Daring Fireball

The European Commission, today:

Today, the European Commission adopted two decisions under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) specifying the measures that Apple has to take to comply with certain aspects of its interoperability obligation. [...]

The first set of measures concerns nine iOS connectivity features, predominantly used for connected devices such as smartwatches, headphones or TVs. The measures will grant device manufacturers and app developers improved access to iPhone features that interact with such devices (e.g. displaying notifications on smartwatches), faster data transfers (e.g. peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connections, and near-field communication) and easier device set-up (e.g. pairing).

Benjamin Mayo, reporting for 9to5Mac:

In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple firmly rebuked the EU decision announced today about specific interoperability requirements the company must implement over the coming months.

Apple said “Today’s decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple’s ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don’t have to play by the same rules. It’s bad for our products and for our European users. We will continue to work with the European Commission to help them understand our concerns on behalf of our users”.

In regards to customer privacy, Apple is especially concerned with the requirements surrounding opening up access to the iOS notification system. The company indicated these measures would allow companies to suck up all user notifications in an unencrypted form to their servers, sidestepping all privacy protections Apple typically enforces.

My interpretation of the adopted decision is that the EU is requiring Apple to treat iOS like a PC operating system, like MacOS or Windows, where users can install third-party software that runs, unfettered, in the background.

Apple’s statement makes clear their staunch opposition to these decisions. But at least at a superficial level, the European Commission’s tenor has changed. The quotes from the Commission executives (Teresa Ribera, who replaced firebrand Margrethe Vestager as competition chief, and Henna Virkkunen) are anodyne. Nothing of the vituperativeness of the quotes from Vestager and Thierry Breton in years past. But the decisions themselves make clear that the EU isn’t backing down from its general position of seeing itself as the rightful decision-maker for how iOS should function and be engineered, and that Apple’s core competitive asset — making devices that work better together than those from other companies — isn’t legal under the DMA.

Sebastiaan de With:

You can speculate what the ‘e’ in ‘16e’ stands for, but in my head it stands for ‘essential’. Some things that I consider particularly essential to the iPhone are all there: fantastic build quality, an OLED screen, iOS and all its apps, and Face ID. It even has satellite connectivity. Some other things I also consider essential are not here: MagSafe is very missed, for instance, but also multiple cameras. It would be reasonable to look at Apple’s Camera app, then, and see what comprises the ‘essential’ iPhone camera experience according to Apple.

Alex Cheema is the founder of EXO Labs, an AI company focused on “AI you can trust with your data” by making systems that run locally, on computers you own and control. Apple provided him with two M3 Ultra Mac Studios, each maxed out with 512 GB of unified memory. Within a day, he had them linked together by Thunderbolt 5 and had the full DeepSeek R1 model running on his desk.

Sure, that’s over $20,000 of computing hardware. But to my knowledge there is no other way in the world to run the full DeepSeek R1 model for even close to $20,000, let alone doing it on your desk rather than a data center. It’s an exclusive advantage, made possible by Apple Silicon’s general performance and the breakthrough of Apple’s unified memory architecture, which lets the GPU cores access the same RAM as the CPU cores.

Apple has tremendous technical advantages to offer in AI. But they’re marketing Genmojis of hot dogs carrying briefcases.

Gus Mueller:

A week or so ago I was grousing to some friends that Apple needs to open up things on the Mac so other LLMs can step in where Siri is failing. In theory we (developers) could do this today, but I would love to see a blessed system where Apple provided APIs to other LLM providers.

Are there security concerns? Yes, of course there are, there always will be. But I would like the choice.

The crux of the issue in my mind is this: Apple has a lot of good ideas, but they don’t have a monopoly on them. I would like some other folks to come in and try their ideas out. I would like things to advance at the pace of the industry, and not Apple’s. Maybe with a blessed system in place, Apple could watch and see how people use LLMs and other generative models (instead of giving us Genmoji that look like something Fisher-Price would make). And maybe open up the existing Apple-only models to developers. There are locally installed image processing models that I would love to take advantage of in my apps.

The analogy I used, talking with Jason Snell during my guest stint on Upgrade last week, was to the heyday of desktop publishing. The Mac was the platform for graphic design because it was the best platform for using design apps. Fonts worked better and looked better on the Mac. Printing worked better from Macs. Peripherals worked better. The apps themselves looked better on the Mac than they did on Windows. The Mac had taste and designers (hopefully) have taste. Graphic designers could understand how their machines worked, and maintain them themselves, in a way they couldn’t with PCs.

But Apple didn’t make any of the actual apps. Companies like Adobe and Macromedia and Aldus did. Independent small developers made niche extensions for use inside apps like Photoshop, FreeHand, and QuarkXPress. When a new app came along like InDesign — which quickly ate Quark’s lunch — the Mac remained the dominant platform to use.

Making a great platform where other developers can innovate is one of Apple’s core strengths. Apple got even better at it once Mac OS X hit its stride in the 2000s — the Cocoa APIs really did empower outside developers to make world-class apps providing experiences that couldn’t be matched on other platforms like Windows or Linux. Then it happened again, with a much bigger audience, with iOS. What desktop publishing was to the Mac in the 1990s, social media was to the iPhone in the 2010s. Apple didn’t make the apps — they made the best platform to use those apps.

Apple should be laser focused on doing this for AI now. Where I quibble with Mueller is that I don’t want Apple to get out of the way. I want Apple to pave the roads to create the way. Apple doesn’t have to make the cars (literally) — just pave the best roads. Make the Mac the best platform for outside developers to create innovative AI systems and experiences. Make iOS the best consumer device to use AI apps from any outside developer. Work on APIs and frameworks for the AI age. No company has ever been better than Apple at designing and delivering those sort of APIs. Lean into that. It’s as useful, relevant, and profitable an institutional strength (and set of values) today as ever.

In a follow-up post, Mueller shows he’s thinking like I’m thinking:

But off the top of my head, here’s one idea that I think could really help and reap benefits for both Apple and developers.

Build a semantic index (SI), and allow apps to access it via permissions given similar to what we do for Address Book or Photos.

Maybe even make the permissions to the SI a bit more fine-grained than you normally would for other personal databases. Historical GPS locations? Scraping contents of the screen over time? Indexed contents of document folder(s)? Make these options for what goes into the SI.

And of course, the same would be true for building the SI. As a user, I’d love to be able to say “sure, capture what’s on the screen and scrape the text out of that, but nope - you better not track where I’ve been over time”.

HealthKit already works a lot like what Mueller is suggesting here (for, say, “SemanticKit”). With explicit user permission — that can be revoked at any time — third party apps can both read from and write to your Health data. Apple does a lot of that itself, both through Apple Watch and from the various activity-related things an iPhone can track, but third-party apps and devices are welcome participants, in a private, easily-understood way.

Scharon Harding, writing for Ars Technica:

Reports of Roku customers seeing video ads automatically play before they could view the OS’ home screen started appearing online this week. A Reddit user, for example, posted yesterday: “I just turned on my Roku and got an ... ad for a movie, before I got to the regular Roku home screen.” Multiple apparent users reported seeing an ad for the movie Moana 2. The ads have a close option, but some users appear to have not seen it.

When reached for comment, a Roku spokesperson shared a company statement that confirms that the autoplaying ads are expected behavior but not a permanent part of Roku OS currently. Instead, Roku claimed, it was just trying the ad capability out. [...]

“Our recent test is just the latest example, as we explore new ways to showcase brands and programming while still providing a delightful and simple user experience.”

What I’d find delightful and simple is disconnecting my Roku box and throwing it out the window.

Eric Migicovsky:

We’re excited to announce two new smartwatches that run open source PebbleOS and are compatible with thousands of your beloved Pebble apps.

• Core 2 Duo has an ultra crisp black and white display, polycarbonate frame, costs $149 and starts shipping in July.
• Core Time 2 has a larger 64-colour display, metal frame, costs $225 and starts shipping in December.

My advice would have been to return with just one watch. Make a decision: color or monochrome. I’d sort of lean toward black-and-white, to differentiate it from Apple Watch and other high-end smartwatches. They’re never going to out-color Apple on display quality, so why not go the other way and lean in on black-and-white utility and contrast?

I would also suggest that whining about the fact that iOS doesn’t allow third-party devices the sort of integration that Apple Watch offers isn’t the path forward. Instead of arguing that “Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones”, lean into the ways that Pebble can be awesome because it isn’t an Apple Watch. 30-day battery life is awesome. I don’t think Apple Watch will ever offer that. Being able to run whatever apps — including watch faces — that you want on your own Pebble watch is awesome, and I know Apple Watch will never offer that. Lean into what Pebble watches can do that Apple Watches can’t. If the experience as a Pebble owner can be a lot better paired with an Android phone than an iPhone, lean into that. Show how much better it is on Android than iOS. Compete.

If you can’t show how much better Pebble is when paired to an Android device (which they couldn’t do 10 years ago), then what’s the point?

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire regarding pollster David Shor’s appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast:

His surveys indicate a clear causal relationship: People who relied on TikTok for news were much more likely to swing toward Trump than those who got their information from TV. His most striking data point:

When you zoom in on people who get their news from TikTok but don’t care very much about politics, this group is eight percentage points more Republican than they were four years ago — which is a lot.

What remains unclear is why this shift happened. Was TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, subtly adjusting its algorithm to undermine Democrats? Or was the platform simply reflecting broader anti-incumbent sentiment? Shor concedes:

You could tell a story that maybe just anti-incumbent stuff is going to do really well on TikTok, and Democrats are going to do great now. I don’t really know. But I think that, for whatever reason, this major shift really helped Republicans.

It used to be that getting your message out required persuading reporters, editors, and gatekeepers — people trained to vet and verify information.

Now anyone can make a short video, and if it’s compelling enough, it spreads like wildfire — except that it may be following a path predetermined by TikTok’s algorithms.

I worry that the liberal/left response to this will be to declare, with exasperation, that people shouldn’t be getting their news or forming their political opinions by what they see on TikTok. You need to meet people where they are, and craft messages for the media they consume.

Random Augustine has written a splendidly nerdy but very approachable overview of the evolution of Apple’s XNU kernel over the last decade:

2017 — Page Protection Layer

With the release of the iPhone 8 and iPhone X containing the A11 processor, Apple introduced a security feature known as the Page Protection Layer (PPL). This hardware+software feature isolated a small part of the kernel and gave it privileges to modify memory page tables — critical structures that manage memory access. The rest of the kernel lost the ability to directly modify these page tables. The PPL’s limited attack surface ensured that bypasses were infamously rare. While PPL added a layer of protection, it was only partly effective as the rest of the kernel still held most privileges required to compromise data without modifying page tables.

2021–2023 — Secure Page Table Monitor

Following PPL, the release of the iPhone 13 containing the A15 processor introduced new functionality utilised in iOS 17: the Secure Page Table Monitor (SPTM). This replaced and improved upon the PPL by securing additional memory functions and dividing them into subsystems, further isolating small kernel components. Validation of code signatures, confirming that all code had been signed by Apple was also isolated.

Around this time, oblique references to exclaves began to surface in XNU source code. These exclaves were speculated to be the subsystems managed by SPTM. Then 2024 happened…

2024 — Exclaves: A major addition to XNU

With the release of XNU source code supporting M4 and A18 based systems (such as the iPhone 16), the curtain was partly pulled back on exclaves. (Exclaves are not active on prior processors).

It is now clear that exclaves are part of a much larger redesign of XNU’s security model.

I am reminded of Gall’s Law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

(I also suspect that Siri — today’s Siri at least — might be a canonical example of “a complex system designed from scratch”. But that’s a different topic.)

Nick Heer:

They are impressive, but my interpretation of statistics like these is that one often finds percentages used like this when neither actual number is very large. Nevertheless, another indication that browser choice screens can have a positive effect for smaller browsers and, conversely, also a reminder of the power of defaults.

Saying the daily users have doubled isn’t very meaningful when they don’t state the baseline. It’s a bit of a Bezos chart. And what’s the proof that this growth is from happy users — users who, upon seeing the DMA browser choice screen on their iPhones, realized only then that they wanted to switch to Firefox? Surely some number of users who switched to Firefox via the choice screen did so by mistake, because they were confused.

The best case scenario is that this growth for Firefox (and presumably for other alternate browsers that qualified for the EU choice screens) means that alternative browsers have gone from a tiny usage share to a twice-as-large-but-still-tiny share, and that most of the growth comes from happy users. I see no proof, though, that the growth hasn’t at least significantly come from confused users who now wonder what happened to Safari. And either way, the DMA’s mandatory choice screen has, thus far, been relatively ineffective overall.

Ten years ago I bought a pair of Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro headphones for use while podcasting. My product research was rigorous and exhaustive: I asked Marco Arment which headphones I should buy, he said these, so I bought them. They’re offered in three impedance variants: 32, 80, and 250 ohms. Beyerdynamics describes 80 ohms as the best “allrounder” choice, and that’s what Marco told me to get.

I’ve since worn them to record at least 275 episodes of The Talk Show (I think this episode was the first) and nearly all of the five-years-and-counting run of Dithering. They sound great, but more importantly, they’re super comfortable. I can wear them for 3+ hours and my ears don’t feel too bad at all. They’re also built to last. Just about everything on mine still looks fairly new, despite my having worn them for something approaching 1,000 hours. No cracking on the cable and the padding on the headband looks new. The one part that didn’t look new were the velour ear pads. Last week I ordered replacements from Beyerdynamics for $40; they arrived earlier this week and I swapped the old pads for new today.

When I bought my headphones in 2015, they cost $250. Today the price is down to just $170, either direct from Beyerdynamic or from Amazon (that’s a make-me-rich affiliate link). I am not an audiophile, and I literally only use mine for podcasting. But I’ve spent quite a lot time podcasting with them over the last decade. I’ll bet I’m still using the same pair (with another set of fresh ear pads) 10 years from now.

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New (well, newish) Mac app from John Siracusa:

Hyperspace searches for files with identical contents within one or more folders. If it finds any, it can then reclaim the disk space taken by all but one of the identical files — without removing any of the files!

You can learn more about how this is done, if you’re interested, but the short version is that Hyperspace uses a standard feature of the macOS file system: space-saving clones. The Finder does the same thing when you duplicate a file.

I love everything about this app. I love the name — it “works” in like at least three ways. I love that it’s right up Siracusa’s alley. I love that Siracusa has talked about it, at wonderful length, on ATP and expounded upon it on his blog. I love that the premise sounds a little crazy but the explanation makes all the sense in the world. I love that this small, laser-focused utility is fully and splendidly documented. I love the way it looks. It’s got a great icon. I mean of course it would, but still, let’s celebrate how fun this is.

Not new, but new to me, is this delightful 7-minute short with a behind-the-scenes look at SNL’s cue card team, led by longtime main cue card guy Wally Feresten. Sometimes you just can’t beat analog.

As a kid I loved Richard Scarry’s books. As an adult I loved (and love) Chris Ware’s graphic novels. As a parent I loved reading Scarry’s books, again, with my son. So of course this essay from Ware, commemorating the 50th anniversary edition of Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, hit hard for me. Bet it will for you too.

Om Malik:

I have my own explanation, something my readers are familiar with, and it is the most obvious one. Just as Google is trapped in the 10-blue-link prison, which prevents it from doing something radical, Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company weighed down by its market capitalization and what stock market expects from it.

They lack the moral authority of Steve Jobs to defy the markets, streamline their product lineup, and focus the company. Instead, they do what a complex business often does: they do more. Could they have done a better job with iPadOS? Should Vision Pro receive more attention?

The answer to all those is yes. Apple has become a complex entity that can’t seem to ever have enough resources to provide the real Apple experience. What you get is “good enough.” And most of the time, I think it is enough — because what others have on the market is worse. They know how to build great hardware; it’s the software where they falter. In the case of Apple Intelligence, they have been caught short because others’ AI products, even when flawed, are significantly better than Apple’s own offerings.

Hardware inherently keeps a company honest in a way that software doesn’t. Hardware either works or it doesn’t. The only way to “upgrade” hardware is via installing newer software, or by taking the hardware apart and replacing physical components. It’s hard to think of a company, in any field, whose software is “better” than its hardware. Maybe Nintendo? But even with Nintendo, I’d say it’s more like their software is as good as their hardware. Also, an interesting thought that popped into my head reading Malik’s post just now: part of what makes Vision Pro so fascinating is that the software is better than the hardware. The hardware for immersive VR is so early-days that even the industry state-of-the-art — which is Vision Pro — stinks compared to where it’s going to be in even just five years. The 1984 Macintosh was a shitty computer with a 9-inch one-bit display, no hard drive, and an absurdly meager 128 kilobytes of RAM. But the software was amazing!

But the bigger, better point Malik makes is that “good enough” is enough to make Apple’s software seem ahead of its competition. I tried to make this point all the way back in 2007 with “Apple Needs a Nikon”, and I think the problem is worse now than it was then. No other company is even vaguely in Apple’s league. But Apple is sliding toward mediocrity on the software side. It’s very open for debate how far they’ve slipped. I, for one, would argue that they haven’t slipped far, and with an honest reckoning — especially with regard to everything related to Siri and AI — they can nip this in the bud. You might argue that they’ve slipped tremendously across the board. But what I don’t think is arguable is that their competition remains below Apple’s league. That’s what gives credence to the voices in Cupertino who are arguing that everything’s fine. Apple’s the only team in the top tier for UI design.

The best thing that could happen to Apple would be for Google to ship an Android Pixel experience that actually makes iPhone owners insanely jealous. Google is incapable of doing that through UI design. They’re incapable of catching up to Apple on hardware. But maybe on the AI front they can do it. Apple needs a rival.

Tesla’s share price has been having a hard time of it lately. The stock has lost about half its value since its all-time high back in December, and, since Musk took office alongside Donald Trump in January, dropped for 7 consecutive weeks, rebounding only ever-so-slightly last week, after Musk got the president of the United States to turn the White House lawn into a cheesy Tesla (sorry, Tesler) dealership. Tesla stock dropped another 5 percent today, on a day when the overall market was slightly up.

I bookmarked this Bryce Elder column at the Financial Times back on January 31, and now seems like a good time to link to it:

The usual explanation for when Tesla trading resembles a Pump.fun shitcoin is: “because Elon talks a lot”. Here’s JPMorgan analyst Ryan Brinkman to expand on the theme:

It’s not clear to us why Tesla shares traded as much as +5% higher in the aftermarket Wednesday, although we have some leading theories. Perhaps it was management’s statement that it had identified an achievable path to becoming worth more than the world’s five most valuable companies taken together (i.e., more than the $14.8 trillion combined market capitalizations of Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, & Alphabet). Or maybe it was management’s belief that just one of its products has by itself the potential to generate “north of $10 trillion in revenue”. It may have even related to management guidance for 2026 (no financial targets were provided, but it was said to be “epic”) and for 2027 and 2028 (“ridiculously good”).

Brinkman, who has a long-standing “underweight” rating on Tesla, is beginning to sound a bit exasperated:

[T]he company’s financial performance and Bloomberg consensus for revenue, margin, earnings, and cash flow all keep coming down, but analyst price targets and the company’s share price keep going up. For instance, Tesla has missed Bloomberg consensus EBIT in 9 of the past 10 quarters by an average of -16.3%.

Consistently missing estimates is one thing. What Tesla has been doing is consistently missing lowered estimates. [...]

Tesla’s biggest asset is hyperbole. The more extreme the hyperbole, the more valuable it gets. Maybe after-hours market participants understand the dynamics better than Tesla bears, so are primed to park fundamentals and trade on vibes. Or maybe something else entirely is going on.

Sounds a lot like the other guy at the White House Auto Mall.

I’ve been commenting and expanding upon some of the commentary my piece prompted, and I have a few more coming, but it’s good to have Tsai collect a comprehensive overview.

Ray Maker, writing at DC Rainmaker:

This would not only be the first time Apple has created a non-watch heart rate sensor, but even more notably, the first time the company has enabled heart rate broadcasting over existing Bluetooth heart rate standards.

The question then becomes: Is it accurate?

Unfortunately, it turns out, that was not the question I should have started with. The real question to start with is: Is the heart rate function (accuracy aside), even usable? A lot of hours later, I have answers to both of those questions. And trust me, it’s a very mixed bag.

The answer:

It’s clear that any movement (even on a stationary bike) quickly leads to either dropouts or inaccurate heart rate. And outdoors running, it’s even worse. Ultimately, I don’t see any value in the heart rate sensor in this product, because it’s simply not good enough to be useful, even for casual use.

So maybe this feature is not soon coming to AirPods? I think there’s a good argument to be made that these are better than no heart rate monitor at all but also not nearly as good as an Apple Watch or dedicated device.

I’m a month late linking to it, but Chance Miller wrote a terrific review for 9to5Mac:

The last several releases from Beats, such as the Studio Buds Plus and Solo 4 headphones, have been powered by a custom Beats chip rather than an Apple-designed chip like what’s used in AirPods. For Beats, this has enabled better cross-platform support for Android users, but it’s also come at the cost of several popular features for Apple fans. For example, the Studio Buds Plus lack support for automatic in-ear detection, iCloud pairing, automatic device switching, personalized spatial audio, and more.

With the Powerbeats Pro 2, Beats has gone back to its roots and opted for an Apple-designed chip. The Powerbeats Pro 2 are powered by Apple’s H2 chip, the same chip used by the latest-generation AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4. This means you get the full suite of Apple-focused audio features.

The degree of shared engineering between Apple’s teams and Beats’s has always seemed odd to me. Sometimes it seems like Beats really is an independent subsidiary, focused on cross-platform headphones, and other times it feels like they’re making Apple products under a different brand label. The sweet spot seems to be about where they landed with these Powerbeats 2.

All of the aforementioned features and improvements make Powerbeats Pro 2 an incredibly compelling product, but Beats has one more thing: Powerbeats Pro 2 feature built-in heart rate monitoring.

Each Powerbeats Pro 2 earbud has a built-in heart rate monitor comprised of four components. First, there’s an LED sensor that emits green LED light at a rate of over 100 pulses per second. This light is emitted through the skin and hits your red blood cells. The photodiode then receives the reflected light from the red blood cells that is modulated by the red blood flow. There’s an optical lens that helps direct and separate the transmitted and received light, along with an accelerometer to ensure accuracy and consistency in data collection.

Beats adds that the Powerbeats Pro 2’s heart rate sensor technology is derived from Apple’s work on the Apple Watch.

It’s weird, but cool, that Beats has delivered in-ear heartbeat monitoring before Apple’s own AirPods have. But now it seems like a lock that this will be a feature in AirPods Pro 3, right?

What I always want in a review I read — and what I try to provide to readers through my own reviews — is a sense of whether a product is for me. Powerbeats Pro 2 aren’t for me — and I know it, because Miller’s review describes them so well. But they seem like a terrific product that a lot of people would prefer to AirPods Pro.

Sebastiaan de With, on X, linking to my “Something Is Rotten” piece last week:

Ex-MobileMe team here. This was a brutal time.

It was so bad that when he presented iCloud onstage, Steve said “I know what you’re thinking: why should I trust them? They’re the ones who gave us MobileMe!”

Michael Gartenberg (who worked at Apple in product marketing for a few years at the tail end of the Jobs era), responded (across two tweets):

When I was at Apple and Apple University was still around there was a whole course on MobileMe and how it was possible that things ended up the way they did. Fascinating to hear all the backstory.

One of the lessons of the Apple University course was much of the MobileMe debacle was directly because Jobs didn’t care about it. He was too preoccupied with the newest iPhone at the time. He didn’t even introduce the product, a lot of the stuff crossed his desk that he ignored.

Twitter-like social posts enforce brevity, but I suspect Gartenberg would agree that it wasn’t that Jobs didn’t care about MobileMe at all. It was that he didn’t think he had to care enough to devote his personal attention to it. Yes, Apple should offer web-based functionality for some online fundamentals (email, calendar, contacts...) and, more importantly, Apple should provide over-the-air Internet sync for that data between customers’ devices. And it should just work, in the way that a hard drive “just works” without Steve Jobs paying close attention to the current state of Apple’s file system team. But then it turned out MobileMe didn’t “just work”, and Jobs decided that he needed to pay laser-focused attention to starting over and building what we now know as iCloud (which is really quite good, very reliable, and I’d say long ago surpassed the “it just works” threshold). Steve Jobs’s final keynote — at WWDC 2011 — was largely focused on the announcement of iCloud.

Who’s got that role inside Apple today — someone with high standards, good taste, and clout within the company — for Siri and Apple Intelligence? Someone who is going to say We didn’t care enough about this, but now we need to, and will.