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.
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...
In the two decades I’ve been in this racket, I’ve never been angrier at myself for missing a story than I am about Apple’s announcement on Friday that the “more personalized Siri” features of Apple Intelligence, scheduled to appear between now and WWDC, would be delayed unti...
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...
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.
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
Ben Lovejoy, writing at 9to5Mac:
Our editor-in-chief Chance Miller wryly commented that a radical
new look would serve as a great way to distract from the
ever-slowing progress on the new Siri. But in truth, I think many
more Apple users will be wowed by a new look than ...
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.
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 ...
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.
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...
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.
In a statement, Apple said it has “been working on a more
personalized Siri, giving it more awareness...
Here’s a statement I got this morning from Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy, verbatim:
“Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done
quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more
conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri a...
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