s...

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac: Since last fall, Apple has been marketing the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence with an unreleased Siri feature. After confirming today that the more personal version of Siri isn’t coming anytime soon, Apple has pulled the ad in question. The commercia...

Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters: Some artificial intelligence improvements to Apple’s voice assistant Siri will be delayed until 2026, the company said on Friday. They put 2026 in the headline too (“Apple Says Some AI Improvements to Siri Delayed to 2026”). I don...

Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters: Some artificial intelligence improvements to Apple’s voice assistant Siri will be delayed until 2026, the company said on Friday. In a statement, Apple said it has “been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness...

Today’s announcement is disappointing, but unsurprising. If it’s Apple’s general policy not to ship a product before it’s ready, that applies tenfold for a product involving LLM access to deeply private on-device information.

This announcement is disappointing, but unsurprising. If it’s Apple’s general policy not to ship a product before it’s ready, that applies tenfold for a product involving LLM access to deeply private on-device information.

Nate Silver, writing at his Silver Bulletin: Last night, as President Trump delivered his State of the Union address, the Wall Street Journal reported that ABC News would lay off the remaining staff at 538 as part of broader cuts within corporate parent Disney. Having be...

From the perspective of a company the size of Disney, it would cost veritable pennies to keep FiveThirtyEight’s website around forever. What a disgrace.

Jason Snell, at Six Colors: With the M4 Mac mini being powerfully tempting for desktop Mac users who crave power, Apple has upgraded the Mac Studio to blast past the mini in terms of performance. The base model, still starting at $1999, is powered by the M4 Max chip prev...