But now is the time to have a more articulate conversation.

Now, most people will look at Cook’s tenure as CEO of Apple and will talk about the incredible financial success it brought to the company. Cook took an already healthy Apple in 2011 and made it exponentially thrive in the following fifteen years. This is as dismissible as an elephant in a room. I never doubted Cook would be a good ‘maintainer’. It’s like letting a much-decorated admiral take control of your ship — of course they’ll do a good job. Before taking the role of CEO, Cook was the company’s COO, and in these past fifteen years he has always been a COO in CEO’s clothes. And I guess Steve Jobs knew that when he appointed Cook as his successor. Jobs didn’t want the Apple ship to sink, and Cook was the man to ensure something like that wouldn’t happen. With regard to vision and direction, well, that’s a whole other matter.

Fifteen years is truly a long time in technology and it’s really easy to forget some of the things during Tim Cook’s tenure as CEO that were pretty awful. There was a stretch where many thought Apple was going to actually abandon the Mac. There’s been some rent-seeking behavior in the area of services. The iPad has sort of been aimlessly existing as a hardware marvel with no clear vision. Mori runs through a rather complete list of critiques that you might have forgotten.

I enjoyed this piece, as it’s easy to focus on how successful the company has been under Cook’s tenure. Apple has thrived financially and much of Apple’s hardware lineup today feels like it’s in a really good place. My views are a bit less pessimistic than Mori and others, but that doesn’t mean that the Cook era was without justifiable criticism. If anything, this could serve as a blueprint for incoming CEO John Ternus as what kinds of things to try to avoid.

Today we announced that I’m taking the next step in my journey at Apple. Over the coming months I will be transitioning into a new role, leaving the CEO job behind in September and becoming Apple’s executive chairman. A new person will be stepping into what I know in my heart is the best job in the world. That leader is John Ternus, a brilliant engineer and thinker who has spent the past 25 years building the Apple products our users love so much, obsessed with every detail, focused on every possible way we can make something better, bolder, more beautiful, and more meaningful. He is the perfect person for the job.

John cares so much about who we are at Apple, what we do at Apple, who we reach at Apple, and he has the heart and character to lead with extraordinary integrity. I am so proud to call him Apple’s next CEO. This company will reach such incredible heights under his leadership, and you will feel his impact in every bit of delight and discovery that grows out of the products and services to come. I can’t wait for you to get to know him like I do.

We’ve all been anticipating this for awhile and I think the timing is quite good—it won’t distract from WWDC and spells out the plans for Cook to move into the executive chairman role. Apple has more in a press release. I think it’s remarkable that this may be the only time Apple has been able to plan a smooth CEO transition over many months. Cook’s tenure started after Steve Jobs abruptly resigned only a month before passing away. Prior to that, Gil Amelio, Michael Spindler, and even John Sculley were relieved of their duties as the company continued on a downward trajectory in the 1990s.

Adobe’s business model, led by now-outgoing CEO Shantanu Narayen, kept following the money. Individual users are good, but big business contracts are better. Why settle for $50 a month from a photographer in Indiana when it could get a multi-million dollar contract from a corporation in Los Angeles?

Adobe started to shift its focus to enticing those corporate customers to the detriment of its connection to the customers that gave it success to begin with. In order to better serve the interests of corporate clients, its media team changed. It ditched its long-time public relations firm that was extremely successful at connecting the business to working artists, for one that was better at getting Adobe featured in the magazines and trade publications CEOs read.

It stopped putting its product managers and engineers in media briefings and public events, instead replacing them with team managers who had never used the software. It put media-trained executives on camera, not the people making new tools. Its messaging started to be written by lawyers, resulting in incredible blowback. Individual users can tell the difference, and they hate it.

It’s a shame because Adobe’s software was the bread-and-butter of anything creative I used in my early computing years. Even when Adobe merged with Macromedia, the promise of a more complete suite of software allowed many to overlook losing a major competitor. In that time, Adobe has added features, but the shift to Creative Cloud meant that the company has taken up rent-seeking and the general behavior seems to include unfixed bugs, bloat, and disrespecting its users.

Even from an institutional standpoint, Adobe has increased prices, meaning that it’s not just the “photographer in Indiana” that’s priced out of the market. I’d be willing to overlook a lot of this if the software continued to get better, but the software has strayed so far from even feeling like it belongs on a Mac. Even one of the common practices to resolve issues using the Creative Cloud Cleaner tool makes the whole thing feel like ’90s Microsoft at best and malware at worst.

The video is fascinating as the process is explained and demonstrated. While it’s highly doubtful this could be used by someone with some equipment walking near you, it could be done with a stolen iPhone. This only affects Visa cards, a point they really took their time making. This is due to the way Visa handles cryptography with online transactions (as in the terminal has connectivity, not payments on a web site.) Setting a non-Visa card to be your default on Express Transit Mode or disabling that feature entirely should prevent the attack.

Right now, Apple Watches that can’t be restored using an iPhone need to be mailed to an Apple Repair Center for service. There is no in-store repair option, so customers have to wait for the Apple Watch to be shipped to the repair depot, get repaired, and be shipped back.

Starting later this month, Apple Stores and AASPs will be able to use an Apple Watch repair dock that connects to a Mac to restore the software on an Apple Watch. An in-store option for fixing software will make software-based repairs much quicker.

This change is overdue—having had an Apple Watch replaced due to a bad software update felt unnecessarily complicated with lots of shipping and waiting. Just about every other device with Apple Silicon can go into a DFU mode and be restored with a Mac, so giving someone the option to drive to an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider and have it taken care of that day is a good move.

Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock. Once frozen, TIME_WAIT connections never expire, ephemeral ports slowly exhaust, and eventually no new TCP connections can be established at all. ICMP (ping) keeps working. Everything else dies. The only fix most people know is a reboot. We discovered this bug on our iMessage service monitoring fleet, reproduced it live on two machines, and traced the root cause to a single comparison in the XNU kernel source. This is the full story.

Hopefully the attention this has already gotten has put it on Apple’s radar (pun intended), as it appears to be affecting more recent versions of macOS. Nonetheless, if you’ve got some Macs in a server/unattended role, it may be worth scheduling a restart so that you won’t go more than 49 days.

The problem with BrowserGate is not only that it affects millions of individuals. It is what LinkedIn can do with the data once it has it.

LinkedIn is not Reddit. It is not Twitter. It is not an anonymous forum where people use pseudonyms and joke about their cats. LinkedIn is the world’s largest verified professional directory. It has 1.2 billion registered members across 200 countries. More than 67 million companies are listed on the platform. Users register with their real names. Many are verified with photo ID. They list their real employers, real job titles, real education history, real professional connections. In many industries, having a LinkedIn profile is not optional. It is a prerequisite for being hired.

This means LinkedIn does not just know that someone has a religious browser extension installed. It knows that person’s name, employer, job title, department, location, and professional network. And it knows the same about every one of their colleagues who also uses LinkedIn.

That is not a privacy breach. That is an intelligence operation.

I debated about including the original provocative headline, as it’s technically true, but a little misleading. When visiting on a Chrome-based browser, LinkedIn looks at what extensions you have loaded. Depending on what extensions one has, this can provide additional demographic data tied to your profile. It’s still intrusive and important to remember that LinkedIn is owned by the same company that happens to make the operating system for most personal computers.