Who better to join the show to commemorate Apple’s 50th anniversary than John Siracusa?

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

As that happened, Apple laid off staff “again and again and again,” Mr. Espinosa said. His manager told him that he had been spared because he had worked for the company for so long that his severance package would be too expensive.

“I was wondering what I was going to do because I had no college degree and I had only worked at one company,” Mr. Espinosa said. Then he figured: “I was here when we turned the lights on. I might as well stick around until we turn the lights off.”

Lovely read.

The New York Times (gift link):

Critics warn it still has many issues — its portico is too big, its stairs lead nowhere, its columns will block views from inside the ballroom.

And that’s just the portico.

This is a really good piece, with animated-as-you-scroll illustrations pointing out specific problems with the design.

Such details affect how people passing by experience these iconic places, and how each structure fits into a capital city that has been planned around civic symbols and sightlines since the 1790s. The deliberation is also an expression of democracy, said Carol Quillen, the president and chief executive of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has sued the administration over the ballroom.

“Even if we are slow and we make mistakes and we fight, that process has meaning to us,” Ms. Quillen said. No project belonging to the public should be the vision of just one man, she said.

That is, however, how the ballroom has often been described.

“President Trump is the best builder and developer in the entire world, and the American people can rest well knowing that this project is in his hands,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. Past administrations and presidents have wanted a ballroom for more than 150 years, he said, and Mr. Trump will accomplish it.

The way that these lickspittles talk about Trump exactly the way North Koreans speak of Little Kim, or that anyone in any other cult speaks of the cult leader, is just revolting. Even the Chinese don’t speak of Xi “The Pooh” Jinping like this. No one in China pretends Xi is a genius architect.

David Pogue, on his new blog at Substack:

When the iPhone was about to go on sale in 2007, a thousand people lined up around the block at New York City’s Apple Store.

I’d written a parody of “My Way,” with the crazy idea of filming a music video with the participation of people standing in that line. It was a total blast; everyone in line was game. I edited the results together and uploaded it — and for six hours, ladies and gentlemen, it was the most watched video on YouTube. (It’s still there.)

Anyway. That night, I got a call from Jobs’s assistant. “I have Steve on the line,” she said. “Can you take the call?”

I was out to dinner with my family, but I said yes.

“David?” Jobs said when he came on the line. “I saw that song video you posted today.”

Oh GREAT, I thought. I steeled myself for another epic reaming by the CEO of Apple.

“I just wanted to say, it was the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Pogue was my guest on The Talk Show a few weeks ago to talk about his new book, Apple: The First 50 Years, and the show was a lot of fun. But the book is so good, so comprehensive, so fun that it feels essential to link to it whilst we celebrate Apple’s 50th year. I’m a print guy, generally, but the print edition of this book is especially good — it’s a gorgeous book printed in full color throughout (not just, say, 16 color pages in the middle). Apple’s history is both literally and figuratively colorful, and the photos and screenshots Pogue includes are terrific.

The book is nothing short of an instant classic — simultaneously a very enjoyable read, and a meticulously-researched reference for the decades to come. Pogue both covers well-known ground and reports umpteen nuggets, anecdotes, and details that have never been told before. For example, we all know that Steve Jobs was resistant to opening the iPhone to third-party apps. But Pogue interviewed Scott Forstall and got this story, about just how far Steve Jobs thought Apple could go to expand the iPhone’s software library while not opening it to third-party developers:

“I want you to make a list of every app any customer would ever want to use,” he told Forstall. “And then the two of us will prioritize that list. And then I’m going to write you a blank check, and you are going to build the largest development team in the history of the world, to build as many apps as you can as quickly as possible.”

Forstall, dubious, began composing a list. But on the side, he instructed his engineers to build the security foundations of an app store into the iPhone’s software-“against Steve’s knowledge and wishes,” Forstall says. [...]

Two weeks after the iPhone’s release, someone figured out how to “jailbreak” the iPhone: to hack it so that they could install custom apps.

Jobs burst into Forstall’s office. “You have to shut this down!”

But Forstall didn’t see the harm of developers spending their efforts making the iPhone better. “If they add something malicious, we’ll ship an update tomorrow to protect against that. But if all they’re doing is adding apps that are useful, there’s no reason to break that.”

Jobs, troubled, reluctantly agreed.

Week by week, more cool apps arrived, available only to jailbroken phones. One day in October, Jobs read an article about some of the coolest ones.

“You know what?” he said. “We should build an app store.”

Forstall, delighted, revealed his secret plan. He had followed in the footsteps of Burrell Smith (the Mac’s memory-expansion circuit) and Bob Belleville (the Sony floppy-drive deal): He’d disobeyed Jobs and wound up saving the project.

The book is just under 600 pages, including a comprehensive index, and it isn’t padded. It is a veritable encyclopedia of Apple history. Just a remarkable, essential, and unique work. If you haven’t ordered a copy, you should, and if you do, here are some make-me-rich affiliate links:

• Hardcover:
  • Amazon
  • Bookshop.org
• E-book:
  • Kindle
  • Apple Books
  • Bookshop.org

Jason Snell, writing at Macworld, regarding joining the staff at MacUser back in 1993:

But as amazing and revelatory as the Mac was for me as a writer and editor of print and online publications, I rapidly discovered that the Apple of the period was a mess. My first day as a full-time employee, a copy editor popped his head over the cubicle wall and asked me if I had heard anything about layoffs. Welcome to the media, kid.

Back in March 1991, Saturday Night Live ran what I consider the best Apple parody ad ever made: “McIntosh Jr.” Siracusa and I talked about it on The Talk Show this week, celebrating Apple’s 50th anniversary, so I looked it up for the show notes. Alas, this appallingly low-resolution copy hosted on Reddit is seemingly the only free-to-watch copy of it available. (If you can find — or make — a better version, let me know.) If you have a Peacock account, you can watch it in much higher quality in their SNL archive: Season 16, Episode 16, starting at 7:30, just after host Jeremy Irons’s monologue. (It rolls right into a good “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey”.)

We just recorded tomorrow’s episode of Dithering, and Ben asked me my favorite Apple commercial of all time. I was tempted to say this one, despite the fact that it isn’t real. The best parodies are the ones that hew the closest to the truth of their subject, that exaggerate the least. And the message of “McIntosh Jr.” is, at its heart, the actual purpose of the Macintosh, and of Apple writ large. Computers that enable you to do your best work. Bicycles for the mind. And, yes, the power to crush the other kids. That’s what drew me and Siracusa to Apple computers, and keeps us drawn to them today.

Update: Here’s a high-quality free-to-watch version on Rumble. Nice!

StepSecurity:

If you have installed axios@1.14.1 or axios@0.30.4, assume your system is compromised.

There are zero lines of malicious code inside axios itself, and that’s exactly what makes this attack so dangerous. Both poisoned releases inject a fake dependency, plain-crypto-js@4.2.1, a package never imported anywhere in the axios source, whose sole purpose is to run a postinstall script that deploys a cross-platform remote access trojan. The dropper contacts a live command-and-control server, delivers separate second-stage payloads for macOS, Windows, and Linux, then erases itself and replaces its own package.json with a clean decoy. A developer who inspects their node_modules folder after the fact will find no indication anything went wrong.

This was not opportunistic. It was precision. The malicious dependency was staged 18 hours in advance. Three payloads were pre-built for three operating systems. Both release branches were poisoned within 39 minutes of each other. Every artifact was designed to self-destruct. Within two seconds of npm install, the malware was already calling home to the attacker’s server before npm had even finished resolving dependencies. This is among the most operationally sophisticated supply chain attacks ever documented against a top-10 npm package.

Could be my bigotry against JavaScript speaking, but I find it unsurprising that this happened to the same framework that this and this happened to.

Katie Deighton, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link; also on News+):

OpenAI bought TBPN to encourage constructive conversation around the changes AI creates by helping the show grow, according to a memo sent by Fidji Simo, the OpenAI’s CEO of applications. TBPN will report to Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, and will help with company communications and marketing outside of the show.

“They’ve helped many brands market online and because they have a strong pulse on where the industry is going, their comms and marketing ideas have really impressed me,” Simo wrote in the memo.

But TBPN will remain editorially independent, retaining control over its programming, editorial decisions, guest selection and production schedule, OpenAI said.

Yes, I’m sure they’ll remain totally independent. You know, like The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos, and CBS News under David Ellison. Many news and commentary publications have remained steadfastly independent while reporting to the head of PR for a company they ostensibly cover.

Great roundup of links from Stephen Hackett:

The crew is made up of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen. They are now on their way to the moon, set to return in 10 days. Their rocket may be the product of a hugely-flawed program, but right now, that doesn’t matter. They are getting us closer to returning to the lunar surface than we’ve been in 50 years. That’s worth celebrating.

John Buck at The Verge (gift link), excerpted from his great book, Inventing the Future:

Steve Perlman: Almost everyone at Apple, and definitely everywhere else, assumed that multimedia would always require specialized hardware — and be expensive. A few of us thought otherwise.

One of the few was Gavin Miller, a research scientist in Apple’s Graphics Group, who worked with Hoffert to crack the problem of software compression and decompression, otherwise known as codec.

Gavin Miller, research scientist: We went for a lunchtime walk, and by the end of it, we had generalized the model to include constant color blocks and 2-bit per-pixel interpolating blocks. This allowed us to trade off quantization artifacts in large flat areas for more detail in textured areas. The result was an increase in quality and performance that helped to make the codec practical for really small video sizes.

Just a typical lunchtime walk-and-talk.

Fun anecdote from 1990:

He asked Peppel to create a product plan that he could announce at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on May 7th. That day, Casey took to the stage and announced QuickTime to a stunned audience, saying, “Apple intends to develop real-time software compression/decompression technology that will run on today’s modular Macintosh systems. A system-wide time coding to allow synchronization of sound, animation, and other time-critical processes.”

Casey explained that Apple’s new multimedia architecture would be delivered by the end of the year. He did not say that QuickTime had no budget, staff, or offices.

Worthington: We were dumbfounded.

Konstantin Othmer, QuickDraw engineer: I was standing next to Bruce Leak, and asked him, “What the heck was that?” He said he had no idea.

QuickTime actually shipped by WWDC 1991, teaching Apple the important lesson that anything they announce at WWDC, no matter how premature, will ship as promised.