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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.

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...

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

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...

I did not enjoy them as much as Apple did.

Washington, October 2025.

From the video Pushing it a bit too far at the Olympic Peninsula coast.

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...

Funny thing about yesterday's Supreme Court decision, if Texas goes ahead with their gerrymandering plan, it probably will backfire on them, cause them to lose a few seats instead of gain them. The news reports generally leave that out, probably figuring the sports fans who can understand the gambling on football and baseball couldn't understand that gerrymandering is a bet that you know which voters will turn out and who they'll vote for a year in the future. In fact NPR reports it as a victory for Repubs. Right now it looks very much like it is not a win for them.

When they say AI is just autocomplete on steroids, that's like saying a human is just a product of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur on steroids. It may be true, but it doesn't say anything useful. It's also like saying that a computer is just a collection of on and off switches.

I've come to think of WordPress as an API with a widely deployed and stable implementation behind it, where the user is in control and developers can build apps without having to get into the storage-selling business. It's an incredible bundle of web functionality that is largely unexplored. I've written two pieces this year, Think Different, and my input into Matt's State of the Word that explain what I'm doing, the best I can, for now.

How could someone who would even *consider* leaving Apple for Meta rise to a level of such prominence at Apple, including as one of the few public faces of the company?

In software I design, I like to have multiple ways to view the same data. In one context it's an outline, then flip a switch and now it's a graphic. MORE was a product we shipped at Living Videotext for the Mac in 1986. You start with an outline and flip a switch to turn ...

When I'm not feeling inspired, I use this simple trick to get me and my camera out.

Oregon, November 2025.

From the video Stuck in my car during a storm (& answering your questions).

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.

It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.

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...

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...

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

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...