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Juli Clover, writing at MacRumors (regarding a report at Reuters): Apple could ultimately have to pay up to an estimated 637 million euros to address the damage suffered by 14 million iPhone and iPad users in the Netherlands. That’s about €45/user. The lawsuit date...

Dasha Litvinova, reporting for the AP: Russian authorities said Thursday they have imposed restrictions on Apple’s video calling service FaceTime, the latest step in an effort to tighten control over the internet and communications online. State internet regulator Roskom...

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times, “Meta Weighs Cuts to Its Metaverse Unit” (gift link): Meta is considering making cuts to a division in its Reality Labs unit that works on the so-called metaverse, said three employees with knowledge of the matter. The cuts ...

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, bot attacks and brute force attempts?

WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. A simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior. Your users trust you. WorkOS Radar lets you keep it that way.

Link: workos.com/radar?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=RSS…

One small update I just appended to my piece Friday taking a look at the winning apps from this year’s App Store Awards:

Lastly, I have questions — some really hard questions — regarding Tiimo’s app icon. Such as, “What is that?”

Perhaps it got picked because it makes Apple’s new OS 26 icons look good by comparison?

Link: daringfireball.net/2025/12/2025_app_store_award_winners

Aaron Tilley and Wayne Ma, in a piece headlined “Why Silicon Valley is Buzzing About Apple CEO Succession” at the paywalled-up-the-wazoo The Information: Prediction site Polymarket places Ternus’ odds of getting the job at nearly 55%, ahead of other current Apple executi...

Dithering is my and Ben Thompson’s twice-a-week podcast — 15 minutes per episode, not a minute less, not a minute more. It’s a $7/month or $70/year subscription, and included in the Stratechery Plus bundle (a bargain). This year our CMS (Passport — check it out) gained a feature that lets us make some episodes free for everyone to listen to on the website. Today’s episode, regarding Alan Dye leaving Apple for Meta, seems like a good one to do that with. (And, once again, this month’s album art serendipitously captures my mood.)

Give it a listen. Subscribe if you enjoy it.

Link: dithering.passport.online/member/episode/alan-dye-leaves…

Apple Newsroom, yesterday: Apple today announced that Jennifer Newstead will become Apple’s general counsel on March 1, 2026, following a transition of duties from Kate Adams, who has served as Apple’s general counsel since 2017. She will join Apple as senior vice presid...

This interview was both interesting and a lot of fun. Worth a listen or re-listen.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2017/04/21/ep-188

Apple, today: “Announcing the 2025 App Store Awards”: This year’s winners represent the best-in-class apps and games we returned to again and again. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do. I did not enjoy all of them as much as Apple did. Tiimo iPhone app of the yea...

Meg James, reporting for The Los Angeles Times (News+ link): The two companies announced the blockbuster deal early Friday morning. The takeover would give Netflix such beloved characters as Batman, Harry Potter and Fred Flintstone. Fred Flintstone? “Our mission ha...

NBC News, back in March 2018: Speaking at a town hall event hosted by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Recode’s Kara Swisher, Cook said Facebook put profits above all else when it allegedly allowed user data to be taken through connected apps. [...] When asked what he would do i...

Straight/dumb quotation marks. Some default Instagram typeface. That period just hanging there, outside the closing quote. This is the post from the man who led Apple’s software design for a decade.

Not to mention the gall to use any quote from Steve Jobs, let alone this particular one, which is enshrined by Apple on the wall outside Town Hall at the old Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino, and provides the title for the splendid book published (in a delightful interactive version on the web, and in gorgeous limited print editions) by the Steve Jobs Archive and LoveFrom.

“Just figure out what’s next” for Alan Dye, after his supposedly wonderful accomplishments at Apple, is ... going to work for Meta? Jiminy H. Christ, that takes stones.

Link: x.com/sdw/status/1996431428561822093?s=46

In my post earlier today on the then-breaking news that Alan Dye has left Apple to join Meta as chief design officer (a new title at the company1), I wrote: It sounds like Dye chose to jump ship, and wasn’t squeezed out (as it seems with former AI chief John Giannandrea ...

Back in July, I was lucky enough to have my friend Louie Mantia on The Talk Show to talk about Liquid Glass and (as I wrote in the show notes) “the worrisome state of Apple’s UI design overall”. This was probably my favorite episode of the show all year, and I think it holds...

Tyler Hall, just one week ago: Maybe it’s because my eyes are getting old or maybe it’s because the contrast between windows on macOS keeps getting worse. Either way, I built a tiny Mac app last night that draws a border around the active window. I named it “Alan”. In A...

That doesn’t look like one of the fancy Mitsubishi traction elevators at Apple Park, but otherwise, this jibes.

Link: pxlnv.com/linklog/dye-exit/

Mark Gurman, with blockbuster news at Bloomberg: Meta Platforms Inc. has poached Apple Inc.’s most prominent design executive in a major coup that underscores a push by the social networking giant into AI-equipped consumer devices. The company is hiring Alan Dye, who ha...

Todd Vaziri, on the HBO Max Mad Men fiasco: It appears as though this represents the original photography, unaltered before digital visual effects got involved. Somehow, this episode (along with many others) do not include all the digital visual effects that were in the ...

Alan Sepinwall, writing for Wired (News+ link in case Wired’s paywall busts your balls): Last month, HBO Max announced a major new addition to its library. Not only would the streamer be adding Mad Men — a show that HBO execs infamously passed on back when Matthew Weiner...

Aditya Kalra and Munsif Vengattil, reporting for Reuters: Apple does not plan to comply with a mandate to preload its smartphones with a state-owned cyber safety app and will convey its concerns to New Delhi, three sources said, after the government’s move sparked survei...

Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bot attacks and brute force attempts?

WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. A simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior.

Your users trust you. Let’s keep it that way.

Link: workos.com/radar?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=RSS…

Speaking of Apple executive HR news, in his Power On Bloomberg column last weekend, Mark Gurman pooh-poohed the Financial Times’s recent report that Tim Cook was likely to retire early next year (paywalled, alas, but summarized by MacRumors): In October, I wrote that the...

Apple Newsroom, “John Giannandrea to Retire From Apple”: Apple today announced John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down from his position and will serve as an advisor to the company before retiring in the spri...

Signal Support: Signal Secure Backups can help you safely restore your chats if something unexpected happens to your device (like dropping your phone in a lake). When this optional feature is enabled, your device will automatically back up your message history so you won...

Mark Gurman, in a tweet just 30 minutes ago: Apple AI chief John Giannandrea is leaving the company. Amar Subramanya from Microsoft is joining to lead AI under Craig Federighi. After the fiasco around Apple Intelligence and the “more personalized Siri” features — which...

Special guest: Tyler Hayes. Topics include how to get a small phone today, which way foldables should fold, the state of Apple TV (including its new “sonic logo”), and some holiday gift gadget recommendations.

Sponsored by:

• Clic for Sonos: No lag. No hassle. Just Clic.
• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/11/30/ep-436

Last year developer Simon Støvring launched a fun new app for the Mac called Festivitas, which let you decorate your menu bar and Dock with animated holiday lights and falling snow. This year he’s added an iOS version for iPhone and iPad that lets you create widgets to decorate your home screens with holidays lights and festive photo frames. Pure fun.

See also: Jason Snell on using Festivitas’s Shortcuts support to create an automation that gives a 10 percent chance of snow every 20 minutes. Støvring’s own Shortcuts examples (available in the app’s Settings window) include things like turning on the lights when music starts playing. With support for Shortcuts, users can create their own fun.

Link: festivitas.app/

My thanks to Dekáf for sponsoring Daring Fireball this week. They’ve just launched a nice lineup of holiday gift bundles — curated sets of their most-loved coffees that make gift-buying easy.

Nine single origins. Six signature blends. Four Mizudashi cold brews. All micro-lot and top-rated coffees are shipped within 24 hours of roasting. No shortcuts. No crash. Dekáf is coffee at its most refined, just without the caffeine. I’ve gone through a few bags, and each one tasted great — like high quality regular coffee.

And, there’s a special offer just for DF readers: get 20% off with code DF.

Link: dekaf.com/s/df