The Financial Times, under a four-person byline (“Tim Bradshaw, Stephen Morris, and Michael Acton in San Francisco, and Daniel Thomas in London”):

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.

I have no little-birdie insight on this, but that’s not surprising. I don’t think there are many people, if any, outside Apple’s top executive team and board of directors who have any insight into Cook’s thinking on this. 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 absolutely love the idea of Cook’s successor being a product person like Ternus, and Ternus is young enough — 50, the same age Cook was in 2011 when he took the reins from Steve Jobs — to hold the job for a long stretch. Ternus took over iPhone hardware engineering in 2020, and was promoted to senior vice president of hardware engineering in January 2021, when Dan Riccio stepped aside. Apple’s hardware, across all product lines and including silicon, has been exemplary under Ternus’s leadership. And Ternus clearly loves and understands the Mac.

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.

The question is, did Meta scrap its native Windows app because they don’t care that much about Windows in particular? Or because they don’t care that much about native desktop apps, period — and a crude web app wrapper is coming to Mac next?

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information on Tuesday (paywalled, alas, but summarized by 9to5Mac here and here):

Apple has since sharply scaled back production of the first iPhone Air and delayed the release of an updated version that was meant to launch in fall 2026, The Information reported earlier this week.

Instead, some Apple engineers are hoping to release a redesigned version with a second camera lens in spring 2027 alongside existing plans to release the standard iPhone 18 and iPhone 18e at that time. It’s still too early to tell whether they can successfully redesign the iPhone Air in time to make that new release window, the people said.

My question: Would that second camera provide an ultra-wide (0.5×) or a telephoto (3× or 4×) lens? The regular non-pro iPhones provide an ultra-wide lens as their second camera. But when the premium iPhones had only two (rather than three) lenses, the second lens was telephoto, not ultra-wide. Apple first used the adjective “Pro” with the iPhones 11 Pro and Pro Max, and all iPhones to date with “Pro” in their name have had three lenses. But the iPhones XS (2018), X (2017), 8 Plus (also 2017), and 7 Plus (2016) all had 1× main and 2× “telephoto” lenses.

In other words, when a premium iPhone had only one extra lens, that lens added additional reach, not ultra-wide perspective. The iPhone Air costs more than a regular no-adjective iPhone, so if that patterns holds, a two-camera second-generation model would add a telephoto, not ultra-wide lens. Personally I’m hoping that’s what Apple will do.

Looking at my own photo library and using smart albums to count the photos I’ve taken using each particular lens on each particular iPhone, roughly speaking, over the past few years, I shoot about 10 percent of my photos with the ultra-wide lens, 10 percent with the telephoto, and 80 percent with the main. But a lot of my ultra-wide photos are really just close-up macro shots of things like product labels. If I were less lazy, I’d go through them and trash a lot of them. I could capture equivalent photos, for a lot of these throwaway macro shots, with the main 1× camera lens just by holding the phone a little further from the subject. Adding a 0.5× ultra-wide to the iPhone Air just wouldn’t add much utility, at least for me, compared to the obvious utility of a telephoto lens with more reach.

(The iPhone Air’s lone 1× camera has a minimum focus distance of 15 cm; the minimum focus distance of the 1× cameras on the iPhones 17 Pro, 16 Pro, and 15 Pro is 20 cm. That 5 cm difference is a largely unheralded advantage for the iPhone Air’s camera, and significantly makes up for the lack of an ultra-wide lens for close-up photography. 5 cm doesn’t sound like much, but in practice it’s very noticeable. That said, for actual macro photography, the 0.5× ultra-wide camera on the iPhone Pro models has a minimum focus distance of just 2 cm.)

Slava Pestov (Hacker News): This is all, of course, about the dreaded the compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time error. This error can appear with both valid and invalid code, and the various workarounds are unsatisfactory, to say the least. Splitting up an expression into smaller pieces, introducing type annotations, or […]

David Pierce (Slashdot): When the iPad Pro came along five years later — it went on sale 10 years ago today — nothing much had changed. The Pro ran all the same apps, did all the same things, had pretty much the same things in pretty much the same places. It was just bigger. Its […]