Daring Fireball
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Chan Karunamuni on the Duo’s Open/Close Translucent Transition
Chan Karunamuni, human interface designer at Apple, on X: iPhone Duo is here! Excited to have worked on the design of our open/close transition. It’s designed to make the two displays feel like one seamless experience by perceptually bending the focal plane, not the content, so that it feels like opening a window onto a singular view. Karunamuni thanks a…
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The Verge’s Duo Review: ‘Apple’s Folding Phone Is a Messy, Expensive Good Time’
Nilay Patel and Allison Johnson (also: 26-minute video review on YouTube ): This means almost every time you open the phone you instinctively rotate it, and while it will work no matter how it’s rotated, it’s better to rotate it counterclockwise so the cameras are on top and the volume buttons are on the top left. Over our week of testing, this started…
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Joanna Stern Reviews the Duo: ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Buggy’
Joanna Stern’s video review packs a ton into 16 minutes. She commissioned a custom robot to fold/unfold the thing over 32,000 times in a week, to see if it loosened the hinge. (I won’t spoil the answer.) She took it on a yacht on the Hudson. She took it to a dark bar to test the cameras. And she really, really missed Face ID. I don’t know how she makes…
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Apple Highlights 50+ iPhone Apps That Have Already Been Optimized for the Duo
Apple Newsroom: New editorial collections for iPhone Duo apps and games will go live on the App Store this Friday, with additional app updates rolling out throughout the year. Apps optimized for iPhone Duo are easy to identify with a Made for iPhone Duo badge on product pages across the storefront. This story highlights dozens of apps that have been…
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★ The iPhone Duo
It’s been a lot of fun trying the Duo out for a week, but it feels like I’ve gotten to use an extraordinarily polished prototype — not a finished product that I’d want to buy and carry.
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Barack Obama on the Trump Administration’s Intimidation Campaign Against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar
Barack Obama, in a 430-word essay: It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. [...] The fact that any president, or any administration, is…
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From the DF Archive: Should a CEO Be a Nerd About Their Company’s Products?
Back in 2022, I quoted from an interesting post by Ben Schlappig at One Mile at a Time, where he wrote : I’ve had the opportunity to interact with quite a few senior airline executives over the years, and I find that their knowledge about competitors is typically one extreme or the other: Some airline executives literally couldn’t tell you the first thing…
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Apple Event, in Los Angeles, Next Week: ‘Pro and Tell’
Greg Joswiak, on X: Can’t wait to pro and tell next week. Juli Clover, MacRumors : Rumors suggest Apple is planning to debut the new MacBook Pro with an OLED touchscreen display, an M6 entry-level MacBook Pro, an M6 iMac, an iPad mini with an OLED display. ★
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★ Estimated Arrival Dates for DF Readers’ Pre-Ordered iPhone Duos
No one should mistake my audience as representative of the general public in any poll, but I bet my audience is at least ballpark representative of the general public when it comes to something like pre-ordering, at the crack of dawn, a new iPhone form factor that costs $2000 to $3200.
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Netflix Shitcanned Film Chief Dan Lin Too
Anthony D’Alessandro, reporting for Deadline: Dan Lin is out as film boss at Netflix in a move that has been largely speculated for weeks. Insiders at the streamer have denied that Lin and even Bela Bajaria were on the chopping block, but here we are. Lin is meeting with his feature staff Monday morning for a post-mortem after the news. Per sources close to…
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Ex-Apple Employee Fred Potter on HomeView
Fred Potter, on LinkedIn: So if you ever meet someone who tells you, “At Apple, I’m the one who did this,” take it with a grain of salt. They were probably part of the team that made it happen, and that’s already something to be proud of. Sometimes, when the final product finally comes out, you can recognize a few of the personal touches you contributed…
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Netflix Lays Off 6 Percent of Staff
Joe Flint and Jessica Toonkel, reporting for The Wall Street Journal last week: Netflix is cutting 6% of its staff, or roughly 1,000 positions globally, its biggest round of layoffs since 2022, as it struggles with slowing growth and customer engagement. Co-Chief Executives Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos said in an email to employees Wednesday morning that…
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Time Magazine Profiles John Ternus
Andrew Chow, writing for Time: Just below the broad smile he’s been wearing all morning, John Ternus’ hands are shaking. On this September day in Silicon Valley, Apple’s new CEO is surrounded by celebrities, tech enthusiasts, and reporters who have flocked to Apple Park from around the world to catch a glimpse of the company’s new and long-awaited foldable…
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Tom the Dancing Bug’s Inner Hive, and Harvey Richards, the Greatest Lawyer in the History of Fiction
Ruben Bolling’s long-running Tom the Dancing Bug is one of my favorite comic strips. I’ve been a huge fan since the early 1990s, when I started reading it in alternative newspapers. (Newspapers were sort of like websites, excepted they were printed daily or weekly. I swear.) Back in 2012 Bolling — noting that the comic was more widely read than ever yet…
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Verizon Is Going to Charge $10/Month for iPhone Handoff
Verizon, in a post headlined “Switch to Verizon and Get the New iPhone Duo Now. No Trade-In Needed.”: Verizon will support iPhone Handoff, giving customers the flexibility to use a single Verizon phone number seamlessly across two compatible iPhone models. Whether using the pocketable iPhone Duo on the go or iPhone 18 Pro for work, customers can switch…
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Gurman on HomeView: ‘Finished Units Have Been Sitting Boxed Up in Warehouses for the Better Part of a Year’
Mark Gurman, today, in his weekly Power On column for Bloomberg (gift link): Without a serviceable version of the new assistant, Apple couldn’t deliver the experience it had envisioned. That left the hardware ready to go, but the software nowhere near finished. So Apple postponed the HomeView repeatedly — first until spring 2025, then summer, then fall, and…
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Claim Chowder: The Information on HomeView Having a ‘Robotic Swiveling Base’
Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting, wrongly, for The Information in January this year (paywalled; here’s MacRumors’s summary ) Apple’s pin joins a growing portfolio of AI-powered products the tech giant has under development, including AirPods equipped with enhanced sensors, a security camera, smart glasses and augmented reality glasses, according to…
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Apple Issues Statement on Duo Demand Far Outstripping Supply
The Financial Times: Apple had originally promised delivery of the Duo by October 23, but within hours of orders opening, delivery times through Apple’s website had slipped into late January. US mobile carriers also saw delivery times for new orders pushed back. “The pre-order demand for iPhone Duo, our first foldable iPhone, has been nothing short of…
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Manton Reece’s Spitball Theory on Why the Wall-Mounted HomeView Costs the Same as the Version With the Subwoofer Base
Manton Reece: All I can come up with is that Apple doesn’t want you to buy the wall-mounted version unless you’re really sure that’s what you need. If the wall-mounted version was cheaper, some people might buy it based on price, then be unhappy because it’s too much trouble to install. Oh, that clicks for me. ★
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Michigan Democratic Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed on His Allegiances
I do see some political content in my feed on X. For example, this extraordinary video posted by Abdul El-Sayed, who seems poised to become the next junior senator from Michigan. You should watch it. It’s so good you might suspect the questioner was a plant, but in fact, he was not. This actually happened. El-Sayed actually handled this heckler this well…
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Whatever You Say Bounces Off Me and Sticks to You
Stephen Nellis and Deepa Seetharaman, reporting Wednesday for Reuters: An OpenAI employee who left the ChatGPT maker for Apple sent more than 100 files about an unreleased product to a personal account and later made a presentation about the unreleased product to senior Apple leadership, a new filing in the lawsuit between OpenAI and Apple alleges. In the…
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★ HomeView Thoughts and Observations
There’s a real “*Why do we need this?*” question here and I don’t think Apple’s video answers it, at all. You need to think you want it if you’re going to buy it. And even if you already had a HomeView set up, I’m not sure how often you’d use it instead of your phone, or instead of just talking to it like a screenless HomePod.
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Apple TV Price History, Charted
Glenn Fleishman: I wondered what the entry-level, initial price of each Apple TV box at introduction was, from the March 2007 original to the Apple TV 4K (4th generation) announced October 13, 2026, adjusted for inflation. So I charted it. I suppose this doesn’t mean Apple has given up on making Apple TV content accessible, but the price-accessible path is…
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The Late Charlie Munger on Elon Musk and Tesla
Re: my post today on the still-vaporware Tesla Roadster and Benedict Evans’s maxim that “Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers”, a reader sent me this YouTube short of Charlie Munger’s answer to a question at Berkshire Hathaway’s 2020 shareholder meeting regarding Tesla’s volatility and Musk’s self-promotion. Munger said: My thoughts are two. I would…
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Apple TV Cost $69 in 2015
Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors back on 9 March 2015: Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday at the “Spring Forward” media event in San Francisco announced that Apple TV will now cost $69, discounted from its regular price of $99. The new price for the set-top box arrives on the heels of the announcement of HBO Now for Apple TV . The new price appears to apply…
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Apple: ‘Strengthening App Review Guidelines Against Nonconsensual Intimate Imagery and Bait-And-Switch Apps’
Apple Developer News: As outlined in our App Review Guidelines, pornographic material has long been prohibited on the App Store — this includes apps that generate nudity or sexually explicit imagery, such as “nudification” apps that create sexually explicit images of real individuals without their consent. Apps that host user-generated content are required…
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Strange Times Make for Strange Bedfellows
Mark Zuckerberg, on X: Muse Spark Open — weights releasing today — runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple. John Ternus, replying : Congrats to the team! Amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open’s caliber and scale this efficiently, right from your desk. Mac Studio keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI! You will…
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How They Got Duo Support in NetNewsWire
From the NetNewsWire blog: The latest version of NetNewsWire for iOS supports iPhone Duo, which is very much a novel iPhone with toolbars running up the side and all kinds of behavior. How we did it: we didn’t do any work at all. We built the app using Xcode 27.1 and the default iOS SDK that comes with it, and that’s it. Here’s the thing, though: we were…
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★ Real Artists Ship, Tesla Edition
If you think Musk is either completely legitimate and trustworthy or an utter fraud, you are wrong. He has led his companies to extraordinary accomplishments, *and* he has made promises based on complete bullshit. He is a shameless bullshitter who *sometimes* delivers.
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Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, Says AI Researchers Have Started Smoking Because They’re Convinced AI (Claude, Probably) Is Going to Cure Cancer
From the transcript of Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS: Shyam Sankar: You know, I take — I think there’s a profound truth to Pascal’s saying that every human has a god-shaped hole in their heart, and it’s important to understand that many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have filled that hole with the machine God of AGI. And…