2025-06-23 01:57:49
My thanks to Drata for sponsoring this last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.
2025-06-23 01:52:06
Joe Rossignol at MacRumors:
Apple has marked its day-old The Parent Presentation video on YouTube as private, meaning that it is no longer available to watch. Apple has also moved The Parent Presentation to the bottom of its College Students page, effectively burying it. When we reported on the marketing campaign yesterday, the presentation was prominently featured at the top of the page.
It is unclear why Apple is suddenly hiding the ad, or if it will return. Apple did not immediately respond to our request for comment. On social media, some people said that the ad was cringe or gross, so perhaps Apple pulled the video due to overly negative reception. To be clear, this is merely speculation, and there were others who found humor in the video.
The 7.5-minute video, which at the moment is still available to watch from re-uploads on YouTube and X — stars Martin Herlihy from SNL’s “Please Don’t Destroy” triumvirate. I wouldn’t describe it as “cringe”, but I also wouldn’t describe it as “funny”. (If Herlihy wrote this, it would suggest that his cohorts Ben Marshall and John Higgins are the funny ones in the trio.) It’s also not the least bit offensive, so it really is unclear why Apple pulled it. If it’s because it’s not funny, how did it not only get approved and produced, but posted for 24 hours? Is Apple’s new marketing strategy to just publish new ads and then wait to see how the world reacts before deciding if they’re any good or not?
One obvious problem with “The Parent Presentation” video is that the gist is that everyone involved is stupid: high school kids (the ostensible target audience?) are too stupid to know how to ask their parents for a MacBook for college, parents are too stupid to know they should buy their kids a good laptop, and even Herlihy’s lecturer is a doofus who himself doesn’t know how to deliver a presentation. I don’t know how this got past the concept stage.
To top things off, the downloadable slide presentation — which Apple still has available in Keynote, PowerPoint, and Google Slides formats — is entirely typeset in Arial. I would take my son’s MacBook away from him if he came to me with a presentation set in Arial.
2025-06-23 01:07:41
Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors:
A bit of sad news for old iPods: Macs might be losing FireWire support.
The first macOS Tahoe developer beta does not support the legacy FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 data-transfer standards, according to @NekoMichi on X, and a Reddit post. As a result, the first few iPod models and old external storage drives that rely on FireWire cannot be synced with or mounted on a Mac running the macOS Tahoe beta.
Unlike on macOS Sequoia and earlier versions, the first macOS Tahoe beta does not include a FireWire section in the System Settings app.
All good things must come to an end, and FireWire was a very good thing indeed. High-performance, reliable, easy to use.
Apple, back in 2001, “Apple FireWire Wins 2001 Primetime Emmy Engineering Award”:
Apple’s FireWire technology will be honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in an awards presentation held tonight at the academy’s Goldenson Theatre in Hollywood. Apple will receive a 2001 Primetime Emmy Engineering Award for FireWire’s material impact on the television industry.
Apple invented FireWire in the mid-90s and shepherded it to become the established cross-platform industry standard IEEE 1394. FireWire is a high-speed serial input/output technology for connecting digital devices such as digital camcorders and cameras to desktop and portable computers. Widely adopted by digital peripheral companies such as Sony, Canon, JVC and Kodak, FireWire has become the established industry standard for both consumers and professionals.
2025-06-23 01:00:28
Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic (gift link):
President Donald Trump has done what he swore he would not do: involve the United States in a war in the Middle East. His supporters will tie themselves in knots (as Vice President J. D. Vance did last week) trying to jam the square peg of Trump’s promises into the round hole of his actions. And many of them may avoid calling this “war” at all, even though that’s what Trump himself called it tonight. They will want to see it as a quick win against an obstinate regime that will eventually declare bygones and come to the table. But whether bombing Iran was a good idea or a bad idea — and it could turn out to be either, or both — it is war by any definition of the term, and something Trump had vowed he would avoid. [...]
Only one outcome is certain: Hypocrisy in the region and around the world will reach galactic levels as nations wring their hands and silently pray that the B-2s carrying the bunker-buster bombs did their job.
See also: Timothy Snyder, on Bluesky:
Five things to remember about war:
- Many things reported with confidence in the first hours and days will turn out not to be true.
- Whatever they say, the people who start wars are often thinking chiefly about domestic politics.
- The rationale given for a war will change over time, such that actual success or failure in achieving a named objective is less relevant than one might think.
- Wars are unpredictable.
- Wars are easy to start and hard to stop.
2025-06-20 07:04:00
Julian Chokkattu, writing for Wired:
You can’t mount a cinema camera on a Formula One race car. These nimble vehicles are built to precise specs, and capturing racing footage from the driver’s point of view isn’t as simple as slapping a GoPro on and calling it a day. That’s the challenge Apple faced after Joseph Kosinski and Claudio Miranda, the director and cinematographer of the upcoming F1 Apple Original, wanted to use real POV racing footage in the film.
If you’ve watched a Formula One race lately, you’ve probably seen clips that show an angle from just behind the cockpit, with the top or side of the driver’s helmet in the frame. Captured by onboard cameras embedded in the car, the resulting footage is designed for broadcast, at a lower resolution using specific color spaces and codecs. Converting it to match the look of the rest of the F1 film would be too challenging to be feasible. Instead, Apple’s engineering team replaced the broadcast module with a camera composed of iPhone parts.
I think back to Phil Schiller, on stage at my WWDC show in 2015, saying that Apple viewed itself then not just as one of the leading camera companies in the world, but the leading camera company in the world.
2025-06-20 06:41:04
Cynthia Littleton, in a long profile for Variety:
When pressed about what Apple’s investments in movies and TV shows have meant for the company as a whole, Cook explains that Apple is at heart “a toolmaker,” delivering computers and other devices that enable creativity in users. (This vision for the company, and the “toolmaker” term specifically, was first articulated by Jobs in the early 1980s.) “We’re a toolmaker,” Cook says again. “We make tools for creative people to empower them to do things they couldn’t do before. So we were doing lots of business with Hollywood well before we were in the TV business.
“We studied it for years before we decided to do [Apple TV+]. I know there’s a lot of different views out there about why we’re into it. We’re into it to tell great stories, and we want it to be a great business as well. That’s why we’re into it, just plain and simple.” [...]
Media analysts and observers have wondered how the content side of Apple threads together with the hardware sales that fuel the core business. As Cook sees it, that’s not the point, although such connections are emerging organically in the course of doing business, as evidenced by “F1” and the camera tech. “I don’t have it in my mind that I’m going to sell more iPhones because of it,” Cook says. “I don’t think about that at all. I think about it as a business. And just like we leverage the best of Apple across iPhones and across our services, we try to leverage the best of Apple TV+.”
Apple TV+ has been killing it with original shows. Maybe with F1 they can start bringing that magic to movies.
