By John Moltz
This Week in Apple: Glass backwards
Apple executives are on the move and so is the opacity level of Liquid Glass. And, look, if you don’t want to read the third section, I won’t blame you.
Tech exec tectonics
They say that an executive in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.
I mean, presumably someone says this.
Apple saw several executives on the move this week as one was poached by Meta for big bucks.
“Apple Loses Key AI Executive to Meta’s Multimillion-Dollar Hiring Spree”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been offering AI engineers massive pay packages to poach them from other companies…
Before you complain about Meta’s predatory practices, have you tried the poached executive? It’s delicious.
Ruoming Pang, who manages Apple’s foundation models team, is moving from Apple to Meta. … Meta lured Pang with a deal worth tens of millions of dollars per year.
The language models aren’t the only things that are large in AI. The salaries are pretty big, too.
The bigger news for Apple, however, is the announcement of the upcoming retirement of COO Jeff Williams. Once considered in the running to take over for Tim Cook, Williams will step down as COO next month and then diminish and go into the West and remain Jeff Williams later this year.
As a result, Sabih Khan will take over as COO, although Apple’s design group will report directly to Tim Cook, because he apparently doesn’t have enough to do.
Better A or B? A? Or B?
As it was foretold in prophecy, so it has unfolded! BEHOLD!
“iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass”
Yes, after much feedback on early betas, someone at Apple turned the big knob that says “GLASS EFFECT” down several notches hoping to get it juuust riiight.
See? Was that so hard? Was it worth all the hair-pulling and gnashing of teeth? You were crying at one point. It was embarrassing. Everyone was very uncomfortable.
This is, of course, how the beta process is supposed to work. Apple ships a beta, people freak out, Apple dials it back. Repeat annually.
Despite this, it’s not exactly like everything is hunky-dory. Depending on what wallpaper you use, notifications can still be a bit of a visual mess at minimum and at worst a real challenge to read.
Somewhere there’s a Windows Vista engineer who’s leaning back and saying “Well, well, well. Looks like it’s not so easy to make things transparent after all, is it?”
The worst timeline
It wouldn’t be a This Week in Apple in the year of our Lord 2025 without a run-in with a regulator of some kind.
“Apple back in the White House’s crosshairs as Trump aide slams Tim Cook over China”
If you’re wondering which no-nothing Trump Administration finishing school dropout it is, this would be Peter Navarro, the guy who was was jailed for contempt of Congress over January 6th and is now… lemme just see here…
…White House Senior Counselor for trade and manufacturing.
I feel like maybe 2025 has been a bit too on the nose in killing all of our Norms.
Apple’s going to need to employ some fancy footwork (or some more of that less fancy palm greasing) pretty soon because…
“Macs and Apple Watch to be hit by Trump tariffs starting on August 1”
Navarro is like a dog with a bone about Apple, except without a shred of the lovability and irrepressible joie de vivre inherent in your average canine. He name-dropped Apple again just days later saying the company thinks it’s “too big to tariff”.
I would like to believe that them’s fighting words. Apple is largely a beloved company that produces products people love. I would like to believe there’s a path here where Apple could parlay some of that “customer sat” Tim Cook likes to talk about into galvanizing public anger about these tariffs, the only goal of which is to serve the president, not the American people.
Or it could just donate millions to Trump’s 2029 inaugural fund. It could do that, too.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]