Good takes on some unpleasant current events, and one of the best brief eulogies for Jimmy Carter I’ve heard.

Wesley Hilliard, writing for AppleInsider regarding Edits, Meta’s pre-announced mobile-first video editing app: Despite that, many apps and features on iPhone toe the line between fun tool and social platform. One of those tools was Clips, which arrived in 2017 to little...

Wes Davis, writing at The Verge, under the headline “Instagram Announces a Blatant CapCut Clone”: Instagram head Adam Mosseri just announced a video editing app called Edits. Mosseri said the app is meant to rival CapCut, a video editing app that went offline along with ...

Interesting selection of Martin Luther King Jr. quotes they’ve chosen for the homepage (PDF archive for posterity):

• “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.”
• “You must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.”
• “We cannot preserve self without being concerned about preserving other selves.”

Read into those quotes what you will, given today’s other national significance. I think there’s an implied message here, but it’s subtle. I’ll pick a different quote from King, one that I believe better speaks to the current moment:

“The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.”

Tim Cook on X: Dr. King once said, “Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.” True greatness lies in lifting others, making a difference, and serving with purpose. Let’s honor his legacy by finding ways to serve and create a better world together. Curious t...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bots attacks and brute force attempts?

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Apple and Google, seemingly, are following the law, not Trump’s good-as-gold word and pinkie-swear promise that they won’t be held liable for violating it. But Oracle and Akamai seemingly are going with Trump’s word.

Tom Warren, The Verge: Earlier this month you could search for “Google” on Bing and get a page that looked a lot like Google, complete with a special search bar, an image resembling a Google Doodle, and even some small text under the search bar just like Google search. ...

Tim Hardwick, last week for MacRumors, “Apple Smart Home Hub Launch Possibly Delayed Until Later in Year”: Apple’s long-rumoured smart home hub or “command center” may not arrive in the spring as previously expected, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. [...] Apple ori...

Joanna Stern, in her weekly Tech Things newsletter for the WSJ:

Despite what my iPhone’s frequent notification summaries report, my husband isn’t messy, he isn’t sad and he definitely didn’t take out the garbage — because, again, I don’t have one. Wife? Yes. Husband? No.

As part of Apple Intelligence, the company rolled out these AI-powered summaries. Instead of scrolling through a mountain of missed alerts, you get little condensed summaries, grouped by app. Great concept, not quite “intelligent” execution.

To the credit of the team that put this presentation together, they mostly got it.

Kyle Wiggers, writing at TechCrunch: Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the chan...

Parker Ortolani works near Grand Central and wrote a great post about the in-character Severance experience on Wednesday, replete with photos, both early in the day when the diorama was largely empty, and later in the day, when it was swarmed with fans and general onlookers because the actors and director Ben Stiller were there. Blogging at its best.

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac: Here are the changes included in iOS 18.3 for Apple Intelligence notification summaries: When you enable notification summaries, iOS 18.3 will make it clearer that the feature — like all Apple Intelligence features — is a beta. You...

Maddy Myers, writing for Polygon: But the weirdest part of the reveal video, in my opinion, is the implication that the Joy-Cons can be used as a mouse. This was already rumored, and if I hadn’t seen those rumors, then I might not have understood what I was looking at d...

Kyle Maclachlan, remembering his friend and longtime collaborator David Lynch, on Instagram:

What I saw in him was an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.

Our friendship blossomed on Blue Velvet and then Twin Peaks and I always found him to be the most authentically alive person I’d ever met.

David was in tune with the universe and his own imagination on a level that seemed to be the best version of human. He was not interested in answers because he understood that questions are the drive that make us who we are. They are our breath.

Another fun promo for Severance season 2.

And a promo on Apple’s homepage featuring a computer made by another company. And a free in-universe book, The Lexington Letters, at Apple Books. (Update: Ah, the book came out in March 2022, as part of season 1. Still: fun! Apple Books does not make the publication date prominent.)

Brian Tallerico, writing for RogerEbert.com: David Lynch saw my dreams. As a teenager growing up in suburban America in the ’80s, “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks” hit like a bolt of lightning. Not only did they capture something about the sinister, surreal underbelly of li...

Ray Ratto, writing for Defector, gets it right. Bob Uecker was just the best: He was the face and voice of baseball cinema, the man whose line-reading made “Ju-u-u-u-st a bit outside” so good that “iconic” doesn’t remotely cover its impact. Even if you’re not a seamhead,...

Fun trailer and a smart if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it design. Switch 2 just looks like a slightly bigger Switch. Pure joy. That it’s just a bigger faster Switch is proof of the genius of the Switch form factor, which has now been widely copied across the industry. The Swit...

Bryan Bedell, on the Field Notes Dispatches blog: The anniversary date of “Field Notes” varies a bit, depending on who you ask. Aaron Draplin first used the name (typeset, of course, in all-caps Futura Bold) on a customized one-off red hardcover notebook in 2002. Our “of...

Marko Parker, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook is planning to attend the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump next week, the latest in a wave of Silicon Valley leaders traveling to Washington for the ceremony.

Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla Inc. who has quickly become one of Trump’s foremost supporters and financial backers, are all also expected to attend.

Rings don’t kiss themselves. But if there’s any consolation in this, it’s that surely none of these guys want to attend this. It’s going to be boring as shit and cold as hell. Imagine Cook stuck sitting between, say, Zuckerberg and Musk all day.

(Via Taegan Goddard.)

Juli Clover, MacRumors: Ahead of the season two premiere of hit TV show Severance, Apple is marketing the show with a fun Severance pop-up at the Grand Central Terminal in New York City. Apple has assembled a glass cube with workstations that are identical to the setups...

Noah Smith, writing at Noahpinion: As many observers have noted, this tells us two important things. First, it tells us that Chinese officials are the ones calling the shots with regards to TikTok. This should be no surprise, given that ByteDance is legally required to o...

Jane Mayer, reporting for The New Yorker: As recently as the spring of 2023, according to an account shared last week with The New Yorker, Hegseth ordered three gin-and-tonics at a weekday breakfast meeting with an acquaintance in Manhattan. “It was an extremely strange ...

Speaking of new (“interim”) Sonos CEO Tom Conrad and Scott Forstall, here’s an interesting anecdote from Tyler Hayes’s terrific piece for Motherboard in 2021, “How Pandora Won Its Royalty Battle but Lost the War to Spotify”: After pushback on only allowing web apps for t...

Sonos interim CEO Tom Conrad, in a company-wide memo obtained by The Verge: With my stepping in as CEO, the Board, Max, and I have agreed that my background makes the Chief Product Officer role redundant. Therefore, Max’s role is being eliminated and the Product organiza...

Nick Wingfield, writing today’s The Briefing column for the paywalled (alas) The Information: Sonos has always been a bit of an odd duck. There aren’t that many consumer electronics startups of its size created in the last quarter century (Sonos was founded in 2002) that...

Mike Davidson: I grew up on Iliff Street, right in the middle of the ashes that up until a few nights ago, was a sunkissed neighborhood known as Pacific Palisades. It was 1978, and I remember my dad climbing up on our roof with a garden hose. Every couple of hours, he w...

Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage, reporting for The New York Times: Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted President-elect Donald J. Trump on charges of illegally seeking to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, said in a final report released early Tuesday t...