Weekly “sponsor the whole week at DF” spots are sold out until August 24. That’s a great sign that sponsorships here work. But it’s not so great if you have a product or service that you’d like to promote now, or soon, to the DF audience — savvy listeners and readers obsessed with high quality and good design.

The good news on that front is that the sponsorship schedule for The Talk Show has openings, including for the next few episodes, starting this week and into next month. The general rule of thumb is that sponsorship spots on The Talk Show cost one-third the rate for the weekly spots on DF. I’m happy to work out deals a little lower than that for first-time sponsors. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to hear pitched on America’s favorite three-star podcast, get in touch.

David Pierce:

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay are joined by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber to talk about their reactions to the news, the (mostly) smooth transition Apple seems to have pulled off, and what we should really make of Tim Cook’s legacy as a product person. Really, the question is: Do we blame Cook for the Touch Bar, or do we blame him for not trying hard enough to make the Touch Bar great?

I know that sounds like a joke but I really do think the biggest problem with the Touch Bar wasn’t that the first crack at it wasn’t good enough, but that they never took a second crack at it. Going back to dumb fiddly F-keys with functional icons printed on them was uncharacteristically lazy for Apple.

[Update: The store is now closed. Thanks to everyone who ordered — you should start getting shipping notices very soon.]

It’s really just a coincidence, but it was 20 years ago this week that I went full-time writing Daring Fireball (after writing the site in my spare time for 4 years). That feels like a long time ago. But it feels like yesterday, too. In my announcement, I wrote:

Daring Fireball is what I love to do.

That remains as true today than it was then. Whether you’re a longtime reader or a relatively new one, you might enjoy reading that piece from 20 years ago. So far, so good. (I’ve got some readers who were only small children when I wrote that. I occasionally hear from some who weren’t even born then.)

There might be other ways you can support my work directly in the future. But for now, the best way is to buy t-shirts and hoodies from my periodic sales. The current sale is going to end sometime tomorrow. If you’re seeing this post Sunday night and thinking about making a purchase, act now. If you’re seeing this Monday morning, you should really act now.

Software brain says *Go faster; do more; the only mistake you can’t fix is having gone too slow.* Hardware brain says *Slow down; do less; focus; strive for perfection and never settle for less than excellence; mistakes are forever.*

Ben Schoon, 9to5Google:

In March, a report revealed some of the internal cuts Samsung has been making for its mobile division, with the company initially concerned it could post an operating loss for the first time ever. It’s a big deal, as Samsung’s mobile (MX) division has historically always turned a profit.

A new report out of Korea (via Jukan) makes this seem all but certain.

Apparently, Samsung’s TM Roh, the head of the company’s mobile division, has expressed concerns of the “possibility of an annual deficit for the MX business unit.” Previously, those concerns came from speculation and outside parties, but with such a high figure in Samsung’s organization worried, it’s clear things are looking pretty bleak.

Back in 2013 analysts pegged the profit share of the handset industry at 70 percent for Apple and 30 percent for Samsung. A lot of other smaller companies sold a lot of other phones, but, so that analysis went, none of them made any profits. A lot of them were losing money. I linked to another such analysis in 2016 that pegged Apple’s share of phone profits at 104 percent, estimating that all other handset makers combined accounted for a 4% percent loss.

Doesn’t seem like much has changed since then. I prompted ChatGPT and Gemini today with this request: “Create a table of the world’s mobile device makers, ranked by profit and profit share of the industry.” ChatGPT pegs Apple’s profit share at 75–85%, Samsung’s at 10–20%, Huawei and Xiaomi in “low single digits”, and everyone else negligible. Gemini pegs Apple’s share at 85–90%, Samsung’s at 7–10%, Xiaomi at 1-2%, and everyone else negligible. This, despite both ChatGPT and Gemini agreeing that iPhones comprise only 20 percent of sales by unit. (Are ChatGPT and Gemini correct about the current profit share split of the mobile industry? I don’t know. But both cite sources in their answers, and it strikes me as very unlikely that their estimates are very far off.)

If Samsung posts a mobile division loss this year, it could be the case that Apple will capture 100 percent of the profits in the phone industry with just 20 percent of the sales.