Apple Newsroom:

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $109.4 billion, up 16 percent year over year. Company gross margin was 50.1 percent, including a favorable impact of approximately 2 percentage points from tariff refunds. Diluted earnings per share was $2.02, up 29 percent year over year, and included a favorable impact of $0.11 from tariff refunds.

“Today, Apple is proud to report our strongest June quarter ever, with double-digit revenue growth across iPhone, Mac and Services, and in every geographic segment,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.

Kevan Parekh, Apple’s CFO:

“Our installed base of active devices also reached a new all-time high across all major product categories and geographic segments.”

“Over 2 and a half billion active devices” Parekh confirmed in his opening remarks on the earnings call.

Stocks go up and down and AAPL was down as much as 8% after hours. Its $5 trillion milestone already feels like a distant memory.

See Also: Jason Snell’s transcript and traditional barrage of charts and graphs.

I debated whether to share these links as The Thomas Crown Affair films remain protected under copyright law, but it’s worth noting that the 1968 original and the 1999 remake are both (currently) available on the Internet Archive.

(I’ll leave it to you to decide on the ethics and legality of watching or downloading unauthorized copies of copyrighted material. I generally prefer to buy (or “buy”) my media, but that’s not always a viable option.)

Speaking of The Thomas Crown Affair, the 1968 original (starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway) and the 1999 remake (starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo) are available in a two-movie collection on Apple TV or Amazon Prime for $20. It’s a steal if you’re okay with not owning your media—but if you aren’t, the physical discs are $16 for the original and $25 for the remake.

The Thomas Crown Affair—the 1968 original starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, and especially the 1999 remake featuring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo—ranks as one of—or I guess, two of—my favorite movies. The teaser trailer for Michael B. Jordan’s version suggests it’ll soon be three of my favorite movies. It’s a mood.

Apple, Tuesday:

Apple today announced Apple Upgrade, a new product leasing program provided by Klarna for iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac, and iPad available on the Apple Store online, in the Apple Store app, and at Apple Store locations in the United States. Apple Upgrade makes it even easier for customers to get the Apple products they love with a leasing plan that is right for them.

Apple Upgrade replaces (in the United States) the iPhone Upgrade Program and iPhone Payments plan. Zero-interest monthly payments will certainly ease the sticker shock of recent price increases (and the increases expected for iPhone come September) for especially price-sensitive customers.

Apple Upgrade offers 12- and 24-month leasing options for iPhone and Apple Watch, and 24- and 36-month leasing options for Mac and iPad. Leasing prices start as low as $17.99 per month for iPhone, $11.99 for Apple Watch, $24.99 for Mac, and $11.99 for iPad.

$17.99 is for the 256GB iPhone 17e on a 24-month lease. Total leased cost would be $431.76, a $167 “saving” versus the “buy it now” $599 price—assuming you upgrade the phone in two years. Apple offers three lease-end options:

At the end of the lease term, customers can upgrade their device to the latest generation, purchase it with a one-time payment, or simply return it and exit the program.

Upgrading requires a new lease at then-current prices (and subject to then-current eligibility rules). For the purchase option, you pay the difference between “the list price minus any lease payments you’ve made” and other credits and fees—basically, the amount you “save” by leasing is also the buyout amount. The return-and-exit option means you turn in the device and walk away; you’re left without a device, but you saved money compared to buying it outright—though perhaps not as much as you might think.

One of the questions (and answers) on the Apple Upgrade marketing page is this:

What do I do if my device gets lost or is stolen?

If you have AppleCare+ Theft and Loss for your iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, you can file a claim at mysupport.apple.com/theftandloss.

If you don’t have AppleCare+ Theft and Loss coverage and your device is stolen or lost, you’ll need to close out your lease by paying the early termination fee or choose to pay the purchase option fee (plus any applicable taxes and fees). […]

You will continue to be charged your monthly lease payments until you either pay the early termination fee or purchase option fee. If you take no action, Klarna will continue to charge you your monthly lease payment through the extension period, and you will be charged the purchase option fee through Klarna.

Apple’s own footnote describes the “early termination fee” as potentially “substantial”—basically, you’re on the hook for whatever’s left on the lease.

Unless, of course, you have AppleCare.

You won’t find a clearer pitch for AppleCare. For iPhone, two years of AppleCare runs $200 (iPhone 17e) to $280 (iPhone 17 Pro Max). For Mac, three years is $315 to $465. In almost all cases, you still save money, and you protect yourself from those “substantial” termination or purchase fees. My guess is that even people who would never otherwise consider buying AppleCare would rather suck it up than risk being out of pocket for hundreds or thousands of dollars for a lost or stolen device. You can bet Apple Retail folks will be hammering this option hard during purchase. Look for reports on “AppleCare attachment rates” leading into next quarter’s earnings. Services!

If you plan on upgrading your device after the lease ends (and don’t mind the attendant uncertainties), the savings can be significant—especially on higher-end configurations. You can save almost a thousand dollars on a 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max with a 12-month lease. A max-configured 16-inch MacBook Pro ($10,149) would cost only $7,787.76 on a 24-month lease. Even after adding AppleCare, you would still save over $2,051.

For many people, that substantial savings is sufficient to sway them from device ownership.

I tend to upgrade my iPhone annually, sliding older devices first into a “test”/“backup” role before handing them down to family members, so ownership is more valuable to me than potential cost savings.

I generally hold on to my Macs for longer, usually three to five years. These I rarely hand down, instead accumulating until I trade them in. Leasing may be an option for my next “main” Mac.

Apple’s market cap touched $5 trillion today, only the second company (after Nvidia) to reach this lofty milestone. It came after Apple briefly reclaimed the “most valuable company” crown from Nvidia last week.

It brought to mind Steve Jobs’ quote from when Apple first surpassed Dell’s market cap in 2006, and again when it topped Microsoft in 2010:

Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today.

La La Land is getting a tenth anniversary rerelease this August, and with it, a new poster, featuring “A minor adjustment.” Jason P. Frank at Vulture explains (potentially paywalled; Apple News+ link):

Well, the studio adjusted it in the way that the Baptists tried to adjust Troye Sivan in Boy Erased. They straightened Ryan Gosling’s wrist.

In the iconic original poster for the film, Gosling’s hand sits at an angle from his arm, rather than continuing the line straight through. It is, for lack of a better term, a limp wrist — a classic signifier of gayness. […]

The gay little wrist ruled. It was a reminder that, while La La Land is a movie about a straight relationship, it’s also a musical, which is the gayest genre. Plus this kind of revisionism flies in the face of the nature of time. Gosling made a decision to have a gay little wrist, and now it’s a part of film history. No take-backsies.

The new poster just looks wrong. I vividly recall the original image. I remember thinking, before seeing the movie, that it was telegraphing an important character trait: a straight man forced to put on an act to get work, or perhaps a gay man striving but utterly failing to conceal his true self. That the movie turned out to be a rather pedestrian star-crossed-lovers story (in the Casablanca mold) contributed to my disappointment with the film. This hand change removes any such misapprehension, but also eliminates the one bit of tension I had going into the movie.

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball awarded Tomtoc (“maker of laptop bags and sleeves”) his newly minted (and hardly coveted) title of “Dickover of the Week” for displaying a “subscribe to our mailing list” dickover on top of its “you’ve unsubscribed from our mailing list” confirmation page.

That is indeed pretty dickish, but I think I have a legitimate challenger to the title: The Locavore Guide, which features what might be the most ludicrous series of dickovers I’ve seen recently.

When you visit the site:

• Immediately on load, a large site logo covers the content.
• After a moment, an “Accept Cookies” dickover animates in, covering one-third of the width of a MacBook 13-inch Air (and the entire width of an iPhone 17 Pro) and obscuring almost completely the very content a visitor is there to read. (It is itself partially covered by the logo.)
• After another moment, a newsletter signup dickover covers the cookie dickover.

That’s three dickovers at once.

(Video: desktop, iPhone.)

The logo shrinks on scroll and the newsletter signup can be dismissed, but that cookie dickover is perniciously persistent. To top it off:

• The two “options” on the cookies banner are the Hobsonian “Accept Cookies” or “Learn more.”
• The “Learn more” option takes you to the site’s privacy page, which is almost completely obscured by the cookie dickover. (Also, every single link in the privacy document resolves to <a href="/undefined">, leading to a treacly “Whoops! Wrong turn...” error page. Yep, also covered by the cookie dickover.)

This dickover remains on screen until you “accept” it. That’s a lot of dickery to swallow.

This site was shared with me by a friend, who asked:

Have you used any websites that have you choose between saying yes to their cookie policy and your tacit approval of said policy? (No opt out option.) I encountered two of those in the last few days. Seems very strong-army.

Yes, sadly—those “Accept and suck it” dialogs are everywhere, though I can’t recall one as glaringly user-hostile as this example.

My friend told me she “left the [Locavore] site even though I really wanted to use it”—which is the correct response—but considering the point of the site is to help readers “Discover over 14,000 independently owned businesses in all five boroughs” of New York, turning off a lifelong New Yorker who’s ready to explore is an abject failure of site design.

Carlos Greaves, at McSweeney’s:

He was an old man who had started a war in a faraway Gulf, and he had gone one hundred and forty-three days now without reopening the Strait.

After forty days, a tentative ceasefire had been reached. Then another one. Then another one after that. Then another one that the old man had bragged about but that the enemy claimed no knowledge of. Then a memorandum that should have been a permanent ceasefire but lasted just eight days.

It was not the first time the old man had encountered such a setback. His entire life had been beset by similar misfortune.

That is the wrong word, he thought.

It was something worse than bad luck.

The Strait was rigged.

Greaves offers “apologies to Ernest Hemingway.” I think Hemingway would have approved.

(Via Tom Clark.)

Cathy Hammer at The Unforgettable Line reviews Hadestown: The Musical, the “much-anticipated live theater capture of the West End production”:

Filmed on location in London’s Lyric Theatre under director Brett Sullivan, there is little attempt to recreate the feeling of sitting in the best seat in the house. Rather, Sullivan seems to draw from his experience on concert films, attempting to visually bridge the divide between onstage and off. Opening with glimpses of backstage preparation, Sullivan employs swooping camera work that takes the viewer below, above and beyond the stage. Though the initial descent into hell is dramatic, it is more often quite hard to spot Rachel Chavkin’s Tony winning staging. David Neumann’s choreography is even harder to detect.

The musical was filmed over two days in 2025, during a reunion run that featured five of the original cast members of the Tony Award-winning Broadway production, including fan-favorite Patrick Page:

Patrick Page tore his achilles tendon shortly before the show’s limited engagement. In lieu of using Phillip Boykin who performed the role for most of the run in Page’s stead, for the capture, they chose to fit Page with a customized boot and rework the staging to minimize the strain on his injury. While that choice will certainly thrill anyone who loves his signature combination of menace and seduction, the Lord of the Underworld should not limp. So while I deeply respect Page as a performer, his inclusion here doesn’t serve the production as fully as a different talented actor with two fully functioning ankles.

Despite these reservations, Cathy predicts the production “is sure to be a treat for the devotees of the initial concept album through to those who were able to enjoy any one of the many live performances.”

It’s in movie theaters for five nights only, starting today, July 24. I hope to catch it, as I’ve never seen the theatrical production.

The book piracy class action lawsuit against Anthropic, first proposed some ten months ago, was finally approved, reports Blake Brittain at Reuters:

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted final approval of the settlement, the largest known ​settlement of a U.S. copyright case, rejecting arguments that it was too small.

The previous judge on the case, William Alsup, had postponed approval of the settlement, saying he felt “misled” and “disappointed” and expressed concerns that the settlement was being forced “down the throat of authors.” He retired (or went “inactive” in court parlance) in December 2025.

Judge Martinez-Olguin appears to have none of those concerns.

The plaintiff’s lead attorney, Justin Nelson, called the settlement “the largest known copyright recovery in history.” The amount per infringed book remains about $3,000. When the proposed settlement was initially announced in September, 2025 I wrote:

$3,000 per book is substantial for most authors, but the total settlement is relatively insignificant for Anthropic, which, just days earlier, was newly valued at $183 billion.

Just eight months later, Anthropic was valued at five times that—$965 billion—and its hotly anticipated IPO will undoubtedly push that several hundred billion dollars higher later this year.

I also described Anthropic as being “thrilled to escape with ‘just’ a $1.5 billion fine as a price of doing business,” concluding:

The lesson for companies: steal it all and pay a minuscule portion of your valuation later.

The settlement was already a rounding error. Anthropic will probably spend more to celebrate the decision. “Thrilled” was an understatement. They’re downright exuberant.

OpenAI:

Last week, Hugging Face disclosed a new kind of security incident⁠ after they detected and contained an AI agent that compromised their infrastructure, something we expect to become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models. After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes — while being internally tested on a benchmark⁠ of cyber capabilities.

We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly. We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of.

In its post, OpenAI writes that researchers removed guardrails from the models, and that:

Our benchmarks run in a highly isolated environment, with network access constrained to the ability to install packages through an internally hosted third-party software that acts as a proxy and cache for package registries.

I originally read that as the environment was not connected to the internet, but that’s not what it means. Instead, the environment only had network access to a package registry cache proxy, which was itself then connected to the broader internet. So the “highly isolated environment” wasn’t actually very isolated at all. It was simply gated by a proxy meant to constrain network traffic, and the model discovered and exploited an unknown (“zero-day”) vulnerability in that proxy.

If the goal was to block network access, connecting it to a system that has network access seems like a terrible implementation decision.

The entire story is a fascinating read, and I found myself particularly impressed by OpenAI’s ability to spin this cyberattack into a positive PR campaign for the capabilities of its models, while managing to disclaim any human responsibility. Check out the terrible, awful, extremely dangerous thing our most capable models just accomplished. Those other models are nowhere near as dangerous as ours!

The company’s practically begging to get banned for being “too powerful.”

Marcin Wichary, in a Mastodon thread:

Chrome installed a global Ctrl+G keyboard shortcut to launch Gemini even if I’m using a different app, and didn’t ask me about it. […]

It literally conflicted with their own shortcut in web dev!

He discovered this accidentally while trying to use that shortcut in another app, which is the way I found out that Perplexity also commits this unforgivable sin. It steals ⇧⌘D, ⇧⌘V, ⇧⌘U, and ⇧⌘P. Does no one at Perplexity use the native Mac Mail app? Or BBEdit? Or the gorram Finder?

Adding global keyboard shortcuts without first asking permission is a disqualifying act of app aggression. Such user-hostile behavior is one of several reasons I quickly abandoned Perplexity. (I’m relieved the “Apple to acquire Perplexity” rumor never panned out, but had it, I’m confident an Apple person would have yelled at them to fix this.)

What is it about AI app developers that they can’t seem to give two shits about being good platform citizens?

UPDATE: Wichary expands on his Mastodon thread with a post to his blog, Unsung:

Let’s not beat around the bush: This is effectively malware behaviour. It’s bullshit. It’s cancer. It’s deeply disrespectful toward the user. It’s prioritizing hollow metrics at the expense of everything else. […]

But, an app installing a global keyboard shortcut without user consent is bad. This can never be anything other than opt-in. At the very least, Chrome should have shown me a clear UI that said “We’re thinking Ctrl+G would be fun for you to use. You okay with that?” and a button for me to press to confirm.

Spot on.

Rachel King, writing for Town & Country back in May:

More than a century before Japanese whisky became one of the most coveted spirits in the world, a young merchant in Osaka had a simple observation: the wines and liquors being imported from Europe didn’t suit Japanese tastes. What he built from that insight—one product at a time, for the last 127 years and counting—is now one of the largest beverage companies on earth.

I was unaware of Suntory’s history. I’m a fan of Japanese whisky and usually have at least one bottle of it in the house. For many years, it was often something from Suntory. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Suntory’s founder, Shinjiro Torii, there are now several great Japanese whisky distilleries from which to choose. (I’m currently partial to Mars.)

Ben Glickman and Peter Rudegeair profile PayPal’s CEO Enrique Lores for The Wall Street Journal (Apple News+ link), following the reports of a potential PayPal acquisition:

The 61-year-old was named chief executive of PayPal earlier this year after decades at HP and its predecessor company, Hewlett-Packard, which he played a key role in splitting up. Lores has since announced an ambitious turnaround plan for PayPal that includes reorganizing its business lines and slashing at least $1.5 billion in costs—moves reminiscent of the playbook he has deployed in his previous roles. […]

In February, PayPal announced that Lores would take over as CEO in a surprise shuffle. A profit warning accompanied the appointment, and the company’s stock slid 19%.

Analysts saw Lores’s history helping to break up Hewlett-Packard and then managing HP as clues of what could be in store for PayPal.

And later:

Now Lores could be overseeing another big corporate deal. He has emphasized his focus on maximizing shareholder value and has said the company should look at “optimizing our portfolio,” sometimes seen as Wall Street code for selling parts of the business.

What fortuitous timing to have a fixer CEO with experience dismantling companies from the inside.

Milana Vinn for Reuters, on July 14:

Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal Holdings Inc (PYPL.O) for $60.50 per share, in a deal that would value the payments company at more than $53 billion, two people familiar with the matter said.

The offer, submitted earlier this month, is backed by about $50 billion in committed financing from banks, said one of them. The offer represents around a 28% premium to PayPal’s closing share price on Tuesday.

PayPal’s stock price jumped about 20% following the report.

Milana Vinn and Manya Saini for Reuters, two days later:

PayPal’s board sees a $53 billion takeover bid by rival Stripe and private equity firm Advent International as undervaluing the company and facing regulatory and financing hurdles, a person familiar with the matter said, potentially setting the stage for negotiations over the future of the U.S. payments giant.

I remember making an above-asking-price offer on a home a couple of years back. The owners (heirs) countered with an even higher price. Flabbergasted by their greed, we walked away. Three weeks later, they came back to us to accept our original offer. We politely told them to screw off. They eventually accepted an offer well below ours.

I don’t know what made me think of that.

I tried to remember the last time someone offered to “PayPal” (or even “Venmo”) me money—it’s almost all shifted to Apple Pay and Zelle—so imagine my surprise when I logged into PayPal to check and saw $100 in my account, a reimbursement from a friend for dinner and drinks in April.

Prior to that, my only other activity was an August 2025 promotional rebate of $96.68 from CharJenPro; a June 2025 payment of $80 for DASH tickets; and a February 2024 payment of $20 for a Nintendo Switch membership. My point is this: I was completely unaware that PayPal was worth even $53 billion—and certainly not more.

9to5Mac:

A 9to5Mac investigation has uncovered more than 60 apps that behave exactly as depicted in their App Store screenshots when accessed from virtually anywhere in the world, except Brazil.

When opened from a Brazilian IP address, the same apps instead reveal online betting platforms […]

Most of the apps are published by developer accounts with only a single App Store listing. Many of the developer names appear to be common in Vietnam and other countries, rather than Brazil.

A timely example of the shenanigans developers pull to circumvent App Review.

Digging deeper, 9to5Mac found a public GitHub repository containing instructions for a Cursor agent to create simple, vibe-coded apps that serve as fronts for the betting platforms.

Of course AI has a role to play, here. It wouldn’t be a 2026 tech story without it. (Cursor, you may recall, was recently acquired by Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI/Twitter/Grok chimera.)

Apple should be doing more to catch these malfeasant developers (and perhaps issue them permanent bans). I believe they have the tools and resources to do a much more thorough screening of both developers and apps, but have decided not to do so (or, to be charitable, have decided not to do so yet)—possibly out of fear of being seen as swinging its ban hammer too enthusiastically.

I am increasingly of the opinion that Apple has painted itself into a corner by refusing to allow alternative app stores. Having just the one place where most developers can sell their apps forces Apple to tread an extremely fine line between “enforcing its rules” and “abusing its control.” The somehow still ongoing Epic lawsuit is an example of that tension.

If Apple embraced alternative app stores, it could be as strict as it wanted with its own App Store, while pointing anyone it denies entry to the alternatives. It could ban any developer from its App Store without facing the wrath of regulators (or the developer community).

In fact, I think Apple should have its own “alternative app store.” Apple should split its App Store in two: one is the current “we accept everything within reason and guidelines” model: follow the rules and we let you in. The second would be modeled after Apple Arcade: a highly curated, invite-only, no-BS storefront. Only the most thoroughly vetted developers and highest quality apps get into this second App Store—the Mac-Ass-iest of Mac-Assed apps, for example (and whatever you’d call the iOS equivalent).

Think of it like this: The current App Store is like your city’s only nightclub. If you dress nicely, act politely, and don’t give off sketchy vibes, they let you in. If you later cause a ruckus while inside, they toss you out the door. Maybe they let you back in if you get your shit together, maybe it’s a permanent ban.

The new App Store would be Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding at Madison Square Garden: a meticulously selected, tightly scoped, NDA-gated invite list. It doesn’t matter how important or famous you are, if you’re not on the list, you’re not getting in. You can party at the nightclub.

(If you’d prefer less pop-culture example, imagine your local Safeway/Albertson’s versus Whole Foods.)

With a (truly) curated App Store, Apple could massively step up its vetting process for developers and apps, and wield its ban hammer as injudiciously as it feels necessary, while exhibiting a comparatively lighter touch for the regular store. Customers can shop the curated store with increased confidence in the quality while still having access to millions of apps.

UPDATE: Apple gave a statement to 9to5Mac:

The company thanked 9to5Mac for its investigation and added that, prior to our reporting, it had already investigated and taken action against 25 similar apps, while also terminating the developer accounts associated with them.

Apple also said its review systems learn from fraudulent and malicious apps by incorporating new signals into its detection models, improving the company’s ability to identify and reject future submissions that exhibit similar behavior.

Calgary.tech, last week:

Apple will make a rare conference appearance in Calgary next week, joining the inaugural Swift Rockies gathering for iOS developers at the Calgary Zoo.

Taking place July 22 and 23, Swift Rockies is a boutique, single-track conference created by Calgary-based iOS engineer Raman Singh. The independently organized event is capped at 180 attendees and designed to encourage closer interaction between speakers and developers through round-table seating and an intimate format.

The newest addition to the agenda is a 90-minute presentation from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Relations team. Scheduled for the afternoon of July 23, the session will examine the biggest announcements from WWDC26, including the thinking behind Apple’s new technologies and how developers can apply them in real-world projects.

Swift Rockies is a “retreat-style iOS developer conference in the heart of the Rockies.”

Apple’s participation comes as a surprise, as it’s been several years since I’ve heard of Apple people officially attending a community-led developer event (and not “attending as an individual while hiding their conference badges”). Even if the session being presented is one they offer globally, it’s fantastic to see Apple’s Developer Relations team again relating to developers outside of an Apple-managed event. That’s a welcome shift from the last few years that I was there (even pre-pandemic). My favorite part of being on that team was direct developer engagement. I hope it marks a return to form for WWDR.

(Apple being Apple, though, a conference ticket is apparently insufficient. You must also be a registered Apple Developer and request attendance. Baby steps.)

Matt Burgess, Wired (Apple News+ link):

Apple and Google have been ordered to take down apps that can “nudify” or “undress” people and told that they must stop profiting from the harmful technology, according to cease-and-desist letters sent to the companies seen by WIRED.

On Thursday, San Francisco city attorney David Chiu sent legal notices to Apple and Google demanding that they remove from their app stores 13 face-swapping apps, which allow users to create AI-generated nonconsensual nude images. The letters say the Silicon Valley giants should stop “aiding and abetting” the sale of explicit deepfake images and “sever” business relationships with the app developers. […]

The city attorney, whose office previously took legal action against 16 popular deepfake websites, says Apple and Google have likely “made millions of dollars in fees” from apps that offer nudification, and they should improve their moderation processes to stop them appearing in their stores in the first place.

One might be tempted to ask why these apps were approved for sale in the first place. We can simply chalk it up to ineptitude, indifference, and income. The app review process is notoriously porous, most reviewers are treadmilling a daily quota, and none of Apple, Google, or developers want to give up the potentially enormous revenue.

I’m sure hardline “free speech absolutists” like Elon Musk will object, but I’d love to see this picked up by cities and states across the country.

(No word on whether the demand included Musk’s Grok, which elicited (unheeded) calls for a ban earlier this year for generating deepfakes.)

Apple’s and Google’s statements are models of deflection. First, let’s establish the baseline expectation for this content:

Both Apple and Google have developer policies that prohibit pornography, abuse, and harassment on their platforms. They have previously removed dozens of nudify and deepfake apps, after reports by researchers and journalists.

Here’s Google’s response:

Google spokesperson Dan Jackson tells WIRED that the company has deleted “hundreds” of apps with nudifying features for policy violations, including the five Android apps flagged by Chiu’s office, among other steps to restrict access to them.

“Google Play does not allow apps that contain sexual content, and we continually take proactive steps to detect and remove apps with harmful content,” Jackson says in a statement. “When violations are reported to us, we investigate and take swift action, which in the case of these apps has included suspending hundreds of violating apps and restricting related search terms like ‘nudify’ on our store."

Here’s Apple’s:

Apple tells WIRED that developers are ultimately responsible for the content of their apps, and those who fail to follow the rules will have their apps removed. The company also says users can report potentially problematic apps themselves. Adam Dema, an Apple spokesperson, tells WIRED in a statement that the company has removed three of the apps flagged by San Francisco city attorney and is “in the process of terminating their developer accounts from our program.” The other four developers must “address policy violations or risk being removed as well,” the company says.

“The App Store was designed to be a safe and trusted place for users, and we have always strictly prohibited apps designed to generate, distribute, or consume pornography," Dema says in the statement. “‘Nudification’ apps are against our App Review Guidelines and we have proactively rejected many of these apps and removed many others, including when users have flagged them via our reporting tools.”

Neither company takes responsibility for allowing “many” to “hundreds” of apps that violate their guidelines onto their stores. Instead of attributing the failures to lapses in their review processes, with promises to improve, they assert the problem is with developers themselves. It’s not our fault developers violated our very clear and precise rules!, I can hear them whine. Oooh, those wily developers!

I find Apple’s “developers are ultimately responsible” to be especially weak, running counter to its own argument that App Review’s vigilance is necessary to ensure a safe storefront. Instead, it places the onus to police content on developers (and customers), as though the review process Apple regularly touts for its fraud prevention is simply incapable of identifying and rejecting these apps.

Some customers want to violate women, and developers want to profit from it. Apple’s job is to short-circuit that by preventing such apps from ever getting past App Review—and immediately banning developers who ship innocuous-seeming apps that mutate after approval. As often as Apple might claim success at this, its failure rate remains too high.

(I fixate on Apple here because I’m most familiar with its App Store and App Review teams and policies, but you can apply this critique in equal measure to Google.)

Yes, it’s true that developers pull all sorts of shenanigans to get their apps through the system. And yes, the porous app review process is riddled with inconsistently applied rules and reviewers more interested in hitting their numbers than in getting it “right.”

Ultimately, this is an Apple (and Google) app review problem. They need to do better.

Michele Luhn, CNBC:

The airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, has officially been renamed after President Donald Trump, the first time an airport has been named after a sitting U.S. president.

Effective Thursday, the facility will be called President Donald J. Trump International Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

The airport — formerly Palm Beach International Airport — said in an FAQ posted online that “updates to signage, branding and public‑facing materials, will occur in phases.”

As part of the transition, the airport’s FAA locational identifier will change from PBI to DJT. The International Air Transport Association code change is set to occur on Aug. 18.

As if I needed more reasons to avoid Florida.

The Trump family business owns the trademark, reported The New York Times in February. The trademark also “requires the airport to pick a vendor to provide any branded merchandise from a list approved by the Trump family business,” per another report from The New York Times in May.

Will that list be exclusively Trump-affiliated businesses, or will they spread the grift to friends of Trump, too?

The internet wags are having a blast with the name change, building humorous itineraries from three-letter airport codes:

• Palm Beach, FL to Sioux City, IA: DJT → SUX 🌍
• Fresno, California to Fukuoka, Japan to Palm Beach, FL: FAT → FUK → DJT 🌍
• West Palm, FL to Mount Isa, Australia to Fresno, CA to Fukuoka, Japan to South Sumatra, Indonesia: DJT → ISA → FAT → FUK → PDO 🌍

And to add three of my own:

• Palm Beach, FL to Dumatubin, Indonesia to Jefferson City, MO to Dominican Republic: DJT → LUV → JEF → EPS 🌍
• Kazakhstan to Barksdale Air Force Base, LA to Manchester, UK to Palm Beach, FL: URA → BAD → MAN → DJT 🌍
• Palm Beach, FL to Guangzhou, China to Ireland to New Caledonia: DJT → CAN → BYT → MEE 🌍

Why not try building your own itinerary?

UPDATE: Great suggestion by Steve Hayman to map out the trips using Great Circle Mapper. I’ve added 🌍 links to each.

The page Sony published listing the 551 movies they deleted from the libraries of PlayStation customers is a single-column table, a layout easily generated from a simple regex find-and-replace^[1]. They couldn’t even spend five minutes in an LLM generating something nicer^[2]. They just didn’t give a damn. I’m surprised they bothered making a table and giving it “bumblebee”^[3] styling.

(Sony, you’re welcome to use that page. Just credit JAG’s Workshop and Anthropic’s Claude.)

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue and start ranting about digital ownership. John Walker, Kotaku:

Sony is contacting PlayStation Store users who bought movies from the platform that were distributed by StudioCanal—like Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind—to say that “you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.” There’s no mention of any refunds or make-goods for the affected users. Sony simply says the films are going away “due to our content licensing agreements,” once again reaffirming the fact that you are never truly buying anything that’s digital, just temporarily renting it.

The first link in that quoted paragraph is to another Kotaku article from 2023, the previous time Sony deleted content customers “bought.” Notes Walker:

What’s really peculiar about the PlayStation message is that it’s entirely unapologetic, simply stating that “purchased content” will be “deleted” as if that’s perfectly normal.

Timothy Geigner at Techdirt follows up:

[…] part of what is striking in all of this is the sheer mundanity of the announcement. Because there have been no consequences, or any action at all from the public or government, Sony treats this all as if it’s perfectly normal and no big deal. You can tell me all you want about how the Ts and Cs in these purchases do in fact note that the nature of the purchase is a temporary licensing of the content for an undetermined time period… but I can promise you that the public in general doesn’t understand that. They think they’re buying a thing, not a license.

If you ask 100 people if they think they “own” the digital downloads they paid money to buy, the vast majority will look at you like you’re an idiot before retorting, “Of course, ya dolt. That’s what buying means.”

We need laws that make that assumption fact. Ironically, the Sony PlayStation Terms of Service itself illuminates the path forward. Section 8.4 (emphasis added):

8.4. No Resale or Commercial Use.

You must be an end user to purchase from PlayStation Store. Resellers, as determined by us in our sole discretion, are prohibited. When you order or purchase a product from PlayStation Store, you buy a personal license to use that product for private, non-commercial use. That license is not transferable unless your local applicable laws say it must be. This means you can use a product in the ways described in the license, but do not own the product.

(Credit to John Siracusa for pointing this out in this week’s ATP members-only Overtime segment.)

The EFF article I linked to yesterday specifically calls for new laws:

Policymakers can and should work to restore our ownership rights for the digital age.

That starts with legal protections ensuring that the same rights that apply to physical media apply to digital media.

Most policymakers are technologically incompetent. One of their grandchildren will need to pressure them into introducing those protections.

The EFF weighs in on Sony’s killing of physical discs in an article by Rory Mir and Suzanne Castillo. Mir and Castillo call it an “attack” that “[moves] the goalpost on what it actually means to ‘own’ a piece of media,” and state clearly that “[if] you bought it, you should own it.” But I wanted to highlight this paragraph:

Depriving gamers of physical discs leads to another obvious and immediate cost: data. Unlike other digital media like film and TV, video games require a ton of storage. Access to high speed internet is still abysmal in the US, making the high-speeds needed for digital game downloads a luxury some of us may take for granted. For many, a modern game can take days and exceed their data caps.

This made physical discs, particularly for the biggest AAA titles, a logical choice that also largely spared gamers from losing traditional ownership rights. With physical disks, the cost of storing the game was included in the purchase.

I seldom see mentioned the impact of digital downloads on consumers with poor internet connectivity or who pay for metered bandwidth. One downloaded game could blow their monthly allotment. In the U.S., this unsurprisingly tends to impact the least privileged communities—often Black, often poor, often rural—the most. (This realization was one of several extra bits of motivation that helped reduce Xcode’s download size over the years.)

Kudos to EFF for calling this out.

This irrationally optimistic petition, created by Jade Pearce of PNP Games, calls on Sony to “save physical games.” It’s garnered over 314,000 signatures on Change.org since it launched two weeks ago. I’ve signed it, naturally. I appreciate a quixotic campaign.

Wesley Yin-Poole, IGN:

Sony has announced physical disc production ends in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles. […]

This new policy will cover all games released on PlayStation consoles from all publishers after this cut-off date […]

Even if you want to own your gaming media, very soon you’ll be unable to. Sony’s Sid Shuman ascribes the decision to “shifting trends in consumer preference.” I ascribe it to Sony’s desire to improve its bottom line. You can pre-order Marvel’s Wolverine as a digital download or physical disc. Either will cost $70, but the download requires zero inventory, and incremental costs per sale amount to bandwidth usage. There are no factories or paper or ink. Shipping logistics are eliminated.

Another reason to prefer physical discs over digital downloads is the resale market. Many players recoup their costs by selling their played games through GameStop or any number of other services. One physical copy of a game could flow through the consoles of half a dozen players, and Sony sees that revenue just once. Digital sales eliminate that. Even one more player buying a copy of the game doubles Sony’s revenue.

Apple realized the value of digital distribution in 2003 with the iTunes Music Store, embraced it in 2008 with the App Store, and solidified it in 2011 when it discontinued boxed software for Mac apps. Apple hasn’t sold physical software in fifteen years. Sony has plenty of “trends in consumer preference” to point to and incremental revenue to book. I’m only surprised they’ve waited this long.

Ty Roush, Forbes:

IBM’s stock plummeted on Tuesday in its largest single-day loss in its 115-year history, after CEO Arvind Krishna warned investors the computing firm’s latest quarter was “worse than our expectations” while failing to adapt to rising chip costs.

I’m not a stock analyst, but this might be what some folks call “a buying opportunity.”

Krishna’s full statement manages to be both stultifyingly opaque and refreshingly transparent:

When we discussed our expectations with you in April, we noted that we would be wrapping on the launch of z17 in the second quarter. Given this was the strongest start to a mainframe program in our history, we expected Infrastructure revenue to decline low-single digits for the year, beginning this quarter.

What played out was worse than our expectations, driven by a shortfall in our Z performance and the associated software stack, primarily in Transaction Processing. In the last few weeks of June, we saw clients shift their quarterly capex spend toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases. This dynamic impacted client buying patterns. While we anticipated some supply chain-related impact in our expectations, we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization. In addition, clients were distracted with rapidly-evolving, industry-wide cybersecurity concerns in the quarter.

These conditions require our teams to execute perfectly, and this quarter we faltered. We did not adapt and move quickly enough, and numerous large deals failed to close on the timelines we expected, driving the majority of our shortfall.

Translation: “Our customers are buying stuff we aren’t selling.”

See Also: Techmeme’s coverage.

Malcolm Crawford (a long-time Apple colleague, recently retired), with a terrific piece on the structural design failure of Apple Park:

Apple Park’s primary design goal was to foster collaboration and serendipitous interaction — almost the exact words Apple’s own head of industrial design used to describe the building years after it opened, and consistent with what Jobs pitched to Cupertino’s city council in 2011: a ring shape chosen specifically to eliminate hierarchical corners in favour of more egalitarian, encounter-friendly circulation. By most accounts from the people who actually work there, it’s failed at exactly that.

The open-plan floors make it hard to concentrate. The building is so large that getting from one meeting to the next eats real time out of the day. It’s common for people to run meetings with colleagues over Webex — colleagues on the same campus, sometimes no more than two hundred yards away.

Ironically, Apple Park replaced a campus that did far better on the same measure without ever trying to. Infinite Loop produced far more of the accidental, cross-team contact Apple Park was explicitly built to create. Working out why starts with what Infinite Loop got right by accident. It continues with what the research on office proximity says about why that kind of thing happens at all. And it ends with what Apple Park could become instead — including a version of the fix Apple already trusts enough to run for a hundred people a year.

Apple Park is a beautiful structure, but is not terribly conducive to focused or collaborative work. Even as an occasional visitor I found it overwhelming. Employees sit shoulder to shoulder, voices bounce off and bleed through glass walls, and privacy is a virtual impossibility. My friends and colleagues who worked there regularly found it difficult to be productive.

I worked in Infinite Loop (Building 3, 2nd floor) for thirteen years (right below Developer Publications, where Malcolm spent a good portion of his Apple career). I loved IL because its design made serendipitous encounters easy. Whether it was sitting outside Caffè Macs or in the IL 1 Atrium, I would inevitably bump into someone and have a conversation that furthered an in-flight project, sparked something new, or simply reinforced the social ties that bind colleagues.

It helped that at that time, Apple had perhaps 10,000 employees, most of whom were in or near IL. After iPhone came about and IL started getting locked down, much of the natural collaboration dissipated, disappearing behind badged doors and disclosures. By the time Apple Park came along, “chance encounters” had already become less frequent, and when they happened, those conversations were necessarily constrained by NDAs. Apple Park was a vision for an Apple that, ten years after iPhone, no longer really existed.

Malcolm’s essay captures the collaborative beauty of IL and the challenges of Apple Park, and offers a solution that I find remarkably appealing.

If you’ve been part of the Apple (or NeXT) developer ecosystem for a while, you may remember Malcolm—mmalc—as a long-time technical writer on Apple’s Developer Publications team. He’s now writing publicly at mmalc X Machina on topics that stem “from a lifelong interest in technology and the environment.” So far he’s covered everything from EV charger infrastructure to crop yield to a conceptual introduction to git. He notes that he’s “not inviting anyone to sign up or become a ‘member’” but I signed up anyway. Or follow him on Mastodon.

The Office of U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, on X/Twitter (XCancel link):

On the evening of Saturday, July 11, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham passed away from a brief and sudden illness. Senator Graham’s family appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period.

The New York Times (gift link):

Mr. Graham was one of many powerful Republicans who changed their public position on Mr. Trump. As Mr. Trump was rising in his first presidential campaign, Mr. Graham lambasted him as a “demagogue” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

“You know how you make America great again?” Mr. Graham said in a CNN interview in 2015. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

He later said that he had voted in the 2016 election for Evan McMullin, an independent candidate, rather than for Mr. Trump or Hillary Clinton, the Democrat.

A decade later, though, he was regularly and effusively lauding Mr. Trump. In a speech celebrating his South Carolina primary victory last month, Mr. Graham joked, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.”

I learned that “If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing.”

Straton Roberts, introducing his sixth (!) Kickstarter campaign for WWDC-inspired pins:

As a UX designer, I’m passionate about the beauty and usability of great design. Naturally, this makes me an Apple fanboy. I’m also a nerdy pin collector and creator. […]

This set of five (5) unofficial enamel pins pays commemorates Apple’s WWDC 2026 conference.

It’s $40, and while I wouldn’t call myself a nerdy pin collector (I’m at best a nerdy pin appreciator), I of course backed it immediately.

The five designs are adorable: Lil Guy (based on Apple’s viral sensation), Lil Tim (Tim Cook in his hands-clasped “good morning!” pose), Orb (based on Siri AI’s new animation), Golden Gate (the bridge and the OS), and my favorite, Crack Marketing Team Microbus. (That’s the one that sold me.)

The campaign has already smashed its $1,000 goal and crushed its $5,000 stretch goal (magnetic clutch backs instead of rubber). With $7,201 pledged by 118 backers as of this writing, it’s still a little shy of its $10,000 stretch goal (vinyl stickers), with four days left.

(Roberts runs Glitchbits, which sells dozens of other beautifully designed pins.)

If you want to go deep into Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Kirk Hamilton dissected it in a May 2025 episode of his terrific Strong Songs podcast. Hamilton, as usual, does a fantastic job exploring the song’s musicality, backstory, and Tyler’s performance, and gives equal due to Tyler’s co-performer, Rory Dodd. (Overcast, Apple Podcasts.)

(Also be sure to watch the Literal Version of the “Total Eclipse” music video that Hamilton mentions. It had me in stitches.)

Alex Williams, The New York Times (gift link):

Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh singer who, with a frosted, teased-up coiffure and a voice both weathered and operatic, soared to No. 1 with “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” one of the titanic pop anthems of the 1980s, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Portugal. She was 75.

“Total Eclipse of the Heart” is a truly epic song, a favorite of my youth. But don’t sleep on “Sometimes When We Touch,” “Holding Out for a Hero,” “It’s a Heartache,” “Making Love (Out of Nothing at All),” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” which were staples of my college and post-college parties—especially among my more melodramatic theatre friends.

Every now and then I fall apart.

Two additional items worth calling out from The Criterion Collection that aren’t (directly) part of the aforelinked Amazon sale:

• 12 Angry Men has a new 4K digital restoration coming in September. You can pre-order on Amazon for $50, but The Criterion Collection website lists it for $40. It’s available now on Blu-ray for $20, but I’m holding out for the 4K remaster. I adore this movie. The first time I watched it was perhaps just ten or twelve years back, as part of an Apple University course. It sparked a passionate conversation. I wish I could find my notes.
• The Complete Kubrick is coming in October: thirteen features and three shorts—including Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Shining—all in 4K. It’s available for pre-order on Amazon for $600, or for $480 directly from Criterion. I’m not a huge Kubrick fan, but I recognize his remarkable technical and creative talent, and a thirty-disc collector’s edition with 4K restorations of his work might push me over the edge, purely as a cinephile.

I assume Amazon will eventually price-match both items (and I’d definitely hold out for a sale on the Kubrick collection), but if you want the best price today, it may be worth ordering from Criterion directly.

Amazon is running a “limited time deal” on dozens of movies from The Criterion Collection. Many are listed as “50% off,” though that’s off MSRP; actual discounts seem to run about $10–$15 off Amazon’s everyday prices.

I’m a big believer in owning physical copies of media I love. All (but one two) are in 4K. Here are a few classics that caught my eye. (No, I’m not buying them all, as tempting as that is.)

• The Princess Bride, $25. I already own the 20th Anniversary Edition, yet my finger hovered over the “Add to cart” button longer than was strictly necessary. Why won’t my arm move?
• Network, $25. Could it be possible this is even more relevant today than it was in 1976?
• Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, $25. Surreal, immature humor? Yes, please.
• Monty Python’s Life of Brian, $25. “Anybody else feel like a little giggle when I mention my fwiend Biggus… Dickus?”
• Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, 1954–1975, $113. This one is for my friends. You know who you are.
• The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years, $249. 4K restorations, over twenty-five hours of special features, and ten illustrated books. I considered it, and I’m not even a Wes Anderson fan.
• Citizen Kane, $30. It’s… fine. “Greatest film ever made”? Eh. Still, it deserves to be in every cinephile’s collection.
• Serenity (2005), $20. Loved this movie, but I’m still pissed about Wash’s “leaf on the wind.” I really hope the Firefly “animated reboot” comes through.
• Thelma & Louise, $25. Millennials might say these two yeeted themselves off a cliff. Millennials.
• The Fisher King, $25. Perhaps my third-favorite Robin Williams movie (behind Dead Poets Society and Hook).
• The Silence of the Lambs, $20. He didn’t say “Hello, Clarice” until Hannibal.
• Do the Right Thing, $20. Fight the power. Not in 4K, alas. I’d prefer a higher quality archive source, but beggars, etc.
• Being John Malkovich, $20. “It’s my head, Schwartz! It’s my head!” Also not in 4K.

I have no idea how long this “limited” sale runs, so if you’re also into owning the media you love, check out the collection.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple scores a historic 89 nominations across 15 programs for the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards, and leads as the network with the most nominations in the Outstanding Drama and Outstanding Comedy series categories, respectively, earning top program nominations for comedies Widow’s Bay, Shrinking, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, alongside dramas Pluribus, Slow Horses, and Your Friends & Neighbors. Apple’s breakout comedy sensation Widow’s Bay leads as one of this year’s most-nominated programs with 19 nominations in total, and Pluribus lands 18 nominations following its global hit freshman season, while celebrated Apple Original Shrinking lands 10 nominations, Slow Horses is recognized with nine, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles scores eight in total.

I should really watch more Apple TV.

Worth clarifying that Apple’s “record,” “historic” 89 Emmy nods are a record and historic only for Apple: HBO Max earned 122 overall nominations, while Netflix racked up 111.

To Apple’s credit, I’ve at least heard of most of its shows, and their batting average is impressive: 15 of the 31 programs submitted for voter consideration—“less than half of what its competitors submitted”—received nominations. Apple may not have a lot of shows, but the shows they have are chock full of quality.

See Also: The Emmys website has a complete list of nominees.

Bob Nightengale, USA Today’s Major League Baseball columnist, in a one-paragraph aside at the end of a long, unrelated column about pitcher Jacob Misiorowski:

Players and fans can soon stop complaining about veteran umpire CB Bucknor. He is one of seven umpires who have informed MLB that he will retire at the season’s conclusion, accepting their buyout offer. The other six umpires: Laz Diaz, Brian O’Nora, Lance Barksdale, Marvin Hudson, Tony Randazzo and Andy Fletcher. The wave of retirements could open the door for Jen Pawol becoming the first full-time female umpire in 2027.

(It was later expanded into a full report.)

Yours truly, in April of this year, reflecting on Bucknor’s early struggles with MLB’s new Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System (ABS):

No doubt many umpires will be frustrated (and embarrassed) seeing their calls overturned—especially close ones that are mere tenths of inches off the strike zone. Good umpires will adapt. Bad umpires will hasten their retirement. I’ll wager Bucknor will be gone by the All-Star Break.

The All-Star break starts Monday and I’m claiming my “I was right” point for a retirement notice ahead of the break, even though Bucknor is still expected to call games post-break.

(Or perhaps not; Bucknor has been out almost the entire season after being hit by a foul tip on a 100 mph pitch from Jacob Misiorowski—the subject of Nightengale’s story, ironically. Bucknor’s called all of two games this year. There’s the possibility he simply won’t return.)

There’s no indication that these retirements have anything to do with ABS, of course (although Bucknor especially had to be feeling the heat after he had seven of nine calls overturned by ABS in his two early-season games behind the plate; his first game was particularly brutal). All seven umpires are between 59 and 63 years old and have been calling games for twenty-five to thirty-five years. A juicy buyout was probably too tantalizing to pass up.

Regardless of the reasons, these retirements open up seven slots for new umpires, which is great news for Jen Pawol, who umped her first regular season games last season and is a substitute umpire this year. I’ll love to see her become MLB’s first full-time female umpire.

Wired’s Jeremy White needed a “first phone” for his son (Internet Archive link if you hit a paywall):

Come September, he will have to walk across town to school on his own. But if he’s going to be walking around out in the world without me, then a tracking tag won’t cut it. He is far too young to have unfettered access to the internet and social media platforms, but what if he gets lost? A classic Nokia, supplying just texts and calls, won’t come to his aid. Maps and satnav require a web connection.

In short, he needs a smartphone that’s not a smartphone.

A “dumb smartphone,” as it were. White considered and dismissed third-party apps (“they charge you for the privilege of removing access to applications”) and discovered a built-in solution:

It’s called Assistive Access. Introduced with iOS 17, Apple designed it for those with cognitive disabilities. If you’ve never encountered or stumbled across it, it’s a distinctive iOS experience: fewer options, more focused features, easier to navigate. The aesthetic is ideal for kids: large, friendly tiles for the apps replace the smaller icons of the “normal” Apple interface.

White details the process of setting it up and various configuration options. In the end:

My chosen setup? My son only gets Calls, Messages, Maps, Camera (so we can video call, but I’ve ruthlessly turned off selfies), Photos, and Music. Nothing else. I’ve turned an old, unused iPhone 13 languishing in a drawer into the best six-app dumb phone money hasn’t bought.

It’s a great feature. Why Apple hides this useful functionality under the Accessibility banner is beyond me. (I think it’s Apple’s way of adding features it isn’t sure are broadly useful, or thinks aren’t polished enough for wide adoption. See the “Side Button”, “Face ID & Attention,” and “Sound & Name Recognition” settings, to name but three examples.)

This story caught my attention because over the weekend, a good friend’s 11-year-old son got lost in a mall. The family spent a frantic hour searching for him (his instinct was to continue wandering around looking for them instead of waiting in one spot). He’s still too young to have a phone, but this solution, with location tracking and text messaging enabled, could have quickly resolved an enormously stressful situation.

Jordan Rubin, reporting for MS Now:

The Supreme Court sided with Texas on Monday in emergency litigation over a law that its opponents said marked the first time a state has ever required its citizens “to prove their age before reading a newspaper, entering a bookstore, or even accessing the internet.”

Student and trade groups brought emergency applications to the high court against the law, called the App Store Accountability Act. The law is intended to help parents direct and supervise children’s downloads of apps and in-app purchases by requiring age verification, parental consent and age rating and content display. […]

A federal judge halted the law, finding that it was likely unconstitutional due to its restrictions on speech. Then a federal appellate panel granted the state’s request to lift the judge’s order, leading the groups to seek urgent relief from the high court.

The federal judge who initially blocked the law was Judge Robert Pitman in the Western District of Texas. Ann E. Marimow, reporting for The New York Times:

He compared it to a proposal that bookstores be required to verify the age of customers and obtain parental consent before minors enter or buy a book.

“It restricts access to a vast universe of speech by requiring Texans to prove their age before downloading a mobile app or accessing paid content within those apps and requires minors to obtain parental consent,” he wrote.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit then paused that ruling and said it would allow the law to take effect, writing that the “need to protect children is intensified in the digital world.”

I continue to contend that age verification laws are mass surveillance under the guise of child safety—an attack on privacy that does little to protect children. No one needs to prove their age to read the print edition of The New York Times, but would need to do so to download and use the app (and eventually, the website, you can be sure).

Apple and Google already comply with the Texas law (and with similar requirements in Utah, Louisiana, Brazil, Australia, and Singapore) via their Declared Age and Play Age Signals APIs, respectively.

Apple’s lengthy Trust and Safety segment at WWDC26 that introduced new “child safety features” was no doubt a preemptive attempt to dissuade further demands to collect and share its customers’ personal data.

Developers have also started to comply. I saw my first age range request dialog a few days ago, from Anthropic’s Claude (separate from the more-intrusive identity verification they’re rolling out).

With laws requiring app stores and developers to verify and confirm your age to download apps, we’re not terribly far from laws that require your identity to do the same. I would wager a hotel-priced beverage that Texas, Utah, and elsewhere are salivating at the prospect of knowing who is downloading which apps and visiting which sites.

Meta banned M.G. Siegler’s WhatsApp account, with no warning and no explanation, after twice banning his Instagram account:

Yes, that’s right, for a third time in as many years, I’ve been banned by Meta. What for? Do you really have to ask? Nobody knows. My suspicion is that it’s directly tied to the claiming of usernames on WhatsApp, which Meta opened up yesterday. After I claimed mine, it seemingly logged me out of my other active instances. And when I went to log back in… boom. Banned.

Siegler lives in Europe, where WhatsApp is the de facto messaging app. Not having a WhatsApp account is like not having a cellphone.

Making matters worse, people can still message Siegler on WhatsApp, but aren’t told he’s not receiving those messages.

Let me just point out that I run a lot of my household through WhatsApp – including childcare. Imagine if there was an issue with a child and someone was frantically trying to get ahold of me and couldn’t because I’ve been banned? Honestly, should that even be legal?

It should not.

When a platform becomes so ubiquitous that it’s effectively become infrastructure that others rely on, it should not be able to ban you or lock you out of your account without clear warnings and a human-led review and appeals process. Even if fraud (or worse) is suspected. It should take significant effort to shut down an account and the burden should be on the provider to prove why it’s necessary, not on the user to argue why it’s not. I would even suggest that cutting access to critical accounts and services should require the corporate equivalent of a court order. Your Apple or Google account, cellphone number, and, yes, your WhatsApp account, have become as essential as a driver’s license or passport and should be equally difficult to suspend, not simply subject to the (likely AI-powered) whims of the account provider.

(Via John Gruber at Daring Fireball, who writes:

I have never seen the appeal of WhatsApp, and would rank iMessage’s dominance here in the U.S. as one of the many reasons I’m so glad to live here.

Like Gruber, I don’t see the appeal of WhatsApp—my most recent message on there is from 2017. I initially refused to use it out of security concerns—it wasn’t end-to-end encrypted—and now I simply refuse to use it on principle: I detest everything associated with Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. Fortunately for me, anyone I communicate with regularly uses an iPhone and Messages. So in addition to Gruber’s appreciation for iMessage’s U.S. dominance, I’m also grateful my friends and family have great taste in phones.)

It’s late in the day, but I’m continuing my annual tradition of sharing Frederick Douglass’ powerful and insightful speech “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (best known by its most famous sentence, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?”) as read by the late James Earl Jones. It continues to move me despite a dozen or more viewings. It’s also worth reading the speech in its entirety (archived for posterity). As I noted last year, it’s “both eye-opening and depressing,” with “countless passages uncomfortably analogous to our current moment.” Do yourself a favor and read it in a comfy chair. It’s meaty, and deserves a careful and considered review.

Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer (gift link if needed):

I’d joked with my editors earlier in the week that I might lose my columnist license (not an actual thing, although maybe it should be) if my piece that runs on the weekend of the United States Semiquincentennial wasn’t a Big Think essay on what the American Experiment all means — to the extent that anyone can actually think through the fireworks, traffic jams, and 100-degree temperatures.

That’s when it hit me. That was exactly the column Donald Trump was counting on from me and every other opinion writer in America ahead of Independence Day. The 47th president needed a week when the pundits put on their wide-angle lenses and put away the magnifying glasses, while his “forgotten Americans” headed off to the beach or the fireworks show, or gorged themselves on six hours of World Cup soccer every day, and stopped watching the news.

An international jewel thief needs to create a distraction. Because if you’d been paying attention during the nation’s summer vacation week, you’d have seen that Trump is robbing us blind.

The amount by which Trump is robbing us blind is detailed in a “federally mandated financial disclosure form” released ahead of the Fourth of July weekend, showing that Trump “earned” $2.2 billion in 2025, an astounding amount for anyone, but for a sitting president is criminal—quite literally, I’m certain. It’s shocking but not surprising that Trump has corruptly leveraged the presidency to enrich himself, his family, and his cronies—and is doing so blatantly and in the open. Bunch details the jaw-dropping scope of Trump’s grift, before pivoting to memories of America’s 200th celebration and “a new hopeful yearning.” He ends by asking:

How do we celebrate a 250-year slow-bending of the arc of the moral universe without losing our focus on the ongoing crime scene at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? […]

Don’t let the president hijack the Fourth of July to rob the focus from what matters most, the things we need to write and discuss and march against every week: his unprecedented criminality.

Yours truly last June, on the then-recently announced Trump phone:

I fully expect this phone will never ship.

Dominic Preston at The Verge, today:

12 months, 16 days, 21 hours, and 54 minutes after I first heard about Trump Mobile’s T1 Phone 8002 (gold version), I’m finally holding one in my own hands.

Journalists started receiving Trump phones in early June. Some early pre-orders also started shipping around that time, and regular orders, like Preston’s, are starting to arrive.

Well, color me embarrassed.

I suppose an apology is in order for doubting the Trump Organization’s ability to ship this phone (and only nine months late).

It’s not exactly a state-of-the-art phone. iFixit revealed it’s a gold-painted HTC U24 Pro—a two-year-old device “designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China.” So much for “Made in America.”

YouTuber Quinn Nelson (Snazzy Labs) also bought the device. In his unboxing and review video, he outlines the overall cheap feel of the product and packaging (his phone shipped with a broken fingerprint sensor, the “Quick Start” guide was printed on what seems to be a home printer with low toner, and his SIM card arrived separately in a hand-addressed envelope, for example).

I’m sure the suckers—I’m sorry, loyal Americans—who buy this phone will be thrilled once it finally arrives at their doorstep.

Rex Huppke, in an opinion piece for USA Today:

Like my good friends in the Republican Party, I fear any kind of democratic socialist as well as any progressives who are actually progressive. They all seem far too fixated on helping “the people.” Blech.

Via Heidi Li Feldman, who calls it satire, though I wouldn’t bet against it being a transcript.

Jack Loftus, McSweeney’s:

Originalism has never meant being chained to the original words. That is a childish misunderstanding promoted by people who think “shall” means “shall” and “all” means “all.” Real originalism means asking what the Founders would have wanted if they had lived long enough to become furious about anchor babies.

Jay Willis at Balls and Strikes, regarding the Supreme Court’s recent 6-3 ruling that allows states to exclude transgender athletes from women’s sports:

Generally speaking, when the fifth paragraph of a Supreme Court opinion contains the phrase “biological males who identify as females,” it is safe to assume that the author is not working toward a ruling that respects the dignity or existence of trans people.

The Brett Kavanaugh-penned majority opinion is riddled with “anti-trans rhetoric,” plus, from Clarence Thomas, “an opportunity to be cruel to trans people in public”:

Perhaps the most revealing opinion in B.P.J. comes from Justice Clarence Thomas, whose concurrence includes what are (at least for now) the most gleefully transphobic lines committed to the pages of the United States Reports. “A man does not have a legal right to compete against women just because he believes that he is a woman,” Thomas wrote. “Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are.” He closed with language that tracks the vile transphobic talking point that transgender people do not exist: To use language that obscures the “reality” of “biological” sex, Thomas wrote, “is to lie to the public.”

Hila Keren, also at Balls and Strikes, on the stunning “stereotype-laden” opinion that’s “laced with condescension for women athletes”:

The Court’s opinion does not just convey the conservatives’ disrespect for trans athletes, though. At times, its portrayals of cis girls in sports almost read as a younger version of the tradwives idealized by the religious right. Kavanaugh’s opinion amplified not only girls’ “inherent” physical inferiority in terms of “height, weight, strength, speed, endurance, and jumping ability,” but also their supposed inability to handle fairness, safety, and competitive issues, and a general struggle to cope with “debilitating disadvantage.”

The ruling itself is awful, and the language used to justify it is especially appalling.

Elie Mystal at The Nation (email-gated; Apple News+ link), regarding Tuesday’s Supreme Court birthright citizenship ruling:

The ruling is a victory, to the extent that upholding a bedrock principle hard-coded into the Constitution for more than 150 years is what passes for a “win” these days. But the ruling was far closer than it should have been. There were a number of dissents, and when you read those dissents, the ruling looks less like the final word and more like the prologue to what will be a long and ugly attempt to write xenophobia and bigotry back into the Constitution.

Birthright citizenship is a law whose meaning and history is so clear and obvious that opposition to it divulges more about the opposers. See also voting rights and slavery.

This 6–3 ruling comes with strong dissents (including from Brett Kavanaugh, part of the purported majority), which lay out “the road map for how Trump or future bigots might get around the Citizenship Clause.” Mystal dismantles each of the dissenters’ points (from an absurd redefinition of “domiciled” to an incredibly xenophobic reinterpretation of the history of American immigration), but notes that we’re a long way from this being settled law:

From where I sit, birthright citizenship is now poised to replace abortion as the litmus test for future Republican judicial appointments, with Barbara replacing Roe as the case Republicans insist must be overturned.

Logic and the Constitution won this round, but the fight has only just begun.

Elizabeth Tai counts herself a member of a “dying” cultural cohort, the “English-educated Chinese in Malaysia”:

I am what many Malaysians would call a banana: Chinese, but more proficient in English.

To others, I’m not “banana” enough, because by some freak of geography and luck, I can converse badly in Mandarin and in a rare form of Hokkien, the northern version spoken in Penang. But that doesn’t mean I’m Chinese enough for the Chinese-educated, who still firmly consider me a banana because I can’t read well, nor have I read the Chinese classics. So I exist in a weird in-between place.

Tai’s story is about her hope of seeing “the next generation of Chinese in Malaysia” adopting more Chinese language and culture while maintaining their western influences, thus eliminating the weird middle ground where she finds herself.

While Tai’s experience and perspective is specific to her cultural background, I found myself nodding along in recognition. I, being West Indian-born and American-raised, resonated with her sense of feeling both culturally part and apart. In middle- and high school, I was never “American” enough, while on summer trips back home I’d become “too American.” In my adulthood, I was both “too Black” and “not Black enough.” To some, I was merely Black on the outside, white on the inside—an Oreo, to use a term that, unlike Tai’s Asian “banana,” no Black person has ever called themselves.

I imagineed that our youth of today are more culturally cross-pollinated than ever in our history. I regularly witness my group of friends navigate these cultural intersections: the daughter of a half-West Indian, half-Chinese dad and Vietnamese mom embracing every aspect of her several cultures; the two kids of a Chinese-Malaysian mom and French-Canadian dad enrolled in a Chinese immersion school; or the daughter of a Jewish mom and Catholic dad choosing to celebrate her bat mitzvah. Our young people will be more culturally attuned than any previous generation. The kids, as they say, are alright.

Pete Buttigieg (regrettably on Substack):

You’ve probably heard of “swatting.” It’s a cruel and dangerous kind of hoax that has started happening more frequently in recent years. Someone anonymously calls 911 with a false report of imminent danger, such as a hostage situation, at the home of a public figure. Law enforcement swarms the house, guns drawn, terrifying the unsuspecting homeowner and family and sometimes even leading to deaths or injuries in the confusion. It’s happened to dozens of lawmakers, judges, celebrities, and others. (When I was in the Cabinet, someone attempted to do this to our home, but fortunately the hoax was quickly detected.) It’s become enough of a problem that the FBI now has a dedicated database to track such incidents.

Now imagine the same concept, but with Child Protective Services instead of a SWAT team. Hadn’t thought of that? Me neither, until a few days ago when a police officer and a CPS worker showed up at our home and politely asked to speak with me.

An anonymous caller accused Buttigieg of committing “unspeakable violent crimes” that purportedly put his twin four-year-olds in danger. The children were separated from their parents for a day and subjected to a “forensic interview” with CPS workers.

Calling the cops as an intimidation tactic is a clear abuse of law enforcement, whether against a public figure or a private citizen, and the perpetrators are unrepentantly evil. That it’s often effective is a scathing indictment of our state of policing.

Buttigieg’s anger comes through, but he’s remarkably restrained in his retelling of this violation against him and his family. I would not have managed such self-control. I’d be seething and prepared to go scorched earth on the person making such a reckless and baseless accusation. I would get medieval on their ass.

Basic Apple Guy:

Since the debut of OS X 10.9 Mavericks in 2013, Apple has released 14 versions of macOS bearing the names of beaches, mountain ranges, islands, valleys, and landmarks from across the Golden State.

But what exactly is a Mavericks? Where is Sonoma? And how many Mac users could point to where Ventura or Tahoe on a map?

Curious myself, I decided to trace the history and real-world locations behind every California-inspired macOS release and the wallpapers used to market the them to the world. Enjoy.

I recall these OS naming announcements fondly. It was always a hoot to hear the tales of the “crack marketing team,” especially as I knew several of them. Those of us not disclosed on the new names would place bets on the new name ahead of release and be sorely disappointed when it wasn’t Oxnard, Fresno, or Chico. (Though I think macOS Napa or Pismo are still future options.)

Come for the history, stay for the photos of a very young Craig Federighi.