Julian Chokkattu, writing for Wired:

You can’t mount a cinema camera on a Formula One race car. These nimble vehicles are built to precise specs, and capturing racing footage from the driver’s point of view isn’t as simple as slapping a GoPro on and calling it a day. That’s the challenge Apple faced after Joseph Kosinski and Claudio Miranda, the director and cinematographer of the upcoming F1 Apple Original, wanted to use real POV racing footage in the film.

If you’ve watched a Formula One race lately, you’ve probably seen clips that show an angle from just behind the cockpit, with the top or side of the driver’s helmet in the frame. Captured by onboard cameras embedded in the car, the resulting footage is designed for broadcast, at a lower resolution using specific color spaces and codecs. Converting it to match the look of the rest of the F1 film would be too challenging to be feasible. Instead, Apple’s engineering team replaced the broadcast module with a camera composed of iPhone parts.

I think back to Phil Schiller, on stage at my WWDC show in 2015, saying that Apple viewed itself then not just as one of the leading camera companies in the world, but the leading camera company in the world.

Cynthia Littleton, in a long profile for Variety:

When pressed about what Apple’s investments in movies and TV shows have meant for the company as a whole, Cook explains that Apple is at heart “a toolmaker,” delivering computers and other devices that enable creativity in users. (This vision for the company, and the “toolmaker” term specifically, was first articulated by Jobs in the early 1980s.) “We’re a toolmaker,” Cook says again. “We make tools for creative people to empower them to do things they couldn’t do before. So we were doing lots of business with Hollywood well before we were in the TV business.

“We studied it for years before we decided to do [Apple TV+]. I know there’s a lot of different views out there about why we’re into it. We’re into it to tell great stories, and we want it to be a great business as well. That’s why we’re into it, just plain and simple.” [...]

Media analysts and observers have wondered how the content side of Apple threads together with the hardware sales that fuel the core business. As Cook sees it, that’s not the point, although such connections are emerging organically in the course of doing business, as evidenced by “F1” and the camera tech. “I don’t have it in my mind that I’m going to sell more iPhones because of it,” Cook says. “I don’t think about that at all. I think about it as a business. And just like we leverage the best of Apple across iPhones and across our services, we try to leverage the best of Apple TV+.”

Apple TV+ has been killing it with original shows. Maybe with F1 they can start bringing that magic to movies.

My biggest takeaway from WWDC 2025 is that Apple seemingly took some lessons to heart from its unfulfilled promises of a year ago. This year’s WWDC wasn’t merely focused on what Apple is confident it can ship in the next 12 months, but on what they can ship *this fall*.

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.