Earlier this month, Tesla was penalized by a jury when a car’s supervised autonomous vehicle features failed, leading to a collision. When I linked to the CBS News article about the story, this was one of several paragraphs that stood out to me:
The most important piece of evidence in the trial, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, was an augmented video of the crash that included data from the Autopilot computer. Tesla previously claimed the video was deleted, but a forensic data expert was able to recover it.
Years after a Tesla driver using Autopilot plowed into a young Florida couple in 2019, crucial electronic data detailing how the fatal wreck unfolded was missing. The information was key for a wrongful death case the survivor and the victim’s family were building against Tesla, but the company said it didn’t have the data.
Then a self-described hacker, enlisted by the plaintiffs to decode the contents of a chip they recovered from the vehicle, found it while sipping a Venti-size hot chocolate at a South Florida Starbucks. Tesla later said in court that it had the data on its own servers all along.
One supposed benefit of autonomous vehicle technologies is in public safety. That is how the simple features on my car are described and marketed, at least, the most basic of which is front-facing collision detection and automatic braking. Tesla’s system, among the most advanced on any car, failed in this case with tragic consequences. I am not saying my car would have performed any better. But I would view Tesla’s system differently if it began from a base of reliable safety features rather than the implications of a name like “Autopilot”.
One supposed benefit of ever greater data collection — even having several cameras constantly recording — is that we can better understand a collision. However, that only works as well as an automaker is trustworthy. It is hard to know what to make of Tesla’s defence here. Either it did not look very hard — which is bad — or the company actively avoided producing evidence until it became impossible for it to play dumb. I sure hope it is more compliant in future collision investigations. But I have no trust that it will be.
I worry that Tesla will learn the wrong lesson, and will instead be even more evasive. The media strategy at Elon Musk’s companies these days, including for articles about this crash, is to say nothing. Better for them to be silent when trust in media and institutions is perilously low. Not good for anyone else.
The law, HB 1126, requires platforms to implement age verification for all users before they can access social networks like Bluesky. Recently, the Supreme Court justices decided to block an emergency appeal that would have prevented the law from going into effect as the legal challenges it faces played out in the courts. This forced Bluesky to make a decision of its own: either comply or risk hefty fines of up to $10,000 per user.
However, others questioned why a VPN would be the necessary solution here. After all, decentralized social networking was meant to reduce the control and power the state — or any authority — would have over these social platforms.
Bluesky blocked access in Mississippi to avoid collecting more data about its users or risk stiff penalties. It points out the law there is more expansive and requires more data collection than the U.K.’s Online Safety Act. It is even, according to a note on JD Supra, more broad than the Texas legislation on which some of its language was based.
But, as Perez writes, surely the whole point of decentralized networks is their resilience to this kind of overbearing legislation. In a way, I guess they are — you can still use the AT Protocol, which underpins Bluesky, in Mississippi through other personal data servers. The same is true for ActivityPub and Mastodon instances, though Mastodon says it has no way to comply with the Mississippi law. That makes me wonder if individual Mastodon instances must each incorporate age validation. I do not see anything in the sloppy text of the law saying it applies only to services over a certain number of users. It seems to non-lawyer me this means any instance — or any Bluesky PDS — allowing interaction in Mississippi could be liable for penalties.
At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes. After installation, the program includes ‘AI’ (of course), an auto-updater, sprinkled ads for Acrobat online services everywhere, and 2 GUIs: ‘new’ and ‘old’.
For comparison, the size of SumatraPDF-3.5.2 installer is 8,246,744 bytes. It has no ‘AI’, no auto-updater (though it can check for new versions, which I find unnecessary, for anyone sane would install it via scoop anyway), and no ads for ‘cloud storage’.
The installed size of the latest version of Acrobat is, on my Mac, 2.18 GB — or, to spell it out as Gromnitsky did, 2,176,053,007 bytes. Of course, over 435 MB of that is because it includes a copy of the Chromium web browser engine. I primarily use this application to view, edit, and add form fields to text-based documents, and to dismiss ads for A.I. features and Adobe services. Gromnitsky is describing only Reader, which is far more limited than Acrobat, even more so than Apple’s own Preview software; you cannot even split a PDF into multiple files with Reader.
If I ever give the impression of being personally attacked when I find a Preview feature no longer works as well as it once did, this is why. Acrobat and Reader are perfect examples of software made without respect for users.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has released new data showing a sharp rise in electronic device searches at border crossings.
From April to June alone, CBP conducted 14,899 electronic device searches, up more than 21 per cent from the previous quarter (23 per cent over the same period last year). Most of those were basic searches, but 1,075 were “advanced,” allowing officers to copy and analyze device contents.
U.S. border agents have conducted tens of thousands of searches every year for many years, along a generally increasing trajectory, so this is not necessarily specific to this administration. Unfortunately, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation reminds us, people have few rights at ports of entry, regardless of whether they are a U.S. citizen.
There are no great ways to avoid a civil rights violation, either. As a security expert told the CBC, people with burner devices would be subject to scrutiny because it is obviously not their main device. It stands to reason that someone travelling without any electronic devices at all would also be seen as more suspicious. Encryption is your best bet, but then you may need to have a whole conversation about why all of your devices are encrypted.
The EFF has a pocket guide with your best options.
If you, thankfully, missed Google’s Pixel 10 unveiling — and even if you did not — you will surely appreciate PetaPixel’s review of the Pro version of the phone from the perspective of photographers and videographers. This line of phones has long boasted computational photography bonafides over the competition, and I thought this was a good exploration of what is new and not-so-new in this year’s models.
Come for Chris and Jordan; stay for Chris’ “pet” deer.
After September 30, 2025, access to Typepad – including account management, blogs, and all associated content – will no longer be available. Your account and all related services will be permanently deactivated.
I have not thought about Typepad in years, and I am certain I am not alone. That is not a condemnation; Typepad occupies a particular time and place on the web. As with anything hosted, however, users are unfortunately dependent on someone else’s interest in maintaining it.
If you have anything hosted at Typepad, now is a good time to back it up.
[…] In 2018, the social-science blog “Data Colada” looked at Metacritic, a review aggregator, and found that more than four out of five albums released that year had received an average rating of at least seventy points out of a hundred — on the site, albums that score sixty-one or above are colored green, for “good.” Even today, music reviews on Metacritic are almost always green, unlike reviews of films, which are more likely to be yellow, for “mixed/average,” or red, for “bad.” The music site Pitchfork, which was once known for its scabrous reviews, hasn’t handed down a perfectly contemptuous score — 0.0 out of 10 — since 2007 (for “This Is Next,” an inoffensive indie-rock compilation). And, in 2022, decades too late for poor Andrew Ridgeley, Rolling Stone abolished its famous five-star system and installed a milder replacement: a pair of merit badges, “Instant Classic” and “Hear This.”
I have quibbles with this article, which I will get to, but I will front-load this with the twist instead of making you wait — this article is, in effect, Sanneh’s response to himself twenty-one years after popularizing the very concept of poptimism in the New York Times. Sanneh in 2004:
In the end, the problem with rockism isn’t that it’s wrong: all critics are wrong sometimes, and some critics (now doesn’t seem like the right time to name names) are wrong almost all the time. The problem with rockism is that it seems increasingly far removed from the way most people actually listen to music.
Are you really pondering the phony distinction between “great art” and a “guilty pleasure” when you’re humming along to the radio? In an era when listeners routinely — and fearlessly — pick music by putting a 40-gig iPod on shuffle, surely we have more interesting things to worry about than that someone might be lip-synching on “Saturday Night Live” or that some rappers gild their phooey. Good critics are good listeners, and the problem with rockism is that it gets in the way of listening. If you’re waiting for some song that conjures up soul or honesty or grit or rebellion, you might miss out on Ciara’s ecstatic electro-pop, or Alan Jackson’s sly country ballads, or Lloyd Banks’s felonious purr.
Here we are in 2025 and a bunch of the best-reviewed records in recent memory are also some of the most popular. They are well-regarded because critics began to review pop records on the genre’s own terms.
Here is one more bonus twist: the New Yorker article is also preoccupied with criticism of Pitchfork, a fellow Condé Nast publication. This is gestured toward twice in the article. Neither one serves to deflate the discomfort, especially since the second mention is in the context of reduced investment in the site by Condé.
Speaking of Pitchfork, though, the numerical scores of its reviews have led to considerable analysis by the statistics obsessed. For example, a 2020 analysis of reviews published between 1999 and early 2017 found the median score was 7.03. This is not bad at all, and it suggests the site is most interested in what it considers decent-to-good music, and cannot be bothered to review bad stuff. The researchers also found a decreasing frequency of very negative reviews beginning in about 2010, which fits Sanneh’s thesis. However, it also found fewer extremely high scores. The difference is more subtle — and you should ignore the dot in the “10.0” column because the source data set appears to also contain Pitchfork’s modern reviews of classic records — but notice how many dots are rated above 8.75 from 2004–2009 compared to later years. A similar analysis of reviews from 1999–2021 found a similar convergence toward mediocre.
As for Metacritic, I had to go and look up the Data Colada article referenced, since the New Yorker does not bother with links. I do not think this piece reinforces Sanneh’s argument very well. What Joe Simmons, its author, attempts to illustrate is that Metacritic skews positive for bands with few aggregated reviews because most music publications are not going to waste time dunking on a nascent band’s early work. I also think Simmons is particularly cruel to a Modern Studies record.
Anecdotally, I do not know that music critics have truly lost their edge. I read and watch a fair amount of music criticism, and I still see a generous number of withering takes. I think music critics, as they become established and busier, recognize they have little time for bad music. Maroon 5 have been a best-selling act for a couple of decades, but Metacritic has aggregated just four reviews of its latest album, because you can just assume it sucks. Your time might be better spent with the great new Water From Your Eyes record.
Even though I am unsure I agree with Sanneh’s conclusion, I think critics should make time and column space for albums they think are bad. Negative reviews are not cruel — or, at least, they should not be — but it is the presence of bad that helps us understand what is good.
Echoing IBM, Microsoft in 1985 built its Windows software to run on Intel processors. The combination created the “Wintel era,” when the majority of the world’s computers featured Windows software and Intel hardware. Microsoft’s and Intel’s profits soared, turning them into two of the world’s most valuable companies by the mid-1990s. Most of the world’s computers soon featured “Intel Inside” stickers, making the chipmaker a household name.
In 2009, the Obama administration was so troubled by Intel’s dominance in computer chips that it filed a broad antitrust case against the Silicon Valley giant. It was settled the next year with concessions that hardly dented the company’s profits.
This is a gift link because I think this one is particularly worth reading. The headline calls it a “long, painful downfall”, but the remarkable thing about it is that it is short, if anything. Revenue is not always the best proxy for this, but the cracks began to show in the early 2010s when its quarterly growth contracted; a few years of modest growth followed before being clobbered since mid-2020. Every similar company in tech seems to have made a fortune off the combined forces of the covid-19 pandemic and artificial intelligence except Intel.
For better or worse, the US is now a shareholder in the chipmaker’s success, which makes sense given Intel’s strategic importance to national security. Remember, Intel is the only American manufacturer of leading edge silicon. TSMC and Samsung may be setting up shop in the US, but hell will freeze over before the US military lets either of them fab its most sensitive chips. Uncle Sam awarded Intel $3.2 billion to build that secure enclave for a reason.
Put mildly, The US government needs Intel Foundry and Lip Bu Tan needs Uncle Sam’s cash to make the whole thing work. It just so happens that right now Intel isn’t in a great position to negotiate.
Mann’s skeptical analysis is also worth your time. There is good sense in the U.S. government holding an interest in the success of Intel. Under this president, however, it raises entirely unique questions and concerns.
Tesla was found partly liable in a wrongful death case involving the electric vehicle company’s Autopilot system, with a jury awarding the plaintiffs $200 million in punitive damages plus additional money in compensatory damages.
[…]
“What we ultimately learned from that augmented video is that the vehicle 100% knew that it was about to run off the roadway, through a stop sign, through a blinking red light, through a parked car and through a pedestrian, yet did nothing other than shut itself off when the crash was unavoidable,” said Adam Boumel, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys.
I continue to believe holding manufacturers legally responsible is the correct outcome for failures of autonomous driving technology. Corporations, unlike people, cannot go to jail; the closest thing we have to accountability is punitive damages.
The crowds are real. Every person you see in the video above started out as real footage of real fans, pulled from video of multiple Will Smith concerts during his recent European tour.
The lines, in this case, are definitely blurry. This is unlike any previous is it A.I.? controversy over crowds I can remember because — and I hope this is more teaser than spoiler — note Baio’s careful word choice in that last quoted paragraph.
A man holds an orange and white device in his hand, about the size of his palm, with an antenna sticking out. He enters some commands with the built-in buttons, then walks over to a nearby car. At first, its doors are locked, and the man tugs on one of them unsuccessfully. He then pushes a button on the gadget in his hand, and the door now unlocks.
The tech used here is the popular Flipper Zero, an ethical hacker’s swiss army knife, capable of all sorts of things such as WiFi attacks or emulating NFC tags. Now, 404 Media has found an underground trade where much shadier hackers sell extra software and patches for the Flipper Zero to unlock all manner of cars, including models popular in the U.S. The hackers say the tool can be used against Ford, Audi, Volkswagen, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia, and several other brands, including sometimes dozens of specific vehicle models, with no easy fix from car manufacturers.
The Canadian government made headlines last year when it banned the Flipper Zero, only to roll it back in favour of a narrowed approach a month later. That was probably the right call. However, too many — including Hackaday and Flipper itself — were too confident in saying the device was not able to, or could not, be used to steal cars. This is demonstrably untrue.
The United States government has long had an interest in boosting its high technology sector, with manifold objectives: for soft power, espionage, and financial dominance, at least. It has accomplished this through tax incentives, funding some of the best universities in the world, lax antitrust and privacy enforcement, and — in some cases — direct involvement. The internet began as a Department of Defense project, and the government invests in businesses through firms like In-Q-Tel.
All of this has worked splendidly for them. The world’s technology stack is overwhelmingly U.S.-dependent across the board, from consumers through large businesses and up to governments, even those which are not allies. Apparently, though, it is not enough and the country’s leaders are desperately worried about regulation in Europe and competition from Eastern Asia.
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson sent letters today to more than a dozen prominent technology companies reminding them of their obligations to protect the privacy and data security of American consumers despite pressure from foreign governments to weaken such protections. He also warned them that censoring Americans at the behest of foreign powers might violate the law.
[…]
“I am concerned that these actions by foreign powers to impose censorship and weaken end-to-end encryption will erode Americans’ freedoms and subject them to myriad harms, such as surveillance by foreign governments and an increased risk of identity theft and fraud,” Chairman [Andrew] Ferguson wrote.
These letters (PDF) serve as a reminder to, in effect, enforce U.S. digital supremacy around the world. Many of the most popular social networks are U.S.-based and export the country’s interpretation of permissive expression laws around the world, even to countries with different expectations. Occasionally, there will be conflicting policies which may mean country-specific moderation. What Ferguson’s letter appears to be asking is for U.S. companies to be sovereign places for U.S. citizens regardless of where their speech may appear.
The U.S. government is certainly correct to protect the interests of its citizens. But let us not pretend this is not also re-emphasizing the importance to the U.S. government of exporting its speech policy internationally, especially when it fails to adhere to it on its home territory. It is not just the hypocrisy that rankles, it is also the audacity requiring posts by U.S. users to be treated as a special class, to the extent that E.U. officials enforcing their own laws in their own territory could be subjected to sanctions.
As far as encryption, I have yet to see sufficient evidence of a radical departure from previous statements made by this president. When he was running the first time around, he called for an Apple boycott over the company’s refusal to build a special version of iOS to decrypt an iPhone used by a mass shooter. During his first term, Trump demanded Apple decrypt another iPhone in a different mass shooting. After two attempted assassinations last year, Trump once again said Apple should forcibly decrypt the iPhones of those allegedly responsible. It was under his first administration in which Apple was dissuaded from launching Advanced Data Protection in the first place. U.S. companies with European divisions recently confirmed they cannot comply with E.U. privacy and security guarantees as they are subject to the provisions of the CLOUD Act enacted during the first Trump administration.
The closest Trump has gotten to changing his stance is in a February interview with the Spectator’s Ben Domenech:
BD: But the problem is he [the British Prime Minister] runs, your vice president obviously eloquently pointed this out in Munich, he runs a nation now that is removing the security helmets on Apple phones so that they can—
DJT: We told them you can’t do this.
BD: Yeah, Tulsi, I saw—
DJT: We actually told him… that’s incredible. That’s something, you know, that you hear about with China.
The red line, it seems, is not at a principled opposition to “removing the security helmet” of encryption, but in the U.K.’s specific legislation. It is a distinction with little difference. The president and U.S. law enforcement want on-demand decryption just as much as their U.K. counterparts and have attempted to legislate similar requirements.
While the U.S. has been reinforcing the supremacy of its tech companies in Europe, it has also been propping them up at home:
Intel Corporation today announced an agreement with the Trump Administration to support the continued expansion of American technology and manufacturing leadership. Under terms of the agreement, the United States government will make an $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock, reflecting the confidence the Administration has in Intel to advance key national priorities and the critically important role the company plays in expanding the domestic semiconductor industry.
The government’s equity stake will be funded by the remaining $5.7 billion in grants previously awarded, but not yet paid, to Intel under the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act and $3.2 billion awarded to the company as part of the Secure Enclave program. Intel will continue to deliver on its Secure Enclave obligations and reaffirmed its commitment to delivering trusted and secure semiconductors to the U.S. Department of Defense. The $8.9 billion investment is in addition to the $2.2 billion in CHIPS grants Intel has received to date, making for a total investment of $11.1 billion.
Despite its size — 10% of the company, making it the single largest shareholder — this press release says this investment is “a passive ownership, with no Board representation or other governance or information rights”. Even so, this is the U.S. attempting to reassert the once-vaunted position of Intel.
This deal is not as absurd as it seems. It is entirely antithetical to the claimed free market capitalist principles common to both major U.S. political parties but, in particular, espoused by Republicans. It is probably going to be wielded in terrible ways. But I can see at least one defensible reason for the U.S. to treat the integrity of Intel as an urgent issue: geology.
Near the end of Patrick McGee’s “Apple in China” sits a section that will haunt the corners of my brain for a long time. McGee writes that a huge amount of microprocessors — “at least 80 percent of the world’s most advanced chips” — are made by TSMC in Taiwan. There are political concerns with the way China has threatened Taiwan, which can be contained and controlled by humans, and frequent earthquakes, which cannot. Even setting aside questions about control, competition, and China, it makes a lot of sense for there to be more manufacturers of high-performance chips in places with less earthquake potential. (Silicon Valley is also sitting in a geologically risky place. Why do we do this to ourselves?)
At least Intel gets the shine of a Trump co-sign, and when has that ever gone wrong?
Then there are the deals struck with Nvidia and AMD, whereby the U.S. government gets a kickback in exchange for trade. Lauren Hirsch and Maureen Farrell, New York Times:
But some of Mr. Trump’s recent moves appear to be a strong break with historical precedent. In the cases of Nvidia and AMD, the Trump administration has proposed dictating the global market that these chipmakers can have access to. The two companies have promised to give 15 percent of their revenue from China to the U.S. government in order to have the right to sell chips in that country and bypass any future U.S. restrictions.
These moves add up and are, apparently, just the beginning. The U.S. has been a dominant force in high technology in part because of a flywheel effect created by early investments, some of which came from government sources and public institutions. This additional context does not undermine the entrepreneurship that came after, and which has been a proud industry trait. In fact, it demonstrates a benefit of strong institutions.
The rest of the world should see these massive investments as an instruction to build up our own high technology industries. We should not be too proud in Canada to set up Crown corporations that can take this on, and we ought to work with governments elsewhere. We should also not lose sight of the increasing hostility of the U.S. government making these moves to reassert its dominance in the space. We can stop getting steamrolled if we want to, but we really need to want to. We can start small.
“Any publicly funded immunization in B.C. can be provided at no cost to any Canadian travelling within the province,” a statement from the ministry said.
“This includes providing publicly funded COVID-19 vaccine to people of Alberta.”
[…]
Alberta is the only Canadian province that will not provide free universal access to COVID-19 vaccines this fall.
The dummies running our province opened what they called a “vaccine booking system” earlier this month allowing Albertans to “pre-order” vaccines. However, despite these terms having defined meanings, the system did not allow anyone to book a specific day, time, or location to receive the vaccine, nor did it take payments or even show prices. The government’s rationale for this strategy is that it is “intended [to] help reduce waste”.
Now that pricing has been revealed, it sure seems like these dopes want us to have a nice weekend just over the B.C. border. A hotel room for a couple or a family will probably be about the same as the combined vaccination cost. Sure, a couple of meals would cost extra, but it is also a nice weekend away. Sure, it means people who are poor or otherwise unable will likely need to pay the $100 “administrative fee” to get their booster, and it means a whole bunch of pre-ordered vaccines will go to waste thereby undermining the whole point of this exercise. But at least it plays to the anti-vaccine crowd. That is what counts for these jokers.
Jane Mundy, writing at the imaginatively named Lawyers and Settlements in December:
A former Apple executive has filed a California labor complaint against Apple and Jay Blahnik, the company’s vice president of fitness technologies. Mandana Mofidi accuses Apple of retaliation after she reported sexual harassment and raised concerns about receiving less pay than her male colleagues.
The Superior Court of California for the County of Los Angeles wants nearly seventeen of the finest United States dollars for a copy of the complaint alone.
But along the way, [Jay] Blahnik created a toxic work environment, said nine current and former employees who worked with or for Mr. Blahnik and spoke about personnel issues on the condition of anonymity. They said Mr. Blahnik, 57, who leads a roughly 100-person division as vice president for fitness technologies, could be verbally abusive, manipulative and inappropriate. His behavior contributed to decisions by more than 10 workers to seek extended mental health or medical leaves of absence since 2022, about 10 percent of the team, these people said.
The behaviours described in this article are deeply unprofessional, at best. It is difficult to square the testimony of a sizeable portion of Blahnik’s team with an internal investigation finding no wrongdoing, but that is what Apple’s spokesperson expects us to believe.
The social networking app is now home to more than 400 million monthly active users, Meta shared with Fast Company on Tuesday. That’s 50 million more than just a few months ago, and a long way from the 175 million it had around its first birthday last summer.
What is even more amazing about this statistic is how non-essential Threads seems to be. I might be in a bubble, but I cannot recall the last time someone sent me a link to a Threads post or mentioned they saw something worthwhile there. I see plenty of screenshots of posts from Bluesky, X, and even Mastodon circulating in various other social networks, but I cannot remember a single one from Threads.
I’m certainly aware that many readers venture outside the Apple ecosystem for certain devices, but I’ve always assumed that most people would opt for Apple’s device in any given category. TidBITS does focus on Apple, after all, and Apple works hard to provide an integrated experience for those who go all-in on Apple. That integration disappears if you use a Mac along with a Samsung Galaxy phone and an Amazon Echo smart speaker.
Let’s put my assumption to the test! Or rather, to the poll. […]
It is a good question; you should take this quick poll if you have a couple of minutes.
This will not be bias-free, but I also have a hard time assuming what kind of bias will be found in a sample of an audience reading TidBits. My gut instinct is many people will be wholly immersed in Apple hardware. However, a TidBits reader probably skews a little more technical and particular — or so I read in the comments — so perhaps not? Engst’s poll only asks about primary hardware and not, say, users’ choice in keyboards or music streaming services, so perhaps it will be different than my gut tells me.
Apple today announced the expansion of its Self Service Repair and Genuine Parts Distributor programs to Canada, providing individuals and independent repair professionals across the country broader access to the parts, tools, and manuals needed to repair Apple devices.
As with other regions where Self-Service Repair is available, manuals are available on Apple’s website, but none of the listed parts and tools are linked to the still-sketchy-looking Self-Service Repair site.
There does not seem to be a pricing advantage, either. My wife’s iPhone 12 Pro needs a new battery. Apple says that costs $119 with a Genius Bar appointment, or I can pay $119 from the Self-Service store for a battery kit plus $67 for a week-long rental of all the required tools. This does not include a $1,500 hold on the credit card for the toolkit. After returning the spent battery, I would get a $57.12 credit, so it costs about $10 more to repair it myself than to bring it in. Perhaps that is just how much these parts cost; or, perhaps Apple is able to effectively rig the cost of repairs by competing only with itself. It is difficult to know.
One possible advantage of the Self-Service Repair option and the Genuine Parts Program is in making service more accessible to people in remote areas of Canada. I tried a remote address in Baker Lake, Nunavut, and the Self-Service Store still said it would ship free in 5–7 business days. Whether it would is a different story. Someone in a Canadian territory should please test this.
U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, in a tweet that happens to be the only communication of this news so far:
Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our partners in the UK, alongside @POTUS and @VP, to ensure Americans’ private data remains private and our Constitutional rights and civil liberties are protected.
As a result, the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a “back door” that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties.
It is unclear to me whether Gabbard is saying the U.K.’s backdoor requirement is entirely gone, or if it means the U.K. is only retreating from requiring worldwide access (or perhaps even only access to U.S. citizens’ data). The BBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are all interpreting this as a worldwide retreat, but Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Guardian say it is only U.S. data. None of them appear to have confirmation beyond Gabbard’s post, thereby illustrating the folly of an administration continuing to make policy decisions and announcements in tweet form. The news section of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is instead obsessed with relitigating Russian interference in the dumbest possible way.
Because of the secrecy required of Apple and the U.K. government, this confusion cannot be clarified by the parties concerned, so one is entrusting the Trump administration to communicate this accurately. Perhaps the U.K. availability of Advanced Data Protection can be a canary — if it comes back, we can hope Apple is not complicit with weakening end-to-end encryption.
When I watched Tim Cook, in the White House, carefully assemble a glass-and-gold trophy fit for a king, it felt to me like a natural outcome of the events and actions exhaustively documented by Patrick McGee in “Apple in China”. It was a reflection of the arc of Cook’s career, and of Apple’s turnaround from dire straits to a kind of supranational superpower. It was a consequence of two of the world’s most powerful nations sliding toward the (even more) authoritarian, and a product of appeasement to strongmen on both sides of the Pacific.
At the heart of that media spectacle was an announcement by Apple of $100 billion in domestic manufacturing investment over four years, in addition to its existing $500 billion promise. This is an extraordinary amount of money to spend in the country from which Apple has extricated its manufacturing over the past twenty years. The message from Cook was “we’re going to keep building technologies at the heart of our products right here in America because we’re a proud American company and we believe deeply in the promise of this great nation”. But what becomes clear after digesting McGee’s book is that core Apple manufacturing is assuredly not returning to the United States.
Do not get me wrong: there is much to be admired in the complementary goals of reducing China-based manufacturing and an increasing U.S. role. Strip away for a minute the context of this president and his corrupt priorities. Rich nations have become dependent on people in poorer nations to make our stuff, and no nation is as critical to our global stuff supply than China. One of the benefits of global trade is that it can smooth local rockiness; a bad harvest season no longer has to mean a shortage of food. Yet even if we ignore their unique political environment and their detestable treatment of Uyghur peoples — among many domestic human rights abuses — it makes little sense for us to be so dependent on this one country. This is basically an antitrust problem.
At the same time, it sure would be nice if we made more of the stuff we buy closer to where we live. We have grown accustomed to externalizing the negative consequences of making all this stuff. Factories exist somewhere else, so the resources they consume and the pollution they create is of little concern to us. They are usually not staffed by a brand we know, and tasks may be subcontracted, so there is often sufficient plausible deniability vis a vis working conditions and labour standards. As McGee documents, activist campaigns had a brief period of limited success in pressuring Apple to reform its standards and crack down on misbehaviour before the pressure of product delivery caught up with the company and it stopped reporting its regressing numbers. Also, it is not as though Apple could truly avoid knowing the conditions at these factories when there are so many of its own employees working side-by-side with Foxconn.
All the work done by people in factories far away from where I live is, frankly, astonishing. Some people still erroneously believe the country of origin is an indicator of whether a product is made with any degree of finesse or care. This is simply untrue, and it has been for decades, as McGee emphasizes. This book is worth reading for this perspective alone. The goods made in China today are among the most precise and well-crafted anywhere, on a simply unbelievable scale. In fact, it is this very ability to produce so much great stuff so quickly that has tied Apple ever tighter to China, argues McGee:
Whereas smartphone rivals like Samsung could bolt a bunch of off-the-shelf components together and make a handset, Apple’s strategy required it to become ever more wedded to the industrial clusters forming around its production. As more of that work took place in China, with no other nation developing the same skills, Apple was growing dependent on the very capabilities it had created. (page 176)
Cook’s White House announcement, for all its patriotic fervour, only underscores this dependency. In the book’s introduction, McGee reports “Apple’s investments in China reached $55 billion per year by 2015, an astronomical figure that doesn’t include the costs of components in Apple hardware” (page 7). That sum built out a complete, nimble, and precise supply chain at vast scale. By contrast, Apple says it is contributing a total of $600 billion over four years, or $150 billion per year. In other words, it is investing about three times as much in the U.S. compared to China and getting far less. Important stuff, to be sure, but less. And, yes, Apple is moving some iPhone production out of China, but not to the U.S. — something like 18% of iPhones are now made in India. McGee’s sources are skeptical of the company’s ability to do so at scale given the organization of the supply chain and the political positioning of its contract manufacturers, but nobody involved thinks Apple is going to have a U.S. iPhone factory.
So much of this story is about the iPhone, and it can be difficult to remember Apple makes a lot of other products. To McGee’s credit, he spends the first two-and-a-half sections of this six-part book exploring Apple’s history, the complex production of the G3 and G4 iMacs, and the making of the iPod which laid the groundwork for the iPhone. But a majority of the rest of the book is about the iPhone. That is unsurprising.
First, the iPhone is the product of a staggering amount of manufacturing knowledge. It is also, of course, a sales bonanza.
In fact, among the most riveting stories in the book do not concern manufacturing at all. McGee writes of grey market iPhone sales — a side effect of which was the implementation of parts pairing and activation — and the early frenzy over the iPad. Most notably, McGee spends a couple of chapters — particularly “5 Alarm Fire” — dissecting the sub-par launch sales of the iPhone XR as revealed through executive emails and depositions after Apple was sued for allegedly misleading shareholders. The case was settled last year for $490 million without Apple admitting wrongdoing. Despite some of these documents becoming public in 2022, it seems nobody before McGee took the time to read through them. I am glad he did because it is revealing. Even pointing to the existence of these documents offers a fascinating glimpse of what Apple does when a product is selling poorly.
Frustratingly, McGee does not attribute specific claims or quotations to individual documents in this chapter. Virtually everything in “5 Alarm Fire” is cited simply to the case number, so you have to go poking around yourself if you wish to validate his claims or learn more about the story.1 It may be worthwhile, however, since it underscores the unique risk Apple takes by releasing just a few new iPhones each year. If a model is not particularly successful, Apple is not going to quietly drop it and replace it with a different SKU. With the 2018 iPhones, Apple was rocked by a bunch of different problems, most notably the decent but uninteresting iPhone XR — 79% fewer preorders (PDF) when compared to the same sales channels as the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus — and the more exciting new phones from Huawei and Xiaomi released around the same time. Apple had hoped the 2018 iPhones would be more interesting to the Chinese market since they supported dual SIMs (PDF) and the iPhone XS came in gold. Apple responded to weak initial demand with targeted promotions, increasing production of the year-old iPhone X, and more marketing, but this was not enough and the company had to lower its revenue expectations for the quarter.
That Cook called this “obviously a disaster” is, of course, a relative term, as is the way I framed this as a “risk” of Apple’s smartphone release strategy. Apple still sold millions of iPhones — even the XR — and it still made a massive amount of money. It is a unique story, however, as it is one of the few times in the book where Apple has a problem of making too many products rather than too few. It is also illustrative of increasing competition from Chinese brands and, as emails reveal (PDF), trade tensions between the U.S. and China.
The fundamental heart of the story of this book is of the tension of a “proud American company” attempting to appease two increasingly nationalist and hostile governments. McGee examines Apple’s billion-dollar investment in Didi Chuxing, and mentions Cook’s appointment to the board of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management. This is all part of the politicking the company realized it would need to do to appease President Xi. Similarly, its massive spending in China needed to be framed correctly. For example, in 2016, it said it was investing $275 billion in China over the following five years:
As mind-bogglingly large as its $275 billion investment was, it was not really a quid pro quo. The number didn’t represent any concession on Apple’s part. It was just the $55 billion the company estimated it’d invested for 2015, multiplied by five years. […] What was new, in other words, wasn’t Apple’s investment, but its marketing of the investment. China was accumulating reams of specialized knowledge from Apple, but Beijing didn’t know this because Apple had been so secretive. From this meeting forward, the days in which Apple failed to score any political points from its investments in the country were over. It was learning to speak the local language.
One can see a similar dynamic in the press releases for U.S. investments it began publishing one year later, after Donald Trump first took office. Like Xi, Trump was eager to bend Apple to his administration’s priorities. Some of the company’s actions and investments are probably the same as those it would have made anyhow, but it is important to these autocrat types that they believe they are calling the shots.
Among the reasons the U.S. has given for taking a more hostile trade position on China is its alleged and, in some cases, proven theft of intellectual property. McGee spends less time on this — in part, I imagine, because it is a hackneyed theme frequently used only to treat innovation by Chinese companies with suspicion and contempt. This book is a more levelheaded piece of analysis. Instead of having the de rigueur chapter or two dedicated to intellectual property leaving through the back door, McGee examines the less-reported front-door access points. Companies are pressured to participate in “joint ventures” with Chinese businesses to retain access to markets, for example; this is why iCloud in China is operated not by Apple, but by AIPO Cloud (Guizhou) Technology Co. Ltd.
Even though patent and design disputes are not an area of focus for McGee, it is part of the two countries’ disagreements over trade, and one area where Apple is again stuck in the middle. A concluding anecdote in the book references the launch of the Huawei Mate XT, a phone that folds in three which, to McGee, “appears to be a marvel of industrial engineering”:2
It was only in 2014 that Jony Ive complained of cheap Chinese phones and their brazen “theft” of his designs; it was 2018 when Cupertino expressed shock at Chinese brands’ ability to match the newest features; now, a Chinese brand is designing, manufacturing, and shipping more expensive phones with alluring features that, according to analysts, Apple isn’t expected to match until 2027. No wonder the most liked comment on a YouTube unboxing video of the Mate XT is, “Now you know why USA banned Huawei.” (pages 377–378)
The Mate XT was introduced the same day as the iPhone 16 line, and the differences could not have been more stark. The iPhone was a modest evolution of the company’s industrial design language, yet would be familiar to someone who had been asleep for the preceding fifteen years. The Mate XT was anything but. The phones also had something in common: displays made by BOE. The company is one of several suppliers for the iPhone, and it enables the radical design of Huawei’s phone. But according to Samsung, BOE’s ability to make OLED and flexible displays depends on technology stolen from them. The U.S. International Trade Commission agreed and will issue a final ruling in November which is likely to prohibit U.S. imports of BOE-made displays. It seems like this will be yet another point of tension between the U.S. and China, and another thing Cook can mention during his next White House visit.
“Apple in China” is, as you can imagine, dense. I have barely made a dent in exploring it here. It is about four hundred pages and not a single one is wasted. This is not one of those typical books about Apple; there is little in here you have read before. It answers a bunch of questions I have had and serves as a way to decode Apple’s actions for the past ten years and, I think, during this second Trump presidency.
At the same time, it leaves me asking questions I did not fully consider before. I have long assumed Apple’s willingness to comply with the demands of the Chinese government are due to its supply chain and manufacturing role. That is certainly true, but I also imagine the country’s sizeable purchasing power is playing an increasing role. That is, even if Apple decentralizes its supply chain — unlikely, if McGee’s sources are to be believed — it is perhaps too large and too alluring a market for Apple to ignore. Then again, it arguably created this problem itself. Its investments in China have been so large and, McGee argues, so impactful they can be considered in the same context as the U.S.’ post-World War II European recovery efforts. Also, the design of Apple’s ecosystem is such that it can be so deferential. If the Chinese government does not want people in its country using an app, the centralized App Store means it can be yanked away.3
Cook has previously advocated for expressing social values as a corporate principle. In 2017, he said, perhaps paraphrasing his heroesMartin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, “if you see something going on that’s not right, the most powerful form of consent is to say nothing”. But how does Cook stand firmly for those values while depending on an authoritarian country for Apple’s hardware, and trying to appease a wanna-be dictator for the good standing of his business? In short, he does not. In long, well, it is this book.
It is this tension — ably shown by McGee in specific actions and stories rather than merely written about — that elevates “Apple in China” above the typical books about Apple and its executives. It is part of the story of how Apple became massive, how an operations team became so influential, and how the seemingly dowdy business of supply chains in China applied increasingly brilliant skills and became such a valuable asset in worldwide manufacturing. And it all leads directly to Tim Cook standing between Donald Trump and J.D. Vance in the White House, using the same autocrat handling skills he has practiced for years. Few people or businesses come out of this story looking good. Some look worse than others.
The most relevant documents I found under the “415” filings from December 2023. ↥︎
I think it is really weird to cite a YouTube comment in a serious book. ↥︎
I could not find a spot for this story in this review, but it forecasts Apple’s current position:
But Jobs resented third-party developers as freeloaders. In early 1980, he had a conversation with Mike Markkula, Apple’s chairman, where the two expressed their frustration at the rise of hardware and software groups building businesses around the Apple II. They asked each other: “Why should we allow people to make money off of us? Off of our innovations?” (page 23)
Sure seems like the position Jobs was able to revisit when Apple created its rules for developing apps for the iPhone and subsequent devices. McGee sources this to Michael Malone’s 1999 book “Infinite Loop”, which I now feel I must read. ↥︎
Over the past week, I’ve been working to track down the new owner of MacSurfer’s Headline News, a beloved site that shut down in 2020 and has recently had somewhat mysterious revival. Fortunately, after some digging that didn’t really lead anywhere, I received an email from its new owner, Ken Turner, and he graciously took the time to answer a few questions about the new project.
Turner sounds like a great steward to carry on the MacSurfer legacy. Even in an era of well-known aggregators like Techmeme and massive forums like Hacker News and Reddit, I think there is still a role for a smaller and more focused media tracking site.
I am uncertain what the role of BackBeat Media is in all this. I have not heard from Dave Hamilton or anyone there to confirm if they even have a role.
