Wiley Hodges, a 22-year veteran of Apple product marketing, who retired in 2022, in an open letter he sent to Tim Cook:

I don’t know where this leaves me as an Apple customer, but I do know that it upsets me as an Apple shareholder. I am asking you and your team to more clearly explain the basis on which you made the decision to remove ICEBlock — and how the government showed good faith and strong evidence in making its demand of Apple, or that you reinstate the app in the App Store.

I hope that as a man of integrity and principle you can understand how outrageous this situation is. Even more, I hope you recognize how every inch you voluntarily give to an authoritarian regime adds to their illegitimately derived power. We are at a critical juncture in our country’s history where we face the imminent threat of the loss of our constitutional republic. It is up to all of us to demand that the rule of law rather than the whims of a handful of people — even elected ones — govern our collective enterprise. Apple and you are better than this. You represent the best of what America can be, and I pray that you will find it in your heart to continue to demonstrate that you are true to the values you have so long and so admirably espoused.

When you give a bully your lunch money, they always come back for more.

Disney learned this. Last December, Disney settled a lawsuit Trump had filed against ABC News and host George Stephanopoulos for $15 million. The lawsuit was bullshit; nearly all experts agreed that if Disney/ABC had taken the case to court, they’d have won. Disney settled — with both the $15 million and “a note of regret” — thinking, surely, that this would get Trump off their back. Put them on Trump’s good side. Then came the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco, when they finally stood up and said, effectively, “Fuck you, make me.”

Hodges, earlier in his letter, makes reference to Apple’s 2016 standoff with the FBI over a locked iPhone belonging to the mass shooter in San Bernardino, California. The FBI and Justice Department pressured Apple to create a version of iOS that would allow them to backdoor the iPhone’s passcode lock. Apple adamantly refused.

The message Trump and his lickspittles surely took from Apple acceding to their “demand” regarding ICEBlock — a demand made without an iota of legal justification, nor any factual justification that the app was being used to put ICE law enforcements agents in harm’s way — is that when they make a demand to Apple, Apple will respond not with the four words “Fuck you, make me” (as they did in the 2016 San Bernardino case), but instead “Whatever you say goes”. It was, obviously, easier for Apple to stand on principle in 2016, when Barack Obama, a man who deeply respected the Constitution and the principle of rule of law, was president. But it’s more important to stand on those same principles with Trump — a would-be mad king with no respect nor even understanding of the Constitution or rule of law — in office.

If not now, when? Apple will, I believe, find out.

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MacKenzie Sigalos, CNBC:

OpenAI and Advanced Micro Devices have reached a deal that could see Sam Altman’s company take a 10% stake in the chipmaker. AMD stock skyrocketed more than 30% on Monday following the news.

OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years and across multiple generations of hardware, the companies said Monday. It will kick off with an initial 1-gigawatt rollout of chips in the second half of 2026.

It only happens once a decade or so, but the most exciting times in tech occur when there’s a breakthrough that’s severely hardware constrained. That includes hardware like infrastructure — bandwidth was a massive constraint during the dot-com boom. It wasn’t even feasible to download audio, like podcasts, for the first decade of the consumer internet boom, let alone video. But it was inevitable that we’d get there.

Right now we’re severely constrained on compute for AI. In a few years, we’ll look back on today’s state of affairs the way we look back on dial-up modems.

My thanks to S&P Global for sponsoring this last week at DF. S&P Global believes that the future of information delivery is AI — and AI thrives on clean, trustworthy metadata. That’s why they’re embracing open web standards to make data more accessible and machine-readable. Explore their open data at dunl.org, their open data portal, and discover rich metadata at S&P’s Metadata Marketplace.

Andrew Liszewski, The Verge:

Lumafield has released the results of a new study of lithium-ion batteries that “reveals an enormous gap in quality between brand-name batteries and low-cost cells” that are readily available through online stores including Amazon and Temu. The company used its computed tomography (CT) scanners, capable of peering inside objects in 3D using X-rays, to analyze over 1,000 lithium-ion batteries. It found dangerous manufacturing defects in low-cost and counterfeit batteries that could potentially lead to fires and explosions.

My gut feeling has long been that cheap battery packs and cheap products with integrated batteries (like all the junk Temu sells) are dangerous. This analysis basically proves it. (I’d have linked directly to Lumafield’s report, but it’s only available by submitting your name and email address, so Liszewski’s summary at The Verge is a better quick read.)