While I’m bitching about Netflix’s craptacular new video player on Apple TV, let me quote from a piece I wrote two years ago (also complaining about Netflix’s tvOS app):

Turns out there are two better ways:

1. If you use the Control Center Apple TV remote control on your iPhone, there’s a dedicated “CC” button.

2. In tvOS, go to Settings → Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut, and set it to “Closed Captions”. Now you can just triple-click the Menu/Back button on the remote to toggle captions. (On older Apple TV remotes, the button is labelled “Menu”; on the new remote, it’s labelled with a “<”.)

But here’s the hitch: Netflix’s tvOS app doesn’t support either of these ways to toggle captions. Netflix only supports the on-screen caption toggle in their custom video player. I get why Netflix and other streaming apps want to use their own custom video players, but it ought to be mandated by App Store review that they support accessibility features like this one.

What Apple should have done right from the start with the tvOS-based Apple TV a decade ago is require all apps to use the system video player. No custom video players. It’s too late for that, alas. But the tvOS App Store review process ought to insist on compliance with these accessibility and platform compliance features.

You want to use your own custom video player? Fine. But apps with custom video players must support the “CC” button in the iOS Control Center remote control, must support the triple-click accessibility shortcut, must support the platform conventions for fast-forwarding and rewinding using the Apple TV remote control, etc. If your video player doesn’t comply, your app update doesn’t get approved.

Apple should use the App Store approval process for the benefit of users. Isn’t that supposed to be the point?

Stephen Hackett, at 512 Pixels:

I’ve thought a lot about the bad timing Jones mentions. Had Apple stuck to the original timeline, and killed off the 2013 Mac Pro in favor of an iMac “specifically targeted at large segments of the pro market,” back in 2017, Apple could have avoided putting out the best Intel Mac ever, less than a year before the transition to Apple silicon.

Did Apple know in 2017 that 2020 was the year the M1 would make it out of the lab? Probably not, but it doesn’t make the timing any less painful.

Apple might not have had 2020 set in stone for the Apple Silicon transition, but in 2017, they definitely knew that Apple Silicon was the future. I think they knew that years before 2017, and in broad strokes, that’s why 2015–2020 was such a bad period for Mac hardware. They didn’t ship a retina MacBook Air until 2018. The 12-inch MacBook was beautiful but expensive and seriously underpowered. And nothing suffered more than the Mac Pro in that stretch. I think Apple knew that the future was on their own silicon, but in the meantime, they just couldn’t get it up for the last five years of the Intel era.

For your weekend listening enjoyment: Christina Warren returns to the show to discuss Apple big month of product announcements — in particular, the iPhone 17e and MacBook Neo. And we pour one out for the Mac Pro.

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Look, I’m all for democracy, but a poll whose results currently have the Extended Keyboard II down at #47 is a poll that makes me angry.

For your weekend viewing enjoyment:

But in almost every way that mattered, the Macintosh was right. Right about how we’d use computers going forward. Right about the idea that computers needed to be less complicated. Right about the fact that caring this deeply about both hardware and software design would make a difference. Though Apple didn’t sell many of those original Macintoshes, there’s no question it changed computers forever.

On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the original Macintosh. David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber explain the strange corporate infighting that led to the project in the first place, the ways in which the Macintosh changed over time, and how Jobs and his team drove such massive hype for the device some people didn’t even want to ship. Then they debate the device’s true legacy, and whether the computer or the commercial is the true icon.

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring the week at DF. Their latest is a CLI that launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration into your codebase. No signup required. It creates an environment, populates your keys, and you claim your account later when you’re ready.

But the CLI goes way beyond installation. WorkOS Skills make your coding agent a WorkOS expert. workos seed defines your environment as code. workos doctor finds and fixes misconfigurations. And once you’re authenticated, your agent can manage users, orgs, and environments directly from the terminal. See how it works at WorkOS’s website.

See also: WorkOS just completed another Launch Week. This one, for Spring 2026, does not disappoint with its custom UI and theme. Even if you don’t have a need for WorkOS you should check out their Launch Week site just for fun.

Scott Knaster:

The Big Mac is about 22 times the size of the little Mac.

Paul Graham:

So when you have a world defined only by brand, it’s going to be a weird, bad world.

Graham’s thoughtful essay focuses on the mechanical watch industry. But I disagree with his conclusion. I think the market for mechanical watches has never been more fun or vibrant than it is today. The action, for me at least, isn’t with the high-end luxury Swiss brands. It’s with the indies, from companies like Baltic and Halios.

It’s also interesting to ponder Graham’s essay in the context of other industries. I think it’s self evident that the entire market for phones — the most popular and lucrative consumer devices in the world — is defined by a single brand, and every competitor just copies that one brand with varying degrees of shamelessness. That’s bad and weird.

Thereallo, after spelunking inside the APK bundle for the Android version:

• Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal’s servers.

• Loads JavaScript from a random person’s GitHub Pages site (lonelycpp.github.io) for YouTube embeds. If that account is compromised, arbitrary code runs in the app’s WebView. [...]

Is any of this illegal? Probably not. Is it what you’d expect from an official government app? Probably not either.

Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

The app is, at least temporarily, popular. As I type this it’s #3 in the iOS App Store top free apps list, sandwiched between Claude and Gemini. I don’t know how similar the iOS app is to the Android one, but I took one for the team and installed it, and after poking around for a few minutes, it hasn’t even prompted me to ask for location access. It’s a crappy app, to be sure. A lot of flashing between screen transitions. When you open an article, there’s a “< Back” button top left, and an “X” button top right. Both buttons seem to do the same thing. There’s no share sheet for “news” articles, which seems particularly stupid. You can’t even copy a link to an article and share it manually.

But the iOS version has a clean privacy report card in the App Store, and I don’t see anything in the app that makes me doubt that. It seems like the Android version is quite different.

Update 1: Someone on Reddit claims to have analyzed the iOS app bundle and discovered similar code as in the Android app, but I still don’t see any way to actually get the iOS app to even ask for location permission. I think there might be code in the app that never gets called. Like I wrote above, it’s clearly not a well-crafted app. If anyone knows how to get the iOS app to actually ask for location access, let me know how. Here’s another analysis of the iOS app.

Update 2: I installed the Android version of the app too, and just like on iOS, the only permission it asks for is to send notifications. Maybe they will in a future software update, but as far as I can see, the app never even tries to check the device’s location, on either platform.

The White House:

The Council will be co-chaired by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios. The following individuals have been appointed:

Marc Andreessen
Sergey Brin
Safra Catz
Michael Dell
Jacob DeWitte
Fred Ehrsam
Larry Ellison
David Friedberg
Jensen Huang
John Martinis
Bob Mumgaard
Lisa Su
Mark Zuckerberg

Under President Trump, PCAST will focus on topics related to the opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies present to the American workforce, and ensuring all Americans thrive in the Golden Age of Innovation.

Scientific American observes that 12/13 are executives, and only one, Martinis, is an academic researcher. But I mean, of course a council like this, from this administration, is going to be made up of big-cap corporate executives and founders. I’d say it’s more surprising there is even one academic researcher than that there aren’t more.

I’m more intrigued by the companies who aren’t represented: no one from Apple, no one from Microsoft, no one from Amazon. (That left room for two from Oracle, that well known bastion of corporate virtue.) Read into that what you will. Me, I can’t help but suspect that this administration is taking on a profound stink, and something like appointments to this council are akin to a game of music chairs where Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Andy Jassy, and Jeff Bezos are happy not to have gotten seats.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, during an on-stage interview at The Hill & Valley Forum last week, was asked “What do you see as America’s unique advantages that other countries don’t have?”

His answer, after taking a moment to think, “America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump.”

Huang, newly appointed to the aforelinked President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, seemingly doesn’t smell the growing stink.

Hana Kiros, writing for The Atlantic:

Recently, a Costco in Florida instituted a new store policy. An employee told me that he was asked to open up every desktop computer displayed in the electronics section and remove the memory chips. Otherwise, the RAM harvesters would get them. Elsewhere, criminal groups are misdirecting trucks carrying RAM in order to loot them. All of this is happening because of a generational shortage of a part used in practically every electronic gadget on Earth.

Two of the best movies ever made, John McTiernan’s Die Hard in 1988, and Michael Mann’s Heat in 1995, revolved around plots to steal bearer bonds. (Also: Beverly Hills Cop — not quite one of the best films ever made, but a classic, for sure.) But bearer bonds have fallen out of favor as the world of legitimate finance has become almost entirely digital. A good heist film targeting a big shipment of RAM chips would be very 2026.

Grace Kay, Ashley Stewart, and Pranav Dixit, writing for Business Insider (News+):

“Part of bringing me on, and giving me the responsibilities of a CEO, was to make sure that I could really run that part of the company with autonomy,” Simo, whose title is CEO of applications, told Business Insider.

Altman defers to Simo when he doesn’t feel strongly, she said, and they “debate it out” when he does.

I am deeply suspicious of any company with two CEOs. It occasionally works, like at Netflix, when they’re not just co-CEOs but co-equals. Simo does not seem Sam Altman’s equal at OpenAI.

As OpenAI races toward a possible IPO later this year, Simo, who oversees nearly two-thirds of the company, has a delicate balancing act. She must craft a strategy to make products profitable, while convincing staffers who joined a research-driven organization that commercialization won’t change the mission.

The stakes are high. Deutsche Bank estimated that OpenAI is expected to amass the “largest startup losses in history,” totaling a projected $143 billion between 2024 and 2029. (An OpenAI spokesperson said that figure is incorrect, and one person familiar with the numbers said OpenAI’s internal projections are in line with other reports of $111 billion cash burn by 2030.)

It’s really something when the number in the company’s favor is a loss of $111 billion.

One former Meta employee recalled a moment when, after a contentious meeting, Simo sent a one-line follow-up saying she was unlikely to change her mind, so the team shouldn’t waste time trying to persuade her. She has little patience for internal debates that lose sight of the product, the former employee said, and she’s skilled at “being super clear in her directive so teams don’t scramble and waste time.”

Debates that lose sight of the product quality, or lose sight of the product revenue? Given that Simo rose to prominence at Facebook, eventually running the Facebook blue app, and considering the product quality vs. product revenue balance of that app, I think we know the answer.

This whole dumb “superapp” idea that leaked last week sounds exactly like the sort of thing someone who ran the Facebook app would think is a good idea. The difference, I expect, is that Facebook is free to let product quality (and experience quality) fall by the wayside because their social platforms have such powerful network effects. People stay on Facebook and Instagram even as the experiences worsen because everyone they know is also still on those apps. There’s no network effect like that for ChatGPT. Claude is already rising to near-equal status in popularity, and Gemini isn’t far behind, and Simo hasn’t even started enshittifying ChatGPT yet. People will just switch.

The Apple.com homepage has a nice little animation showing sketches of the company’s most iconic products. The video file itself is hosted here, but I’m not sure how permanent that link is.

Tim Cook posted a different video on Twitter/X, a VHS-style “rewind” through Apple product history. This one’s more fun. There’s an absolutely exquisite audio glitch at a certain moment — chef’s kiss. Bit of a shame that it’s only on X as far I know. Update: Ah, Apple posted the same video to their homepage, linked to a “◀︎◀︎ REW” button set in bitmapped Chicago 12, but it’s seemingly only shown when you visit on an iPhone. I don’t see the button from my Mac or iPad. But you should be able to watch the video from any device at this link. (I would have awarded bonus points for making the “◀︎◀︎” triangles pixel art too. I mean, come on!)

And, last night, Paul McCartney played a full concert at Apple Park for Apple employees. Good to see the two Apples burying the hatchet.

The AP:

Hershey said Wednesday it will use classic recipes for all Reese’s products starting next year, a change that comes after the grandson of Reese’s founder criticized the company for shifting to cheaper ingredients.

Running to the press never works.

(Stick to Trader Joe’s, I say.)

Jacob Krol, writing at TechRadar:

To understand exactly what that means five years on, TechRadar sat down with Apple VP of Platform Architecture Tim Millet and Director of Audio Product Marketing Eric Treski to unpack how AirPods Max 2 is finally catching up to its own ambitions. [...]

One of the boldest claims Apple makes for AirPods Max 2 is a 1.5× improvement in active noise cancellation — achieved without changing a single physical component. “Getting those improvements to ANC and especially that 1.5 times more powerful ANC, which of course is a feat in itself, considering we didn’t change the actual design of the headphone at all from a form factor or material standpoint,” says Treski.

That improvement isn’t limited to a specific frequency band either. “We take that average at 1.5 times across an average of all frequencies. We’re not cherry-picking individual frequencies or a certain range,” he adds. That means AirPods Max 2 should perform better whether it’s blocking louder, booming sounds or higher-pitched ones — and that’s a high bar, given that the original AirPods Max were no slouches when it came to blocking out sound.

Ryan D’Agostino, writing at Esquire (News+ link, in case Esquire stiffs you with their paywall):

Cook was at Jobs’s house the day he died. As he drove back to the office to announce it to the employees and, in so doing, to the world, he felt a strange kind of shock — strange because Jobs had been sick for so long, had even refused medicine when he was first diagnosed, instead trying to cure the disease with fruit juices, and so there should have been no shock at all.

“By that time, unfortunately, there was an inevitability to it,” Cook says. “But I was in denial for so long about the disease and where it would go, because I had watched him bounce back so many times, I assumed he always would. When I took the CEO role, I thought he was going to be executive chairman forever — that’s what I thought literally six weeks earlier. Looking back, I know somebody could say, How could you think that, given the circumstances? But that’s not the way I was wired in that moment.”

D’Agostino, fondly recalling the Apple IIe his family got for Christmas in 1983, wrongly remembers that, “When we turned it on, there was a little trash can in the corner of the screen.” Don’t let that conflation of the IIe and the Macintosh (yet to come in 1983) turn you off. It’s a good profile. Cook’s thoughts on Steve Jobs are touching, and D’Agostino gets Cook to expound upon his strategy of “engagement” with the Trump administration to a degree that I don’t think any other interviewer has. Cook’s answer is over 400 words, and Esquire, to their credit, ran the whole thing.

By far the dumbest Internet Jackass Day “joke” I’ve seen so far is this one from the official New Jersey state account on Twitter/X, claiming that effective immediately, they’re lifting the statewide ban on self-service gasoline. For those of you who’ve never been there, I swear, you cannot pump your own gas anywhere in the state. It’s so ridiculous — and the historical reason so crooked — that people have a hard time believing it. You have to wait for an attendant, who is generally rude and almost always slow. Back in the day, they were extra slow returning with change when you paid in cash, hoping you’d just give up and leave. I’d rather run out of gas and just abandon my car on the side of the road than buy a single gallon of gas in New Jersey. And yet here’s the official state Twitter account yucking it up like the joke isn’t on them.

Lex Friedman (with an embedded video to prove it):

If you reverse the new Apple video that plays in “rewind,” it’s the Think Different ad music, pitched up.

Of course it is.

And, regarding that “◀︎◀︎ REW” button where the “REW” was set in bitmapped Chicago 12” but the “◀︎◀︎” was modern, Craig Hockenberry fixed it:

I pretended to be Susan Kare and fixed it, bottom is the original, top is my interpretation.