By John Gruber

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Sarah Perez on Core Devices, the Sequel to Pebble ★

Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch:

“We’ve structured this entire business around being a sustainable, profitable, and hopefully, long-running enterprise, but not a startup,” Migicovsky told TechCrunch on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. [...]

“I want a companion to my phone, rather than a replacement for my phone. I want it to be more like a Swatch than a Rolex. I want it to be a little bit more fun, casual, playful, and plasticky.” Plus, he added, with the reboot of Pebble, he’s now okay with a watch that doesn’t try to do it all.

“I’m okay with a limited vision and a limited scope of what we’re trying to accomplish,” Migicovsky said.

Under the new company, Core Devices, the team has announced the Pebble Time 2 smartwatch, a round-faced Pebble Round 2, and a $75 AI smart ring, called the Index 01.

What a great profile from Perez. I think she captured the current moment for Core Devices. I personally don’t want their new watches, and I don’t see the appeal (especially ergonomically, given that it needs to be on your index finger) of the Index 01 ring, but I can see why some people might. And I’m delighted to see a small company trying these things. Better to make things a few people might love than to try to make something zillions might like.

MacOS 26’s Cut Corners ★

Here’s an illustrated follow-up regarding the absurdity of MacOS 26’s “looks like they’re rounded off like a child’s toy but actually they’re still rectangles with corners” windows. If you turn on always-visible scrollbars (which you should) and scroll to the bottom, they look like this:

(That’s Safari, which I think is a somewhat popular app.)

It would make more sense if we found out that the team behind redesigning the UI for MacOS 26 Tahoe was hired by Meta a year ago and deliberately sabotaged their work to make the Mac look clownish and amateur.

Jackass of the Week: Elon Musk ★

Elon Musk, in a tweet responding to Google’s announcement of their deal to provide Gemini to Apple for use in Apple Intelligence:

This seems like an unreasonable concentration of power for Google, given that the also have Android and Chrome

I’m sure that if Grok were as popular as Gemini, Musk would turn down a deal with Apple to avoid concentrating “power” in his hands.

Eddy Cue on Apple’s 2025 Year in Services ★

Eddy Cue, in a rare bylined post on Apple Newsroom:

The numbers reflect the incredible enthusiasm of our customers, whether it’s downloading an exciting new app or game, watching the hottest new show with family and friends, listening to their favorite songs, or shopping with peace of mind. The App Store alone saw over 850 million average weekly users globally, with developers earning over $550 billion on our platform since 2008. Apple Pay also made a significant impact by eliminating well over $1 billion in fraud, while generating more than $100 billion in incremental merchant sales globally, and purchases made through Apple Pay significantly outpaced the overall growth in consumer spending levels during the peak holiday shopping period in November and December.

Those are numbers.

Apple TV eclipsed all prior viewership records in December 2025, while Apple Music reached all-time highs in both listenership and new subscribers.

Those are not numbers.

Apple TV’s engagement this past December soared, with total hours viewed up 36 percent compared to the previous year, setting a new record for monthly engagement.

That’s a number, but it’s a Bezos Number.

Apple, Rather Quietly and With No Details, Announces Partnership With Google to Use Gemini Technology for Apple Foundation Models, and Presumably, the Year-Overdue More Personalized Siri ★

CNBC:

The multi-year partnership will lean on Google’s Gemini and cloud technology for future Apple foundational models, according to a joint statement obtained by CNBC’s Jim Cramer.

“After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we’re excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users,” Apple said in a statement on Monday.

The models will continue to run on Apple devices and the company’s private cloud compute, they added. Apple declined to comment on the terms of the deal. Google referred CNBC to the joint statement.

That’s the whole announcement, at least for now. A statement that, as far as I can see, went only to CNBC (and Jim Cramer specifically, of all people).

There’s slightly more detail in this brief announcement from Google, on, of all places, Twitter/X:

Joint Statement: Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.

After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al [sic] technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.

I suspect more details will be forthcoming from Apple sooner rather than later. But for now, that’s it.

This phrasing, in both Apple’s statement to Cramer and the joint Apple/Google statement released by Google, is, I think subtly telling about how significant this news is: “Google’s AI technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models”. There’s a slight redundancy with foundation appearing twice in the span of four words. Imagine if WebKit had been named “Safari Rendering Engine” — there would be times when one might need to write “the rendering engine is Safari Rendering Engine”, because that’s what it is, and that’s the name. But in this case, it’s a bit incongruous. A foundation is a foundation; it doesn’t have a foundation. So this brief bit of phrasing reveals the obvious, awkward truth that Apple Foundation Models didn’t actually have a foundation.

Also, perhaps some evidence of OCR copy-and-pasting: in the tweet of the joint statement, marked by “[sic]” above, AI is spelled uppercase-A lowercase-L. Update: Same misspelling in the version of the announcement hosted on Google’s own news site.

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Sunday, 11 January 2026

Statement From Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell ★

Shit’s getting real, folks.

Copilot Money ★

My thanks to Copilot Money for sponsoring last week at DF. Copilot is a personal finance app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’ve always deeply believed in the value of embracing the design idioms and technical features of truly native apps for Apple platforms. Apple has noticed, awarding Copilot an App Store Editor’s Choice and featuring Copilot earlier this year on Apple Developer for their use of Swift Charts.

Copilot’s big news this month is they’ve launched a new web app, bringing access to Copilot from any device, anywhere. It’s designed with all the attention to detail — and concern for privacy and security — as their native apps.

Copilot Money brings all your spending, budgets, investments, and net worth into one organized dashboard, with intelligent categorization and insights that help you stay on track without spreadsheets or app-hopping. Designed to feel calm and intuitive, Copilot makes it easy to understand your finances across all your devices.

Copilot first sponsored DF back in 2021. My wife and I started using it then to track our finances, and we haven’t looked back. Copilot Money isn’t just better than anything we’d used before, it absolutely blew everything else away. It’s easy to connect to your financial accounts, and once you do, you don’t need to spend any effort at all to enter transactions. Copilot just tracks it all automatically, and most importantly, presents it to you in clear, intuitive ways. It’s so good. I’m not saying that because they sponsored DF last week — I’m saying that as a happy paying customer for over four years now.

Copilot is offering DF readers two months free with code DARING, plus 26% off your first year for a limited time, available through this link.

U.S. Senators Ask Cook and Pichai to Remove X and Grok From App Store and Play Store ★

U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), and Ben Ray Luján (D-New Mexico), in a letter addressed to Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai:

Your app stores’ policies are clear. Google’s terms of service require apps to “prohibit users from creating, uploading, or distributing content that facilitates the exploitation or abuse of children” including prohibiting the “portrayal of children in a manner that could result in the sexual exploitation of children.” Apps that do not are said to be subject to “immediate removal from Google Play” for violations. Similarly, Apple’s terms of service bar apps from including “offensive” or “just plain creepy” content, which under any definition must include nonconsensually-generated sexualized images of children and women. Further, Apple’s terms explicitly bar apps from including content that is “[o]vertly sexual or pornographic material” including material “intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.”

Turning a blind eye to X’s egregious behavior would make a mockery of your moderation practices. Indeed, not taking action would undermine your claims in public and in court that your app stores offer a safer user experience than letting users download apps directly to their phones. This principle has been core to your advocacy against legislative reforms to increase app store competition and your defenses to claims that your app stores abuse their market power through their payment systems.

Emphasizing that leaving X and Grok available in the App Store and Play Store directly contradicts Apple and Google’s stated reasons for maintaining control over software distribution is a good pressure point. Do they selectively enforce content moderation based on whims and/or shifting political winds, or rigorously enforce the plain language of their own content guidelines? Which is it? It can’t be both.

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Saturday, 10 January 2026

MAGA’s Foundational Lie ★

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic (gift link), on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection and the first year of the second Trump presidency:

We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander — they were actually aroused by it — and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.

Friday, 9 January 2026

Jim Moylan and the Moylan Arrow ★

Ben Cohen, writing last week for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

One rainy day 40 years ago, Moylan was headed to a meeting across Ford’s campus and hopped in a company car. When he saw the fuel tank was nearly empty, he stopped at a gas pump. What happened next is something that’s happened to all of us: He realized that he’d parked on the wrong side.

Unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t infuriated. He was inspired. By the time he pulled his car around, he was already thinking about how to solve this everyday inconvenience that drives people absolutely crazy. And because the gas pump wasn’t covered by an overhead awning, he was also soaking wet. But when he got back to the office, Moylan didn’t even bother taking off his drenched coat when he started typing the first draft of a memo.

“I would like to propose a small addition,” he wrote, “in all passenger car and truck lines.” The proposal he had in mind was a symbol on the dashboard that would tell drivers which side of the car the gas tank was on. [...]

As soon as they read his memo, they began prototyping his little indicator that would be known as the Moylan Arrow. Within months, it was on the dashboard of Ford’s upcoming models. Within years, it was ripped off by the competition. Before long, it was a fixture of just about every car in the world.

What a fantastic story. I’m old enough that I remember learning to drive on cars that didn’t have the Moylan Arrow. Then I remember spotting one sometime in the 1990s, and wondering if I’d just never noticed them before. But no: this seemingly incredibly obvious design element had only recently been invented. The Journal has a copy of Moylan’s original memo, and it’s a delight to read. Clear, concise, persuasive.

“Society loves the founder who builds new companies, like Henry Ford,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told me. “I would argue that Jim Moylan is an equally compelling kind of disrupter: an engineer in a large company who insisted on making our daily lives better.”

These days, there are two types of drivers: the ones aware of the Moylan Arrow and the ones who get to find out.

Rest in peace, Jim Moylan.

Thursday, 8 January 2026

The New York Times Profiles John Ternus ★

Kalley Huang and Tripp Mickle, writing for The New York Times (gift link):

Threading the needle between adding new bells and whistles to Apple’s products while watching the bottom line has defined the careful, low-profile style of Mr. Ternus, who joined Apple in 2001. He is now considered by some company insiders to be the front-runner to replace Tim Cook, Apple’s longtime chief executive, if Mr. Cook decides to step aside.

Apple last year began accelerating its planning for Mr. Cook’s succession, according to three people close to the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity about Apple’s confidential deliberations. Mr. Cook, 65, has told senior leaders that he is tired and would like to reduce his workload, the people said. Should he step down, Mr. Cook is likely to become the chairman of Apple’s board, according to three people close to the company.

Cook may well be preparing to retire as CEO. He is 65! But it doesn’t ring true to me that he’s telling “senior leaders” that he’s tired. First, I’ve heard otherwise from actual senior leaders at the company. Second, any senior leader he’d tell that to, if true, wouldn’t share it.

It seems to me that aside from the utterly normal and plainly obvious speculation that, at age 65, he might be on the cusp of retiring as CEO, there’s something going on where a narrative is being spread that Cook is in poor health. Mark Gurman included two paragraphs about a tremor in Cook’s hands in his colossal fuck-up at Bloomberg a month ago, falsely reporting that Johny Srouji was unhappy and on the cusp of leaving Apple for a competitor.

Despite his low profile, Mr. Ternus appears to have shot to the front of the pack to be Apple’s next C.E.O., according to four people close to the company.

The Times report describes Ternus as “low-profile” three times. This makes no sense. Ternus is one of Apple’s highest-profile executives. I would guess that over the last five years he’s appeared in more keynotes, for more time, than anyone but Cook and Craig Federighi.

But Mr. Cook is also preparing several other internal candidates to be his potential successor, two of the people said. They could include Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software; Eddy Cue, its head of services; Greg Joswiak, its head of worldwide marketing; and Deirdre O’Brien, its head of retail and human resources.

I don’t think there’s any chance that Cook’s successor will be someone who isn’t a frequent presence in Apple keynotes. I can’t recall O’Brien ever appearing in a keynote, and Cue hasn’t appeared in one for several years. Also, Cue is 61 and Joz is 62. Neither is that much younger than Cook.

Two interesting tidbits re: Ternus:

Within about three years, he became a manager, said Steve Siefert, Mr. Ternus’s first boss at Apple. During that time, their team moved office floors, switching from a closed office plan to mostly open seating with a few offices. When he was promoted, Mr. Ternus had the option to move into one of those offices but declined.

Mr. Ternus was “a man of the people,” Mr. Siefert said, adding that the decision to sit with his team likely helped Mr. Ternus manage and motivate his staff. When Mr. Siefert retired in 2011, freeing up his office, Mr. Ternus once again said he wanted to remain in the open space.

And:

“If you want to make an iPhone every year, Ternus is your guy,” said Cameron Rogers, who worked on product and software engineering management at Apple from 2005 to 2022. [...]

“He’s a nice guy,” Mr. Rogers said. “He’s someone you want to hang out with. Everyone loves him because he’s great. Has he made any hard decisions? No. Are there hard problems he’s solved in hardware? No.”

This guy Cameron Rogers sounds like a real asshole.

What complaints does anyone have about Apple hardware over the last five years? Off the top of my head I can’t think of any that are serious. Ternus has overseen what I’d argue is the best sustained stretch of Apple hardware, across more product lines than ever, in the company’s 50-year history. But he didn’t make any hard decisions or solve any hard problems. Sure. Hardware is easy.

Know Your Rights: Filming and Photographing the Police ★

The ACLU:

Taking photographs and video of things that are plainly visible in public spaces is a constitutional right — and that includes police and other government officials carrying out their duties.

However, there is a widespread, continuing pattern of law enforcement officers ordering people to stop taking photographs or video in public places and harassing, detaining, and arresting those who fail to comply.

Here’s their advice on what to say and do if you are stopped or detained for taking photographs or video.

Also, as good a time as ever for one of my periodic reminders to remember how to hard-lock your iPhone to temporarily disable Face ID: press and hold the side button and either one of the volume buttons at the same time for a few seconds.

Chase to Become New Issuer of Apple Card ★

Apple Newsroom:

Today, Apple and Chase announced that Chase will become the new issuer of Apple Card, with an expected transition in approximately 24 months.

Apple Card users can continue to enjoy the award-winning experience of Apple Card, which includes up to 3 percent unlimited Daily Cash back on every purchase, easy-to-navigate spending tools, Apple Card Family, access to a high-yield Savings account, and more. Mastercard will remain the payment network for Apple Card, and Apple Card users can continue to access Mastercard’s global acceptance and benefits. [...]

During this transition, Apple Card users can continue to use their card as they normally do. More information, including FAQs, is available at learn.applecard.apple/transition. Additional details will be shared with users as the transition date approaches.

In the press release, Apple’s only mention of the current issuer, Goldman Sachs, is in the small gray fine print footnotes. (Goldman is mentioned prominently in the linked FAQ.)

Why Are Grok and X Still Available in App Stores? ★

Caroline Haskins, writing for Wired (News+ link, in case Wired’s paywall blocks you):

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is being used to flood X with thousands of sexualized images of adults and apparent minors wearing minimal clothing. Some of this content appears to not only violate X’s own policies, which prohibit sharing illegal content such as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but may also violate the guidelines of Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store.

Apple and Google both explicitly ban apps containing CSAM, which is illegal to host and distribute in many countries. The tech giants also forbid apps that contain pornographic material or facilitate harassment. The Apple App Store says it doesn’t allow “overtly sexual or pornographic material,” as well as “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content,” especially if the app is “likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group.” The Google Play store bans apps that “contain or promote content associated with sexually predatory behavior, or distribute non-consensual sexual content,” and well as programs that “contain or facilitate threats, harassment, or bullying.”

Over the past two years, Apple and Google removed a number of “nudify” and AI image-generation apps after investigations by the BBC and 404 Media found they were being advertised or used to effectively turn ordinary photos into explicit images of women without their consent.

But at the time of publication, both the X app and the standalone Grok app remain available in both app stores. Apple, Google, and X did not respond to requests for comment.

I just browsed through the last five minutes of replies generated by Grok on Twitter/X, and saw both seeming CSAM (all young Asian women) and just outright hardcore pornographic video (that, for what it’s worth, seemed to feature adults, whether real or generated).

It was a barely concealed secret before Musk bought Twitter that Twitter had an active dark underbelly of pornographic content. But you had to know where to look for it. It really wasn’t something you might just stumble upon. Now you get hardcore porno just by looking at the profile page for Grok. And any user can send any photo they want to @grok and tell it to change or remove the subject’s clothing and change their pose. Lord only knows what people are generating privately using the standalone Grok app.

If a new social network app launched featuring this content, it surely would be removed from the App Store and Play Store. X is seemingly untouchable for political reasons.

Update: Recall that Apple pulled the Tumblr app from the App Store in 2018 for similar content.

The Gold Trump Phone Still Hasn’t Shipped ★

Maybe “next year” meant “next next year”?

(They’re still accepting $100 deposits for pre-orders.)

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Wednesday, 7 January 2026

The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible ★

This 2021 post from Jason Fried is a good chaser to his “The Big Regression” this week (which I linked to yesterday):

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful.

Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing — like a paperclip, for example — everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen, etc) does, the more calls you have to make.

This isn’t the same as prioritizing things. High, medium, low priority doesn’t tell you enough about the problem. “What needs to be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high priority?” Further, priority doesn’t tell you anything about cost. And the first thing to internalize is that everything has a cost.

Obvious / easy / possible is a good filter through which to create — and critique — designs. To borrow an example from yesterday: old-fashioned analog light switches are exemplars of obviousness; most new-fashioned smart switches are exemplars of possibility.

Tuesday, 6 January 2026

Howard Oakley on the MacOS 26 Tahoe UI ★

Howard Oakley, writing at The Eclectic Light Company

macOS Tahoe’s visual interface:

• Fits largely rectangular contents into windows with excessively rounded corners.
• Enlarges controls without any functional benefit.
• Results in app icons being more uniform, thus less distinguishable and memorable.
• Fails to distinguish tools, controls and other interface elements using differences in tone, so making them harder to use.
• Makes a mess where transparent layers are superimposed, and won’t reduce transparency when that’s needed to render its interface more accessible.

Maybe this is because I’m getting older, but that gives me the benefit of having experienced Apple’s older interfaces, with their exceptional quality and functionality.

It’s just remarkable how much better-looking MacOS was 10 years ago, compared to MacOS 26 Tahoe at its best. And it’s equally remarkable just how bad MacOS 26 Tahoe looks in many typical, non-contrived situations, where entire menus, search fields, and window titles are rendered completely illegible.

‘Icons in Menus Everywhere — Send Help’ ★

Jim Nielsen:

It’s extra noise to me. It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful (more on that below). It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.

This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of an icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?”

The former doesn’t require thinking. It’s just templating — they all have icons, so we need to put something there. The latter requires care and thoughtfulness for each use case and its context.

To defend my point, one of the examples I always pointed to was macOS. For the longest time, Apple’s OS-level menus seemed to avoid this default approach of sticking icons in every menu item.

That is, until macOS Tahoe shipped.

Nielsen’s post on MacOS 26 Tahoe’s tragic “icons for every menu item” design edict was published a month ago, before Nikita Prokopov’s post on the same subject yesterday. Both posts are crackerjack good, and complement each other. Nielsen makes the point that the Mac stood as a counter to platforms and systems that put icons next to every menu item. Of course Google Docs has icons next to every menu item. It sucks. Google sucks at UI design. We Mac users laugh at their crappy designs.

Well, who’s laughing now? It might sound hyperbolic but this change is the reason why I’ve decided not to upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe. I could put up with the rest of Liquid Glass’s half-baked who-thought-this-was-OK-to-ship? nonsense, but not the whole menu bar. I can tolerate being angry about UI changes Apple makes to the Mac. But I can’t tolerate being heartbroken.

‘The Big Regression’ ★

Jason Fried:

My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months so we rented them a house nearby.

It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state of the art systems. You know, the ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and interfaces that try too hard.

And it’s terrible. What a regression.

Examples include: light switches that require a demo to use, a Miele dishwasher that requires the use of a companion phone app, a confusing-to-use TV (of course), inscrutable thermostats, and:

And the lag. Lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind. Everything. Lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. Real-time must be the hardest problem.

Now look... I’m no luddite. But this experience is close to conversion therapy. Tech can make things better, but I simply can’t see in these cases. I’ve heard the pitches too — you can set up scenes and one button can change EVERYTHING. Not buying it. It actually feels primitive, like we haven’t figured out how to make things easy yet.

In this period of the computerization of everything, so many systems have lost the innate intuitiveness from their analog counterparts. Light switches were easy and obvious. Flip the switch. Thermostats were easy and obvious. Turn the dial until the indicator points to the temperature you want. Light switches and Honeywell thermostats were so simple they seemed like they weren’t “interfaces” at all, which is why they were such great interfaces. The best interfaces almost literally disappear.

One of the mottos of the Perl programming language is that easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible. That’s the ideal when designing anything. But the more important part is keeping easy things easy. A house full of old-fashioned analog light switches is better than a house full of smart switches that need a demo to use at all, even though with the old-fashioned switches, you can’t do hard things like turn off the lights remotely, or turn off every light in the house with one action. The smart switches might seem like an improvement because they make possible hard things that were previously impossible. Making possible the impossible is surely a win, right? But not necessarily. Making possible the heretofore impossible isn’t axiomatically a win. It’s a loss if it comes at the expense of keeping the easy things easy, consistent, reliable, and intuitive. Nothing exemplifies that more than the decline in user experience of watching TV, and attempting something as previously simple as flipping between two games on two different channels.

The guiding principle when creating computerized versions of analog systems ought to be “First, do no harm.” Everything should be as easy, obvious, reliable, and intuitive as in the old system. Only add to that what doesn’t introduce any regressions on those fronts.

Alas, that’s not how the world has proceeded.

‘Who’s Who at X, the Deepfake Porn Site Formerly Known as Twitter’ ★

The Financial Times has a nice illustrated guide to the leadership team at Twitter/X, where things are going about as you’d expect.

Don Mattingly Joins Phillies as Bench Coach ★

Welcome to Philadelphia, Donnie Baseball.

Monday, 5 January 2026

‘It’s Hard to Justify Tahoe Icons’ ★

This essay from UI critic Nikita Prokopov is just devastatingly good. If you’ve looked at MacOS 26 Tahoe, you’re surely appalled by the new UI guideline that recommends putting icons next to every single menu item. Prokopov argues — with copious screenshot illustrations every step of the way — that this is a terrible idea in the first place, and that Apple has implemented it poorly. There’s no defense for any of this. Don’t make the mistake of thinking Apple just needs better, more consistent icons. The fact that Tahoe’s menu item icons are glaringly inconsistent and often utterly inscrutable is the fudge icing on a shit cake, but the real embarrassment is that the idea ever got past the proposal stage. No real UI or icon designers think this is a good idea. None.

A shitty idea that works against usability, inconsistently implemented, all in the name of adding some ugly visual bling to the UI. Perhaps the epitome of a Dye job.

Simply a must-read piece. I have much more to say about the menus in Tahoe, but thanks to Prokopov, I don’t have to say it all.

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Sunday, 4 January 2026

NFL Playoff Scenarios ★

What a great site (and Bluesky account) this is. Just what it says on the tin: all the scenarios for how the NFL playoff seedings can shake out, presented very plainly but clearly. The old-school World Wide Web still has a beating heart.

Saturday, 3 January 2026

Listen Later ★

My thanks to Listen Later for sponsoring this week at DF. Listen Later is a super simple, super useful service that turns articles into podcast episodes. When you sign up, you get a custom email address to send articles to; every article you forward to your Listen Later address is transformed into very human-like narration, and gets delivered to your private podcast feed. You can subscribe to your private Listen Later podcast feed in any podcast app.

In addition to the email gateway, there’s a Shortcut for sending articles from Safari (on Mac or iOS), a web extension for Chrome, and a simple web interface for submitting new articles. It’s very simple and the narrated versions sound great.

Sign up for free and start listening today. New users get $2 in credits to try it out — no commitment. And if you like it, you simply prepay for credits as you go. There’s no subscription — you simply pay for what you use. I wish more services had a pay-as-you-go model like Listen Later’s.

Matthew Dowd Exposes the Pickle 1 XR Glasses as a Preposterous Fraud ★

Matthew Dowd, in a long, devastatingly careful post on Twitter/X:

If they’re suggesting their waveguide displays are bright enough and vibrant enough to see clearly in direct sunlight, that would be yet another innovation they’ve discovered that every other player in the market (including the Chinese manufacturers where the waveguide displays come from) has missed.

Meta has access to every display manufacturer and their Display Glasses’ peak brightness is ~5,000 nits, itself very power heavy. These glasses came out just last fall and there is no sign of significantly brighter waveguides shipping for commercial products since then. It’s also worth noting that Meta Display Glasses users have noted poor readability in direct sunlight, suggesting a greater leap would be necessary to meet Pickle’s claims.

Put simply, Pickle having much brighter waveguides that also have a 30-degree FOV is extremely unlikely. It would mean that some waveguide manufacturer out there (there aren’t many) recently achieved a breakthrough and has chosen Pickle to be the first device it’s found in. Oh, and it’s going to ship next quarter.

I don’t know what these scammers at Pickle think is going to happen, but they sure as shit aren’t going to ship a product that does anything vaguely close to what they claim they’re on the cusp of shipping. I doubt they’re going to ship anything at all, ever. The whole thing is like the Big Lie, but for technology not politics.

One of two scenarios is true:

1. Pickle, a 15-person startup founded in 2024 that has raised less than $10 million, is the most advanced personal computer hardware company in the world, on the cusp of launching multiple hardware and software technologies that put the company 5-10 years ahead of established rivals like Apple, Meta, Samsung, Google, Sony, and Zeiss. The Pickle 1 glasses are the most amazing consumer electronics device since the original iPhone. CEO Daniel Park will go down in history as one of the most innovative leaders and inventors in the history of the world. Or:

2. Pickle is a complete and utter sham that is accepting $200 pre-orders for a product that exists only as a fabricated fake in its launch video. CEO Daniel Park is a liar and fraud, and, depending upon what they do with the pre-order payments they are now collecting, perhaps a thief.

Either (a) is mostly true or (b) is mostly true. Given that there exists not one single independent person other than Park himself who vouches that the Pickle 1 actually exists and functions in prototype form, I think it’s pretty obvious which scenario is the case. Which makes me wonder what the hell is going on at Y Combinator these days.

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Wednesday, 31 December 2025

The Talk Show: ‘2025 Year in Review’ ★

A look back at Apple’s 2025, with special guest Rene Ritchie.

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Photoshop 1.0 and the Early Macintosh HIG ★

After posting a link to the Computer History Museum’s release of the Photoshop 1.0 source code last week, I spent some time paging through the original Photoshop manuals. I found a screenshot of the dialog box where you entered your serial number, and posted it to Mastodon, writing:

If you’re annoyed by something that is obviously wrong about this dialog box from Photoshop 1.0, you’re my type of person. (Even more so if, like me, you remember being annoyed by this at the time, when you were entering your cracked SN.)

What a lovely thread it generated, replete with screenshots from early versions of the HIG.

Sidenote: I would eat my hat if Alan Dye knew what was wrong and gross about this dialog box. This is exactly the sort of sweating the idiomatic usability details thing that has frequently been wrong in Apple software in the last decade. The response from Dye and those in his cohort would be, I’d wager, to roll their eyes with a “Who gives a shit what the UI guidelines were forty fucking years ago?” dismissal. Here’s the thing. Styles have changed as time has marched on. Technical capabilities — screen resolution, color — have marched on. But the fundamental idioms of good Macintosh UI design are timeless (and many of them ought to apply to Apple’s other platforms). These idioms are like grammar. Slang changes. Language forever moves forward. But many important idioms are so fundamental they do not change. Styles and technical advances have advanced over time in filmmaking and print design too, but the basic principles of good cinema and graphic layout are timeless. Only a fool dismisses the collective knowledge passed down by those who came before us.

‘The Strange Death of Make America Great Again’ ★

Matthew Walther, in an opinion piece last week for The New York Times (gift link):

MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an end in itself. Loyalty tests proliferate. Those who counsel de-escalation find themselves subject to denunciation; prudential disagreement is allowed to provide cover for rank bigotry. Partisans celebrate one another for exacerbating tensions even when exacerbation forecloses coalition building.

There is also a related problem: The Trumpist movement has generated a lunatic array of semiautonomous online subcultures that are largely indifferent to strategic considerations and immune from political consequences while still exercising influence over actors whose decisions are not so immune. The disappearance of the informal gate-keeping function once performed by conservative luminaries such as William F. Buckley Jr. is probably permanent. In the absence of such authority, informed argument exists alongside phony outrage, profiteering, self-aggrandizement and saying things for the hell of it. The result is not merely the radicalization that Mr. Buckley feared but a kind of omnidirectional incoherence.

“A kind of omnidirectional incoherence” is as perfect a description as I’ve seen regarding the whole Trumpist movement in this second administration.

Tuesday, 30 December 2025

‘I’m in Charge at This Hertz Location, and Buddy, You’re Not Getting a Car Today’ ★

Emily Delaney, at McSweeney’s:

Okay, now you’re getting upset. You’re getting upset despite the fact that we have strict rules against getting upset at this Hertz location. But tell me, honestly, when you reserved a rental car through Hertz, you thought… what? That we were going to set aside a special little car just for you? Seriously? Oh my god.

(Via Kottke.)

The U.S. Conservative Aggrieved Mindset, Explained ★

Jason Pargin is — well, to my tastes — a master of the TikTok video format. This one is so good, and ends with a mic-drop closing line.

Using AirPods Live Translation in Japan ★

Ruffin Prevost, writing at The New York Times:

As everyone filed out, I repeated, in English, some of the priest’s comments to my guide, Keiko Hatada, who taught English for 30 years and has led custom tours of Tokyo for the past decade. I wanted to make sure I had understood things correctly.

I recounted the priest’s admonition to set aside unwholesome feelings of anger and greed, and work instead to show compassion and generosity, as well as his reminder that his temple was still accepting donations for those affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

“You told me you didn’t speak Japanese,” my guide said, pleasantly surprised.

Beyond a few basic greetings and food terms, I don’t.

I wrote the following two years ago in my AirPods Pro 2 review:

The new AirPods Pro are the best single expression of Apple as a company today. Not the most important product, not the most complicated, not the most essential. But the one that exemplifies everything Apple is trying to do. They are simple, they are useful, and they offer features that most people use and want. Most people use headphones. A lot of people use them every day — in noisy environments. AirPods Pro are — for any scenario where big over-ear-style headphones are impractical — the best headphones in the world.

That was before Live Translation, a feature that until recently existed only in science fiction.

ICEBlock App Sues Trump Administration for Censorship ★

Bobby Allyn, reporting three weeks ago for NPR:

The developer of ICEBlock, an iPhone app that anonymously tracks the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, has sued the Trump administration for free speech violations after Apple removed the service from its app store under demands from the White House.

The suit, filed on Monday in federal court in Washington, asks a judge to declare that the administration violated the First Amendment when it threatened to criminally prosecute the app’s developer and pressured Apple to make the app unavailable for download, which the tech company did in October. [...]

To First Amendment advocates, the White House’s pressure campaign targeting ICEBlock is the latest example of what’s known as “jawboning,” when government officials wield state power to suppress speech. The Cato Institute calls the practice “censorship by proxy.”

Good on developer Joshua Aaron for filing this suit and defending his work.

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Sunday, 28 December 2025

Copilot Money ★

My thanks to Copilot Money for sponsoring last week at DF. Copilot is a personal finance app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’ve always deeply believed in the value of embracing the design idioms and technical features of truly native apps for Apple platforms. Apple has noticed, awarding Copilot an App Store Editor’s Choice and featuring Copilot earlier this year on Apple Developer for their use of Swift Charts.

Copilot’s big news this week is they’ve launched a new web app, bringing access to Copilot from any device, anywhere. It’s designed with all the attention to detail — and concern for privacy and security — as their native apps.

Copilot Money brings all your spending, budgets, investments, and net worth into one organized dashboard, with intelligent categorization and insights that help you stay on track without spreadsheets or app-hopping. Designed to feel calm and intuitive, Copilot makes it easy to understand your finances across all your devices.

Copilot first sponsored DF back in 2021. My wife and I started using it then to track our finances, and we haven’t looked back. Copilot Money isn’t just better than anything we’d used before, it absolutely blew everything else away. It’s easy to connect to your financial accounts, and once you do, you don’t need to spend any effort at all to enter transactions. Copilot just tracks it all automatically, and most importantly, presents it to you in clear, intuitive ways. It’s so good. I’m not saying that because they sponsored DF last week — I’m saying that as a happy paying customer for over four years now.

Copilot is offering DF readers two months free with code DARING, plus 26% off your first year for a limited time, available through this link.

SoundSource 6 ★

Major update to Rogue Amoeba’s essential audio utility for the Mac. I’ve written about versions 5 and 4 previously, and everything I wrote then remains true. SoundSource remains the system-wide audio menu item that ought to be built into MacOS, giving you easy, intuitive control over every audio device (input and output), and easy, intuitive control over every app in which you play or record audio. That one seemingly-simple app does both those things is quite the remarkable design achievement. And aside from that usability, SoundSource remains an exemplar of UI design stylistically — distinctive and branded, while looking and feeling in every way like a standard Mac app.

New tentpole features in version 6 include fine-grained AirPlay support (e.g. route output from one app over AirPlay while leaving the rest of your system’s audio output local to your Mac), groups for output devices, and a new “Quick Configs” feature for saving and switching between, well, quick configurations. $49 for a new license, $25 to upgrade from a previous one.

Saturday, 27 December 2025

Tim Cook Posts AI Slop in Christmas Message on Twitter/X, Ostensibly to Promote ‘Pluribus’ ★

The whole illustration is just weird looking, for one thing. As for sloppy details, the tree is in soft focus but somehow has a crisp edge, the carton is labeled both “Whole Milk” and “Lowfat Milk”, and the “Cow Fun Puzzle” maze is just goofily wrong. (I can’t recall ever seeing a puzzle of any kind on a milk carton, because they’re waxy and hard to write on. It’s like a conflation of milk cartons and cereal boxes.)

[Update, 29 December: Turns out, the “lowfat” milk carton props from the actual show have the same mistake with “whole milk” printed above. That doesn’t change that it’s a stupid mistake to copy, or that there are a slew of other telltale signs that the image was generated by AI.]

The Apple TV X account retweeted Cook, and added a credit: “We thought you might like this festive artwork by Keith Thomson, made on MacBook Pro.”

Apple didn’t tag the “Keith Thomson” who supposedly created this artwork for them, but if it’s this Keith Thomson, Apple must have somehow fallen for a scam, because that Keith Thomson’s published paintings are wonderful. It does seem to be that Keith Thomson’s signature on Apple’s sloppy illustration, though. (I like a bunch of the paintings from that Keith Thomson, and love a few of them, but this one in particular feels like it was made just for me. It’s perfect.)

Thursday, 25 December 2025

A 3D Tour Inside Trump’s Oval Office ★

Terrific interaction design from The New York Times. Not so terrific interior design from the president.

Wednesday, 24 December 2025

The Talk Show: ‘A Naughty Citizen’ ★

Special guest Quinn Nelson returns for a two-topic holiday spectacular: the iPad in the wake of iPadOS 26, and Apple’s executive changes as Tim Cook seemingly nears the end of his time as CEO.

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• Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together.
• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.

Quinn Nelson on Apple’s Executive Shuffling ★

Another great video from Quinn Nelson. If your dumb cousin who knows you’re an Apple nerd approaches you on Christmas and says “Hey what’s going on at Apple, Bloomberg says it’s rats leaving a sinking ship over there?” and you don’t feel like explaining, just tell him to watch this video. Just the perfect explanation.

‘The iPad’s Software Problem Is Permanent’ ★

Smart, fair video from Quinn Nelson on the gap that remains between iPadOS 26 and desktop OSes. I think it’s right that there is a gap there. Apple has the Macintosh, the best desktop/workstation platform in the industry. So whatever the ideal is for iPadOS, it ought to fall short of MacOS in terms of technical capabilities, and instead offer a degree of simplicity and can’t-screw-it-up-edness that the Mac can’t match. But, some of the limitations that remain in iPadOS are just frustrating. iPadOS 26 is a huge leap forward, and I think sets the stage for Apple to address those limitations.

Tuesday, 23 December 2025

I Guess Nothing Is Foolproof ★

From a 2023 report at The Verge:

Sony highly confidential information about its PlayStation business has just been revealed by mistake. As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the margins Sony shares with publishers, its Call of Duty revenues, and even the cost of developing some of its games.

It looks like someone redacted the documents with a black Sharpie — but when you scan them in, it’s easy to see some of the redactions. Oops.

This is sort of the exception that proves the rule regarding redactions. If you redact a document digitally, you have to know what to look for (e.g. metadata) to be certain you’ve redacted everything you want to redact. If you redact a document on paper, you can just look at it, with good light and sharp eyes.

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