Jim Vorel, writing just yesterday for Jezebel:

It can be hard to know what exactly to call the substances that are now found coating many major candy bars such as Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, Almond Joy, Mr. Goodbar or Rolos. Food scientists refer to it as “compound chocolate” coating, because it’s made from actual cocoa powder, but replaces the more expensive source of fat (cocoa butter) with cheaper, lower-quality vegetable fats. When Hershey brands such as Mr. Goodbar or Almond Joy made the switch in recent years, their labels subtly changed from claiming that they were “milk chocolate,” to “chocolate candy,” which strikes me as particularly insidious phrasing. A more obvious indicator is another word that many companies use: “Chocolatey” coating. Wondering how much this scourge had infiltrated my own home, I took a look moments ago at several packages of Girl Scout Cookies, only to find the inevitable: Both my Thin Mints and Peanut Butter Patties are also made with compound chocolate, rather than the real thing. I can hardly pretend to be surprised. Even in candies that continue to use real chocolate, meanwhile, cost-cutting measures have sometimes been employed, such as the milk chocolate coating of a Snickers bar becoming slightly thinner over time. Some products even mix real chocolate and compound chocolate in a single cookie or candy.

After writing a few days ago about the current brouhaha over the severe decline in the edibility of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and linking to Trader Joe’s shade-throwing description of their own, I of course had to try theirs. In the name of science, I bought both the milk and dark chocolate variants.

Verdict: Excellent. Both chocolates taste like chocolate, not candle wax, and the peanut butter is creamy and smooth — you know, like peanut butter. Not the sand-and-sawdust mix that Hershey fills Reese’s cups with now.

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Jason Snell and Myke Hurley:

We discuss the results of the Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2025 in depth, with our added opinions on every category. Jason chooses to be a rascal, and Myke tries to give ten out of five.

Upgrade is always a good podcast, and their annual “Jason discusses this year’s Apple Report Card” episode is always one of my favorites. But when Jason got “rascally” regarding MacOS 26 Tahoe in this one, I wanted to reach out and strangle him.

Jason Snell:

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment — the “vibe in the room” — regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)

This is the eleventh year that I’ve presented this survey to my hand-selected group. They were prompted with 14 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best) and optionally provide text commentary per category.

I still need to polish it up a bit, but per tradition, I’ll publish my own report card shortly. In the meantime, it’s always edifying to read Snell’s summary and the average grades. You’ll never guess which category Apple flunked for 2025. (Spoiler: World Impact.)

Regarding MacOS 26 Tahoe, here are the comments from two Johns:

“Tahoe is the worst user interface update in the history of the Mac. Every change is either wrongheaded, poorly executed, or both. The Mac remains usable only because of Tahoe’s lack of ambition: it mostly alters the appearance and metrics of interface elements rather than making fundamental changes to the structure of the Mac UI. Thank goodness for that. The bad ideas embodied in Tahoe reveal an Apple design team that has abandoned the most basic principles of human-computer interaction.” —John Siracusa

“Tahoe is the worst regression in the entire history of MacOS. There are many reasons to prefer MacOS to any of its competition, but the one that has been the most consistent since System 1 in 1984 is the superiority of its user interface. There is nothing about Tahoe’s new UI that is better than its predecessor…. Fundamental principles of computer-human interaction — principles that Apple itself forged over decades — have been completely ignored.” —John Gruber

Siracusa and I didn’t say a word to each other while writing those comments. (If we had, I’d have switched to “human-computer interaction” from “computer-human interaction”.)