669: Ternus, Take the Wheel

Kicking off with peak Richmond chaos: we got a rare December snowfall, and the city tapped out before a single flake hit by pre‑canceling school, which still cracks me up given how little snow we actually got.

Calling off school makes sense for a blizzard, but two days for a few inches feels wild, even if the plows and salt aren’t there.

The real issue is the neighborhood streets; the main roads get cleared eventually, but the side streets stay sloppy.

And despite all the giant SUVs out there, most have low‑profile tires and drivers who assume size equals snow skills, which backfires.

I still owe my daughter a proper snow‑lot lesson like I did with my son; the window closes fast once the plows hit the lots.

It reminded me of watching LA drivers pirouette in simple rain years ago; when weather is unusual, people just lose the plot.

Follow‑up: Apple Fitness+ is expanding to dozens of new regions and adding AI‑dubbed workouts in Spanish, German, and Japanese using voices modeled on the trainers, plus a K‑pop music category.

Whatever its internal status, Fitness+ is at least shipping things, which is more than you can say for some high‑end Macs lately.

The dubbing tech sounds like what powers the watch’s “workout buddy” voice, which already sounds impressively natural in my workouts.

There’s controversy here: game studios have pushed actors to license their voices for synthesis, so contracts and fair pay matter, and cross‑language sounds may expose limits in the models.

If you’re a native speaker of those languages, try the dubs and tell us whether they sound right.

We’d love to know if it passes as natural or if the AI tells on itself.

One eyebrow‑raiser: Apple’s statement quoted Jay Blahnik despite recent workplace allegations, which Apple seemed to downplay.

Big companies often shield powerful execs; if this reached daylight, it was probably pretty bad.

TLS certificates are shrinking to roughly a month and a half, which makes automation mandatory, and Apple reportedly pushed hard for that timeline.

Short renewals force tooling and reduce human error; it’s a classic nudge to stop hand‑rolling secrets every few years and forgetting.

Someone suggested GitHub Pages for John’s static site, but he’s not into Markdown or tying core hosting to Microsoft.

Cloudflare’s Workers with R2 storage got me a proto‑deployment running in a day; I hit a 25‑megabyte asset limit, routed big files to R2, and now have a working test domain that might replace my crusty shared host.

I avoid specialized hosting for Overcast; at my scale the image math explodes, and I want to be able to move between standard VPSes and S3‑compatible storage without rewriting everything.

There’s always a little glue to port—Apache or NGINX configs turn into a short Worker script—but that’s better than being locked into a proprietary compute platform.

Right after we talked about Cloudflare’s last outage, another one hit during a rush to mitigate an industry bug, with a chunk of traffic failing for about twenty‑five minutes.

The timing was comical; my site stayed up, but it proves outages cluster.

On Siri: you can set spoken responses to automatic, prefer quiet, or prefer spoken in Siri settings, and it will read aloud in certain cases like when the screen is off or you’re driving.

Automatic usually works for me, except when I needed it to speak and it refused.

A listener got Siri to say their name over AirPods and had to explicitly set a contact as “daughter” from the contact screen; also, Siri in Hebrew was rough.

Siri has long been able to act on “this” for links and reminders, and Apple Intelligence should improve that kind of on‑screen awareness.

About that wake phrase we said last episode: Overcast’s smart resume bounced some listeners into a loop where it kept retriggering, which was equal parts sorry and hilarious.

That was on all of us—the timing plus the rewind made a perfect storm.

Underscore’s adoption charts showed Apple hit the “push it to everyone” button later than last year, but it’s climbing now.

Maybe 26.0’s bugs slowed it; by the way, some enterprises apparently forced employees onto early 26.1 betas to keep their stacks working.

Small gripe: tethering on my iPhone 17 Pro has become unusable and I’m carrying a dedicated hotspot again; if anyone knows a fix, I’m all ears.

Chip rumors: if Intel fabs Apple silicon, do they learn too much from Apple’s designs, unlike with TSMC?

Foundry and chip design should be walled off, but it’s still cozier than with TSMC, and reverse‑engineering happens anyway; remember, Samsung fabbed iPhone chips for years.

A twist: Apple, Broadcom, and Qualcomm are eyeing Intel’s advanced packaging like EMIB, even if their current process node isn’t ideal for low‑power mobile.

It’s plausible Apple would fab dies at TSMC and use Intel only for packaging; longer‑term, a report floated Intel making some non‑Pro iPhone chips around 2028 on a future node, but Intel has to actually deliver.

John Gruber unloaded on Alan Dye’s software design era, citing an exodus of frustrated designers and near‑universal disapproval among UI pros.

It was unusually fiery from Gruber, but it echoed what many of us felt about the taste level and priorities behind recent UI choices.

Dye may be a strong designer in other mediums, but software UI seemed like the wrong fit, and Apple put him in a spot he shouldn’t have had.

There was even a passing claim that Jony Ive held a low opinion of Dye’s work, which, if true, is telling.

The bigger point was that sloppy decisions crept into the OS not because the whole thing is broken, but because the judgment behind certain changes was shaky.

Executive shuffle: Apple’s bringing in Jennifer Newstead as general counsel and folding government affairs into that, while Lisa Jackson is retiring and her teams will be redistributed.

People dislike Newstead’s Patriot Act and Meta history, but for the top lawyer role, winning against regulators is the job; the environmental reorg raises eyebrows but doesn’t automatically mean backsliding.

I don’t read this as Apple abandoning environmental goals, even if the optics are rough.

German said Johnny Srouji might leave, then Srouji told his org he’s staying; both can be true if Cook successfully convinced him to remain.

He’s had a stellar run; my lone nit is the missing ultra‑high‑end Mac Pro‑class chip they once aimed for, which never shipped, but otherwise the record is gold.

Power is consolidating around Ternus, Craig, Eddy, and Sabih, with Craig informally steering AI and Ternus stepping into a bigger public role.

Turnover is healthy; the worry isn’t the old guard leaving, it’s the mid‑level brain drain that happens when bad managers are protected and good people give up.

A CEO change usually triggers a wave of departures and promotions, and there’s a lot of smoke suggesting Tim Cook’s era may be winding down, which could unlock long‑stalled ideas.

We need leaders who restore core values like thoughtful UI and attention to detail, while bringing back veterans who still remember that culture and pairing them with fresh energy.

Quick gripe to end this segment: Messages cloned our family group into two threads—one keyed to phone numbers, the other to Apple IDs—and I can’t merge them, which breaks the mental model Contacts should enable.

Maybe the system stays strict to avoid revealing data across mismatched contact records, but if anyone knows a clean fix that preserves history, we’re listening.

Group chats keep splitting because different people are seen as a phone number here and an email there, even when all that info belongs to the same person; I just want a way to merge threads or force Messages to treat all identifiers as one history.

When a group includes an unknown number, Messages should nudge the folks who aren’t in everyone’s contacts to share their details with the rest of the group, not just a name and photo.

Give us a single action in a thread—hit a super share button and, with everyone’s consent, exchange full contact cards so no one has to juggle mystery numbers or figure out how to open a vCard. And please stop the constant auto-offers to replace the custom photos I set for people—my kid loves a goofy picture of me, and the system keeps trying to overwrite it.

Setting your own contact photos for friends is one of life’s small joys, and the system should not keep second-guessing that. Also, I’ve noticed a pattern: people at Apple often use Memoji, while almost no one else does.

Same here; not universal, but close.

Memoji rarely resemble the actual person because the faces are too uniform; they’re fine as generic avatars, but they’re not distinctive enough to help me recognize who’s who.

It’s almost a quiet signal that someone works at Apple, which brings me to a bigger wish: archived contacts, so we can hide people from Siri and autocomplete without deleting their history—think exes, estranged relatives, or someone who has passed away.

I want that inside a contact too, where old emails and addresses are kept for historical association but don’t appear in autocomplete or new messages.

So many near-misses come from tap-happy autocompletes, and I don’t want to accidentally call someone I haven’t spoken to in years just because their name pops up first.

Name collisions are rough—my late grandfather and my nephew share a name, and I’d love archived entries to show up dimmed or clearly marked so I don’t pick the wrong one.

I’d ship both: the thread merge fix and archived contacts; if we were Craig for a day, that’s what I’d push through.

If Apple really does a calmer, quality-focused OS cycle, this is a perfect crowd-pleaser—moderate effort, huge relief, and a big applause moment on stage.

It reaches into a lot of apps, so it’s not trivial, though Apple has tackled similar system-wide features like password history; honestly, fixing thread splits in Messages is likely the quicker win.

You could still make archived entries invisible to pickers by default so they stop popping up where they shouldn’t.

Photos still needs archived people to match faces, but I’ll take a forward fix: stop new threads from splitting and reliably treat all identifiers as the same person.

Exactly—mixing emails and numbers shouldn’t fracture a group chat in 2025; we clearly have the tech to avoid it.

And on Apple TV FaceTime, the picker doesn’t tell me if I’m starting with a phone number or an Apple ID, so the call can land on the wrong device with zero warning.

But hey, at least the interface is nice and sparse for your content, John.

Right, just giant tiles labeled home and mobile on a huge screen, and somehow there’s no room to say what they actually are.