Apple PR has their work cut out for them.

On the China front, John Gruber takes on Tim Cook’s company wide email on the on-again, off-again approval of the HKMap app:

I can’t recall an Apple memo or statement that crumbles so quickly under scrutiny. For a company that usually measures umpteen times before cutting anything, it’s both sad and startling.

This is the tip of the iceberg on hot takes concerning Apple’s dealings with China. This issue is complex, and Apple has made a decision that China’s market is important to them, have stepped into the fire.

Then there’s Catalina. There’s this hot take from Tyler Hall (just a snippet, read the whole thing:

Apple’s insistence on their annual, big-splash release cycle is fundamentally breaking engineering. I know I’m not privy to their internal decision making and that software features that depend on hardware releases and vice-versa are planned and timed years (if not half-decades) in advance, but I can think of no other explanation than that Marketing alone is purely in charge of when things ship.

There’s another hot take making its way around Twitter, not going to link to it because it appears to come from an Apple employee and there’s no grain of salt big enough to make it worth sharing without attribution and permission, but it’s a doozy.

My experience with Catalina has been spotty at best. There’s lots of general stability and wonderful new features, punctuated by bizarre bugs that have consumed a lot of cycles to work through.

Difficult times for Apple, hard to see this when you know how hard these folks work, and reflect on how much Apple has changed the world. I’m old enough to remember the days of the flip phone, having to type a message with a phone’s digits as your keyboard. What we have now is a miracle to me. I’m hoping we get through these difficult times quickly, get back to the whimsy.