Golfo del Gringo Loco

Monday, 17 February 2025

You saw the news last week, I’m sure, that both of the major mapping-app providers, Google and Apple, have updated their maps to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”. Microsoft’s Bing Maps, which I would describe as a minor provider, has made the change too.¹ It’s all actually quite a bit more complicated than “they renamed the Gulf of Mexico”, but bear with me for now.

You’ve also seen, I’m equally sure, a lot of people angry at Google and Apple for going along with this. That anger is — to some degree — misplaced. I get where the anger comes from, but it’s still misplaced. My initial take, right in the midst of Trump’s inauguration speech on January 20, was that if he went through with it, Apple and Google and everyone else who publishes maps should just ignore it. Trump, obviously, did go through with it: the United States Geological Survey, an agency within the Department of the Interior, which is within the executive branch and thus under the president’s purview, officially made the change on February 7. Now that it’s official US government policy, “just ignore it” really isn’t feasible. If that’s still your stance, I implore you to consider at least a bit more nuance.

But let’s first stipulate up front that there are multiple far more important and urgent issues facing the United States and the world, just four short weeks into the Trump 2.0 administration. Off the top of my head: Ukraine, Gaza, tariffs, DOGE, the rule of law. Whether you approve or disapprove of Trump’s actions on any or all of those issues, there should be no question that all of them are important and consequential. The name we see on maps for a body of water, not as much. But it’s the smallness, the relative unimportance, the spiteful pettiness of the renaming in the first place — down to the fact that until Trump’s executive action, there was no controversy, zero, none, nada, anywhere in the world, amongst any group of people, regarding the name of the Gulf of Mexico — that makes it interesting to examine in detail how Google and Apple have chosen to deal with it. It’s only because this particular issue is so spectacularly piddling that we can consider it in full.

The motivation behind the name change is simple as well. Trump didn’t change the US’s officially recognized name of, say, the Atlantic Ocean or the continent of Africa. He just as easily could, but he won’t. And it’s not like “Gulf of Mexico” was on a list of “debatable or controversial names” until he created this controversy out of thin air. It’s just the one name on the globe that a president of the United States can change to stick it to Mexico, a country Donald Trump has objectively racist feelings toward. Trump never campaigned on building a wall at our northern border with Canada, nor has he (yet?) attempted to rename Lake Ontario. It’s about Mexico, and asserting power by fiat. Trump has a lifelong history of putting his name on buildings he didn’t own. He’d rather have his name emblazoned on a building he doesn’t own than own a building that doesn’t bear his name. To Trump, the name on the sign is more important than the deed. So too, now, with the name on a map. The Gulf of Mexico is an international body of water that belongs to no nation, but declaring this new name implies that it heretofore belonged to Mexico, and now belongs to us, which is to say belongs to him, our unquestioned dear leader. That Trump took it from Mexico, without firing a shot — when in fact all he did was order a string to be changed in a government database. Shakespeare would have us believe that a sea by any other name would taste as salty. Trump doesn’t read Shakespeare.

How Google and Apple Are Labelling the Gulf, Globally

The first important thing to know is that Google Maps and Apple Maps are not singular global atlases. They both show different names (and in rare cases, different geographies) in different regions around the world. They each are more like a collection of regional atlases. In constrast, there’s only one Oxford English Dictionary. If the OED changes a word’s definition, or adds a new word, those changes appear to everyone in the world. My OED is your OED, no matter where you and I live or currently find ourselves on the globe. Google and Apple Maps aren’t like that. It’s better to think of them as services that provide region-by-region maps.

Google, to their credit, has a blog post describing and illustrating exactly what users around the world now see in Google Maps:

In the U.S., the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has officially updated “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America.” As we announced two weeks ago and consistent with our longstanding practices, we’ve begun rolling out changes to reflect this update. People using Maps in the U.S. will see “Gulf of America,” and people in Mexico will see “Gulf of Mexico.” Everyone else will see both names.

As their illustration shows, “both names” means putting “Gulf of America” in parentheses for users who are anywhere else in the world other than the U.S. or Mexico: “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.

Apple’s approach has been more Apple-like, which is to say without comment. They made no public comment before changing the name in Apple Maps, and they have made no public comment since. (I’ve asked Apple PR for comment, but gotten none.) I’d appreciate a statement, like Google’s, stating what users around the world should expect to see. But I also understand their desire to say as little as possible. In a sense, the labels on Apple Maps speak for themselves, and are the only thing that actually matters. I also appreciate, that by never declaring a policy on the matter, Apple can change its map labels without rescinding or amending a policy.

So without a statement from Apple describing how the Gulf is labelled around the world, I did what I could: I asked my followers on Mastodon who are the outside the US what they saw as the Gulf’s name, and to include screenshots if possible. That was on Friday, 14 February, after Apple Maps began showing “Gulf of America” in place of “Gulf of Mexico” to users here in the US. The response was overwhelming, with replies from people in over two dozen countries from around the world.² And at the time, their replies suggested that Apple was taking a subtly but intriguingly different approach from Google. To wit, while everyone in the US saw “Gulf of America” (with no mention of the established name), everyone everywhere else in the world still saw “Gulf of Mexico” (or their language’s translation of that name), with no mention, in parentheses or otherwise, of the new name now recognized by the United States.

I hoped that that was Apple’s plan, which would have been quietly subversive in isolating the United States as the only country in the world to even see the name “Gulf of America”. But I feared that Apple was simply slower than Google, that changes had been applied for users in the US first, but changes for the rest of the world simply hadn’t propagated. My fears were warranted.

Late in the evening (US Eastern Time) on Saturday, 15 February, new responses to my entreaty on Mastodon began showing labels in Apple Maps that matched Google’s:

• In the US: “Gulf of America”.
• In Mexico: “Gulf of Mexico”.
• Everywhere else: “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.

I believe that the determining factor for what label you see, at least for Apple Maps, is unrelated to your physical location as determined by GPS or your IP address, but simply the region setting of your OS. On both MacOS and iOS, that’s in Settings → General → Language & Region → Region. This makes sense — you can use Apple Maps (and Google Maps) with Location Services turned off. You can play with this setting on your device to see what users around world see in Maps without leaving your home, and without changing your device’s language. Thus, if you’re an American with your device set to the “United States” region, if you travel outside the US without changing your device settings, you’ll still see the US-specific new name for the gulf: “Gulf of America”, with its historic and world-recognized name — dare I say, its unambiguously correct name — not even referenced in parentheses.

The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

This whole thing, needless to say, sucks. It’s profoundly stupid, and the aspects that aren’t stupid are jingoistic. But the notion that Google or Apple might reasonably just ignore this and tell Trump (and the entire Republican Party, and their supporters) to go pound sand is facile. I’m not saying they couldn’t do it. Of course they could. That’s like saying Trump can’t just declare a new name for an international body of water with a heretofore uncontroversial 400-year-old name.

But it wouldn’t be reasonable. It is reasonable for Google and Apple Maps to defer to, or least acknowledge, the officially recognized names for each region in which they’re available. It’s not Google or Apple’s place to determine and adjudicate the official names on a map; their job is to recognize and display those names. In theory Google and/or Apple could position themselves as a global authoritative reference for geographic names. To be to maps something akin to the OED or Merriam-Webster to the English language. But if they were to pursue that route they’d put themselves in the position of adjudicating any and all controversies and disputes over names and borders. Civic government is where we should want such disputes arbitrated, if not resolved. Not by private companies. If Apple Maps is to be available in China, Apple Maps needs to present names and borders (and even the size of land masses — more on this below) that are amenable to the Chinese government. China sticks out because their demands are in stark contrast to the names and borders recognized by the rest of the world. Chinese maps are governed by CCP-mandated dogma. Most maps are governed by geographic and geopolitical reality. Taiwan, for example, is in fact an independent nation. Chinese maps (including those served by Apple to mainland Chinese users) label Taiwan as a province of China.

Now the United States is governed by another such dogma-driven regime.

In theory, maps ought not be political. In practice, they are and always have been. In theory, reasonable decisions and objectively correct decisions are one and the same when it comes to cartography. In practice, politics intercedes and they conflict. You can argue (and many people are) that Google and Apple should stick with the 400-year-old, recognized-the-world-over, and heretofore uncontroversial name “Gulf of Mexico”, and apply it globally. To simply ignore the new officially-recognized name of the gulf by the United States government. They could do that. No one would go to prison if they did. There would be no fines. But there would be a price to pay. Ignoring the new “Gulf of America” name recognized by the US government would, without question, court controversy. Republicans started to complain that Apple Maps hadn’t adopted the new name three weeks ago, before the change was even made official in the government’s GNIS reference database.

To ignore political reality is to court political controversy. It is not in the interests of large multinational corporations to court controversy. But it’s not possible to avoid controversy. What is reasonable to minimize controversy. There’s a famous quote from Michael Jordan, when he declined to publicly endorse the Democratic challenger to the unabashedly racist Republican Jesse Helms in the 1990 North Carolina Senate race: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

Some might say “That’s the problem with capitalism.” I’d argue that it’s one of the benefits of capitalism. Unless you think extreme polarization is in the service of society, you want to see major institutions that are apolitical. For-profit corporations naturally serve that role. Yes, there’s a profit motive. Republicans don’t just buy sneakers, they buy phones and conduct web searches too. But who wants to see a world where everything is polarized politically, where every retailer, every device maker, every online service provider, every restaurant, every single thing you do, buy, or visit, is viewed through a polarized political prism? That way lies madness.

Most Americans, and most people in the western world, are beyond exhausted by our current levels of societal polarization. Escalating tensions further is not just contrary to the bottom-line interests of Apple and Google, it’s in none of our interests. People just want good accurate maps. They don’t want to choose — or worse, to be forced to choose — between right-leaning maps and left-leaning maps.

So if your argument is that neither Apple nor Google should be showing the name “Gulf of America” to anyone, anywhere, I’m with you that that’s the correct cartographical stance. But it would constitute political malpractice. Maps are important services to both companies, but the editorial integrity of their maps isn’t close to their primary business or purpose. Maps aren’t to Google or Apple what the English language is to the OED or Merriam-Webster. (Or what the news is to, say, the Associated Press. Hold that thought.)

So whether Google and Apple should show the new name at all shouldn’t be the question we’re asking. The right question is necessarily more nuanced: Who should see which names, where? And Google and Apple’s answers to that question are, alas, disappointing and worrisome. I’ll repeat the seemingly identical policy both companies are actually presenting today, by region:

• United States: “Gulf of America”.
• Mexico: “Gulf of Mexico”.
• Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.

The best politically realistic option they could have chosen would be (I’ll use italics to emphasize that these are my own suggestions):

• United States: “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”.
• Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico”.

There’s no good reason to even show “Gulf of America” in parentheses outside the US. We’re the ones with the stupid name change on the books, so we’re the ones who get stuck seeing the stupid name. No one else should suffer the consequences of our political idiocy. But it is correct to show us, in America, the new dumb “Gulf of America” name. Again, if it were up to me, American users would see “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”, and everyone else would just see “Gulf of Mexico”. But that’s surely the best we in the reality-based community could hope for.

It’s absurd that users here in the US no longer see “Gulf of Mexico” at all. You can search for that term, and the “Gulf of America” will be the first result, but the 400-year-old name “Gulf of Mexico” no longer appears as a label on maps to US-region users for either Google Maps or Apple Maps. In any even vaguely reasonable political climate, even those in favor of the name change would endorse, perhaps even insist upon, a transitional period where the previous, familiar name appears in parentheses. Insisting that the name be changed in a snap, with no parenthetical reference to the previous name (a name that, again, has been recognized globally for over 400 years, and remains on every single printed map in existence, and every single work of literature and history referencing the Gulf) has some truly Orwellian memory hole vibes. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia. It’s always been the Gulf of America.

The US political right often makes use of the term “snowflake” to suggest that those on the left are delicate and fragile. But it sure seems snowflaky to object to “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)” as a map label. Sticks and stones may break their bones but a historically accurate parenthetical map label will hurt them? Food for thought as you enjoy your freedom fries.

Consider the simple premise that a map ought to make sense to someone who doesn’t follow current events. That ought to be uncontroversial. But to someone who has tuned out of the news for the last two months this change must seem downright baffling. Even worse, it’s misleading. There’s no reason for most people even to suspect, let alone know, that both Google Maps and Apple Maps show region-specific names and labels. Americans, in general, tend to be parochial. Showing Americans the name “Gulf of America”, without “(Gulf of Mexico)” strongly implies that this is now the new world-recognized name, when in the fact the truth is quite the opposite: it’s a name recognized by one and only one country.³

Not showing the new name, at all, to Americans would be unreasonably provocative to the Trump administration and its supporters. But showing the new name to every region in the world but Mexico itself is needlessly obsequious to Trump and his supporters. And making Mexico an exception to global naming policy isn’t an honor or a favor to them — it’s an implied insult. It insinuates that there’s something wrong with them, too, legitimizing the notion that outside the US Trumpist right, there’s a legitimate debate about the Gulf’s name. The implied message is “Here you go, you delicate idiots, we’ll make you the second of only two nations in the world regarding the displayed name of this body of water — you, and the United States.” Mexico neither asked for nor provoked any of this. (Mexico only achieved independence from Spain in 1821; the “Gulf of Mexico” name is twice as old as Mexico as a nation, and at least 150 years older than the United States.)

There are numerous countries where Google Maps and Apple Maps show region-specific names and differing disputed borders (or lack thereof). From a 2020 report in The Washington Post:

And the line in Western Sahara marking the northern border with Morocco disappears for Moroccans seeking it out on the Web — along with the region’s name altogether. The sparsely populated northwest Africa region is disputed between Morocco, which seized it in 1975, and the indigenous Sahrawi.

Sometimes that flies in the face of international consensus. Google Maps users inside Turkey can find the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, or TRNC, represented in the northern third of the Mediterranean island nation. The territory is not recognized by the United Nations, nor Google’s mapping competitors.

There are other places around the world where Apple and Google show downright crazy or incorrect things on maps. The latter have one thing in common: they are to comply with the demands of countries governed by thin-skinned autocratic men who surround themselves with sycophants. As mentioned above, in China, Taiwan is falsely labelled as a province of China in Apple Maps.⁴ (Google Maps, like Google services generally, aren’t available in China.) In 2021, in a report for The Information headlined “Inside Tim Cook’s Secret $275 Billion Deal with Chinese Authorities”, Wayne Ma reported:

Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial dispute between China and Japan, appear large even when users zoomed out from them. Chinese regulators also threatened to withhold approval of the first Apple Watch, scheduled for release in 2015, if Apple didn’t comply with the unusual request, according to internal documents.

Some members of the team back at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., initially balked at the demand. But the Maps app had become a priority for Apple, so eventually the company complied. The Diaoyu Islands, when viewed in Apple Maps in mainland China, continue to appear on a larger scale than surrounding territories.

You’ll stand on firm ground criticizing Apple for capitulating to China’s demands on that. But the root problem clearly isn’t Apple. It’s that China is governed by communist authoritarians, and authoritarianism warps minds — including those of the authoritarian leaders themselves. You know what no one says? “The leadership of China is completely sane and sensible, and their edicts are based on reality, not dogma.”

If you don’t see that Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico is on the same spectrum of nuttiness, then your mind, at least on this matter, has been warped. We can argue how far along that spectrum this “Gulf of America” thing is, but the only reasonable debate is of matters of degree. Apple and Google’s decision to show this made-up name in parentheses to everyone around the world is akin to showing China’s fictionally inflated size of the Diaoyu Islands to everyone in the world, as, say, a dotted outline surrounding the geographically accurate representations of the actual islands’ sizes. There’s a word for this stuff, and that word is propaganda.

Imagine if the government of France decreed that the English Channel is now the “French Channel”. Now imagine that Google and Apple Maps complied, even just to the degree of changing the label, outside France (which, per their company policies, should see “French Channel”) and the United Kingdom (which would still see only “English Channel”) to show the rest of the world, including us in the United States, “English Channel (French Channel)”. It would rightfully be considered insulting nonsense.

The only difference from my hypothetical and our reality with the Gulf of Mexico is that France, in addition to not having a narcissistic would-be autocrat as its president (yet?), is not the world’s lone remaining superpower. That’s what makes Google’s and Apple’s acquiescence worrisome, not merely irritating. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pithily observed over the weekend, on Bluesky, “My take is that your willingness to accept this Gulf of America nonsense is an indicator of your willingness to accept much worse things coming from this administration.”

The calculus Google and Apple should naturally be striving to achieve is finding the correct balance between two axes. One axis is integrity: both the cartographic integrity of the labels on the companies’ maps, and the institutional integrity — dignity even — of the companies themselves. Billions of people around the world trust Google and Apple. Their decisions on this mapping matter — no matter how trivial in the grand scheme of things — should strengthen, not erode, that trust.

The other axis is the minimization of controversy.

Simply maximizing integrity — by ignoring the “Gulf of America” name completely — would incur volcanic controversy within the United States. This calculated balance is behind my suggestion of showing “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)” within the United States, and showing just “Gulf of Mexico” everywhere else. Perhaps the inclusion of the longstanding name within parentheses is too much for freedom-fry-eating Republicans. But showing the new “Gulf of America” name in parentheses to everyone around the world is itself incurring controversy, and, more tellingly, is a strike against the integrity of both the companies and their maps.

Obsequiousness is inherently undignified. Google and Apple are proud companies. But both have chosen a gratuitously undignified presentation of this new American-dictated name to the entire world. Their mutual decision here ultimately seems driven not by integrity (to be sure), nor the minimization of controversy, but instead by a third, unnatural factor: fear.

Neither company will comment on it but surely this issue — inconsequential in the grand scheme of things though it may be — rose to the highest ranks of leadership. I’ll eat my hat if Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook didn’t both sign off on, if not actively participate in the decision-making process, of how to represent the Gulf of Mexico’s name. Much serious thought and consideration, from very smart people in Mountain View and Cupertino, went into determining how to respond to a profoundly silly and thoughtless executive order. But so eager are Pichai and Cook to avoid the wrath and vindictiveness of Trump that they’re willing to peddle his foolish “Gulf of America” name to everyone in the world who doesn’t live in Mexico. Wrapping it in parentheses is like wrapping a dead fish in newspaper — it doesn’t contain the stench.

Of course “The Gulf of America” name is stupid. Trump is stupid. Not stupid meaning dim or dull — would that he were, but he remains sharp, cunning, and highly agitated — but stupid because he’s nuts, warped by a narcissistic disorder of Napoleonic dimensions. The new name is as stupid as his MAGA hats are ugly. He might as well have sold the naming rights to Musk and Tesla. There is something really wrong with him, and this “Gulf of America” name change exemplifies at least one aspect of his narcissistic insanity. Everyone knows it. Even his supporters know it. They just tell themselves it’s fine. It’s how tribalism morphs into cultism.

The false note in Hans Christian Andersen’s parable “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is that once the emperor is called out, for in fact strutting around stark naked while ostensibly wearing a suit of clothes so fine that they’ve visible only to the eyes of smart and discerning people, is that all the townsfolk laugh at him. That wouldn’t happen. Many would laugh. Most, one hopes. But the emperor’s die-hard supporters would anger at the outburst of mockery, not laugh. He looks great, they’d insist, not like the jackass their own lying eyes tell them he is.

There is something wrong with Trump — and there is something lesser, but worrisomely wrong with those defending him.

Apple Maps and Google Maps do not consider themselves cartographic editorial authorities. They choose not to show one universal set of mapping (and naming) data to the world. They could. But they don’t. Actual editorial authorities, on the other hand, are under no obligation to follow the US GNIS’s official decisions. Wikipedia correctly still calls it The Gulf of Mexico. The Associated Press, whose stylebook is followed by many publications, small and large, issued the following guidance after Trump’s executive order last month:

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The body of water has shared borders between the U.S. and Mexico. Trump’s order only carries authority within the United States. Mexico, as well as other countries and international bodies, do not have to recognize the name change.

The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.

The Trump administration — petty, stupid, vindictive, and most of all, insecure fools that they are — has lashed out, and is now in the midst of a weeklong standoff during which they’ve prevented AP journalists from attending official events, entirely and solely because of the AP’s perfectly reasonable style guidance on the Gulf’s name. If Trump and his 2.0 administration had any modicum of confidence that this name change is correct and justified, they’d roll their eyes, not lash out, at the Associated Press for continuing to stipulate otherwise. What kind of government does stuff like that? Everyone knows the answer: tin-pot dictator autocracies. (And would-be autocracies, we can hope.)⁵ This whole “Gulf of America” thing is, if you take a step back, objectively hilarious. Like Pinocchio turning into a real boy, Trump renaming the Gulf of Mexico is like a late night comedy joke turned real. It’s beyond parody. If this had been on SNL during the 2024 campaign, you’d have laughed. And you should laugh now. Mockery is a powerfully subversive weapon against authority — even more effective, I’d argue, than a guitar.

But it’s worth directing our laughter at Google and Apple as well. They’re squandering their own hard-earned reputations for integrity to suggest there’s even a parenthetical alternative-name level of international legitimacy — not merely one man’s vanity — behind this. There isn’t. ★

Fox’s New Scorebug Graphic Design, and Our Innate Resistance to Change

Monday, 10 February 2025

A scorebug is industry jargon for the sub-genre of chyron (itself jargon) that shows ever-present information about a televised sporting event while you’re watching. These graphics display the teams, the score, the time remaining, and other metadata pertaining to the current situation. The current ball/strike count in baseball. The down and yards-to-go in football. The shot clock in basketball. That sort of thing.¹

Fox was the broadcast network for Super Bowl 59 yesterday, in which the Philadelphia Eagles utterly embarrassed the Kansas City Chiefs 40-22 (but which felt like a score of 114-0). The NFL rotates the Super Bowl annually between the networks that broadcast games. Fox has a tradition of unveiling updated on-screen graphics packages when it has the Super Bowl. This year, they didn’t just tweak the design, they completely re-thought it and redesigned it.

First, here’s Fox’s familiar old scorebug, as captured from their broadcast of Super Bowl 57, a game that also pitted the Eagles against the Chiefs two years ago.²

Here’s the new scorebug they debuted last night, in front of the biggest sports audience of the year:

I noticed the change immediately (of course), and my knee-jerk instant reaction was negative. Too big, too bold, too different. Don’t like. That’s natural. Human beings evolved to be alarmed by change. If everything looks the same as usual, everything is probably as safe as usual. If something looks jarringly different, it might be a sign that you’re about to be killed. (Evolutionarily speaking.)

So I started studying and considering the changes to Fox’s scorebug. I quickly not only warmed up to the new scorebug, I decided I really like it. It’s better than Fox’s old one, and better than every other network’s (which all largely look the same), in almost every single regard.

I like the new scorebug so much I (cross-)posted about it to social media during the game. My posts, in order of engagement: Threads (~6,600 likes, ~700 replies and reposts), Bluesky (~3,900 likes, ~600 replies and reposts), and Mastodon (179 likes, 53 replies and reposts).

No change an app developer can make will generate more commentary and emotional feedback from users than changing the app’s icon. Everyone sees an app’s icon, and has an opinion about them. That opinion, after a change, is usually “I like the old icon and hate the new one.” Likewise with a game broadcast’s scorebug — everyone sees them, and everyone has an opinion when they change. Most reactions to Fox’s new scorebug were negative, and many of those were really negative. Yahoo Sports ran a story under the headline “Super Bowl: Fox Sports Debuts New Scorebug, to Universally Negative Reaction”. The sports media-focused site Awful Announcing ran a take by Drew Lerner under the headline “Please Stop Debuting New Scorebugs During the Super Bowl” (subhead: “Can’t I just watch one Super Bowl without having to learn a new graphic?”). I have not even come close to reading all the replies to my social media take (well, except on Mastodon — it was quick to catch up there), but if you peruse them, you’ll be quick to see that most replies are from people who despise the change. A representative tasting:

“It looks as if they just let an intern knock something up in PowerPoint and didn’t bother having someone check it first. Awful. 👎”

“Lol. Muted for being a dumbass.”

“It’s hideous, and its overbearing size distracts from the actual content of the game.”

“The scorebug is absolutely horrible! I really hope they don’t adopt this for the 2025 season, or I will riot. Horrible design and very distracting especially the score, this looks like something out of Fortnite.”

“Looks like something out of Fortnite” isn’t the dis the last commenter thinks it is. A lot of people play and love Fortnite.

Here’s an expanded (from what I posted to social media) version of why I like, perhaps even love, the new scorebug. First, the primary items: who’s playing and what’s the score:

• Team initialisms: Huge.
• Team logos: None. Colors say enough.
• Score: Huge.
• Game clock: Big enough and centered.
• Needless chrome: None.

Every team in the league is known by fans by a 2- or 3-letter abbreviation of its home location, sort of like airport codes or stock tickers. They’re all obvious (unlike many airport codes). The Dallas Cowboys are DAL. The New England Patriots are NE. For the two cities which have two teams, New York and Los Angeles, the cities conveniently abbreviate to two letters and a third letter is drawn from the team nicknames: the Giants and Jets are NYG and NYJ; the Rams and Chargers are LAR and LAC.

Team logos are not as instantly identifiable, especially at small sizes. A bunch of teams have angry bird mascots: Eagles, Seahawks, Falcons, and Cardinals. Do you remember the Tennessee Titans’ logo? Or the Houston Texans’? The Cleveland Browns don’t even have a logo to speak of. (And they’re also not brown.) But I guarantee you know which teams are TEN, HOU, and CLE.³

And, importantly, these team initialisms are not represented by typography alone: they are in a box with the team’s primary color. That use of color does all the branding work necessary, and does it more effectively, at small sizes or viewed from far distances, than the team logos. (One small niggle I have is that the team initialisms are big white letters but are outlined by the team’s secondary color. If you look closely at my screen capture from yesterday’s Super Bowl above, you’ll see that “KC” is outlined in yellow and “PHI” in silver. This has the effect, at a normal viewing distance, of making the initialisms look a little fuzzy. The secondary color outlines are too subtle to have their intended effect of further branding the teams, and instead have the unintended effect of making the text look poorly rendered on screen. I bet Fox tweaks this by next year.)

The elimination of all needless chrome is arguably the most striking change of all, because Fox’s old scorebug had the most chrome with the most superfluous “3D” styling and textures. This isn’t minimalism, per se, but it’s a strike against needless decoration — reminiscent to my mind of Jony Ive’s radical redesign of iOS 7 a decade ago. Elements that can be conveyed by type and color alone are expressed by type and color alone.

Other noteworthy features:

• Timeouts remaining: Prominent but not distracting. Seeing how many timeouts a team has remaining was a huge problem with Fox’s old scorebug, and with most other networks’ current scorebugs. (Remaining timeouts are very important in close football games.)

• Current down and yards to go indicator (e.g. “1st & 10”): Placement atop the team initialism conveys which team has the ball. Fox’s old scorebug did have a “possession” indicator, but scroll back up to look at it, and see how long it takes you to figure out what it is. I’ll put the answer in a footnote.⁴

• Typography: Classic, legible, bold, timeless. It is also very “Fox” — the C in “KC” looks like the O in the classic “FOX” wordmark, and the zero (a digit Chiefs fans became very familiar with until the final seconds of the third quarter, because that’s how many points they’d scored until then — the Eagles cycled through a bunch of different digits en route to taking a 34-0 lead) looks pretty much exactly like the uppercase o in “FOX”.

Bigger and bolder typography adds clarity. But removing the background chrome lets viewers “see through” to any game action that happens at the bottom of the screen. To me, after just one game, the old Fox scorebug looks hopelessly dated; old-fashioned without any nostalgic charm. If anything, the new typography-first design is the one that looks timeless, evocative of the graphics from classic NFL Films productions.

---

Here’s the thing. NFL broadcasts didn’t always have scorebugs. I don’t mean that they had smaller score indicators on screen. I mean they had none at all. This was true for all major sports on TV, not just football (e.g. the premise of this gag from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Until 1994, the networks would show the score and time remaining when they cut to a commercial break, and then show it again when they came back from commercials. But while the game played, there was no score on screen. Part of that is technology: game telecasts were low-fidelity over-the-air transmissions to relatively small TV screens that were viewed from across the room. Go back far enough and there wasn’t even color. But a bigger aspect is inertia. Not showing the score at all times was the way games were always broadcast, so it was the way they were still broadcast.

Then came Fox.

For decades, there were three major TV networks in the US: ABC, NBC, and CBS. CBS had the Sunday game rights to the superior National Football Conference. “Superior” for the related reasons of team popularity and team market size, which matters for ratings. Chicago, Philly, Washington, Dallas, Frisco. NBC had the Sunday game rights for the American Football Conference with teams from generally smaller cities. Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Miami. Good teams, but smaller cities. (In 1993, though, NFC teams had won 9 consecutive Super Bowls.)

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network was an attempt — soon enough proven successful — to establish a fourth US network. At the time of their debut in 1987, Fox only had prime time programming on one night a week (Sundays, conveniently). In 1993 Murdoch and Fox upended the world of sports broadcasting by outbidding (stupid, tightfisted, hubristic) CBS for the rights to broadcast the NFC games on Sundays.

In 2018, Bryan Curtis published at The Ringer a comprehensive oral history of the deal and its consequences: “The Great NFL Heist: How Fox Paid for and Changed Football Forever”. If this sort of thing interests you at all, read that. It’s a great story, well told.

But so in 1994 Fox took over the NFC broadcasts. They poached from CBS all the announcers, cameramen, directors, and producers. (CBS didn’t need them anymore, because they had no football games to broadcast.) But while the voices announcing the game were familiar (including the best duo ever to do it: John Madden and Pat Summerall), the look and feel of the broadcasts was intentionally new and fresh and, well, because it was Fox, brash. This included an innovation they called the “Fox Box”. Quoting from Curtis’s oral history at The Ringer:

David Hill’s most controversial idea about the NFL was his simplest: He thought the score and clock should have a permanent home on the screen — a feature that became known as the “Fox Box.” A noisy group of critics and rival executives thought the Fox Box was a terrible idea. It would clutter the screen and drive people away from blowouts. But Hill was convinced, because he’d created a proto–Fox Box after a frustrating afternoon watching soccer in the U.K.

Hill: We’d been out walking our dogs. We’d come in, got a cup of tea, and switched the BBC on. I watched the game for a good 15 minutes. I don’t know what the score is. I’m thinking to myself, “Shit, I’d really like to know what the score is.” So I thought, “That’s easy. On a chyron, I’ll just put it up in the corner.” So I did it.

Madden: Instead of saying, “No, that’s a stupid idea, we got other things we have to do,” he said, “If the score and the time is the most important thing, why don’t we just put it up and leave it there?” That’s where the Fox Box came from. That was David Hill.

Dolgin: All the networks told us, “You’re screwing this up. You’re idiots to do this.”

Albert: The thought was, some networks won’t leave the time and score up because it’s a blowout and they didn’t want you to know it’s a blowout.

The “Fox Box” idea wasn’t just controversial, it was widely panned as stupid. The networks literally thought it would be better if many viewers didn’t know the score. And when the Fox Box appeared, many critics agreed. Here’s Dan Cox’s review of Fox’s opening week broadcast for Variety, in September 1994:

The network also still insists on that annoying see-through clock and score graphic in the upper-left corner of the screen throughout nearly the entire game. Fox Sports prexy David Hill has said it’s important to know the score and how much time is left when you sit down and the game is already on.

Well, yes. But how about those who actually watched the beginning of the game and would rather have their screen clear of graphics.

Who seems stupid now? Imagine the outcry if Fox had broadcast yesterday’s Super Bowl without any scorebug at all — you know, for those who would rather have their screen clear of graphics.

Change of any sort is always going to raise alarm, whether it’s actually better or not. When smoking bans started going into effect in cities 30 years ago, people loudly claimed that it would put restaurants and especially bars out of business. Smokers want to smoke and would stay home if they couldn’t, the argument went. Turns out, if you force smokers to go outside in the cold or even rain to smoke, they’ll do it. And a lot of other people — who had been staying home because they despised the stench of cigarettes — started going out more often. In hindsight banning cigarettes from shared public spaces (airplanes, for chrissake!) was obviously the correct decision. But change is hard to accept, no matter how obviously for the better.

I say Fox’s new scorebug is better, and raised a ruckus only because it’s so much better that what most viewers noticed is only that it’s so different. When you get used to it, you’ll see. This new design, with bigger bolder type but less needless chrome, pulls off the remarkable feat of conveying key information with more clarity both on the biggest of big screens — TVs in public spaces like bars and restaurants, which are viewed from a distance — and the smallest of small screens, our phones.

Different doesn’t always mean better. But better necessarily implies different. ★

Nike’s ‘So Win’ Won the Super Bowl

Monday, 10 February 2025

Well, the Philadelphia Eagles, of course, won the actual Super Bowl, winning in a romp so one-sided that they would have embarrassed the Chiefs less if they had pantsed Patrick Mahomes at the 50-yard line. But the second contest is for best commercial. And my vote goes to Nike.

The problem with modern Super Bowl commercials is they’re bland. Offensively bland. It really makes no sense to me. The commercial time is famously expensive — Fox was supposedly selling 30-second spots for last night’s game for $8 million — but the sponsors who buy that time tend to squander it with absolute mindless pap.

Fewer and fewer sponsors each year, it seems, attempt to bring something actually interesting. Something different. Something with some punch. Something that’s actually funny. Something that makes you actually feel. You don’t have to make a genuinely artistic short film, like Apple’s Ridley-Scott-directed 1984 spot heralding the introduction of the Macintosh — the ad that is justifiably regarded as the best commercial ever made. Some of what I’d list among the best Super Bowl ads ever were silly gimmicks that revelled in their abject silliness, like the “Bud Bowl” commercials (featuring anthropomorphic bottles of Budweiser and Bud Light playing football) — very far from “high art” but very fun, and created specifically to be shown once and only once, in the context of the Super Bowl. One simple measure is whether the ads are memorable. Most of the ads in last night’s game I forgot by the time the game resumed after the break.

I don’t know why anyone would book and commission a Super Bowl commercial if they weren’t trying to do something or say something memorable with the spot. Still, though, there are always at least a handful of standouts.

My favorite yesterday was Nike’s “So Win” spot, a heralding of its own — not for a new Nike product, but for the explosion in interest in women’s sports, featuring WNBA phenom Caitlin Clark and a few other top women’s athletes. Gorgeous black and white cinematography. Led Zeppelin’s rollicking “Whole Lotta Love” as the soundtrack. And a righteous manifesto of a message, delivered with pitch-perfect gusto by narrator Doechii. Nike, it turns out, hadn’t run a Super Bowl ad since 1998, and they came back with a banger that to me reinvigorated the Nike brand. They’ve been in a bit of a free fall and I think this ad was intended as much to inspire Nike employees as it was to female athletes and sports fans. (Shades of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign.) I’ve re-watched this spot a few times while writing this post and I like it more each time.

Honorable mentions:

• ChatGPT’s branding spot, positioning AI alongside historical breakthroughs in technology. Loved it. I think it was supposed to be a mystery until the very end of the 60-second spot who the ad was for and what exactly it was about, but I guessed “ChatGPT” about 5 seconds in. I kind of hate making a third comparison to an old Apple ad, but ChatGPT’s spot does evoke — not as a rip-off, but homage — the 90-second “There are a thousand no’s for every yes” opening film from WWDC 2013, perhaps the nadir of Apple’s post-Steve-Jobs grief.
• Stella Artois: David Beckham learns that he has a twin brother, named Other David Beckham, whom his parents abandoned at birth in America. Beckham sets off to meet him. Don’t read anything more about it, just watch. Good kicker at the end, too.

Dishonorable mention: ★

• Tubi is a streaming platform owned by Fox. Apparently it’s existed since 2014 and has been owned by Fox since 2020, but I’d forgotten it existed until this week, when it was in the news as the streaming platform carrying the Super Bowl. Fox ran a couple of house ads, intended to promote Tubi, about a young man born with a head shaped like a cowboy hat. Memorable, yes, but the execution was revolting, not funny. The message I took was that Tubi is the streaming app that will make you feel grossed out.

My 2024 Apple Report Card

Friday, 7 February 2025

This week Jason Snell published his annual Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2024. As I’ve done in the past — 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 — I’m publishing my full remarks and grades here. On Snell’s report card, voters give per-category scores ranging from 5 to 1; I’ve translated these to letter grades, A to F, which is how I consider them.¹

Most of my grades are unchanged from a year ago. For those that have changed, I’ve noted last year’s grade in parentheses. I didn’t realize this as I was writing my report card, but each of my grades that changed from last year was lower. Not one grade went up. Thinking about that as I write this preamble today, it feels correct: there are several areas where Apple maintained consistent excellence in 2024, but I can’t think of a single area where Apple levelled up. Not one. That feels like a problem.²

It’s also worth noting that “Siri” is not a standalone category in the report card. We graders simply comment on it as one aspect within other categories and products, like HomePod or Apple Music. Historically that made sense — when it started, Siri was just a flashy new feature of iOS 5. At this point, though, I think “Siri/Apple Intelligence” clearly deserves to be considered as a category unto itself. One way to think about it: anything that comprises the entire domain of a senior Apple executive probably ought to be its own category on the report card. For Siri and Apple Intelligence, that’s John Giannandrea. For another: Apple’s own heavy marketing of Apple Intelligence suggests they themselves consider it a category-level aspect of the company. I’ve suggested this to Snell, and he’s considering adding it as a proper category next year. (And, unsurprisingly, given his own sharp writing on the subject, he was already thinking about it before I pinged him.)

If “Siri/Apple Intelligence” were a category for this report card, I’d have graded it a D — and much closer to an F than a C. Longstanding Siri features have not only not gotten better, they’ve seemingly gotten worse. Apple is simply not a relevant player in the explosively popular LLM game. The features under the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella mostly feel like Apple shipped them a full year ahead of readiness simply because the rest of the industry — and Wall Street — is way ahead of them, and they felt the need to ship what they had, ready or not. There are a lot of obviously useful potential AI-powered features — ones that integrate between apps, and/or use your personal data on-device — that, thanks to the tightly restricted sandboxing system Apple itself designed for iOS, only Apple itself can provide via AI. It doesn’t matter that Apple doesn’t offer, say, its own web search engine, because Safari can use whatever search engine you want. It does matter that Siri sucks because only Siri can tightly integrate at the system level with your device, and with your private cross-application data. The saving grace — what kept me from giving this if-it-were-a-category category an F — is that a few of Apple’s ML/AI features are actually pretty great. Image search in Photos is excellent, downright amazing at times. The new Clean Up generative AI object/person removal tool in Photos is very good — both technically, and in terms of striking an opinionated balance regarding the nature of photography itself. Private Cloud Compute is a tremendously ambitious initiative — but we haven’t seen much fruit from it yet.

Mac: A

The Macs that Apple is shipping are better than ever. The most popular Mac models, by far, are the laptops, and both the MacBook Pro and Air lineups had good years. Even better, both now seem to be on regular annual upgrade schedules: MacBook Pros in the fall, MacBook Airs in the spring. Personally I am especially pleased, borderline ecstatic, regarding the new nano-texture (matte) display option now available on MacBook Pros for $150 extra. (They don’t even charge more for the option on the 16-models than 14-inch.)

The only hitch in the lineup are the Macs Apple hasn’t been shipping: the Mac Studio and Mac Pro remain unchanged since 2023, when the M2 models debuted. My presumption/hunch is they skipped the M3 generation for engineering reasons pertaining to TSMC’s first-generation 3nm process, and will be back on track in 2025 with new M4-generation models around WWDC.

MacOS 15 Sequoia, like 14 Sonoma and 13 Ventura before it, is a fine release. Reliable and familiar. Apple Intelligence features that I largely don’t use (or at least don’t use much yet) are easily ignored and do not get in the way of what is tried and true about, by far, the greatest computing platform the world has ever seen.

iPhone: A

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Nothing has been broke regarding the iPhone lineup, and Apple hasn’t tried to fix anything. This is good. Changes for the sake of change are the surest sign of a company in decline. Stagnation and hubris are concerns for any wildly successful product, but it takes confidence to let great design speak for itself without making facile unnecessary changes.

Camera Control is the big new hardware change in the iPhone 16 generation, and while I’d like to see the actual button improve (I think it’s too hard to press), in practice I make frequent use of it. I spent some time back on an iPhone 15 over the holidays and I instantly missed having a Camera Control button to launch the Camera app. Also: kudos to Apple for bringing Camera Control to the entire iPhone 16 lineup, not just the Pro models.

iOS 18 is refined, mature, and familiar.

iPad: C

The iPad hardware story is excellent. iPad Pros got the M4 chips months ahead of the Mac, and now have an excellent nano-texture display option. (Please, Apple: bring nano-texture to the iPhone. Take my money.) The iPad Air got a fine update to the M2 chip in May. And the iPad Mini got its first update since 2021, and thus continues to be a product in Apple’s lineup.

But iPadOS still strikes me like the no-man’s-land platform: nowhere near as capable productivity-wise as a Mac; nowhere near as portable or as conceptually simple as an iPhone. I made a concerted effort not to use my iPad for anything but long-form reading in recent months. I find myself noticeably more productive for it. Trying to work on an iPad, for me, continues to feel like trying to perform surgery while wearing mittens.

Wearables Overall: B

AirPods 4 with ANC are a terrific update. AirPods Pro 2, though years-old hardware, saw significant software improvements this year — most notably, widely acclaimed support for use as certified hearing aids. AirPods continue to exemplify Apple at its best.

Apple Watch: C (last year: B)

Series 10 watches feature a new display that supports once-per-second updates while in energy-saving always-on mode. So the seconds hand on an analog face can “tick” once per second even when the display isn’t fully on. But Apple only enabled this ticking seconds indicator on two watch faces, both new to WatchOS 11: Flux and Reflections. Setting aside the fact that I personally don’t like either of those faces (Flux in particular seems deliberately obtuse), this is ridiculous. WatchOS 11 offers, by my quick count, at least 33 different watch faces that offer a non-digital seconds hand or indicator. And only 2 of them support the new 1Hz refresh rate? That’s bullshit. And it wasn’t just a launch thing, because here we are in February, with WatchOS 11.3, and zero additional watch faces have been updated to support it. This is not how a serious watchmaker treats its watches. I will admit to caring far more about always-on seconds hands than most people, but this isn’t how a serious watchmaker deals with technical breakthroughs like this new display with a 1Hz refresh rate. Not just most, but every single watch face should have been updated to support ticking seconds. Apple Watch is turning more into a fitness tracker that happens to show the time, and away from serving as a proper watch.

Also: no Ultra 3 this year. The year-old Ultra 2 did gain a very nice black titanium color option, but that’s it. Kind of weird for a watch that starts at $800 — and that seems quite popular — to skip a year of silicon improvements.

Vision Pro: B (last year: N/A)

Is it a hit? No, far from it. But I remain unconvinced that Apple ever had much hope that this first Vision device would sell in much higher quantities than it has. The narrative that it’s a laughably overpriced bust reminds me of the original Macintosh in 1984, whose $2,500 price tag, adjusted for inflation, works out to over $7,500 in today’s dollars. After an initial wave of publicity on launch, the original Macintosh sold so poorly that it was arguably the primary impetus for John Sculley and Apple’s board to fire Steve Jobs and exile him from the company. Many pundits of the era confidently proclaimed that the entire concept of a GUI was a gimmick with no future.

Am I predicting that the Vision platform will have as bright and essential a future ahead of it as the Macintosh did in 1984? No. But I suspect it has a bright and essential future ahead of it. The entire concept and paradigm is so new and different that, like the Macintosh 40 years prior, the product had to ship years before a version will be made at a price that appeals to the mass market, and years before there’s all that much to do using it.

But, as it stands, Vision Pro today offers an incredible experience for watching traditional movies and shows, and a breakthrough experience for watching spatial content. If Bang & Olufsen sold this product in a form that only played movies — no “spatial computing” — it would cost $10,000 and some people would consider it well worth the price. Spatial computing feels fun to me, but not very productive. That could change, and I suspect “fun but not productive” is how I would have described trying to work on a Macintosh in 1984 vs. an Apple II. And Vision Pro’s remarkable (and with VisionOS 2, much improved) Mac Virtual Display feature is a highly-productive environment for work.

I can’t give Vision Pro an A for 2024, but I foresee A’s in future years.

Home: D (last year: C)

I can’t name one improvement to HomeKit or anything Home-related in 2024, and this is a platform sorely in need of many improvements. Fingers crossed for 2025, though. I know there are talented people on that team, and they have to be up to something.

Apple TV: C (last year: B)

I’m a very happy daily (well, nightly) Apple TV user. But what exactly improved or changed in 2024? Anything? It may well be fair to say the current hardware — Apple TV 4K 3rd-gen, which shipped in November 2022 — is fine, and this is a hardware platform that only needs updates every 3 or 4 years, but we’re grading what happened in 2024.

Also: I feel like Apple has never yet made a truly great remote control for this platform. The current one is their best yet, but it has obvious flaws.

Services: B

TV+ is far from the biggest streaming service, but I’d argue adamantly that it has by far the highest batting average for quality content. Movies are still a weakness: Wolfs should have been great but was mediocre and forgettable. And that was TV+’s best movie of the year. But TV+ series continue to excel: Slow Horses had another crackerjack season, For All Mankind finished a good fourth season, and new shows like Dark Matter, Bad Monkey, and Presumed Innocent were all strong. TV+ is also a great streaming platform for young kids.

iCloud, especially with iCloud Plus, remains secure, fast, and reliable. It enables so much seamless continuity (hence Apple’s “Continuity” umbrella brand for those features) across devices.

But here we are again, with me repeating the same gripe from previous years: it’s miserly that Apple is still offering a mere 5 GB of storage at the free tier, and have left the paid-tier storage allotments unchanged since like forever. I crap bigger than 5 GB. I wonder how many zillions of iPhone users out there don’t have device backups because they only have a free iCloud account with 5 GB? The Apple One bundle is a good deal, but the free iCloud tier should be genuinely useful for backing up a modern iPhone. And paid Plus tiers should now offer more storage than they do.

Hardware Reliability: A

No news remains great news in this category.

Apple OS Quality: B
Apple Apps: B

Unchanged comment, and grade, from a year ago: I have concerns and complaints about aspects of the direction Apple’s software design is headed (or in some ways, has been now for years), but their software reliability has been very good for me.

One odd trend: several of Apple’s newest apps, like Journal and Sports (and now, though outside the temporal boundary for a 2024 report card, Invites) are only available for iPhone. Not even iOS, including iPhone and iPad. Just iPhone. Journal in particular belongs on iPadOS and MacOS, too, where people have hardware keyboards for writing.

Developer Relations: D (last year: C)

Fourth year in a row with basically the same comment: Resentment over App Store policies continues to build. Frustrations with the App Store review process seem unresolved. Apple’s goal should be for developer relations to be so good that developers look for excuses to create software exclusively for Apple’s platforms. The opposite is happening.

The big change globally this year is the Digital Markets Act going into effect in the EU. I stand apart from many in the Cupertino punditry racket in applauding Apple for their compliance efforts. I think they’ve complied with a terrible law as best they can while protecting their own vision for how their platforms should be designed and work. (And, of course, protecting their own vision for how Apple should be able to monetize those platforms.) But even I — a guy who thinks Apple has done a remarkable job shipping an enormous amount of work in order to comply with the DMA — can’t and won’t argue that any of Apple’s efforts on the DMA front have repaired or improved its relationship with third-party developers.

Despite the situation being largely unchanged, I’ve adjusted my grade on this subject from C to D this year, because stagnation is catching up to Apple. More of the same is making matters worse. And I think we saw that with the relative dearth of native app support for Vision Pro. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem with a new platform like VisionOS. The best way to generate developer interest in a new platform is to sell a lot of units to a lot of users who are looking for apps to use and games to play. But the best way to sell a lot of hardware units to a lot of users is to have a deep exclusive-to-the-platform ecosystem of both first- and third-party apps and games.

With previous new developer platforms, like iOS and Mac OS X, Apple powered through this initial conundrum by attracting developers who just wanted to create awesome new software for an awesome new platform. That enthusiasm was tempered greatly last year for VisionOS, and I think it was a lot more about how developers feel about Apple and the App Store than how they feel about Vision Pro itself.

Social and Societal Impact: B (last year: A)

Snell’s prompt for this category states, “Consider anything you deem appropriate, including education and environmental initiatives, commitment to accessibility and diversity, treatment of Apple’s work force, and other political and policy stances.” Apple’s efforts on the environmental front continue to strike me as extraordinary. Their accessibility features are so far ahead of the rest of the industry that I don’t even know who’s in second place. On social issues, by staying true to its longstanding, humane, common sense values, Apple’s culture has seemingly remained utterly consistent through a series of tumultuous years in our society at large, during which other companies have ping-ponged first sharply left, and now sharply right.

If I stopped there, that would make for an obvious A grade. But: politics. I understand (I think) Tim Cook’s thinking and approach. I wouldn’t want his job, and genuinely wonder at times who would. Sing-song congratulatory tweets leave a bitter taste, but I’m amenable to the argument that CEOs must play the cards they’ve been dealt, not the cards they’d hoped for. If you have to serve shit sandwiches, serve shit sandwiches — but don’t tell us they taste like pumpkin pie. Tim Cook can’t donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration slush fund when Apple donated a mere $43,200 to Biden’s and expect us to do anything but laugh at the supposed justification that Cook “believes the inauguration is a great American tradition, and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity.” That’s Tim Cook’s hoagie-sized shit sandwich to eat, and it’s disrespectful to pitch us on taking a few bites ourselves to help him get through it.

I genuinely believe Cook is doing what’s best for Apple, and that’s quite literally his job. But it was true during the first Trump administration, and already is again in the second, that what’s best for Apple politically is in conflict with what’s best for the country and for the world. ★

Bootable Mac Startup Drive Backups, and Another Ode to SuperDuper

Thursday, 6 February 2025

Dave Nanian, last week at the Shirt Pocket blog:

Just a quick post: macOS 15.3 is now out, and with it, a fix for the broken replicator. As such, macOS copying will work again with Erase, Then Copy backups. No update to SuperDuper is necessary (but feel free to install our v3.10 Beta 2, below). [...]

Thanks for your patience as we waited for the fix from Apple. I know I’m relieved that I (hopefully) will no longer be bombarded with support because of it!

You may recall that this was a bug introduced in MacOS 15.2, which prevented Shirt Pocket’s excellent long-standing utility SuperDuper from making a bootable clone of your startup drive. Great news, bug fixed, hurrah.

Back in December, though, when the bug had just started circulating, Mike Bombich, developer of Carbon Copy Cloner (the long-standing also-excellent archrival to SuperDuper), wrote a post that I took to suggest that he thought the bug was not a bug, “Bootable Backups Have Been Deprecated for Several Years”:

While some developers seem surprised by a change in macOS 15.2, we’ve known for several years that making bootable backups would eventually become impossible. We shifted CCC’s strategy away from relying on External Boot so our users wouldn’t be affected by this inevitable result.

I took a few days off last week to help a family member, and returned to find the Mac community all aflutter with comments about bootable backups not working after the 15.2 update and comparisons of Apple to The Grinch. After reviewing a lot of comments on this subject, I felt it was time to weigh in. Apple is taking a lot of heat for this “bug” in 15.2, but if there is any finger-pointing here, I think it should be directed towards any developers that have misled their users into believing that ASR and “bootable backups” had any place in a backup/recovery strategy post-Big Sur.

That feels like some shade thrown toward Nanian and Shirt Pocket, but here we are with MacOS 15.3, and bootable startup drive clones are back, so I have to question who needs to don sunglasses here.

I don’t think anyone would dispute that “creating a bootable startup drive clone” has gotten complicated in the Apple Silicon era, which began with MacOS 11 Big Sur in late 2020. Not to mention the complications that were introduced with the switch from HFS+ to APFS with MacOS 10.13 High Sierra in 2017, and the read-only boot volume and SIP with MacOS 10.15 Catalina in 2019. M-series Macs boot weirder than Intel-based Macs. Not bad weird. I think it’s all justified in the pursuit of security (SIP stands for System Integrity Protection, and is aptly named) and elegant system architecture. But booting is now makes-things-much-more-difficult-than-before weird for tools like SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner.

It’s also true that from the perspective of most Mac users, all of these changes have been, unambiguously, changes for the better. Catastrophic boot drive errors seem to occur with less frequency than ever. Part of that is simply because SSDs are far more reliable than spinning hard disks, but part of it too is that APFS seems more reliable than HFS+ ever was. HFS+ wasn’t unreliable — and its reliability levelled up with the addition of journaling back in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther¹ — but APFS seems more reliable. When catastrophe does strike, the path to recovery is better than ever. In the old days, you’d need to find a bootable system software DVD (or, going back in time, a CD, or a floppy...) or a bootable USB drive, and reinstall the OS from disk. In recent years, however, that’s been replaced by the built-in MacOS Recovery system that lets you do things like run Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, reinstall the entire OS from scratch, and more. No hunting around for a special CD/DVD or thumb drive (that Murphy’s Law suggests you won’t have handy when you suddenly find yourself needing one). Just long-press the power button on your Mac and boom — you’re in Recovery mode.

I have no data to prove that APFS is more reliable than HFS+ was, so to check my gut feeling, I asked both John Siracusa (filesystem aficionado²) and Nanian (who works in the trenches of SuperDuper customer support). Both agreed that APFS is more reliable. Nanian further observed, though, that when things do go catastrophically wrong with an APFS disk now, it tends to be at a very low level — corruption at the container or volume level. And if Apple’s own Disk Utility can’t fix it, there aren’t any third-party tools that can.³ That’s the bad news. The good news is, if the problem really is just with uncorrectable corruption (and not a hardware failure with the device), you can use Recovery to fully erase the drive and container, clean install the OS, and restore your data from your backup drive using Migration Assistant — and that will almost certainly work.

So in some sense, the argument goes, there’s no need for bootable clones of a startup drive any more. Just clone your data, not your whole drive, to an external drive for backup purposes, and if something goes wrong with your startup volume:

1. Boot into Recovery.
2. Try repairing the startup disk using Disk Utility from within Recovery. Hierarchically, you do this at the volume level first, then container level, then the device itself. A device encompasses containers, containers encompass volumes, and you should repair from the inside out. This support document from Apple, “Repair a Storage Device in Disk Utility on Mac”, explains and illustrates the process.
3. If Disk Utility can’t fix it, use Recovery to erase the disk, then install the OS.
4. During the first boot after the clean install, choose the option to “restore” (which is effectively like running Migration Assistant) and choose your external drive, with the backup clone of your previous startup volume, as the source. In other words, treat your restored Mac as though it’s a brand-new Mac. (If you get to the point of creating a new, fresh user account, you’ve gone too far.)

The backup you use in step #3 above does not need to have MacOS installed on it, or, if it does have a bootable copy of MacOS, that version doesn’t need to be the same version of MacOS that Recovery clean installed on the internal drive. In SuperDuper, you can just use “Backup - all files” with Smart Update, which clones everything in the writeable “Data” volume, but doesn’t copy the OS from the read-only “System” (OS) volume (because it can’t, for technical reasons you and I need not worry about — seriously, this stuff will take you deep into the weeds).

But let me try to speedrun through what I, as a SuperDuper user, want to know and understand. To make a clone of your internal startup drive to an external drive, you want to use “Backup - all files”. (SuperDuper’s “Backup - user files” will only back up what’s in user account home folders inside /Users/. That will include most of your personal files, but it won’t include system-wide data that’s shared between all users, such as applications you’ve installed in the top-level /Applications/ folder, or everything in /Library/. I’m sure some people have a need for “Backup - user files”, but I don’t. And it’s worth pointing out that an external drive that contains cloned data from “Backup - user files” cannot serve as the source for Migration Assistant. That’s a dealbreaker for me. The primary purpose of a SuperDuper backup, for me, is its ability to serve as the source for Migration Assistant, which, as I’ve written previously, is an astonishingly good and useful tool.)

When you run “Backup - all files”, you have the following options:⁴

• Erase, then copy — This completely erases the external destination volume before copying over the entire contents of your internal startup drive. This takes longer than Smart Update, but, importantly, “Erase, then copy” will clone the entire internal disk, including the read-only System volume containing MacOS. This should leave you with a bootable clone of your startup drive.
• Smart Update — This does what you think a “smart” update would do. Instead of copying everything, every time, it just copies and erases what’s necessary to make the Data volume on the destination disk identical to the Data volume on the source disk. If you start with a fresh, empty external drive as the destination, it has to copy everything, but after that, Smart Update runs will be faster. But the nature of how it works means that it can only clone the read/write Data volume of your startup drive. That means it won’t copy the OS from the read-only System volume. No matter what else you do (which I’m about to cover), that’s OK, because the result of a Smart Update is an external drive containing all of your own files and installed apps, and, crucially, it’s a disk that you can use as the source for Migration Assistant.

So if you always use “Erase, then copy”, your SuperDuper external backups will always be bootable clones of your startup drive, with the same version of MacOS installed as your internal disk. The only downside to doing it this way is that backups take longer, because you’re erasing the external drive and copying everything every time. (You don’t have to supervise SuperDuper backups in any way, so how long they take doesn’t really matter much.)

If you start with “Smart Update”, you won’t have a bootable external drive (because the read-only System volume is never copied over), but you will have all your own files, and the external drive will work as a source for Migration Assistant.

If you start with “Erase, then copy” to create the initial backup clone, but subsequently use “Smart Update” for incremental backups, all of your data and installed apps will be updated on the external drive each time you back up. And the drive should remain a bootable backup — but the version of MacOS installed on the external drive will remain unchanged from the initial “Erase, then copy” backup. This is how I’ve been running SuperDuper.

Why Bootable Backup Drives Still Matter

In the course of writing this article — which I’ve been thinking about, and researching, on and off since December, when the MacOS 15.2 replicator bug broke SuperDuper’s ability to create bootable backups — I’ve shaken some of my own longstanding assumptions about my backup needs. I’ve been making bootable clones with SuperDuper since whenever I started using it, which was over two decades ago. The earliest mention of SuperDuper on Daring Fireball is this post, explaining how I installed OS updates at the time, from December 2004:

I use SuperDuper for cloning my entire startup drive. I highly recommend it.

Still true! I have no intention to stop making regular backups of my entire startup drive using SuperDuper. But: do I care anymore whether they’re bootable? If you’d asked me before December, I would have said yes, definitely. Why? Because, my thinking went, if something catastrophic happened to my internal startup drive, and I was working on something urgent, I’d want to get back up and working again as soon as possible. Rather than wait for MacOS Recovery to reinstall the OS on the internal drive and then wait for Migration Assistant to copy my data from my external drive to the clean install of MacOS on the internal drive, I could just boot from the external backup drive and get back to work immediately.

I’ve been lucky enough over my now many years as a Mac user to have suffered very few disk calamities like that. But I’ve encountered them. And there have been situations when having an up-to-date bootable backup drive has been useful, if not crucial. But, upon reflection, I realize now that it’s been many many years since the last time I even thought to boot from my backup drive. I used to even periodically test that the backup drive was, in fact, bootable, as a precaution. I haven’t done that in years.

I mentioned above that for my regular backup cloning, I use SuperDuper’s Smart Update, which leaves the read-only installation of MacOS on the backup drive unchanged. I just checked today and while my MacBook Pro is running the current version of MacOS (15.3 Sequoia), the version on my cloned backup drive was 12.6.1 Monterey, which was released in October 2022. (That’s the last time I did a full “Erase, then copy” backup in SuperDuper.) That effectively means my backup drive hasn’t been bootable, or at least not usefully bootable. For example, all my email files are in the mailbox format expected by Apple Mail in MacOS 15.3; I doubt that Apple Mail from MacOS 12.6 can read those mailbox files. The same is probably true for just about every app — or at least every system app from Apple — that I use. Surely some software from MacOS 12.6 can’t read the files or settings from the software from MacOS 15.3, and I’ll bet a lot of it can’t. New software can often recognize old file formats generated by older versions of the software; old software can’t recognize new file formats that were introduced after the old software was written.

What you should do, if you really want bootable startup drive backups via SuperDuper, is use “Erase, then copy” after every MacOS software update. Or just use “Erase, then copy” every time. But the fact that I wasn’t doing this for the last two years doesn’t mean my cloned backup drive has been useless. It just means it’s only been useful for restoring backed-up data, not for booting my Mac. Which, when I think about it, is how I would have used it if I had needed to. I don’t work in a fast-paced production environment with tight deadlines. I think MacBooks really only run properly when booting from their internal drives, anyway. If something ever goes wrong with mine, I’ll try using Disk Utility to repair it, and if that fails, I’ll turn to MacOS Recovery to clean install the OS and then use Migration Assistant to copy my data back from my external backup drive.

Thinking about it, booting from an old version of MacOS on an external backup drive containing data from the current version of MacOS sounds like a good way to corrupt some of the files on that disk — subverting the entire purpose of a backup. (Most likely, if you try this, the Mac will simply fail to boot.) It’s reckless to boot from and “use” a backup drive for production when the source drive that it’s a clone of has failed — at that point, your backup drive is likely your only local copy of the data from that failed drive. It really only ought to be treated as a read-only source for restoration. And the way Macs are designed to work today, with MacOS Recovery and Migration Assistant, makes that pretty easy.

The last time I had a catastrophic problem with my startup drive was in 2010, and I wrote about how I recovered, gracefully and with no drama (nor, seemingly, an iota of lost data), in a piece I titled “An Ode to DiskWarrior, SuperDuper, and Dropbox”. More of my digital life is in the cloud — and thus replicated in at least one place other than my Mac’s startup drive — now than then. Off the top of my head, I’m hard pressed to think of anything I do on my Mac that isn’t synced to cloud storage via Dropbox, iCloud, or IMAP. Starting in 2014 I’ve also been a customer of Backblaze, a set-it-and-forget-it online backup service (that, for many years, has been a regular sponsor of this site and The Talk Show, but I recommend it because it’s good, not because they have been and might someday again be a sponsor). That’s another copy of all my personal data backed up somewhere.⁵

Having my SuperDuper-cloned backup drive be bootable is nice to have, but I really can’t say I need it any more. 20, 15, even just 10 years ago, that wasn’t true — I really did want the ability to boot from my backup drive at a moment’s notice. But that’s really not true any more for me. It probably isn’t for you, either. It definitely isn’t true for most Mac users.

But it remains true for some people, who are using (or responsible for) Macs in high-pressure tight-deadline production environments. Live broadcast studios. Magazines or newspapers with a deadline for the printer that’s just hours (or minutes) away. Places with strict security/privacy rules that forbid cloud storage of certain critical files. If the startup drive on a production machine fails, they need to get up and running now. Plug in a backup drive, restart, and go. Anything longer than that is unacceptable.

That’s not me. That’s probably not you. But there are a lot of people whose work environment that describes. For as much as Apple Silicon Macs have become iOS-like devices in many ways, they’re still Macs at heart: workstations. There remain people inside Apple who know that, too. ★