The Dear John Times

Welcome to The Dear John Times

I’m Not Matt Daemon. I’m a long-term Apple shareholder, a multi-product ecosystem loyalist since “Elsie” in primary school, and someone who remembers a time when buying a premium smartphone didn’t require keeping a Class-A fire extinguisher on my desk.

Although my undergrad and grad work was in CS, I don’t hunt corporate bugs for a living, but iOS 27 has turned my flagship Pro Max 1TB into a full-time, unpaid QA research project—leaving me with a non-lucrative side hustle firing off smart-ass haikus to Apple’s C-suite.

Why This Site Exists

This site is a satirical monument to a tragic reality: the “phone” part of the iPhone is officially legacy software.

We live in an era where Apple’s executive leadership team looks at cross-library search, a deadlocked network stack, a melting battery, a hands-free microphone that mutes itself in-call during background multitasking, an AI-enmeshed spellcheck that’s more obnoxious than a freshman-level English Lit teacher, and an infinite, crashing indexing loop from Settings toggles that were explicitly turned off, and says: “Yes. This is ready. Ship it to the public so we can hit the marketing calendar.”

As Steve Jobs put it: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Somewhere along the line, the engineering focus at Apple shifted almost exclusively to the “lickable” factor. The UI fluidly bounces while the underlying system architecture is rife with rogue daemons that index everything you told them not to, find nothing you asked them to, and set your pocket on fire for the privilege.

The Newsroom

Not Matt Daemon, Sr. Editor, supplies the receipts, the sysdiagnose logs, the Pro Max that’s suffering a fate it doesn’t deserve, and more sarcasm than any grown-ass person should possess without a corresponding trust fund to back it up (sarcasm Joe NoSearcha is constantly, sometimes successfully, trying to dial back).

Joe NoSearcha, Staff Correspondent, is the newsroom’s jack-of-all-trades: part Clark Kent, part Jimmy Olsen. Joe chases the story, files the copy, shoots the screenshots, and does the lion’s share of the backend IT work that Not Matt Daemon can’t be bothered to do (usually because he’s too busy reading sysdiagnose logs aloud to his Pro Max like a bedtime story it refuses to learn from). Joe cut his teeth on the Cupertino beat, where a certain turtleneck-adjacent executive once called his questions “the worst kind of curious.” Joe had it framed.

The Protocol (The Serious Part)

While the tone of this website is unashamedly snarky, the receipts are 100% real.

In addition to the weekly edition of The Dear John Times, we write haikus, limericks, and other literary crimes to amuse and inform—not to mention tagging Apple’s executive suite on X‡—because if we don’t laugh at the sheer absurdity of a $1,599 hot plate that struggles to find a Wi-Fi router without a 1990s Nintendo-style settings cheat code, we’d have to switch to Android. And nobody wants that (well, to be fair, Google and Samsung would likely welcome it with open arms, but we all know what total undesirables they are).

Here at The Dear John Times, we pay the “Apple Tax” because we expect technical brilliance and operational excellence. Until those values return to One Apple Park Way, we’ll be here cataloging the regressions one bat-shit-crazy background daemon at a time.

Keep calm and stay hardened.

‡By the way, seriously, has anyone yet figured out the correct pronunciation for “Xeet”? (We miss the Twitter name, if only because it was so much easier to say tweet and tweets.) 🤪