John Paczkowski and Joseph Bernstein, reporting for BuzzFeed News:

“There is no truth in their story about Apple,” Cook told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview.

This is an extraordinary statement from Cook and Apple. The company has never previously publicly (though it may have done so privately) called for the retraction of a news story — even in cases where the stories have had major errors, or were demonstratively false, such as a This American Life episode that was shown to be fabricated.

Reached for comment, Bloomberg reiterated its previous defense of the story. “Bloomberg Businessweek’s investigation is the result of more than a year of reporting, during which we conducted more than 100 interviews,” a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News in response to a series of questions.

“Seventeen individual sources, including government officials and insiders at the companies, confirmed the manipulation of hardware and other elements of the attacks. We also published three companies’ full statements, as well as a statement from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We stand by our story and are confident in our reporting and sources.”

Matt Honan, reviewing the Google Pixel 3:

The world is on fire but the new Google Pixel 3 — a Good Phone, which I do recommend you buy if you like Android and can afford it, although its updates are mostly incremental — in my pocket is cool to the touch. A dark slab of metal and glass. It comes alive when I rub my finger across the back of it.

And then!

“We’re doomed,” a colleague texts me on Signal*. A push alert from a well-regarded news site has more details on the alleged murder and dismemberment of a Saudi journalist. On Nextdoor, several neighbors report that their drinking water has tested positive for unsafe levels of pesticides. The Citizen app prompts me to record video of an angry naked man rampaging in the shit-strewn streets of San Francisco. Facebook is hacked and our information is out there. Everyone on Twitter is angry, you fucking cuck. You idiot. You tender, triggered snowflake. Everyone on Instagram is posturing, posing. You are less beautiful than they. The places you go are not as interesting.

[…]

I don’t recall exactly when my phone became such a festival of stress and psychological trauma, but here we are.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh but that camera! That screen! The Lens feature that can tell me what I’m looking at — what kind of plant it is or what kind of animal it is or what information is captured in a business card so that I do not have to go to the library and I do not have to enter it in or even remember it at all. I don’t have to remember! Okay, Google, I don’t want to think about it. Okay?

[…]

We are reaching a point of no return, when it comes to information collection, if we have not already gone beyond it. Cameras and screens, microphones and speakers. Capture your face and your voice and your friends’ faces and voices and where you are and what’s in your email and where you were when you sent it and… What did you say? Click, here’s an ad. And where did you go? Click, here’s an ad. Who were you with? Here’s an ad. What did you read here’s an ad how do you feel here’s an ad are you lonely here’s an ad are you lonely here’s an ad are you lonely?
Some of the new Pixel 3’s best features are ones designed to help you not use the phone.

Digital Wellbeing (which you can also enable on the previous Pixels) will turn your phone’s screen grayscale and turn off your notifications. It will tell you how much time you have spent on your phone for the day, and which apps you have spent that time in. You can also set a time limit on apps if you want. I found this useful and good. (It is also easily circumvented.)

[…]

Google is at the top of its game when it comes to hardware. While hardware may only be a queer little sideline for the company, it has never rolled out better devices. This phone is amazing. The operating system is amazing.

There are a few apps on the iPhone that I wish this Pixel 3 had (FaceTime, for example) but overall I strongly prefer this device to the new iPhone. And, in my estimation, all other Android phones are just garbage by comparison. (Having said this, Paczkowski’s dictum holds true here: Pick the ecosystem you like. Spend what you can afford. Buy the newest device. If you like iOS, you should get an iPhone. If you really love Samsung, get a Galaxy Note or whatever. If you can’t afford this phone, but you like Android devices, there are some excellent devices from Motorola in particular that are more reasonably priced.)

Dan Frommer, writing for Re/Code on how the Instagram founders leaving could leave it open for Facebook to screw up:

Instagram’s founders are finally leaving Facebook, six years after they sold their startup to Mark Zuckerberg. We’ll skip the drama of their departure in this post. This is about keeping a great thing going — and how Facebook could potentially mess it up.

Instagram is, in many parts of the world, the most culturally relevant technology since texting. And that has everything to do with its founders — Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger — and their teams, who have meticulously shaped it since creation, executing near-flawlessly with tight control.

Walking through the things that make Instagram so special — its network, product, experience and institutional taste — it’s easy to see vulnerability in the wrong hands. Facebook can’t afford to screw this up — especially now, as it increasingly relies on Instagram for growth and for engagement from younger users.

[…]

For the near term, it’s likely that Instagram’s network and product will keep it going strong. (It’s not like there’s a suitable alternative!) Many interesting and talented people still work there and won’t necessarily follow the founders out the door. But over the years, it’s crucial to keep a strong sense of identity of what it uniquely means to be Instagram or it will lose its magic. Who will do that? Is that something Mark Zuckerberg cares about?

Apple has largely kept its impeccable institutional taste after Steve Jobs’s death because Tim Cook is a very classy CEO, and Jony Ive and his industrial design sensibility have long been the driving force of the company. So things keep going. YouTube has also done well since its founders left many years ago — credit to Google — so there’s hope.

Dan makes a few good points in his article, so hopefully, Facebook will leave Instagram alone and not mess with it too much.

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times:

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of the photo-sharing app Instagram, have resigned and plan to leave the company in coming weeks, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. The exits add to the challenges facing Instagram’s parent company, Facebook.

Mr. Systrom, Instagram’s chief executive, and Mr. Krieger, the chief technical officer, notified Instagram’s leadership team and Facebook on Monday of their decision to leave, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

[…]

“We’re planning on taking some time off to explore our curiosity and creativity again,” Mr. Systrom said. “Building new things requires that we step back, understand what inspires us and match that with what the world needs; that’s what we plan to do.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, praised the Instagram founders in a statement and said that he wished them “all the best and I’m looking forward to seeing what they build next.”

The departures raise questions about Instagram’s future at a time when Facebook faces its most sustained set of crises in its 14-year history. For much of the past two years, critics have railed against Facebook for being careless with user data and for not preventing foreign interference across its network of more than two billion people.

The issues have started taking a toll on Facebook’s business, with the company saying in July that growth in digital advertising sales and in the number of its users had slowed down.

Against those problems, Instagram has been one of the jewels of Facebook. The social network acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, when the photo-sharing site was used by around 30 million people. Since then, Instagram’s reach has ballooned and it has widely been seen as one of Facebook’s most successful acquisitions.

Facebook has lost other founders of businesses it has acquired. In April, Jan Koum, a Facebook board member and a founder of WhatsApp, the messaging app that the social network purchased in 2014, said he was leaving. Mr. Koum had grown increasingly concerned about Facebook’s position on user data in recent years, people with knowledge of the situation said at the time.

In Silicon Valley, reaction to the Instagram founders’ resignation was swift.

“Wow,” tweeted John Lilly, a venture capitalist at Greylock, calling the exits “a real moment.” He added, “What an impact they’ve had on all of us.”

Instagram was founded in 2010 and at first was a location check-in app called Burbn. Mr. Krieger, an enthusiastic user of Burbn, met Mr. Systrom at a Stanford University fellowship program and they decided to work together. Eventually, Burbn was retooled and renamed Instagram.

Instagram became popular in Silicon Valley almost immediately. The app heavily emphasized the use of a smartphone camera as iPhones were being widely adopted, turning everyday people into amateur photographers. Mr. Systrom and Mr. Krieger popularized photo filters and camera lenses, spurring a wave of copycat apps for the iPhone and Android-based smartphones.

The duo worked out of a small office in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco. Instagram spent a lot of money in its early years just trying to keep its app online as its servers struggled under the constant stream of new user sign-ups.

Instagram eventually caught the eye of Mr. Zuckerberg, who realized how powerful Instagram’s nascent photo-sharing network would become, and saw the wealth of photo-sharing activity across his own social network. Mr. Zuckerberg handled the negotiations with Mr. Systrom and Mr. Krieger largely on his own.

Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock (though the final cost was closer to $715 million because the stock on which part of the deal was based declined in value). It was Facebook’s biggest acquisition to date, and came a month before the social network’s initial public offering.

[…]

Facebook went on to purchase Parse, a service that provided tools for mobile developers, and Oculus, a virtual reality hardware start-up, branching into new areas beyond the original social network. Mr. Zuckerberg also spent $19 billion to buy WhatsApp.

But Instagram remained Mr. Zuckerberg’s main success story. As Facebook saw a threat in young people departing the network for Snapchat, a rival photo-sharing network, Instagram was quick to shift and recreate one of Snapchat’s key features of online stories. Since then, Instagram has surged further in popularity, while Snapchat’s growth has been inconsistent.

The departures of Mr. Systrom and Mr. Krieger create uncertainty around the app. It is unclear who will lead the company on the founders’ departures, and if that person can continue Instagram’s longstanding success streak. Marne Levine, who was previously Instagram’s chief operating officer, left her role at Instagram earlier this month to return to Facebook and lead partnerships.