Interesting two-part interview, with far more information than we’ve heard about the demise of The Problem With Jon Stewart on Apple TV+. Part two is here; Overcast links to parts one and two ; Apple Podcasts links to parts one and two .

Some nuggets:

• The split seemed very much amicable. Stewart isn’t one to hold back, and he emphasized repeated there’s no hard feelings. He even professed to getting his morning news in Apple News.

• Apple paid the show’s staff for all of season 3, despite cancelling the show before production began. That’s nearly unheard of in the entertainment industry.

• Stewart himself admits that season one more or less stunk.

Well worth a listen.

John Shea, the San Francisco Chronicle:

Willie Mays, the iconic and endearing “Say Hey Kid” who charmed countless fans with his brilliant athleticism and graceful style and was widely considered baseball’s greatest and most entertaining player, died Tuesday of heart failure. He was 93.

“My father has passed away peacefully and among loved ones,” Mays son, Michael Mays, said. “I want to thank you all from the bottom of my broken heart for the unwavering love you have shown him over the years. You have been his life’s blood.” [...]

Mays spent most of his 23-year playing career with the Giants, six in New York and 15 in San Francisco, making him a cherished superstar from coast to coast. He hit 660 home runs, made 24 All-Star appearances and won 12 Gold Gloves, which weren’t given out until Mays’ sixth season.

The consummate five-tool player, Mays was elite at hitting, power hitting, defending, throwing and baserunning, and his ability to out-think and out-smart the competition served as a valuable sixth tool.

My dad was a clerk in Navy in New York in the late 1950s, and they’d give free tickets to servicemen to attend ballgames for all three teams in the city: the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants. At the time, all three teams had centerfielders destined for the Hall of Fame: Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider, and Mays. My dad has never wavered from his conviction that Willie Mays was the best baseball player he ever saw, hands down. He hit for power and average, ran like the wind, made catches no one else could make, and had a cannon for an arm.

Michael Tsai:

This is confusing, but I think what Apple is saying is that, even with notarization, apps are not allowed to “download executable code.” Rule 2.5.2 says apps may not “download, install, or execute code” except for limited educational purposes. Rule 4.7 makes an exception to this so that retro game emulators and some other app types can run code “that is not embedded in the binary.” This is grayed out when you select “Show Notarization Review Guidelines Only”, meaning that the exception only applies within the App Store. Thus, the general prohibition remains in effect for App Marketplaces and Web Distribution. But it seems like this wasn’t initially clear to Apple, either, because the review process took two months .

This also seems inconsistent with the fact that the Delta emulator is allowed to be notarized outside the App Store. It doesn’t make much sense for the rules to be more lax within the App Store. I first thought the mistake was that Apple didn’t mean to gray out 4.7 for notarization. Then everything would make sense. But the clarification states that 4.7 is not intended to apply to notarization.

The bottom line for me is that Apple doesn’t want general-purpose emulators, it’s questionable whether the DMA lets it block them, and even siding with Apple on this it isn’t consistently applying its own rules.

Confusing indeed. Apple’s stance on this seems inscrutable and arbitrary: retro game emulators are, at long last , acceptable, but general PC emulators are not. Such arbitrary policy decisions related to the purpose of the app are fine for the App Store (legally speaking), but clearly not compliant with the DMA. That’s one of the few areas where the DMA is clear. Apple can, of course, ban (say) porno apps from the App Store, but can’t refuse to notarize them for distribution outside the App Store in the EU.

Apple has a security leg to stand on when it comes to JIT compilation , but the version of UTM (UTM SE) that was held up in review for two months, and ultimately rejected by Apple, doesn’t use a JIT . And because it doesn’t use a JIT , performance is poor; hence the UTM developers’ deeming it not worth fighting about . Apple goes into depth on the security challenges pertaining to JIT compilation in its documentation for BrowserEngineKit , the framework for developing non-WebKit browser engines for distribution in the EU. That’s ostensibly the reason why developers need a special entitlement to use a custom browser engine — JavaScript engines need a JIT to perform well but JITs pose a security risk.

In an earlier revision of this post, I suggested that Delta — Riley Testut’s excellent and wildly popular retro Nintendo console emulator for iOS — uses a JIT. There is indeed a JIT in Delta’s source code repository , but Testut informs me that it’s currently only enabled through the version of AltStore distributed through sideloading . Delta’s JIT is removed from the versions of Delta in the App Store and AltStore PAL (the EU app marketplace), because of Apple’s restrictions on JIT compilers. No app with a JIT is going to pass review by Apple, including for distribution outside the App Store in the EU. That restriction should, in theory, be permitted under the DMA on security grounds. But how the no-JIT version of UTM could be rejected for notarization, I do not see.

(Thinking about BrowserEngineKit makes me wonder: Now that over four months have passed since Apple announced its initial DMA compliance plans, has even a single browser developer announced plans to bring their own rendering engine to iOS in the EU? As far as I know the answer is no. It’s entirely possible Apple went to all the trouble of creating BrowserEngineKit for compliance with the DMA, but no one is actually going to use it because no browser developer deems the EU market worth forking their browser for, solely for distribution outside the App Store — while on the hook for the 50-euro-cents-per-download Core Technology Fee if such a browser becomes popular.)

This is one of those stories with no bad guy. Delta’s icon/logo was clearly supposed to represent an uppercase Greek delta (Δ). Adobe’s logo is even more clearly an uppercase A . But Delta’s Δ really does look too much like Adobe’s A . If I were an Adobe lawyer I’d have sent the same letter. (Note that Adobe’s lawyers made no threats and were nice about it.)

What’s funny though is that, taking colors into consideration, Delta’s icon looks more like an upside-down Verge favicon.

Jodi Kantor, reporting for The New York Times:

After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag.

One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.

How in the world did this not come to light before now?

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Profile in courage.

Speaking of Apple’s “Crush” ad , Samsung has posted a “response”, depicting a woman guitarist sitting atop a paint-splash-strewn platform standing in for a hydraulic press, with the slogan “We would never crush creativity. #UnCrush”

Rather than sit back and enjoy Apple own-goaling itself last week, they couldn’t resist gracelessly piling on, accomplishing nothing but to remind everyone that they’re Pepsi to Apple’s Coke — content to sit in second place forever, copying not just Apple’s hardware and software designs, but even parodying Apple’s ads. This one is the equivalent of picking ideas out of Apple’s trash. Sad.

Henry Goldblatt, writing for Tudum, Netflix’s splendidly named in-house blog:

Netflix has an early Christmas gift for you — but it won’t fit under the tree. On Dec. 25, 2024, we’ll be the global home of the NFL’s two Christmas Day marquee games: the Super Bowl LVII-winning Chiefs vs Steelers and Ravens vs. Texans. And mark your calendar for Christmas Day in 2025 and 2026 when we’ll be streaming at least one holiday game each year as part of this three-season deal.

My two questions:

First, who’s going to announce the games?

Second, how strong a bid did Apple make to get these games?

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

The new iPad Pro is here and the inevitable YouTube stress tests are already online. JerryRigEverything and AppleTrack posted their bend test videos, and both seemingly came to the same conclusion: the new iPad Pro holds up well to extreme force and seems pretty resistant to bending during normal use.

AppleTrack repeated the same bends with the M2 iPad Pro and the new M4 iPad Pro to compare, and whereas the M4 iPad Pro came away almost unscathed, the M2 iPad Pro had a definitive curl in the corner near the cameras. JerryRigEverything praised the device for its “black magic levels of structural integrity”, at least when bent horizontally.

Good to know that they really are bend-resistant. But I can’t help but see some incongruity between the performative outrage over Apple’s “Crush” ad last week and the fact that the top-trending tech videos on YouTube today are of people destroying the very same iPads the “Crush” ad was promoting.

Mike Krieger:

Anthropic’s research continues to be at the forefront of AI. When paired with thoughtful product development, I [see] tons of potential to positively impact how people and companies get their work done. And as a two time entrepreneur, I’m particularly excited by how Claude, along with the right scaffolding and product features, can empower more people to innovate at a faster pace and at a lower cost.

Tangentially related: Anthropic shipped a native iOS Claude app two weeks ago.