With advertising, the market acts as if all goods are high-quality. When everything claims to be high-quality, consumers no longer know what high quality means. Over time, people can no longer differentiate between high and low-quality products. Then they no longer care. They’ve lost their taste.
Recently, I was trying to buy a watch winder for my father-in-law. I went to Amazon, and every watch winder is from an unpronounceable, alphabet-soup brand. They all had 4.2 stars. How could I tell which one was better? I had no idea. So I checked Reddit, and the only “branded” recommendation was a Wolf watch winder that costs thousands of dollars. I just wanted a machine that rotates a few times per day.
One of the things a brand is supposed to do is to align a set of products with the distinct qualities of their maker. If you buy tickets from Air Canada or WestJet, you understand it to have the backing and reputation of a company interested in maintaining a specific reputation. But this does not always pan out for two reasons. One is that some companies, like Flair Airlines, do not give a single care about how they are perceived and have nothing to lose by being terrible.
The other, though, is what Tan is getting at in this essay: name-brands compromise trust for volume, to the extent it is hard to distinguish them from some Scrabble-bag Amazon seller. This is particularly pronounced in luxury circles — Gucci and Louis Vuitton are not selling belts and card holders and fragrances because they believe they are particularly good examples of their craft — and it is similarly true in the more normal worlds I and (probably) you spend time in. The stuff on Amazon looks an awful lot like the stuff you might buy in a store; it might even be some of the same stuff. But it is difficult to know when everyone seems to be dishonest.
We are rapidly losing any framework we may have had for trust. It is hard not to see the products of A.I. making that worse, at least for now. I am not saying it is suddenly making us believe all sorts of horrible or untrue things we did not think before, but I do think its existence accelerates the ongoing erosion of trust.
Frequent sponsor of the site Magic Lasso Adblock has just released an update bringing its capabilities outside Safari to apps across your system. (This is not a sponsored post.) I have been using this version for about a week now and, while it does not yet eliminate all ads in third-party apps, it has solved a specific iOS frustration.
After iOS began registering taps immediately, I found scrolling apps with interstitial ads — particularly news apps like those from CBC News and the New York Times — to be particularly hostile. I would scroll and then, while intending to stop the scroll, often tap on an ad which would send me to Safari. Irritating. Not all ads are blocked in these apps, but enough are that it has improved my news reading.
More broadly, ad blocking is an ethical dilemma. I find arguments in favour of advertising generally compelling, but I reject how often they are conflated with behaviourally targeted advertising. I think it is fair to use advertising as a financial support — heck, I have ads on this website and I accept sponsorships, including from this very ad blocker. However, I do not think we should relinquish our right to privacy to provide this financial backing. We know ads in third-party apps are among the most capable and precise means of sweeping up vast amounts of our data. It is unfair how little control we have over how much we feed this surveillance machine. We can effectively minimize it only by using wide-ranging tools like ad blockers.
This is a pretty blunt instrument. The VPN-based nature of this in-app ad blocking strategy has no fine-grained controls at the moment — no allow or deny lists, for example. But it is one of the better strategies for improving your privacy.
In recent months, Alphabet Inc.-owned Google has tested Recipe Quick View, which showed some food bloggers’ content in search. The company framed the feature as an attempt to help users determine whether they are interested in a recipe before visiting a website. But some bloggers said they feared that the product would keep users from clicking through to their sites, depriving them of traffic and ad revenue.
Google on Tuesday confirmed it ended the trial. “We continually experiment with ways to make it easier for people to find helpful information on Search,” a spokesperson for Google said in a statement. “Learnings from these experiments help to inform future development and efforts.”
Google began testing this feature around October. While the company did not provide any commentary beyond well-worn lines about “always experimenting”, it is not unreasonable to see it as a reaction to common tactics by recipe bloggers to juice their organic rankings and ad revenue. Google has repeatedlyexplained that it values just the recipe, but folk wisdom among bloggers indicates that alone is insufficient for ranking well. Alas, I am not sure how much any of this matters in an era of A.I. results.
To support those negotiations, the Minister of Finance and National Revenue, the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, announced today that Canada would rescind the Digital Services Tax (DST) in anticipation of a mutually beneficial comprehensive trade arrangement with the United States. Consistent with this action, Prime Minister Carney and President Trump have agreed that parties will resume negotiations with a view towards agreeing on a deal by July 21, 2025.
U.S. President Donald Trump says he’s ending all trade discussions with Canada to hit back at Ottawa for slapping a tax on web giants — and he wants it removed before negotiations can begin again.
His objection is, ostensibly, about its apparent targeting of companies based in the United States. This is a very silly complaint. The U.S. seized the heart of the tech economy and, instead of cooperating with others, used it as leverage around the world. That is one reason for its unrivalled dominance in the industry. Any tax on tech companies will disproportionately affect U.S. businesses, but they have been exerting disproportionate influence around the world for decades.
This is just the latest thing our hostile neighbour can use to try and make us crack. If there were no tax, there would be something else to complain about, because we are not dealing with a reasonable administration that wants mutually beneficial trade arrangements.
As far as I can see, this tax makes sense. Unlike the Online News Act, which requires large platforms to pay for some traffic they send elsewhere, this act is specifically about revenue extracted from Canadians by businesses that are only beginning to see antitrust regulation.
I find this reallyconfusing, but I think when they say “single business model” they mean unifying the CTF and the CTC and the previous “alternative” terms for apps that are not using the traditional App Store model. There are still two models in that you can do the simple flat rate that’s the same throughout the world or the complicated and ever-changing EU model that supposedly satisfies the DMA.
It’s not zero, but these terms are way more reasonable than the Core Technology Fee bullshit. But it also means that there is, from my understanding, no option for alternative distribution that is completely free. The lowest amount you will pay is 10%
Just to confuse matters, it looks like if you remain in the App Store and have a paid-upfront app, your app purchase commission fees are either 20% or 13% (small business program), down from the 30% and 15% today?
What I found striking about the search differences between Tier 1 and Tier 2 is that in creating this distinction, Apple clearly considers App Store search to be a developer feature rather than a user feature. In other words, the user’s interest in finding an app via search is disregarded, and Apple is willing to be less helpful to users to the extent that app developers pay a lesser commission to Apple. A common talking point in defense of Apple’s App Store lockdown on iOS is that the App Store is supposed to be for the benefit of users rather than developers. Apple’s new policies give the lie to that notion.
Assuming this meets the policies laid out by the European Commission, I am curious to see how the changes affect different developers. As I wrote yesterday, it seems like this is complicated enough to make comparisons or predictions very difficult. A developer with existing marketing channels may find the more restricted App Store search functionality a smaller issue, but may be stung by the lack of automatic updates. A smaller developer would likely benefit most from a smaller commission to Apple, but may find the App Store limitations too restrictive.
But perhaps users may ultimately come out on top if App Store search is kneecapped. Perhaps Apple’s proposals will encourage more third-party app marketplaces, giving Apple competition for reaching users on its platform. Then, perhaps, the company would find reasons to loosen its reins and change its relationship with developers without being compelled by courts or regulators.
Or maybe Apple will preload Android onto its E.U.-bound iPhones. Seems similarly likely.
The European Commission has required Apple to make a series of additional changes under the Digital Markets Act: […]
The wording of this sentence makes it sound like the list of specific policies following it were dictated by the European Commission, but I am not sure that is true.
Fees have changed for developers offering external purchases, too, and include:
an initial acquisition fee of 2% is charged for sales made within six months of a user’s first unpaid installation of an app;
a 5% or 13% store services fee depending on the store services used for any purchases made within 12 months of an app’s download;
for apps that offer external purchases, a Core Technology Commission (not Fee) of 5% for purchases made within 12 months of installation will be charged;
For developers on Apple’s standard business terms in the EU, there is a new Core Technology Commission. Instead of the per-install fee, they will pay a 5% commission on sales made through in-app promotion of alternative payments.
Apple also announced today that it will shift to a new unified business model in the EU by January 1, 2026. Under this unified model, a developer will transition from the Core Technology Fee to the newly announced Core Technology Commission, which is paid based on the sales of digital goods and services, rather than app downloads.
Store Services Tier 1: This tier provides capabilities needed for app delivery, trust & safety, app management, and engagement; and features a reduced store services fee. This tier is mandatory for apps communicating and promoting offers.
Store Services Tier 2: This tier is optional, and provides additional capabilities for app delivery and management, engagement, curation & personalization, app insights, and developer marketing.
Developers can move an app between tiers on a per-app, per-storefront basis once a quarter. […]
Notable omissions from apps on the first tier include ratings and reviews, search features other than exact matches, automatic updates, and bulk app management through Business Manager or School Manager. These and other features are apparently worth eight points of app-based digital purchase revenue.
This is complicated. What I would love to see are different practical examples comparing Apple’s distribution policies in most countries, its policies in the U.S. post-ruling, its previous E.U. policies, and these new ones. But there are a lot of variables here to the extent making an accurate comparison may be difficult. A more cynical person may say that is by design, and it would be hard to dispute that. But it is also the result of Apple’s specific and sometimes contradictory monetization decisions.
Last week, we reported that iOS 26 introduces an opt-in Adaptive Power Mode on the iPhone, alongside the existing Low Power Mode.
[…]
iOS 26 is compatible with the iPhone 11 series and newer, but unfortunately Adaptive Power Mode is only available on the iPhone 15 Pro models and newer. This is because the AI-powered feature requires an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence.
This appears to be the feature Mark Gurman reported in May was coming to this year’s iOS updates, about which I commented:
[…] Gurman says this is “part of the Apple Intelligence platform”, but also says it “will be available for all iPhones that have iOS 19”. This is confusing. Apple has so far marketed Apple Intelligence as being available on only a subset of devices supporting iOS 18. Either Apple’s delineation of “Apple Intelligence” features is about to get even fuzzier, or one of the two statements Gurman made is going to be wrong.
Turns out one of those two statements was wrong.
Apple says Adaptive Power Mode “can make small performance adjustments to extend your battery life, including slightly lowering the display brightness or allowing some activities to take a little longer”. Mysterious. Unlike Low Power Mode, it is not (yet?) available as a toggle in Control Centre. I have turned it on to see what it does in the real world.
In March 2020, Apple changed its rules to formally permit ads in push notifications. I wrote:
Notably, there is also no requirement that push notification ads be a promotion for the app or its features. It seems perfectly legal under these rules for unscrupulous developers to sell push notification ad slots to third parties. Gross.
Well, it apparently decided to promote its new Formula 1 movie in partnership with Fandango. Casey Liss was one of many to share a screenshot of a push notification from Wallet reading:
$10 off at Fandango
Save on 2+ tickets to F1® The Movie with APPLEPAYTEN. Ends 6/29. While supplies
last. Terms apply.
This is not really an ad for Wallet. It is an ad for Fandango to promote Apple’s movie, tickets for which may be added to Wallet. This is not the only time Apple has promoted its services through push notifications and in-app banners, and it is far from the only company doing this. It is tacky — yet the only surprising thing about it is how it is possible for a multi-trillion-dollar company to still feel like a sellout.
The iyO in question emerged from the Alphabet X “moonshot factory,” and its first announced product is a set of generative AI-powered earbuds. An earlier report at Bloomberg Law noted that iyO had brought a trademark lawsuit against OpenAI, with the judge suggesting she’s open to the company’s argument that OpenAI’s promotional video might already be creating consumer confusion.
A wearable device with an A.I. spin introduced in a TED Talk? Where have I seen this before? Oh, right. Still, hard for me to believe io and iyO would not be easily confused. The latter’s domain was registered a full year before Ive’s io was revealed in a New York Times article.
[Time Machine screenshot, with the notice: “Disk Not Recommended for Backups The next major version of macOS will no longer support AirPort Disk, or other Time Capsule disks, for Time Machine backups.”]
Time Machine can back up to the built-in disk of another Mac on your network, or to an external storage device connected to that Mac.
If either Mac is using macOS Catalina or earlier, this solution is no longer recommended, because Time Machine backup over the network to or from those earlier macOS versions uses Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), which won’t be supported in a future version of macOS.
Starting with macOS 27, Time Capsule backups will require a storage drive that supports more current file-sharing protocols like SMBv2 and SMBv3.
I have, rather embarrassingly, procrastinated replacing the hard drive for our networked Time Machine backup for nearly two years. That backup is connected to a MacBook Air which cannot be upgraded past MacOS Catalina, at least officially. So I guess I now have two problems to figure out.
Anyone have experience with barrykn’s patcher on a mid-2012 MacBook Air?
Tim Cook ought to call Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and offer him $30 billion for his AI search engine. And he should do it right away.
[…]
“Not likely!” Perplexity chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko told me of a potential tie-up with Apple. “But Meta-Scale is so unlikely that I feel we aren’t living in a world of likelies.”
Apple and Perplexity have had no M&A discussions to date, Shevelenko added, not even a wink.
Meta Platforms Inc. held discussions with artificial intelligence search startup Perplexity AI Inc. about a possible takeover before moving ahead with a multibillion-dollar investment in Scale AI, according to people familiar with the matter.
Deirdre Bosa and Ashley Capoot, of CNBC, confirmed Bloomberg’s reporting, adding that one source “said Perplexity walked away from a potential deal”.
Apple Inc. executives have held internal discussions about potentially bidding for artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI, seeking to address the need for more AI talent and technology.
You will note the day began with Kantrowitz’s article calling for Apple to buy Perplexity. It was not a reaction to Gurman’s report, which was published late in the afternoon and came after a different story about another possible Perplexity acquisition, to which Gurman also contributed. Heck of a coincidence all of these dropped on the same day.
Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent a publisher, per [Cloudflare CEO Matthew] Prince.
[…]
Now:
For Google, it’s 18:1
For OpenAI, it’s 1,500:1
For Anthropic, it’s 60,000:1
It is a curious side effect of Cloudflare’s size and position that it is among a true handful of companies with this kind of visibility into a meaningful slice of global web traffic.
In an alternate world, these artificial intelligence businesses may have tried to work with publishers. Perhaps they would have given greater prominence to references, self-policed the amount of summarization they would offer, and provide some kind of financial kickback. Instead, they have trained their systems on publishers’ vast libraries without telling them until it is far too late for it to matter. They take so much while providing so little in return. This will surely accelerate the walling-off of the necessarily paid web, further affirming what I have taken to calling “Robinson’s Law”. This helps explain the increasinglyunethical means of acquiring this training data.
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I have many thoughts about the redesigned elements common across most of Apple’s platforms but they are still brewing, much as I hope the same is true for the visual interface itself. There is one thing, though, which is a downright shame: Apple’s guidance for the shape of Mac app icons:
An app icon’s shape varies based on a platform’s visual language. In iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, icons are square, and the system applies masking to produce rounded corners that precisely match the curvature of other rounded interface elements throughout the system and the bezel of the physical device itself. In tvOS, icons are rectangular, also with concentric edges. In visionOS and watchOS, icons are square and the system applies circular masking.
This is no longer optional, but mandated by the system. App icons across Apple’s three most popular operating systems share a similar rounded square mask, and it is a downgrade. Simon B. Støvring correctly calls out the “expressive, varied app icons, a case of character over conformity” as a highlight of past versions of MacOS. I miss detailed and artistic app icons plenty. Indulging in realistic textures and thoughtful rendering was not only a differentiator for the Mac; it also conveyed the sense an app was built with a high degree of care.
Perhaps that is largely a product of nostalgia. Change can be uncomfortable, but it could be for good reasons. Stripping icons of their detail might not be bad, just different. But wrapping everything in a uniform shape? That is, dare I say, an objective degradation.
Since MacOS Big Sur debuted the precursor to this format, I have found it harder to differentiate between applications which, as I understand it, is the very function and purpose of an icon. I know this has been a long-running gripe for those of us of a certain age, but it remains true, and a walk through the history of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines indicates the company also understands it to be true.
The uniform rounded rectangular icons in MacOS Tahoe are the product of a slow but steady series of changes Apple has made to its guidance beginning with OS X Yosemite. At its introduction at WWDC 2014, Craig Federighi said those icons were “beautifully crafted”, “so clean and yet so fundamentally still Mac”. While Apple has long provided recommendations for icon shapes and the angle at which objects should sit, its Yosemite guidelines tended to converge around specific shapes. However, Apple still advised “giving your app icon a realistic, unique shape”, since a “unique outline focuses attention on the depicted object and makes it easier for users to recognize the icon at a glance”. It also said developers should not use the same icon as a companion iOS app, since “you don’t want to imply that your app isn’t tailored for the OS X environment”.
By the next major redesign in MacOS Big Sur, Apple was extolling the “harmonious user experience” of “a common set of visual attributes, including the rounded-rectangle shape, front-facing perspective, level position, and uniform drop shadow”. Still, it emphasized the delight of including a “familiar tool” and “realistic objects” in an icon, in a manner that “float[s] just above the background and extend[s] slightly past the icon boundaries”. This is one of the reasons the MarsEdit icon remains so distinctive to me — not only does the rocket ship have enough contrast with the background, its silhouette is not the same as the icons for Mimestream above it or Fantastical below it. This is not a knock against either of those two apps; they are understandably following the documentation Apple provides and follows with all the first-party app icons I also keep in my dock.
MacOS Tahoe overrides all this previous guidance in both written policy and technical implementation. Apple, as quoted above, now says icons should be square, and the system will take care of rounding the corners — just like on iOS. Since iOS apps can run on MacOS, a lack of being “tailored for the [MacOS] environment” is no longer seen by Apple as something to caution against. But it goes further. Designers should, in its words, “embrace simplicity”:
An icon with fine visual features might look busy when rendered with system-provided shadows and highlights, and details may be hard to discern at smaller sizes. […]
Designers no longer get to decide highlights and shadows, the system does. It defines the shape, too, and non-updated icons that do not conform are doomed to live out their days in a little grey jail cell.
Apple used to guide designers on how to make smaller icons by removing details and simplifying. Something you will often hear from designers is the fun and challenge of very small icons; how does one convey the same impression of fidelity when you have exactly 256 pixels to use? It is a delicate feat. Now, Apple simply says no icon — no matter how large — is deserving of detail. This, to me, betrays a lack of trust in the third-party designers it apparently celebrates.
Moreover, it fundamentally contradicts longstanding icon design principles. Reducing each application’s visual identity to a simple glyph — albeit with the potential for a few layers — on a coloured background necessarily leads to this perverse revision of Figure 5–15 from the 2004 Human Interface Guidelines:
Though this description and figure is specifically regarding toolbar icons, Apple’s rationale for using different shapes remains clear-eyed and simply expressed:
Each toolbar icon should be easily and quickly distinguishable from the other items in the toolbar. Toolbar icons emphasize their outline form, rather than subtler visual details.
Perhaps this reasoning is incorrect. If so, the current guidelines make no effort to explain how or why users are not guided by outline in addition to colour and enclosed shape. Apple simply says icons should be constructed “in a simple, unique way with a minimal number of shapes” on “a simple background, such as a solid colour or gradient”. Not only are there no longer any “subtler visual details”, there is also no distinct outline for each icon. I believe limitations spur creativity, but imposed uniformity sure makes that difficult. This is, however, apparently required because of new icon formats available to users, including a clear version that makes it look as though the glyph and base are an ice sculpture: cool, but entirely indistinguishable from others surrounding it. Again, this wrests control away from designers to give a little bit to users, but only at the behest of and within the boundaries of Apple’s mandates.
The technical and feature improvements in MacOS Tahoe are intriguing. I sure hope the Spotlight improvements are as excellent as they seem to be since I expect I will be increasingly dependent upon it as an application launcher. I am also excited to try Liquid Glass on a Mac. Though I remain skeptical, it is at least interesting. That is something I find difficult to see in the new direction of MacOS icons.
My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest — what you say, what you do — is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.
This article crystallizes for me the uncomfortable feeling I have about prediction markets, generally, and the specific feeling I got when I read the phrase “[c]ombining Polymarket’s accurate, unbiased, and real-time prediction market probabilities with Grok’s analysis and X’s real time insights”. The whole point is to turn someone’s being correct — not right, in any moral or ethical sense, nor principled, but merely correct — into money, which is the purest expression of the fiction that being financially successful is a product of being smart, and vice versa.
Marie Woolf, of the Globe and Mail, reporting on the extraordinarily broad provisions of Bill C-2:
New powers in the government’s border bill would allow the police and CSIS to request information on whether people have accessed services from abortion clinics, doctors, hotels and other entities without a warrant from a judge, experts warn.
There is no definition or obvious limitation on the services in question or the person who provides them – it could be a telecom provider, physician, hospital, library, educational institution, or financial institution. But why stop there? The provision is so broad that your dry cleaner or barber are captured by it. If served with the appropriate form, anyone who provides services is required to confirm whether they have provided services to any subscriber, client, account, or identifier. They must also disclose whether they have any information about the subscriber, client, account or identifier as well as advise where and when they provided the service. On top of that, they must advise when they started providing the service and list the names of any other person that may have provided other services.
Kate Robertson, of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab:
While Bill C-2 does not explicitly state that it is paving the way for new and expanded data-sharing with the United States or other countries, the legislation contains references to the potential for “agreement[s] or arrangement[s]” with a foreign state, and references elsewhere the potential that persons in Canada may become compelled by the laws of a foreign state to disclose information. Other data and surveillance powers in Bill C-2 read like they could have been drafted by U.S. officials.
Robertson and the Citizen Lab explain how this seems to be driven by compliance with the Second Additional Protocol to the Cybercrime Convention, but it could have far-reaching implications as currently drafted.
Most smart TV operating system (OS) owners are in the ad sales business now. Software providers for budget and premium TVs are honing their ad skills, which requires advancing their ability to collect user data. This is creating an “inherent conflict” within the industry, Takashi Nakano, VP of content and programming at Samsung TV Plus, said at the StreamTV Show in Denver last week.
During a panel at StreamTV Insider’s conference entitled “CTV OS Leader Roundtable: From Drivers to Engagement and Content Strategy,” Nakano acknowledged the opposing needs of advertisers and smart TV users, who are calling for a reasonable amount of data privacy.
Thanks to the failed nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court, the country actually has privacy protections specifically related to television and video services. Yet even with all the data advertisers are able to obtain — sometimes illicitly — it is never enough for this greedy, unethical industry.
It’s a cool, sunny morning at Apple Park as I’m walking my way along the iconic glass ring to meet with Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, for a conversation about the iPad.
[…]
I came into this WWDC thinking – or, at the very least, hoping – that Apple would show a newfound commitment to the iPad and iPadOS, addressing the longstanding concerns of those who have been pushing iPadOS to its limits while keeping true to the essence of the device. It’s a careful balancing act, but having tried iPadOS 26 on my 13” iPad Pro for the past week, it seems clear to me that Apple delivered this year.
An on-the-record interview with an Apple executive is always going to be a guarded affair, and this is no different. Federighi is very clearly trying to sell the achievements of iPadOS 26 without veering into substantial self-criticism.
I understand all of that, yet I think Viticci’s interview is worth every word. It is a beautifully written article, and both parties explore depths of the iPad’s existence I had not considered for a long time. Federighi directly addresses critics who thought Apple is perhaps coasting on the iPad — not me directly, of course, but along similar lines to what I wrote last year about the latest iPad Pro models.
To Apple’s credit, here is what I will say: for the first time in many years, I am seriously considering buying a new iPad. But I know this system too well; I recognize it is perhaps best to wait for iPadOS reviews before I commit. I like the iPad a lot conceptually. I have consistently found it frustrating in practice. Perhaps this is the year that breaks the trend.
One of my favorite moments from WWDC 2025 was when Apple designer Billy Sorrentino introduced the changes to visual intelligence. The new screenshot features in iOS 26 are already among my favorites, but what really caught my eye was the surprising amount of screen time given to Tapbots’ Ivory.
Ortolani describes this as an “endorsement”, “snuck” into the presentation. I am not sure it is either. For one thing, these presentations are obviously choreographed with each segment approved by many, many people. Nothing truly sneaks in. For another, I do not know that this is endorsing Mastodon as much as it is evading one, as Eric Schwarz writes:
I also noticed this during the keynote and I think it served a few subtle purposes: highlight an indie developer (Tapbots) that has been developing for Apple’s platforms for years, serve as a way to avoid endorsing a specific commercial social network, and potentially throw some support (indirectly) behind Mastodon. It doesn’t appear that Sorrentino has an account, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone on the team that worked on his portion of the presentation does.
Apple probably does not want to associate with Meta’s family of social apps. TikTok is problematic for some number of people and probably not a good illustration of this feature. X is, well, you know. What typical social platforms are left — LinkedIn?
I obviously checked if these were real accounts — Apple used to have a set of fakey Twitter accounts it used in demos like these. But I could not find any public record of them. That is another advantage of Mastodon: Apple could be running a private instance internally just for demos like these. Or, of course, the whole thing could just be a mockup of sorts.
