Daring FireballModify

2026-04-27 03:30:00

It’s really just a coincidence, but it was 20 years ago this week that I went full-time writing Daring Fireball (after writing the site in my spare time for 4 years). That feels like a long time ago. But it feels like yesterday, too. In my announcement, I wrote:

Daring Fireball is what I love to do.

That remains as true today than it was then. Whether you’re a longtime reader or a relatively new one, you might enjoy reading that piece from 20 years ago. So far, so good. (I’ve got some readers who were only small children when I wrote that. I occasionally hear from some who weren’t even born then.)

There might be other ways you can support my work directly in the future. But for now, the best way is to buy t-shirts and hoodies from my periodic sales. The current sale is going to end sometime tomorrow. If you’re seeing this post Sunday night and thinking about making a purchase, act now. If you’re seeing this Monday morning, you should really act now.

2026-04-27 03:28:59

The New York Times PR account, on Twitter/X a week ago:

Sunday’s crossword puzzle in the print edition of The New York Times Magazine contains a grid that does not match the clues. The correct version of the puzzle can be found in the news section of Sunday’s print edition of The Times. The puzzle on our app is correct.

Maggie Duffy, writing for Vulture:

Some solvers who, like Wegener’s wife, complete the Sunday puzzle in the print magazine (often with pen) complained on crossword forums and social media, saying they were “nearly in tears,” some with fears of “sudden onset dementia” or, worse yet, ineptitude.

For Irene Papoulis, a former writing instructor at Trinity College, the puzzle is typically a source of pride. “It didn’t even occur to me that it could be their mistake,” she told me. “I just blamed myself.” When Mike McFadden, in New Jersey, couldn’t crack it, he had a similar reaction. “I thought something was wrong with me,” he told me. “I didn’t think that they would have an error.” It nagged at him all day. At a function on Saturday, he couldn’t bring himself to mention it to his brother-in-law, a fellow solver; he was still too upset.

Some had such trust in the crossword that they believed the erroneous grid was purposeful. “I’m saying to myself, ‘Okay, maybe there’s some sort of scientific or mathematical trick,’” McFadden said. When I spoke with Will Shortz, the Times’ crossword editor, he said the Times does “so many tricks with the puzzles” that he could see how someone’s first thought would be “I wonder what they’re up to now?”

This is the first such mistake the Times has made in the 84 years that they’ve been printing a crossword puzzle. I came of age doing work in print — writing and editing The Triangle, the student newspaper at Drexel, and then spending a few years as a working graphic designer, at a time when print still ruled. There’s an inherent stress about going to press. Mistakes are forever. We once ran a headline at The Triangle that read “Headline Goes Here”. Once. Going to press is stressful but exhilarating. There’s an adrenaline rush that comes with giving the go-ahead to start a very expensive large-scale full-color press run. The stress focuses the mind.

Print, effectively, is hardware. Atoms, not bits. The web is literally software. If you make a mistake in software that results in incorrect mathematical results, you ship an update. If you make a mistake in a CPU such that it results in incorrect floating-point math, perhaps only in 1 out of every 9 billion calculations, people will remember the mistake 30 years later.

If The New York Times had run the wrong crossword grid on the web or in their app, they would have corrected the error quickly, few people would have encountered it, and fewer still would remember it. But by printing the wrong grid in the Sunday magazine last week, they made a mistake that some people will never forget (and some will never forgive).

Hardware brain is different from software brain. Software brain says Go faster; do more; the only mistake you can’t fix is having gone too slow. Hardware brain says Slow down; do less; focus; strive for perfection and never settle for less than excellence; mistakes are forever.

If his background in hardware means that incoming Apple CEO John Ternus has hardware brain, and will lead Apple accordingly, that suggests Apple will double down on zigging in the midst of a still-escalating AI hype cycle that has the rest of the industry zagging ever more frenetically. That feels right to me.

2026-04-27 01:39:40

Ben Schoon, 9to5Google:

In March, a report revealed some of the internal cuts Samsung has been making for its mobile division, with the company initially concerned it could post an operating loss for the first time ever. It’s a big deal, as Samsung’s mobile (MX) division has historically always turned a profit.

A new report out of Korea (via Jukan) makes this seem all but certain.

Apparently, Samsung’s TM Roh, the head of the company’s mobile division, has expressed concerns of the “possibility of an annual deficit for the MX business unit.” Previously, those concerns came from speculation and outside parties, but with such a high figure in Samsung’s organization worried, it’s clear things are looking pretty bleak.

Back in 2013 analysts pegged the profit share of the handset industry at 70 percent for Apple and 30 percent for Samsung. A lot of other smaller companies sold a lot of other phones, but, so that analysis went, none of them made any profits. A lot of them were losing money. I linked to another such analysis in 2016 that pegged Apple’s share of phone profits at 104 percent, estimating that all other handset makers combined accounted for a 4% percent loss.

Doesn’t seem like much has changed since then. I prompted ChatGPT and Gemini today with this request: “Create a table of the world’s mobile device makers, ranked by profit and profit share of the industry.” ChatGPT pegs Apple’s profit share at 75–85%, Samsung’s at 10–20%, Huawei and Xiaomi in “low single digits”, and everyone else negligible. Gemini pegs Apple’s share at 85–90%, Samsung’s at 7–10%, Xiaomi at 1-2%, and everyone else negligible. This, despite both ChatGPT and Gemini agreeing that iPhones comprise only 20 percent of sales by unit. (Are ChatGPT and Gemini correct about the current profit share split of the mobile industry? I don’t know. But both cite sources in their answers, and it strikes me as very unlikely that their estimates are very far off.)

If Samsung posts a mobile division loss this year, it could be the case that Apple will capture 100 percent of the profits in the phone industry with just 20 percent of the sales.

2026-04-25 08:56:12

In May 2024, Bloomberg ran a feature story by Mark Gurman under the headline, “Tim Cook Can’t Run Apple Forever. Who’s Next?” The subhead: “John Ternus, the head of hardware engineering, is emerging as a potential successor to the CEO.” The nut grafs from that piece:

There’s no reason to assume that a change at the helm is imminent. Cook may be older than the CEOs of the other tech companies at the top of the S&P 500, but he’s hardly the oldest person running a major corporation. “If Trump or Biden can be president at 80, Tim Cook can be CEO of Apple for many more years. It used to be automatic that CEOs are moved out at 65,” says someone who knows him. “The world has changed.”

While Cook hasn’t given any indication how long he’ll remain in charge — other than telling Dua Lipa it would be “a while” — people close to him believe he’ll be CEO at least another three years. After that, they say, he’ll start a charitable foundation to donate the wealth he accumulated at Apple.

If Cook were to stay that long, people within Apple say, the most likely successor would be John Ternus, the hardware engineering chief. In a company whose success has always come from building category-defining gadgets, the ascension of a hardware engineering expert to the CEO job would seem logical. Ternus, who’s not yet 50, would also be more likely than other members of the executive team to stick around for a long time, potentially providing another decade or more of Cook-esque stability.

Ternus is well-liked inside Apple, and he’s earned the respect of Cook, Williams and other leaders. “Tim likes him a lot, because he can give a good presentation, he’s very mild-mannered, never puts anything into an email that is controversial and is a very reticent decision-maker,” says one person close to Apple’s executive team. “He has a lot of managerial characteristics like Tim.” Christopher Stringer, a former top Apple hardware designer, called Ternus a “trustworthy hand” who’s “never failed with any role he’s been elevated to.” Eddy Cue, the Apple executive known as Cook’s closest confidant, has privately told colleagues that Ternus should be the next CEO, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Linking to Gurman’s report, I wrote:

I wouldn’t have linked to this if not for the above line about Eddy Cue. If Cue is telling people that, that means a lot. No executive at Apple is more juiced-in company-wide than Cue. Cook’s first action as CEO was to promote Cue, and Cue was arguably just as tight with and trusted by Steve Jobs.

It was two more years, not three, but Gurman was the first to report that Ternus was the guy at the top of the list.

There was no significant additional reporting between Gurman’s May 2024 Bloomberg report until November 15 last year, when the Financial Times published a blockbuster story under the headline “Apple Intensifies Succession Planning for CEO Tim Cook”, with four bylines: “Tim Bradshaw, Stephen Morris and Michael Acton in San Francisco and Daniel Thomas in London”. Bradshaw is the FT’s lead Apple reporter, and it’s no coincidence his name was first among the four. The article gets right to the point at the start:

Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as next year. Several people familiar with discussions inside the tech group told the Financial Times that its board and senior executives have recently intensified preparations for Cook to hand over the reins at the $4tn company after more than 14 years.

John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice-president of hardware engineering, is widely seen as Cook’s most likely successor, although no final decisions have been made, these people said.

People close to Apple say the long-planned transition is not related to the company’s current performance, ahead of what is expected to be a blockbuster end-of-year sales period for the iPhone. [...]

The company is unlikely to name a new CEO before its next earnings report in late January, which covers the critical holiday period. An announcement early in the year would give its new leadership team time to settle in ahead of its big annual keynote events, its developer conference in June and its iPhone launch in September, the people said. These people said that although preparations have intensified, the timing of any announcement could change.

So, per the FT in November, Apple’s plan was to name Ternus as the company’s next CEO “early in the year”, after their Q1 results (January 29) but ahead of WWDC (June 8). The halfway point between those dates was April 4; Apple announced Ternus as the company’s next CEO on April 20. Every single word of the FT report, in hindsight, was exactly correct. I can’t think of a way that their November story could have been more prescient. It was a home run. A report for the ages, like when CNet and The Wall Street Journal scooped the Mac’s transition to Intel processors on the eve of WWDC 2005.

My own take, back in November when the FT report dropped, was that it had the distinct aroma of a deliberate expectations-setting leak, and was almost certainly accurate:

That “several people” spoke to the FT about this says to me that those sources (members of the board?) did so with Cook’s blessing, and they want this announcement to be no more than a little surprising. [...]

I would also bet that Cook moves into the role of executive chairman, and will still play a significant, if not leading, role for the company when it comes to domestic and international politics. Especially with regard to Trump.

Cook moving into the position of executive chairman and continuing to play a leading role as the company’s political ambassador was my own speculation, and that proved out. Easy money, making that prediction.

One week after the FT’s report, in his Bloomberg “Power On” newsletter on November 23, Gurman wrote:

In October, I wrote that the internal spotlight on Ternus was “intensifying,” and that barring unforeseen circumstances he would be the leading candidate. But I didn’t put a date on when a change might happen. Then, around midnight two Fridays ago, the Financial Times published a report with three central claims: Apple is “intensifying” succession planning; Ternus is likely the next CEO; and Cook is expected to step down between late January and June.

The first two points are anything but revelations if you’ve read Bloomberg coverage and Power On, or have simply been paying attention to the realities of Cook’s age and tenure. The timing, however, is another matter entirely. It’s a huge deal that the FT did this: A respected publication should only predict the CEO transition date for a company of Apple’s scale with a high level of confidence — based on people legitimately in the know.

This is where I have concerns. Based on everything I’ve learned in recent weeks, I don’t believe a departure by the middle of next year is likely. In fact, I would be shocked if Cook steps down in the time frame outlined by the FT. Some people have speculated that the story was a “test balloon” orchestrated by Apple or someone close to Cook to prepare Wall Street for a change, but that isn’t the case either. I believe the story was simply false.

Gurman must be well and truly “shocked” by this week’s announcements, because as it turns out, Cook is stepping aside exactly “in the time frame outlined by the FT”. The FT’s report was not “simply false”. It was, in fact, completely true. The Financial Times, which truly is a respected publication (with no black marks on its record, like, say, Bloomberg’s to-this-day-still-uncorrected “The Big Hack” fiasco), obviously did have a high level of confidence in Apple’s plans, because they were, in fact, briefed by people “legitimately in the know”. Gurman’s reading comprehension is questionable as well, because the FT did not report that Cook would “step down” between January and June. The FT report spoke only of “naming a new CEO” and making an “announcement” between January and June. That’s exactly what happened. Nor is anyone “departing” — but a change in leadership will occur in the middle of the year.

In January, Gurman reiterated his stance that the FT was wrong:

It’s just a question of timing. The Financial Times reported last year that the change would happen as early as the beginning of 2026. But let me be clear: This seems unlikely.

By pooh-poohing the FT’s completely accurate reporting as “simply false”, Gurman wound up poo-pooing the bed. Calibrate the grains of salt with which you take his other reporting on Apple executive goings-on accordingly. A humble correction and sincere apology to the Financial Times — and Tim Bradshaw personally — are surely forthcoming in this weekend’s edition of Power On.¹

2026-04-25 00:09:50

The Norwegian Maritime Authority:

If you were born in 1980 or later and plan to operate a recreational craft of more than 8 metres in length or with an engine power of more than 25 hp, you need a boating licence. The boating licence is a certificate permitting you to operate Norwegian recreational craft of less than 15 meters in length (49.21 feet) in Norwegian territory.

That’s an interesting example of generational law. It kind of sucked, I’m sure, if you were from a family of mariners and were born in 1980 and your sibling was born in 1979. You got stuck having to qualify for a license and your sibling did not. But: this is very different from an outright ban on those born after a certain year. It’s a relatively gentle change, and the cutoff had to apply somewhere. (The state of Missouri has a similar law with a birth cutoff of 1984.)

This whole topic of generational law is fascinating. I’ve gotten more emails from readers — around the world — about my post on the U.K. ban on tobacco sales to those born in 2009 or later than just about anything I’ve written about recently. Lots of amazing feedback — including a note pointing me to the above Norwegian law. I’m replying to a bunch but can’t reply to them all, and but I’m thankful for every one.

What makes the Norwegian boat licensing cutoff unobjectionable to me is that it’s not binary. It’s not saying those born in 1979 can pilot a boat and those born in 1980 cannot. It’s only saying that there’s an additional restriction on those born in 1980. A generational restriction feels fundamentally different from a generational ban. A bunch of readers who support these generational tobacco bans point to other laws with age cutoffs, like when the age for buying alcohol changed from 18 to 21. I’m sure that sucked if you wanted to drink and were 18, 19, or 20 when the limit was raised to 21 in your state. (Or if you were 17, and went from being one year away to four years away with the swoop of your governor’s pen.) But everyone turns 21 eventually. Adults putting additional restrictions on the young feels to me entirely different than adults banning the young from ever partaking in something that they — the current adults who are imposing the restriction — can continue to do in perpetuity. It’s not just a violation of the idea that all adults are equals, but to me it’s just blatantly hypocritical.

If you tell me I’m not permitted to do something, but others are, it makes me want to do that thing. And it really makes me want to give the finger to whoever is imposing the restriction. Fine for you but not for me? Fuck you.

Also, grandfathering devices (old cars don’t need to meet new emission standards) or buildings (new buildings must have elevators for accessibility, but existing buildings aren’t required to add them) feels fundamentally different from grandfathering people.

To be clear, I support the intention of these tobacco laws, but I am highly dubious about their practical effect in addition to my objections to their fairness. Some people have a tendency to focus solely on intent and not on the practical effects of the law. That if the intent is good, the law must be good. I think laws are only good when their practical effects are beneficial. A well-intentioned law with no practical benefit is needless bureaucracy; a well-intentioned law with adverse practical effects is a bad law.¹ I can’t help but think everyone who supports these generational smoking bans is stuck thinking of those below the age cut-off as the 17-year-olds they currently are. But they’re all going to be 40, 50, 60 years old eventually. It’s absurd to think about a 60-year-old man who needs to ask his 61-year-old friend to buy him smokes.

My spitball idea for a generational law to keep more young people from ever starting a tobacco habit — and thus, nicotine addiction — would be through scaled taxation. Require everyone, no matter what age, to present ID when purchasing tobacco. Set the tax rate on the year they were born, with significantly higher taxes the younger they are. But with no wild fluctuation from someone else who is a year or two apart in age. Start with the highest rate for 21-year-olds, and lower those taxes by a point or two for every additional year old someone is. In this structure, no adult would be forbidden from buying tobacco, but someone who is 21 would pay significantly more for a pack of cigarettes than someone who is 65 — but only slightly more than someone who is, say, 22 or 23. Keep increasing the base rate for everyone, every year, so that everyone, no matter how old, has to pay slightly higher prices year after year. Thus the starting price, for newly-turned-21-year-olds, would escalate annually. That feels fair, should reduce the demand for a black market, and I think would have the practical effect of decreasing the number of young people who ever start — while also minimizing the punitive costs for older adults with decades-long addictions.

2026-04-24 22:18:03

George Lucas got so many nuances right in Star Wars. Little touches that said so much. One of the most overlooked is a moment that I vividly remember from first seeing it, on the big screen, as a kindergartener or thereabouts. It’s during the scene where Luke enters the Mos Eisley cantina. We still haven’t met Han Solo and Chewbacca. And while we’ve seen space ships and droids, stormtroopers and Darth Vader, Jawas and Tusken Raiders, every character we’ve seen in the flesh is a human. And then, boom, 45 minutes into the movie, we enter the cantina, and the joint is absolutely lousy with dozens of wild and wildly different aliens — including the band playing that iconic jaunty song. We suddenly learn just how diverse the galaxy really is. It’s one of the best and most memorable scenes in movie history.

The moment I’m talking about is when Luke enters with C-3PO and R2-D2, and the frighteningly gruff bartender barks at him:

                BARTENDER
      We don't serve their kind here!

Luke, still recovering from the shock of
seeing so many outlandish creatures, doesn't
quite catch the bartender's drift.

                LUKE
      What?

                BARTENDER
      Your droids. They'll have to wait 
      outside. We don't want them here.

Luke looks at old Ben, who is busy talking
to one of the Galactic pirates. He notices
several of the gruesome creatures along the
bar are giving him a very unfriendly glare.

Luke pats Threepio on the shoulder.

                LUKE
      Listen, why don't you wait out by 
      the speeder. We don't want any 
      trouble.

                THREEPIO
      I heartily agree with you sir.

As a kid, I didn’t get it. Why would you not want droids? Star Wars made robots seem so real, so fun. Why would you ban them? That scene has stuck with me for my entire life. I didn’t get why, but I understood what it meant about that galaxy: the underclass deeply resented droids. The bartender’s attitude wasn’t “Hey kid, I’m sorry, but rules are rules and they’re not permitted.” His attitude was “Get those fucking things out of here.”

I think about this scene more and more lately.