If you want to burn tokens making a bespoke podcast player its probably a good learning exercise. I like Overcast, it would be great if i could see the latest episodes on the front page when opening the app, otherwise its fine.

I mean, whatever your opinion of his redesign of the app (I know a lot of people were pretty unhappy), he is a host on a podcast that has had Phil Schiller (former head of marketing who was on stage with Jobs for many years) as a guest while he was still an Apple exec. He's a known entity to them.

Further, one of the other hosts is John Siracusa, the guy who wrote in-depth 18 page reviews of MacOS X releases for ArsTechnica for many years. He got a shoutout from Apple's head of software, Craig Federighi, when I attended a live interview in 2019 during the week of their World Wide Developer's Conference (hosted by John Gruber of Daring Fireball). Siracusa must have been in the first few rows because Federighi said something like, "Oh, there's Siracusa." You could label that "fan service" because everyone in that theater knows who he's talking about and it's a form of acknowledging the crowd as a community.

So, all of this is to say that Marco is one of the small number of outsiders who could write such a letter on their blog and have upper ranks of Apple hear about it and maybe, maybe not, be curious enough to see what was said. I can't do that. I don't know if you can. But Marco can. I'm glad he took a shot. Whether it means anything, we'll never know.

And yes, the release of his redesign was premature, but I'm ok with the app as my daily podcast driver right now.

> Why would anyone pay close attention to a company ?

Why would anyone pay close attention to a sports team? A musician? A writer?

But if you read Arment's post:

> As you grow into the leader that we know you can be, I urge you, on behalf of everyone who loves computers as much as we do, to protect and cultivate this spirit of Apple’s founders as the company’s top priority:

> *We love computers. We don’t hide that — we celebrate it!

> *We use computers to enhance our minds, lives, and abilities — not to be controlled, restricted, tricked, placated, angered, or surveilled.

> *Our computers work for us, with the utmost respect for our time, attention, money, data, and privacy.

> *We are customers and owners — not resources to be harvested, annoyed, or badgered into ever more services and upsells.

> Apple leads the industry in these values, but leading doesn’t always mean excelling. Remaining true to these values requires constant diligence, honest evaluation, introspection, and the audacity and courage to effect change.

* https://marco.org/2026/04/01/letter-to-john-ternus

Perhaps if more companies had values besides "shareholder value"[1] the world would be a better place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

I dunno. Cause I spend a lot of money on their products and a lot of my time using their software. The announcements they make affect the way I use computers.

Does anyone here pay close attention to updates in the Linux kernel or is that pretty stupid too? (To be fair, you didn't call me stupid, but it's sorta there.)

What's Framework doing? I'm pretty jazzed about their laptops even though I don't buy them.

What about game companies that get bought by Microsoft and now people worry that the franchise they love might get killed?

I'm a nerd and I care a lot about a thing. I don't feel bad about that.

Because you’re a shareholder.

Or because you’re interested in the products and the „company community“ is fun and you like talking about it.

I'm curious how you ended up creating an account on Hacker News if you don't see why people would be interested in major news regarding the biggest computer maker on the planet.

When your livelihood indirectly depends on their whims (aka the app store rules) or the possibility some new feature or product they announce directly affects the way you build your software, either positively or negatively, why not pay close attention?