Notices by Steve Troughton-Smith (stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social)

‘Between iOS 18 and iOS 26, Apple was unable to ship its announced Apple Intelligence features’ hits different

Hate to break it to you, but the OS version numbers will probably stay the same in the APIs even if the marketing names change, or else everything might break in weird ways 😅 So we’ll likely still have to keep track of versioning per platform

We take it completely for granted these days, but Duolingo is kinda awesome isn’t it? There’s a reason everybody uses it. Since I’m in Brazil for a few weeks I figured I’d learn some Portuguese, and for the hell of it I checked up on the French I haven’t spoken in 20 years. Neat how it can evaluate where to put you when you drop in from nothing. I wish I had the brain space to put languages into

If anything, the last few years have taught us so much about Apple and the people who lead it. The company cannot be trusted

They've lied, they've cheated, they've bullied, strongarmed, and mislead, they've lobbied and bribed authoritarian leaders for support, they've faked 'independent reviews', they've intentionally degraded their products and their product user experience, they've broken laws and spurned lawmakers, shook down developers, and they will continue to do all of these things

If I haven't been talking about app development for a while, there's a reason for that: a very close family member has recently been diagnosed with late-stage Lewy body dementia, and things are rough and snowballing fast. We've been completely blindsided by the speed and severity. I have very little energy left over to think about Xcode, but if there are sweeping OS redesigns announced at WWDC I will do my best to handle them. Other than that, my app update schedule will be quiet for a while ✌️

@mikecane @WarnerCrocker @doctorlaura nobody wants to wear a pin, especially with the train wreck that Siri is

You know, I'm not sure the world needs a specific day where everybody lies to each other

@mikecane @WarnerCrocker @doctorlaura are you scraping computers out of the dumpster??

A delaminating screen is going to frost over as it gets worse

@WarnerCrocker @mikecane @doctorlaura he's an ‘arbitrary excuses’ kind of guy. There will always be some invented reason he’s only window shopping 😜

@gruber @thomholwerda there are features *every year* that Apple doesn't launch in the EU. It's been 20 years and I don't have TV Shows in iTunes. They just fooled the eager tech press into believing *this* round of half-finished, delayed features was somehow the EU's fault, and not because multiple divisions at Apple are in now crisis mode because of a decade of bad decisions

ChatGPT didn't need access to all your local or sensitive data to be incredibly useful. It didn't need to be wired into every corner of the OS or outside of the sandbox. It didn't need special privileges or entitlements given to only it. It didn't need the biggest and most powerful Apple chips, or the latest OS to run on.

Apple has lost itself completely in the weeds, when a Siri app and API that works just like ChatGPT’s would have done 90% of what anybody is actually looking for

⚓️ Realistically, this AI race is a giant ship anchor Apple has willingly strapped to its own neck, that will mire it dreadfully. A game they can’t ever win, and a distraction that is eating up all the OS engineering energy that some of their product lines desperately need. It has added literally nothing of value to this year's OS releases.

Apple needed to do two things: make Siri not suck, and provide an LLM through API so that devs could make their own features and choices. It did neither

There's a new budget phone from the company whose CEO funded a venue where one dude pledged to eradicate trans people and another dude did some nazi salutes, and that's about as much coverage as it deserves

Apple, fuck right off. *You* decided notarization would be an approval process, and you inserted yourself in it, which means yes *you approved this app*.

Much like you didn't approve a bunch of other apps, like emulators.

Shame on Apple-affiliated sites for regurgitating this crap, once again. You're knowingly and willingly lying to your readers on behalf of a company that would happily eat you for breakfast

https://9to5mac.com/2025/02/03/apple-forced-to-approve-porn-app-on-eu-iphones-due-to-dma/

Your favorite big tech CEO (pick one) just sat on stage behind and in support of somebody who defined trans people out of existence, side by side with some motherfucker who later did nazi salutes from behind the seal of the POTUS.

There is no going back from that

Europe risks catastrophe if it doesn’t start cutting off access to Twitter/X, and other US-lead social media following it down this dark path. The risks are even higher than in the case of RT; if we wait until some big conflict it will be far too late

Meta is very publicly doing what _every other company in the US_ is going to be doing in the near future. This is about as much of a heads-up big tech is going to give. You might want to save some of that anger to channel later, because an awful lot of vulnerable groups are going to be relying on your voice

The ’cultural realignment' is real.

https://www.404media.co/meta-deletes-trans-and-nonbinary-messenger-themes/

@dansup good luck with the launch[es]! 😄

Chilling. If the wake-up call hasn't set in yet, we outside the US really need to start viewing all US-based companies as from a hostile aggressor, beholden to imperial dictates, not law. As a new dark age engulfs America, the rest of us must do what we can to insulate ourselves from the fallout

https://www.instagram.com/p/DEhf2uTJUs0/