Howard Oakley: To work out how long you can expect your Mac’s internal SSD to last before it reaches that cycle limit, all you need do is to measure how much data is written to it, and once that is 3,000 times the capacity of the SSD, you should expect it to fail through wear. […]

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

Sponsorships have been selling briskly, of late. There are only three weeks open between now and the end of June. But one of those open weeks is next week, starting this coming Monday:

• March 9–15 (Update: Sold)
• April 20–26 (Update: Sold)
• May 25–31

I’m also booking sponsorships for Q3 2026, and roughly half of those weeks are already sold.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch — especially if you can act quick for next week’s opening.

Google Threat Intelligence Group, earlier this week:

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a new and powerful exploit kit targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS version 13.0 (released in September 2019) up to version 17.2.1 (released in December 2023). The exploit kit, named “Coruna” by its developers, contained five full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits. The core technical value of this exploit kit lies in its comprehensive collection of iOS exploits, with the most advanced ones using non-public exploitation techniques and mitigation bypasses.

The Coruna exploit kit provides another example of how sophisticated capabilities proliferate. Over the course of 2025, GTIG tracked its use in highly targeted operations initially conducted by a customer of a surveillance vendor, then observed its deployment in watering hole attacks targeting Ukrainian users by UNC6353, a suspected Russian espionage group. We then retrieved the complete exploit kit when it was later used in broad-scale campaigns by UNC6691, a financially motivated threat actor operating from China. How this proliferation occurred is unclear, but suggests an active market for “second hand” zero-day exploits. Beyond these identified exploits, multiple threat actors have now acquired advanced exploitation techniques that can be re-used and modified with newly identified vulnerabilities.

Nick Heer, writing at Pixel Envy, uses Pages (from 2009 through today) to illustrate Apple’s march toward putting “greater focus on your content” by making window chrome, and toolbar icons, more and more invisible:

Perhaps Apple has some user studies that suggest otherwise, but I cannot see how dialling back the lines between interface and document is supposed to be beneficial for the user. It does not, in my use, result in less distraction while I am working in these apps. In fact, it often does the opposite. I do not think the prescription is rolling back to a decade-old design language. However, I think Apple should consider exploring the wealth of variables it can change to differentiate tools within toolbars, and to more clearly delineate window chrome from document.

This entire idea that application window chrome should disappear is madness. Some people — at Apple, quite obviously — think it looks better, in the abstract, but I can’t see how it makes actually using these apps more productive. Artists don’t want to use invisible tools. Artists crave tools that look and feel distinctive and cool.

Clean lines between content and application chrome are clarifying, not distracting. It’s also useful to be able to tell, at a glance, which application is which. I look at Heer’s screenshot of the new version of Pages running on MacOS 26 Tahoe and not only can I not tell at a glance that it’s Pages, I can’t even tell at a glance that it’s a document word processor, especially with the formatting sidebar hidden. One of the worst aspects of Liquid Glass, across all platforms, but exemplified by MacOS 26, is that all apps look exactly the same. Not just different apps that are in the same category, but different apps from entirely different categories. Safari looks like Mail looks like Pages looks like the Finder — even though web browsers, email clients, word processors, and file browsers aren’t anything alike.

The Verge:

Sean Hollister: What would you say the differences are between the Apple and Google cases?

Tim Sweeney: I would say Apple was ice and Google was fire.

The thing with Apple is all of their antitrust trickery is internal to the company. They use their store, their payments, they force developers to all have the same terms, they force OEMs and carriers to all have the same terms.

Whereas Google, to achieve things with Android, they were going around and paying off game developers, dozens of game developers, to not compete. And they’re paying off dozens of carriers and OEMs to not compete — and when all of these different companies do deals together, lots of people put things in writing, and it’s right there for everybody to read and to see plainly.

I think the Apple case would be no less interesting if we could see all of their internal thoughts and deliberations, but Apple was not putting it in writing, whereas Google was. You know, I think Apple is... it’s a little bit unfortunate that in a lot of ways Apple’s restrictions on competition are absolute. Thou shalt not have a competing store on iOS and thou shalt not use a competing payment method. And I think Apple should be receiving at least as harsh antitrust scrutiny as Google.

Interesting interview, for sure — but it’s from December 2023, when Epic scored its first court victory against Google. And, notably, it came before Sweeney signed away his right to criticize Google or the Play Store.

But I don’t see Epic’s ultimate victory in the lawsuit as a win for Android users, and I don’t think it’s much of a win for Android developers either. These new terms from Google just seem confusing and complicated, with varying rates for “existing installs” vs. “new installs”.