Peter Kafka:

So in March, when Gruber announced that Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino — focusing on Apple’s botched plans to imbue its ailing Siri service with state-of-the-art AI — lots of people paid attention. Including, apparently, folks at the very top of the Apple org chart.

I talked to Gruber about the fallout from that post. Which is pretty interesting! But there’s a lot more going on in this conversation. It’s partly about the friction Apple has been generating lately — not just about its AI efforts, but the way it runs its App Store, and the way it interacts with developers — and why all of that does and doesn’t matter.

And it’s also about the delightfully retro practice of running an ad-supported blog in 2025. That works very well for Gruber, but it seems like the new Grubers of the world are doing their work on YouTube or Substack. He’s got some thoughts about that, too.

Good interview, I thought — I always enjoy talking to Kafka. No permalink for the episode on the web, so my main link for this post is to Overcast. Here’s a link to Apple Podcasts, and one from a new service called Pod.link too.

Nicolas Lellouche, writing for the French-language site Numerama (block quote below is from Safari’s English translation) (via Joe Rossignol at MacRumors):

What is the problem with Europe? Apple does not explain it very clearly, but suggests that the European Union’s requests for opening create uncertainties. It is likely that the brand suspects Europe of forcing it to open macOS to devices other than the iPhone if this function were to happen. A mandatory iPhone Mirroring on Windows or an Android Mirroring on Mac may not be in his plans. The other probability is the question of gatekeepers, raised in 2024. Apple would fear that macOS will be on the list of monitored platforms if it can emulate iOS, one of the gatekeepers monitored by Europe.

The problem isn’t about MacOS getting flagged as another “gatekeeping” platform under the DMA. Whether or not Apple enables iPhone Mirroring on MacOS in the EU would have no bearing on whether the Mac is deemed a gatekeeper. The DMA defines a “gatekeeper” platform as “a core platform service that in the last financial year has at least 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the Union and at least 10,000 yearly active business users established in the Union”. I’m not sure how many Mac users there are in the EU, but I’m pretty sure the number is well under 45 million. (Estimates seem to peg the worldwide number of Mac users at just over 100 million.) Conversely, if the European Commission decided that there were 45 million Mac users in the EU, the Mac would be considered a gatekeeping platform, period.

The problem is simply that the iPhone is a gatekeeping platform, and iPhone Mirroring obviously involves the iPhone. The EU’s recent demands regarding “interoperability requirements” flag just about every single feature that involves an iPhone communicating with another Apple device. AirDrop, AirPlay, AirPods pairing, Apple Watch connectivity — all of that has been deemed illegal gatekeeping. Clearly, iPhone Mirroring would fall under the same interpretation, thus, iPhone Mirroring isn’t going to be available in the EU. If the DMA had been in place 15 years ago, the EU wouldn’t have AirDrop or AirPlay and perhaps wouldn’t have Apple Watch or AirPods, either.

If Apple made iPhone Mirroring available in the EU now, my guess is the European Commission would add it to the interoperability requirements list, and demand that Apple support mirroring your iPhone to all other platforms, such as Windows and Android. They might also demand that Apple add support to iOS for third-party screen mirroring protocols.

Several weeks ago, Apple indicated that other new products may be blocked in Europe in the future. What about what’s new in iOS 26? Apple is not commenting at the moment, since it must verify the compatibility of its new functions with the European Union. Some new features, such as the Phone application on Mac to make calls with your iPhone, seem difficult to be compatible with the vision of Europe.

The new Phone app on MacOS is almost certainly not coming to the EU, unless the European Commission changes its stance on these interoperability requirements.

John Voorhees, writing at MacStories, regarding a new command-line transcription tool cleverly named Yap written by his son Finn last week during WWDC:

On the way, Finn filled me in on a new class in Apple’s Speech framework called SpeechAnalyzer and its SpeechTranscriber module. Both the class and module are part of Apple’s OS betas that were released to developers last week at WWDC. My ears perked up immediately when he told me that he’d tested SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber and was impressed with how fast and accurate they were. [...]

What stood out above all else was Yap’s speed. By harnessing SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber on-device, the command line tool tore through the 7GB video file a full 2.2× faster than MacWhisper’s Large V3 Turbo model, with no noticeable difference in transcription quality.

At first blush, the difference between 0:45 and 1:41 may seem insignificant, and it arguably is, but those are the results for just one 34-minute video. Extrapolate that to running Yap against the hours of Apple Developer videos released on YouTube with the help of yt-dlp, and suddenly, you’re talking about a significant amount of time. Like all automation, picking up a 2.2× speed gain one video or audio clip at a time, multiple times each week, adds up quickly.

Apple’s Foundation Models sure seem to be the sleeper hit from WWDC this year. This bodes very well for all sorts of use cases where transcription would be helpful, like third-party podcast players.

Bungie:

Through every comment and real-time conversation on social media and Discord, your voice has been strong and clear. We’ve taken this to heart, and we know we need more time to craft Marathon into the game that truly reflects your passion. After much discussion within our Dev team, we’ve made the decision to delay the September 23rd release.

The Alpha test created an opportunity for us to calibrate and focus the game on what will make it uniquely compelling — survival under pressure, mystery and lore around every corner, raid-like endgame challenges, and Bungie’s genre-defining FPS combat.

We’re using this time to empower the team to create the intense, high-stakes experience that a title like Marathon is built around. This means deepening the relationship between the developers and the game’s most important voices: our players.

Translation to plain English: The game as currently imagined stinks, so we’re going back to the drawing board. We can’t explain why we, the game’s developers, didn’t know that it stunk, and instead seemingly needed to wait for scathing alpha test feedback from players — but Occam’s Razor clearly suggests the problem is that decisions at Bungie are made by executives with no taste.

Apple executives were a little light on substantial interviews last week, but a good one dropped today — Craig Federighi talking to Federico Viticci on the vast Mac-style windowing overhaul in iPadOS 26:

“We don’t want to create a boat car or, you know, a spork”, Federighi begins. Seeing the confused look on my face, he continues: “I don’t know if you have those in Italy. Someone said, “If a spoon’s great, a fork’s great, then let’s combine them into a single utensil, right?” It turns out it’s not a good spoon and it’s not a good fork. It’s a bad idea. And so we don’t want to build sporks”. [...]

By and large, one could argue that Apple has created one such convertible product with the iPad Pro, but Federighi strongly believes in the Mac and iPad each having their own reasons to exist. “The Mac lets the iPad be iPad”, Federighi notes, adding that Apple’s objective “has not been to have iPad completely displace those places where the Mac is the right tool for the job”. [...]

I don’t need to ask Federighi the perennial question of running macOS on the iPad, since he goes there on his own. “I don’t think the iPad should run macOS, but I think the iPad can be inspired by elements of the Mac”, Federighi tells me. “I think the Mac can be inspired by elements of iPad, and I think that that’s happened a great deal”.

I think Apple has tied itself into knots in the past decade trying to make the iPad more useful to more advanced users without making it resemble the Mac at a superficial level. But it’s been obvious all along that it should resemble the Mac at a superficial level. Apple solved windowing in 1984. Use that.