Welcome to 995 Mac Daily for Friday, August 22nd, 2025. I'm your host, Chance Miller. We are

sponsored this week by Backblaze. Leading off today, Meta's hiring spree in Cooper Tino

continues. As Bloomberg reports, the company has just hired yet another researcher from Apple's AI team.

When news broke last month that Meta had hired Ruming Pang, Apple's lead of the Foundation Models team,

many assumed he'd start taking a few of his closest colleagues with him.

That has quickly proven true.

Bloomberg says that Apple has lost

Frank Chu, who led its AI teams focused on cloud infrastructure, training, and search to Meta.

Chew is at least the sixth Apple employee working on AI models to leave for Meta. At Meta, he will

join the company's superintelligence team and will

work on a new team responsible for AI infrastructure work. But for Apple, there also might be some

good news this week. In a memo, Meta said that it is slowing its recruitment and temporarily

pausing hiring across its meta superintelligence lab teams, with the exception

of business critical roles.

This could mean that Apple is safe for meta poaching any further employees from its AI teams,

at least for now.

But of course, the broader context here is that Apple continues to have internal drama plaguing its AI research,

notably as it continues to fall behind and actually shipping the features it announced last year.

In other news today, we talked earlier this week about Apple's work on a replacement for fine woven iPhone cases.

Apple introduced the fine woven brand two years agowoven iPhone cases. Apple introduced the fine-woven brand two years ago

with the iPhone 15, but the cases were widely criticized for their price and their durability.

Last year, Apple discontinued fine-woven iPhone cases without a replacement, so the only Apple

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