Daring Fireball
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The Making of the Lumon Industries WoeMeter
Wonderfully detailed write-up of a perfect prop from Make3: Repurposed Nagra Knobs & Switches — To ground the device in a tangible, vintage aesthetic, we salvaged original knobs and switches...
Jason Snell’s M4 MacBook Air Review
Jason Snell, last month: The new M4 MacBook Air is the Mac most people should buy. [...] That’s why perhaps the most important change in the M4 MacBook Air is...
U.S. Transaction Shares for Visa, Mastercard, and Amex
Following up on the previous item, here’s a WSJ report from October on Visa’s dominant position in the payments industry: Visa, based in San Francisco, has built its network over...
WSJ: Visa Offers Apple Roughly $100 Million to Switch Apple Card’s Network From Mastercard
AnnaMaria Andriotis, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link): The Apple card is up for grabs because Goldman Sachs, the bank behind it, is getting out of the consumer...
‘Trump Declares a Trade War on Uninhabited Islands, US Military, and Economic Logic’
Mike Masnick has a great piece at TechDirt running down just how stupid everything about Trump’s tariff trade war is: Whoever on the Council of Economic Advisers used this formula...
The Economist on Trump’s Mindless Tariffs
The Economist: On economics Mr Trump’s assertions are flat-out nonsense. The president says tariffs are needed to close America’s trade deficit, which he sees as a transfer of wealth to...
Trump Tariffs, Day Two
CNBC: Markets plunged the day after President Donald Trump imposed a far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy, including a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country on earth. The plan slaps much...
Nintendo Switch 2 Details
Great roundup from The Verge: While Nintendo told us very little in the official reveal of the console in January, now we know when the Switch 2 is coming and...
Steve Kornacki Exits MSNBC for New Deal With NBC News and NBC Sports
Stephen Battaglio, reporting for the LA Times: MSNBC viewers have seen the last of Steve Kornacki’s big board. The popular data maven has signed a deal with NBC that will...
‘What Makes an App Feel “Right” on the Mac?’
Watts Martin: If we hold things to this list, programs like Nova, MarsEdit, and Apple Pages — canonical Mac-assed Mac apps — all do unsurprisingly smashingly. But Obsidian, the Electron-based...
Jason Snell’s Unsuccessful Journey Into Netflix’s Ad Tier
Jason Snell: While the ads played on, I began creating a thought experiment: There’s a $10 difference between the ad and ad-free plans. If Mr. Netflix (he wears a top...
★ France Fines Apple $162M for App Tracking Transparency, Taking the Side of Surveillance Advertisers Over Users
It’s like a consortium of sketchy pawn shops complaining to the authorities after a retailer successfully cracked down on an organized shoplifting/pickpocketing ring, and the authorities then fining the retailer...
Release Day for Apple’s .4 OS Versions
All out today: iOS 18.4 (priority notifications, lots of new languages and EU support for Apple Intelligence). MacOS 15.4 (AI message categorization in Apple Mail, Quick Start for setting up...
The White House Correspondents Association Speaks Cowardice to Power
Brian Steinberg and Pat Saperstein, reporting for Variety over the weekend: The White House Correspondents’ Association has canceled plans to have comedian Amber Ruffin perform at its annual dinner on...
Lex.Games
My thanks to Lex Friedman for sponsoring this past week at DF to promote Lex.Games, a collection of eight daily word games. Quoting from Friedman’s own description in the sponsored...
Vertu Is Still Selling Phones, Which Suggests Someone Is Still Buying Them
Calfskin for $1,500, flip-foldables for $5,000, and whatever these are for a lot more. Who needs any sense (or a spelling checker) when you’ve got “elesant charisma / heroic essence”?...
Keach Hagey Reports on the Backstory Behind Sam Altman’s Firing and Quick Rehiring at OpenAI in 2023
Interesting excerpt at the WSJ from Keach Hagey’s upcoming book The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. (Main link is a gift link, but also...
★ ‘The Studio’ Is Fantastic So Far
Perhaps Apple’s leadership simply believes, as I do, that cinema is the grandest and greatest form of art the world has ever seen — one that encompasses acting, writing, photography...
MacOS 15 Sequoia’s Annoying-as-Hell ‘Turn On Reactions’ Menu Bar Prompt
Matt Birchler: I really thought that the screen recording notifications in macOS Sequoia would be the bane of my existence, but thankfully those have been changed quite a bit from...
ChatGPT 4o Adds Image Generation and It’s Fun as Hell
MG Siegler: I’m not even talking about Apple and AI here. We’ve done that, a lot. Probably enough — for now (famous last words). I’m talking about Apple in general....