John Cassidy, writing for The New Yorker (requires a free account to read, annoyingly):

Of course, these calculations can’t be taken literally. Even Musk has said that he wants to protect essential workers. If the entire federal workforce were eliminated, there’d be no one to make sure that federal benefits got paid or that federal taxes were collected. The spending and revenue figures would crater; essential services like veterans’ hospitals, air-traffic-control systems, and border-crossing stations would be completely abandoned. But this thought experiment does illustrate the point that “bloated” payrolls aren’t what is driving federal spending and deficits. Since the nineteen-seventies, as the accompanying chart shows, the total number of federal employees has remained fairly steady.

Here’s a copy of the chart. Cassidy continues:

Unlike the figures from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the chart, which comes from the Federal Reserve Economic Database, counts members of the U.S. Postal Service as federal employees. It does show that the federal workforce has grown in recent years, but it’s still no larger than it was thirty or forty years ago. During the interim, total employment elsewhere in the economy has grown steadily alongside population growth. Consequently, the size of the federal workforce relative to the workforce at large has fallen considerably, as the following chart shows.

Here’s a copy of that second chart.

I knew the supposed justifications for the whole DOGE endeavor were a sham, but until this piece I was under the incorrect assumption that the federal government workforce has been growing steadily for decades, at least keeping pace with its percentage of the overall US workforce. The opposite is true — because the federal workforce size has remained steady while the population has continued to grow, its share of the overall workforce has in fact shrunk considerably.

Jason Snell, writing last week at Six Colors:

While a lot of us have gotten excited about the potential of Apple’s immersive video format, the truth is that the Vision Pro is also a great viewer of more traditional 3-D video content. And Apple has built a new visionOS app to highlight great spatial content: Spatial Gallery.

Think of Spatial Gallery as something sort of like the TV app, but for spatial videos, photos, and panoramas. The content comes from Apple as well as third-party content sources, and Apple is curating it all itself. The company says the content will be updated on a regular basis, and among the demo content I saw featured was some of 3-D (not immersive) behind-the-scenes content from various Apple TV+ productions such as “Severance” and “Shrinking.”

Just as the Apple Watch has its own app on iOS, so too will the Vision Pro. The new Vision Pro iOS app will be available with iOS 18.4, and will automatically appear on the iPhones of people who have Vision Pros. Of course the app will show off new content and offer tips, but it’s also functional: If you add highlighted media content via the app, it’ll be set to download on the Vision Pro. Similarly, you can use the Vision Pro app to remotely download apps to your Vision Pro, so they’re ready for you when you put the headset on.

VisionOS 2.4 is also making some big improvements to guest mode, making it much easier to let someone else use your Vision Pro. It remains to be seen if Vision is ever going to be a successful platform, but the potential is clearly there, and Apple is definitely rolling on it.

Like any great caricature, Myers’s Elon Musk conveys a better sense of Musk than watching Musk himself does. A cruel and infinitely self-satisfied know-it-all, whose utter self-confidence runs counter to the fact that he’s unfathomably awkward, as uncoordinated socially as he is physically. Just an utter and total spaz, who believes no one’s jokes are funnier than his own. The sort of person no one likes but who has nevertheless parlayed tremendous wealth into great power, forcing his influence upon the world.

Ming-Chi Kuo, back on Sunday September 15:

Based on my latest supply chain survey and pre-order results from Apple’s official websites, I’ve compiled key data on iPhone 16’s first-weekend pre-orders for each model, including pre-order sales, average delivery times, and shipments before pre-order. [...]

Analysis and Conclusions:

iPhone 16 series first-weekend pre-order sales are estimated at about 37 million units, down about 12.7% YoY from last year’s iPhone 15 series first-weekend sales. The key factor is the lower-than-expected demand for the iPhone 16 Pro series.

Note that pre-orders for the iPhone 16 lineup only started two days prior, on Friday September 13. Here were Kuo’s estimates for first-weekend pre-order sales, compared year-over-year to the equivalent iPhone 15 models:

These numbers bear no resemblance to Apple’s actual financial results for the October-December quarter. There was no marked downswing in demand for the 16 Pro and Pro Max, and there was no wild upswing in demand for the 16 Plus. Just one month after posting the above opening-weekend nonsense, Kuo himself reported, “iPhone 16 orders were cut by around 10M units for 4Q24–1H25, with most of the cuts affecting non-Pro models.” So in September Kuo claimed Pro sales were alarmingly down and regular iPhone 16 and 16 Plus sales were surprisingly strong, but in October he said Apple cut orders mostly with the “non-Pro models”. So why was any of this reported as news?

My thesis has long been that while Kuo clearly has some insight into some of Apple’s suppliers in Asia, he has no insight whatsoever into Apple’s sales. How could he? “Apple’s official websites” don’t publish sales numbers. I think he just pulls this stuff right out of his ass and hand waves that it has something to do with the estimated ship dates for new iPhone models. Further, I think Kuo picks these numbers not at random, and not based on an honest attempt to even guess the actual sales, but rather to create headlines and inject his name into the news. Has he ever once issued a “survey” that reported that iPhone demand was pretty much in line with expectations? If all you did was follow Ming-Chi Kuo’s reporting, you’d think Jeff Williams is incompetent and should have been fired years ago, because he has no ability to accurately forecast demand for Apple’s most important product. Clickbait in its purest form, detached completely from any factual reality.

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