Notices by Marco Arment (marcoarment@mastodon.social)

True. But that's true of every big fandom.

Google's been doing *wildly* unethical things for years, and most nerds never called them out because they made great tech, it worked well, and we liked the nerdy ethos that the founders had.

Like Apple, that ethos left a long time ago, but it's hard for us to stop believing it. We *want* to believe, because we're fans!
https://urusai.social/@nazokiyoubinbou/114739279452257744

This is a core system app interrupting you, promoting a sale by a movie-ticketing company, to push you to go see the platform vendor’s new movie.

Why not just pop up random ads all the time, always creating new channels that everyone’s opted-into by default so you can never keep up with opting out of them all?

Oh wait, that’s already what happens.

Apple’s as bad as everyone else. They don’t respect their customers — we’re fodder.

They truly have no standards anymore.
https://mastodon.social/@caseyliss/114738626109660386

I couldn't remember the name of an iPhone dock I've seen a million times in Instagram ads, and can't find it via web search.

So I figured, let me just open Instagram and scroll a bit, and I'll probably see it.

Upon doing that, within seconds, I found an ad… for the wrong one, that I'd just landed on via web search on my Mac a minute earlier.

And this is the advertising hellscape we live in.

Another example is in Mail, where I'll often train my email provider's spam filter by moving spam into the Junk folder from the Inbox screen.

Before, it was Select, tap message, Move. Three taps.

Now it's four: "…" menu, THEN move finger down to Select, tap message, tap (now-unlabeled) Move icon at the bottom.

Why? What are we using all of that navigation-bar space for?

My "content”?

A hallmark of iOS 26 design seems to be the consolidation of what was previously multiple toolbar buttons into a "…" button that shows a menu.

Which looks fine, I guess, but some VERY common actions are now an additional tap away!

Safari is the worst offender. Want to switch tabs or close the current tab? The all-tabs view, previously the two-squares toolbar icon, is now buried in a menu, adding an extra tap and significant finger movement to possibly the most common action in Safari:

We've known for decades that translucency in UIs looks really cool, but is extremely difficult to design in a way that works with arbitrary content across versatile situations.

With the glass-redesign rumors, many of us thought, “If anyone can do it, it's Apple! They must've finally solved it."

They haven’t.

It still looks cool in some contexts, and utterly fails in others.

If Apple ever touches the Small Business Program again (15% fee instead of 30% for devs making under $1M/year in the App Store), they should fix its biggest issues: it’s not automatic, and it’s not progressive.

If you’re about to cross $1M in December, you’re highly incentivized to remove your app from sale until January 1. That’s dysfunctional.

Just apply the 15% rate automatically to the first $1M/year that any developer makes. No applications, no cliffs, no delays.
https://mastodon.social/@agiletortoise/114625122375020382

“Even if that's not explicitly what Apple is doing here, they simply must know that's what it looks like. And it's just about the worst look imaginable.”

https://spyglass.org/apple-you-cowards/

Retreating to Safety
https://marco.org/2025/05/30/retreat

Maybe Apple has good reasons to decline an interview by @gruber at WWDC this year.

Maybe not.

LOOOOOOLLLLLLLLL

Apple's leaders have truly lost it.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/05/14/critical-warning-for-external-purchases-in-app-store/

Not new (2023), but this exemplifies Apple’s culture of arrogance and entitlement.

By their logic, the local electric company “facilitates” a large portion of my Apple-device use. They should claim that they created the platform that lets Apple devices exist, and demand a third of their revenue.

What about my ISP? Cellular provider? Router manufacturer? The wires in my walls? The pizza place down the street, for fueling my body as I type?

Institutional delusion.

From: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/08/appfigures-apple-made-over-10b-from-us-app-store-comissions-last-year/

Saw the Minecraft movie with the family. If you know the game or have a kid who does…

GO. See it THIS WEEKEND.

It was so, so stupid… and so, so fun.

Everything was loudly cheered by an entire theater of nerdy middle schoolers, occasionally yelling out smart, funny one-liners. It was like this generation’s Rocky Horror.

I’m so glad I got to be a part of it. (Really.) I was laughing so hard — at and with the audience — that I was crying.

Holy shit, @codinghorror is committing another 50 MILLION DOLLARS to Guaranteed Minimum Income projects: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-road-not-taken-is-guaranteed-minimum-income/

We need more people in the world like Jeff Atwood and his family.

Perhaps nothing encapsulates Apple's decline in user respect more than the transformation of the Settings app on ALL of their platforms into an advertising vehicle.

Which is impressive, considering it's competing with App Store search ads and using notifications for marketing.

“Image Playground Is Here”

Where? Right there, in that unadorned label in the decontented new Settings app that looks like a rendering bug?

Is that supposed to be a promo? What happens if I click on it? [click]

Oh my god.

Do any UI designers still work at Apple? Can we get some of them assigned to the Mac, please?

OK, how do I get rid of this terrible promo in the sidebar?

i have to open image playground, don't i

what is happening over there

“A rotten Apple: Tim Cook’s betrayal of LGBTQ+ rights”
https://ryanleetaylor.com/blog/a-rotten-apple-tim-cook-betrayal-of-lgbtq-rights

> “If Apple’s leadership is willing to compromise on fundamental human rights, can I, in good conscience, continue to be part of that ecosystem? This question now haunts me, and I suspect I’m not alone.”

You're not. I’m suddenly seeing statements to this effect, public and private, more than ever.

Supporting Apple has never felt morally difficult… until now.

That's entirely on Tim Cook.

It's time for him to go.

Watch everyone now bend over backward to justify this as some sort of forced move that Cook HAD to do.

Tim Cook, reluctantly supporting Trump, because it's the savvy move for Apple…

Tim Cook… reluctantly supporting Trump…

Tim Cook… supporting Trump…

Are we getting it yet?
https://mastodon.social/@appleinsider/113766618970266062

Have you considered the possibility that Tim Cook just… supports Trump?

Like so many other mega-rich CEOs?

I've never thought to try it again.

The same benefits and risks would still apply. CBR is INCREDIBLY wasteful for podcasts, but I bet lots of platforms still don't seek properly in long VBR MP3s.

One solution could be adding multi-enclosure-format support to the podcast ecosystem, where we offer modern clients a list of formats and let them pick more advanced ones if they support them.

But I bet ZERO big DAI platforms, and therefore zero popular podcasts, would support it.

It was still MP3, but I tried VBR encoding.

In 2016, I wrote: https://marco.org/2016/08/15/vbr-mp3-plea

ATP: https://atp.fm/182

It worked! The following year's Apple OSes (iOS 11+) implemented support for all three VBR-seek-table standards — MLLT, VBRI, and Xing/LAME-tag.

ATP: https://atp.fm/228

But when I later tried releasing ATP in VBR with all three tags, we got so many problem reports from Android users that I went back to CBR after one episode:

https://atp.fm/244
https://ioc.exchange/@whophd/113717975279161741