"I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to 'kiss my ass.'"

Writes Donald Trump, on Truth Social this morning:

I have always been a big fan of Tim Cook, and likewise, Steve Jobs, but if Steve was not taken from the Planet Earth so young, and ran the company instead of Tim, the company would have done well, but nowhere near as well as it has under Tim. For me it began with a phone call from Tim at the beginning of my First Term. He had a fairly large problem that only I, as President, could fix. Most people would have paid millions of dollars to a consultant, who I probably would not have known, but who would say that he knew me well. The fees would be paid but the job would not have gotten done. When I got the call I said, wow, it’s Tim Apple (Cook!) calling, how big is that? I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to “kiss my ass.”

"Long before Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall, she made 'Apple,' a piece of fresh fruit on a stand..."

"... at the Indica gallery in London. (Lennon, naughtily and biblically, took a chomp.) I am not an Ono-phile who wants to wallow overmuch in this kind of art, but applaud Sheff’s book as an important corrective to years of bad P.R. He’s done the opposite of a hatchet job, putting his subject back together branch by branch, like a forester. (Climbing trees is a big theme in her work.) He argues convincingly for her as survivor, feminist, avant-gardist, political activist and world-class sass...."

Writes Alexandra Jacobs, in "Yoko Ono, Demonized No Longer/David Sheff’s new biography convincingly argues for John Lennon’s widow as a feminist, activist, avant-garde artist and world-class sass" (NYT).

"Yoko, meaning 'ocean child,' was born in 1933 in Tokyo to wealthy but cold parents. She didn’t meet her father until she was 2½, and her mother was vain and germophobic. 'Even now I find it unpleasant to sit on a cushion or chair that still retains the temperature of somebody who had just been sitting there,' Ono once wrote."

"Apple has acknowledged an issue with the iPhone's voice-to-text feature where it briefly displays 'Trump' when the user says 'racist.'"

"This glitch has sparked discussions across social media platforms, with some users interpreting it as intentional bias. Apple is reportedly addressing the issue to ensure accurate dictation."

X reports.

Major Scandal Breaking! Apple iPhones now replace the word racist with Trump! pic.twitter.com/buaqR3AxY1

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) February 25, 2025

"During his 27 years at Apple, he had conceived the minimalist aesthetic of Apple products...."

"Over the past four years, [Jony Ive] has quietly accumulated nearly $90 million worth of real estate on a single city block. The purchases began early in the pandemic, at a time when many tech luminaries were fleeing San Francisco. Mr. Ive found the exodus noxious.... A self-professed control freak, Mr. Ive decided that he had fretted enough over the snugness of each iPhone box, the layout of every Apple Watch component and the curve of every iPad corner. He wanted something new.... [H]e and his future wife, Heather, fell in love with Jackson Square. Many buildings in the neighborhood had survived the city’s 1906 earthquake and fire because there was a whiskey storehouse in the area. City officials had worried the alcohol would catch on fire, so they protected the neighborhood, even as the rest of the city burned.... At Apple, he had worked at Infinite Loop, a sterile office park near the interstate, and Apple Park, a futuristic circle of glass and blonde wood. Both campuses were so isolated that they could have existed anywhere. He wanted his new office to be part of the community."

From "After Apple, Jony Ive Is Building an Empire of His Own/Five years after leaving Apple, the iPhone designer is forging a new life in San Francisco, one imaginative building at a time" (NYT)(free-access link).

"Sonny and Cher sing 'All I Ever Need is You' as the device destroys some of the most beautiful objects a creative person could ever hope to have, or see..."

"... a trumpet, camera lenses, an upright piano, paints, a metronome, a clay maquette, a wooden anatomical reference model, vinyl albums, a framed photo, and most disturbingly (because they suggest destructive violence against children's toys, and against the child in all of us) a ceramic Angry Birds figure and a stack of rubber emoji balls" (from rogerebert.com):

 

The NYT reports on the backlash and Apple's caving to (hydraulic) pressure: "Apple Says Destructive iPad Ad ‘Missed the Mark’/People in the creative world widely panned a commercial showing a giant hydraulic press squishing objects ranging from paint cans to a piano":

"The Justice Department called out Apple for afflicting Android smartphone users with the dreaded 'green bubble' in text messages..."

"... calling it a mark of 'social stigma, exclusion and blame' as part of its landmark antitrust case against the iPhone maker. 'Green bubble' status has long been a source of mockery online, with some women even jokingly declaring that they find men who own Androids less attractive...."

The New York Post reports.

"The Justice Department and 16 state attorneys general filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple on Thursday...."

"The government argued that Apple violated antitrust laws by preventing other companies from offering applications that compete with Apple products like its digital wallets, which could diminish the value of the iPhone. Apple’s policies hurt consumers and smaller companies that compete with some of Apple’s services.... 'Each step in Apple’s course of conduct built and reinforced the moat around its smartphone monopoly,' the government said in the lawsuit."

The NYT reports.

"The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011."

"The effort had four different leaders and conducted multiple rounds of layoffs. But it festered and ultimately fizzled in large part because developing the software and algorithms for a car with autonomous driving features proved too difficult.... If it ever came to market, an Apple car was likely to cost at least $100,000 and still generate razor-thin profit compared with smartphones and earbuds. It would also arrive years after Tesla had dominated the market. The company held some discussions with Elon Musk about acquiring Tesla.... But ultimately, it decided that building its own car made more sense...."

From "Behind Apple’s Doomed Car Project: False Starts and Wrong Turns/Internal disagreements over the direction of the Apple car led the effort to sputter for years before it was canceled this week" (NYT).

"Jon Stewart’s show on Apple’s streaming service is abruptly coming to an end..."

"Mr. Stewart and Apple executives decided to part ways in recent days.... [P]otential show topics related to China and artificial intelligence were causing concern among Apple executives, a person with knowledge of the meeting said.... Apple’s foray into entertainment has raised the risk of collateral damage to its brand or estrangement of the diverse customers who buy its pricey iPhones and iPads...."

From "Jon Stewart’s Show on Apple Is Ending/Mr. Stewart and Apple are parting ways because of creative differences over 'The Problem,' people with knowledge of the decision said" (NYT).

"I can’t put myself in the unisex Crocs of a young person exploring classical music for the first time, but Apple Classical strikes me as an oddly clumsy point of entry."

"An array of playlists called Composer Essentials is adorned with dour, sickly portraits that, according to Apple, were 'commissioned from a diverse group of artists.' (I envisioned a studio of talented girls and boys at an orphanage in rural Romania.) Composer Essentials are greatest-hits assemblages of movements and arias—rush-hour classical radio without traffic and weather. This approach defeats the point of listening to, say, Gustav Mahler: if you have time only for the Adagietto of his Fifth Symphony or for the last seven minutes of his Eighth, you might as well skip him altogether. And who qualifies as essential? Apple Classical gestures toward an expanded canon, with Clara Schumann and Florence Price prominently featured. At the same time, it promotes white-male purveyors of soothing sub-minimalist noodling.... Music history is more than a procession of names and faces: it’s a multiplicitous stream of styles, forms, and techniques with an ever-shifting social and political context... I couldn’t decide whether a section titled Music by Mood was generated by humans or machines. Is it an arcane joke that Meredith Monk’s 'Early Morning Melody' appears on the Classical Late Night list? Why does Classical Dinner Party feature Branford Marsalis playing a saxophone arrangement of Mahler’s 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen' ('I Am Lost to the World')? I couldn’t argue, though, when I saw Classical Commute fleshed out with a movement from Adès’s 'Dante': 'The Thieves—devoured by reptiles.'"

Writes Alex Ross in "Apple Again Fails to Save Classical Music/As classical listeners shift to streaming, Apple’s bespoke app falls short of its smaller-scale competitors" (The New Yorker). Much more at the link.

Apple's new Mindfulness app lets you log in your “momentary emotion” and “daily mood”...

"... compiling a diary of feelings and their causes — perhaps family time makes you happy and time working in front of screens makes you sad — which could be reflected back as insights that might help make things better. [There] was a set of tools for improving users’ 'vision health,' with a focus on myopia.... Using data from device sensors, Apple will instruct users — especially but not exclusively young ones — to go outside, into the natural light, or to move their screens further from their faces....[while also selling you] the Vision Pro, a $3,500 computer that straps directly to your face...."

From "Apple Keeps Trying To Fix Its Users/The company’s guilty conscience is making it nudgy" (NY Magazine).

"The screen, which has an incredible fidelity, allows me to see everything in the room around me. It’s not reality, but it’s close to it."

"I know I’m wearing a headset, but I can also see everything clearly, including my watch, my iPhone, furniture and of course people.... After some mundane stuff like looking at pictures, messing around with web surfing, viewing messages and taking a rather uncanny valley FaceTime call with a digital avatar, I get to experience some truly breathtaking — and at times dystopian — moments that almost brought a tear to my eye. Because where the Vision Pro really shines is handling 3D movies and interactive graphical experiences. One moment I’m at a child’s birthday party where I’m sure my 80-year-old self would be crying at having enjoyed a life well lived and the next I’m courtside at an NBA game, on the goal line at a football match, in Alicia Keys’s music studio and fending off cute baby rhinos who want to say hello all recorded in what Apple calls Apple Immersive Video. The pièce de resistance? A butterfly that gracefully flies around the room before landing on my outstretched hand.... By the end I’m almost lost for words, a rare moment, but also left with the burning question — what is this all for?"

 
From "I tried the Apple Vision Pro. I was lost for words/The VR headset takes users to 3D experiences that feel incredibly real" by Stuart Miles (London Times).

Here's my burning question: How does it work for people who use different prescription glasses for different distances?

"Apple has done this before. Eventual hits like the iPod, iPhone and Apple Watch started in niche markets that grew into big businesses."

"But even Apple executives have been skeptical about the company’s prospects in virtual reality, which, they say, may still not be ready for its mainstream moment. Apple declined to comment."

 
From "Apple Is Stepping Into the Metaverse. Will Anyone Care? Interest in the futuristic, immersive digital world is fading just as Apple plans to debut a virtual reality device" (NYT).

The forthcoming product is a headset that will cost about $3,000.

Since Apple declined to comment, the article is mostly about the massive shunning of Meta (the Facebook virtual reality product).

The comments at the NYT are things like: "No. No one cares. I will take ugly reality over happy fantasy every time."

"The Montana House of Representatives on Friday approved a total ban on TikTok inside the state..."

"The legislation, which would also bar app stores from carrying TikTok, the wildly popular viral video app, was approved 54 to 43 in the last of two votes in the State House. The State Senate passed it in March.... Montana will be in uncharted territory if it tries to ban the app. A trade group funded by Apple and Google has said the companies cannot stop app downloads in a single state. Critics of the legislation say that TikTok users could disguise their location to maintain access to the app, and that the ban may be hard to enforce in border towns.... The American Civil Liberties Union and other free speech groups have said the bill violates the First Amendment rights of Montanans who use the app."

From "Montana Legislature Approves Outright Ban of TikTok/The bill, which would make the state the first to ban the social media app, now goes to the desk of Gov. Greg Gianforte" (NYT).

Here's the top comment at the Times: "I might suggest that the Montana State House tech gurus contact their counterparts in China. They are far more experienced in throttling apps, prosecuting developers and penalizing users of consumer software offerings."

The ACLU notes the free speech violation, and Apple and Google — saying that they can't stop downloads in a single state — are setting up the argument that it violates the dormant Commerce Clause. 

I think Governor Gianforte has the background to see multiple reasons to veto this bill. Wikipedia:

Asked what he does for a living, the Apple exec said "I have rich cars, play golf and fondle big-breasted women but I take weekends and holidays off."

Tony Blevins, Apple’s vice president of procurement, was answering a question asked by TikTok/Instagram personality Daniel Mac. Mac's thing is to ask drivers of expensive cars, "What do you do for a living?"

For his sin, Blevins has had to resign, The NY Post reports. 

It's so off-brand for Apple:

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A post shared by Daniel Mac (@itsdanielmac)

You just don't picture Apple management looking and acting like that.

Only 3 TikToks today. I'm highly selective, you know. Some people love it.

1. A simple harmonious tribute to the Queen.

2. The baby with a gangster demeanor.

3. The story arc of the Mac startup tone. 

6 TikToks for you this evening. Let me know what you like.

1. The Japanese grandmother's house.

2. The table representative at the group dinner.

3. The baby has a high emotional IQ.

4. Medieval doodling in official court records.

5. Back when only 20% of us were on the internet, Jeff Goldblum did an Apple ad.

6. How old is she?

The Apple aesthetic is taking a sojourn in Hell.

 

My heaven of Apple ads was back in 2008: 

 

Consider the difference. The new ad creates an oppressive environment, like something I imagine in those thrilling movies I never go to see or in the kind of video games I've been encouraged to feel amazed by, where a little person — you, supposedly — goes into a surreal environment that is irritatingly lit and pumped full of pulsating sounds and elbowing you endlessly to be excited, be very very excited. Ugh!

And I want to buy a new desktop computer and would never buy a computer/tablet/phone that isn't Apple. I know they don't make ads for the old and they need to beg for favor from the young, but that just makes me worry more. Who are these young people who would bond to Apple over that ad? Where is the beauty, the kindness, the joy?

ADDED: The emphasis on the pattern of ventilation holes in the new ad may trigger trypophobia.

"Hate for Putin’s Russia Consumes Ukraine/Much of the bitterness is directed at President Vladimir V. Putin, but Ukrainians also chastise ordinary Russians, calling them complicit."

The NYT reports. 

Some Ukrainians... have vented by writing on the reviews pages for websites of Moscow restaurants. And they have been mocking Russians in scathing terms for complaining about hardships with banking transactions or the collapsing ruble currency because of international sanctions. “Damn, what’s wrong with Apple Pay?”

"If I ever found one of those on my car, I’d attach it to a police car ASAP. The owner would have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do when a cop with an iPhone was informed he was being tracked."

A comment on the NYT article "Are Apple AirTags Being Used to Track People and Steal Cars?/Privacy groups sounded alarms about the coin-sized location-tracking devices when they were introduced. Now people are concerned those fears are being realized." 

(The AirTags send the message "AirTag Detected Near You" so you find out that someone may be stalking you, but it's not easy to figure out who.)

ADDED: The post title is not offered as legal advice — or even practical advice. I consider it more of an expression of exasperation and helplessness and a hope of redirecting chaos.