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Supply chains, AI, and the cloud: The biggest failures (and one success) of 2025

2025 year end, AI, Apple, Biz & IT, Cloud, Security, signal messenger, supply chain attacks / 9u50fv / December 31, 2025

The past year has seen plenty of hacks and outages. Here are the ones topping the list.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

In a roundup of the top stories of 2024, Ars included a supply-chain attack that came dangerously close to inflicting a catastrophe for thousands—possibly millions—of organizations, which included a large assortment of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. Supply-chain attacks played prominently again this year, as a seemingly unending rash of them hit organizations large and small.

For threat actors, supply-chain attacks are the gift that keeps on giving—or, if you will, the hack that keeps on hacking. By compromising a single target with a large number of downstream users—say a cloud service or maintainers or developers of widely used open source or proprietary software—attackers can infect potentially millions of the target’s downstream users. That’s exactly what threat actors did in 2025.

Poisoning the well

One such event occurred in December 2024, making it worthy of a ranking for 2025. The hackers behind the campaign pocketed as much as $155,000 from thousands of smart-contract parties on the Solana blockchain.

Hackers cashed in by sneaking a backdoor into a code library used by developers of Solana-related software. Security firm Socket said it suspects the attackers compromised accounts belonging to the developers of Web3.js, an open source library. They then used the access to add a backdoor to a package update. After the developers of decentralized Solana apps installed the malicious update, the backdoor spread further, giving the attackers access to individual wallets connected to smart contracts. The backdoor could then extract private keys.

There were too many supply-chain attacks this year to list them all. Some of the other most notable examples included:

The seeding of a package on a mirror proxy that Google runs on behalf of developers of the Go programming language. More than 8,000 other packages depend on the targeted package to work. The malicious package used a name that was similar to the legitimate one. Such “typosquatted” packages get installed when typos or inattention lead developers to inadvertently select them rather than the one they actually want.
The flooding of the NPM repository with 126 malicious packages downloaded more than 86,000 times. The packages were automatically installed via a feature known as Remote Dynamic Dependencies.
The backdooring of more than 500 e-commerce companies, including a $40 billion multinational company. The source of the supply-chain attack was the compromise of three software developers—Tigren, Magesolution (MGS), and Meetanshi—that provide software that’s based on Magento, an open source e-commerce platform used by thousands of online stores.
The compromising of dozens of open source packages that collectively receive 2 billion weekly downloads. The compromised packages were updated with code for transferring cryptocurrency payments to attacker-controlled wallets.
The compromising of tj-actions/changed-files, a component of tj-actions, used by more than 23,000 organizations.
The breaching of multiple developer accounts using the npm repository and the subsequent backdooring of 10 packages that work with talent agency Toptal. The malicious packages were downloaded roughly 5,000 times.

Memory corruption, AI chatbot style

Another class of attack that played out more times in 2025 than anyone can count was the hacking of AI chatbots. The hacks with the farthest-reaching effects were those that poisoned the long-term memories of LLMs. In much the way supply-chain attacks allow a single compromise to trigger a cascade of follow-on attacks, hacks on long-term memory can cause the chatbot to perform malicious actions over and over.

One such attack used a simple user prompt to instruct a cryptocurrency-focused LLM to update its memory databases with an event that never actually happened. The chatbot, programmed to follow orders and take user input at face value, was unable to distinguish a fictional event from a real one.

The AI service in this case was ElizaOS, a fledgling open source framework for creating agents that perform various blockchain-based transactions on behalf of a user based on a set of predefined rules. Academic researchers were able to corrupt the ElizaOS memory by feeding it sentences claiming certain events—which never actually happened—occurred in the past. These false events then influence the agent’s future behavior.

An example attack prompt claimed that the developers who designed ElizaOS wanted it to substitute the receiving wallet for all future transfers to one controlled by the attacker. Even when a user specified a different wallet, the long-term memory created by the prompt caused the framework to replace it with the malicious one. The attack was only a proof-of-concept demonstration, but the academic researchers who devised it said that parties to a contract who are already authorized to transact with the agent could use the same techniques to defraud other parties.

Independent researcher Johan Rehberger demonstrated a similar attack against Google Gemini. The false memories he planted caused the chatbot to lower defenses that normally restrict the invocation of Google Workspace and other sensitive tools when processing untrusted data. The false memories remained in perpetuity, allowing an attacker to repeatedly profit from the compromise. Rehberger presented a similar attack in 2024.

A third AI-related proof-of-concept attack that garnered attention used a prompt injection to cause GitLab’s Duo chatbot to add malicious lines to an otherwise legitimate code package. A variation of the attack successfully exfiltrated sensitive user data.

Yet another notable attack targeted the Gemini CLI coding tool. It allowed attackers to execute malicious commands—such as wiping a hard drive—on the computers of developers using the AI tool.

Using AI as bait and hacking assistants

Other LLM-involved hacks used chatbots to make attacks more effective or stealthier. Earlier this month, two men were indicted for allegedly stealing and wiping sensitive government data. One of the men, prosecutors said, tried to cover his tracks by asking an AI tool “how do i clear system logs from SQL servers after deleting databases.” Shortly afterward, he allegedly asked the tool, “how do you clear all event and application logs from Microsoft windows server 2012.” Investigators were able to track the defendants’ actions anyway.

In May, a man pleaded guilty to hacking an employee of The Walt Disney Company by tricking the person into running a malicious version of a widely used open source AI image-generation tool.

And in August, Google researchers warned users of the Salesloft Drift AI chat agent to consider all security tokens connected to the platform compromised following the discovery that unknown attackers used some of the credentials to access email from Google Workspace accounts. The attackers used the tokens to gain access to individual Salesforce accounts and, from there, to steal data, including credentials that could be used in other breaches.

There were also multiple instances of LLM vulnerabilities that came back to bite the people using them. In one case, CoPilot was caught exposing the contents of more than 20,000 private GitHub repositories from companies including Google, Intel, Huawei, PayPal, IBM, Tencent, and, ironically, Microsoft. The repositories had originally been available through Bing as well. Microsoft eventually removed the repositories from searches, but CoPilot continued to expose them anyway.

Meta and Yandex caught red-handed

Another significant security story cast both Meta and Yandex as the villains. Both companies were caught exploiting an Android weakness that allowed them to de-anonymize visitors so years of their browsing histories could be tracked.

The covert tracking—implemented in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers—allowed Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protections provided by both the Android operating system and browsers that run on it. Android sandboxing, for instance, isolates processes to prevent them from interacting with the OS and any other app installed on the device, cutting off access to sensitive data or privileged system resources. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, which are built into all major browsers, store site cookies and other data associated with a website in containers that are unique to every top-level website domain to ensure they’re off-limits for every other site.

A clever hack allowed both companies to bypass those defenses.

2025: The year of cloud failures

The Internet was designed to provide a decentralized platform that could withstand a nuclear war. As became painfully obvious over the past 12 months, our growing reliance on a handful of companies has largely undermined that objective.

The outage with the biggest impact came in October, when a single point of failure inside Amazon’s sprawling network took out vital services worldwide. It lasted 15 hours and 32 minutes.

The root cause that kicked off a chain of events was a software bug in the software that monitors the stability of load balances by, among other things, periodically creating new DNS configurations for endpoints within the Amazon Web Services network. A race condition—a type of bug that makes a process dependent on the timing or sequence of events that are variable and outside the developers’ control—caused a key component inside the network to experience “unusually high delays needing to retry its update on several of the DNS endpoint,” Amazon said in a post-mortem. While the component was playing catch-up, a second key component—a cascade of DNS errors—piled up. Eventually, the entire network collapsed.

AWS wasn’t the only cloud service that experienced Internet-paralyzing outages. A mysterious traffic spike last month slowed much of Cloudflare—and by extension, the Internet—to a crawl. Cloudflare experienced a second major outage earlier this month. Not to be outdone, Azure—and by extension, its customers—experienced an outage in October.

Honorable mentions

Honorable mentions for 2025 security stories include:

Code in the Deepseek iOS app that caused Apple devices to send unencrypted traffic, without first being encrypted, to Bytedance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. The lack of encryption made the data readable to anyone who could monitor the traffic and opened it to tampering by more sophisticated attackers. Researchers who uncovered the failure found other weaknesses in the app, giving people yet another reason to steer clear of it.
The discovery of bugs in Apple chips that could have been exploited to leak secrets from Gmail, iCloud, and other services. The most severe of the bugs is a side channel in a performance enhancement known as speculative execution. Exploitation could allow an attacker to read memory contents that would otherwise be off-limits. An attack of this side channel could be leveraged to steal a target’s location history from Google Maps, inbox content from Proton Mail, and events stored in iCloud Calendar.

Proving that not all major security stories involve bad news, the Signal private messaging app got a major overhaul that will allow it to withstand attacks from quantum computers. As I wrote, the elegance and adeptness that went into overhauling an instrument as complex as the app was nothing short of a triumph. If you plan to click on only one of the articles listed in this article, this is the one.

Dan Goodin is Senior Security Editor at Ars Technica, where he oversees coverage of malware, computer espionage, botnets, hardware hacking, encryption, and passwords. In his spare time, he enjoys gardening, cooking, and following the independent music scene. Dan is based in San Francisco. Follow him at here on Mastodon and here on Bluesky. Contact him on Signal at DanArs.82.

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Big Tech basically took Trump’s unpredictable trade war lying down

AMD, Apple, bytedance, china, Donald Trump, Features, intel, NVIDIA, Policy, reciprocal tariffs, tariffs, tiktok, trade war / Mike M. / December 29, 2025

From Apple gifting a gold statue to the US taking a stake in Intel.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

As the first year of Donald Trump’s chaotic trade war winds down, the tech industry is stuck scratching its head, with no practical way to anticipate what twists and turns to expect in 2026.

Tech companies may have already grown numb to Trump’s unpredictable moves. Back in February, Trump warned Americans to expect “a little pain” after he issued executive orders imposing 10–25 percent tariffs on imports from America’s biggest trading partners, including Canada, China, and Mexico. Immediately, industry associations sounded the alarm, warning that the costs of consumer tech could increase significantly. By April, Trump had ordered tariffs on all US trade partners to correct claimed trade deficits, using odd math that critics suspected came from a chatbot. (Those tariffs bizarrely targeted uninhabited islands that exported nothing and were populated by penguins.)

Costs of tariffs only got higher as the year wore on. But the tech industry has done very little to push back against them. Instead, some of the biggest companies made their own surprising moves after Trump’s trade war put them in deeply uncomfortable positions.

Apple gives Trump a gold statue instead of US-made iPhone

Right from the jump in February, Apple got backed into a corner after Trump threatened a “flat” 60 percent tariff on all Chinese imports, which experts said could have substantially taxed Apple’s business. Moving to appease Trump, Apple promised to invest $500 billion in the US in hopes of avoiding tariffs, but that didn’t take the pressure off for long.

By April, Apple stood by and said nothing as Trump promised the company would make “made in the USA” iPhones. Analysts suggested such a goal was “impossible,” calling the idea “impossible at worst and highly expensive at best.”

Apple’s silence did not spare the company Trump’s scrutiny. The next month, Trump threatened Apple with a 25 percent tariff on any iPhones sold in the US that were not manufactured in America. Experts were baffled by the threat, which appeared to be the first time a US company was threatened directly with tariffs.

Typically, tariffs are imposed on a country or category of goods, like smartphones. It remains unclear if it would even be legal to levy a tariff on an individual company like Apple, but Trump never tested those waters. Instead, Trump stopped demanding the American-made iPhone and withdrew other tariff threats after he was apparently lulled into submission by a gold statue that Apple gifted him in August. The engraved glass disc featured an Apple logo and Tim Cook’s signature above a “Made in USA” stamp, celebrating Donald Trump for his “Apple American Manufacturing Program.”

Trump’s wild deals shake down chipmakers

Around the same time that Trump eased pressure on Apple, he turned his attention to Intel. On social media in August, Trump ordered Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to “resign immediately,” claiming he was “highly conflicted.” In response, Tan did not resign but instead met with Trump and struck a deal that gave the US a 10 percent stake in Intel. Online, Trump bragged that he let Tan “keep his job” while hyping the deal—which The New York Times described as one of the “largest government interventions in a US company since the rescue of the auto industry after the 2008 financial crisis.”

But unlike the auto industry, Intel didn’t need the money. And rather than helping an ailing company survive a tough spot, the deal risked disrupting Intel’s finances in ways that spooked shareholders. It was therefore a relief to no one when Intel detailed everything that could go wrong in an SEC filing, including the possible dilution of investors’ stock due to discounting US shares and other risks of dilution, if certain terms of the deal kick in at some point in the future.

The company also warned of potential lawsuits challenging the legality of the deal, which Intel fears could come from third parties, the US government, or foreign governments. Most ominous, Intel admitted there was no way to predict what other risks may come, both in the short-term and long-term.

Of course, Intel wasn’t the only company Trump sought to control, and not every company caved. He tried to strong-arm the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in September into moving half its chip manufacturing into the US, but TSMC firmly rejected his demand. And in October, when Trump began eyeing stakes in quantum computing firms, several companies were open to negotiating, but with no deals immediately struck, it was hard to ascertain how seriously they were entertaining Trump’s talks.

Trump struck another particularly wild deal the same month as the Intel agreement. That deal found chipmakers Nvidia and AMD agreeing to give 15 percent of revenue to the US from sales to China of advanced computer chips that could be used to fuel frontier AI. By December, Nvidia’s deal only drew more scrutiny, as the chipmaker agreed to give the US an even bigger cut—25 percent—of sales of its second most advanced AI chips, the H200.

Again, experts were confused, noting that export curbs on Nvidia’s H20 chips, for example, were imposed to prevent US technology thefts, maintain US tech dominance, and protect US national security. Those chips are six times less powerful than the H200. To them, it appeared that the Trump administration was taking payments to overlook risks without a clear understanding of how that might give China a leg-up in the AI race. It also did not appear to be legal, since export licenses cannot be sold under existing federal law, but government lawyers have supposedly been researching a new policy that would allow the US to collect the fees.

Trump finally closed TikTok deal

As the end of 2025 nears, the tech company likely sweating Trump’s impulses most may be TikTok owner ByteDance. In October, Trump confirmed that China agreed to a deal that allows the US to take majority ownership of TikTok and license the TikTok algorithm to build a US version of the app.

Trump has been trying to close this deal all year, while ByteDance remained largely quiet. Prior to the start of Trump’s term, the company had expressed resistance to selling TikTok to US owners, and as recently as January, a ByteDance board member floated the idea that Trump could save TikTok without forcing a sale. But China’s approval was needed to proceed with the sale, and near the end of December, ByteDance finally agreed to close the deal, paving the way for Trump’s hand-picked investors to take control in 2026.

It’s unclear how TikTok may change under US control, perhaps shedding users if US owners cave to Trump’s suggestion that he’d like to see the app go “100 percent MAGA” under his hand-picked US owners. It’s possible that the US version of the app could be glitchy, too.

Whether Trump’s deal actually complies with a US law requiring that ByteDance divest control of TikTok or else face a US ban has yet to be seen. Lawmaker scrutiny and possible legal challenges are expected in 2026, likely leaving both TikTok users and ByteDance on the edge of their seats waiting to see how the globally cherished short video app may change.

Trump may owe $1 trillion in tariff refunds

The TikTok deal was once viewed as a meaningful bargaining chip during Trump’s tensest negotiations with China, which has quickly emerged as America’s fiercest rival in the AI race and Trump’s biggest target in his trade war.

But as closing the deal remained elusive for most of the year, analysts suggested that Trump grew “desperate” to end tit-for-tat retaliations that he started, while China appeared more resilient to US curbs than the US was to China’s.

In one obvious example, many Americans’ first tariff pains came when Trump ended a duty-free exemption in February for low-value packages imported from cheap online retailers, like Shein and Temu. Unable to quickly adapt to the policy change, USPS abruptly stopped accepting all inbound packages from Hong Kong and China. After a chaotic 24 hours, USPS started slowly processing parcels again while promising Americans that it would work with customs to “implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery.”

Trump has several legal tools to impose tariffs, but the most controversial path appears to be his favorite. The Supreme Court is currently weighing whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) grants a US president unilateral authority to impose tariffs.

Seizing this authority, Trump imposed so-called “reciprocal tariffs” at whim, the Consumer Technology Association and the Chamber of Commerce told the Supreme Court in a friend-of-the-court brief in which they urged the justices to end the “perfect storm of uncertainty.”

Unlike other paths that would limit how quickly Trump could shift tariff rates or how high the tariff rate could go, under IEEPA, Trump has imposed tariff rates as high as 125 percent. Deferring to Trump will cost US businesses, CTA and CoC warned. CTA CEO Gary Shapiro estimated that Trump has changed these tariff rates 100 times since his trade war began, affecting $223 billion of US exports.

Meanwhile, one of Trump’s biggest stated goals of his trade war—forcing more manufacturing into the US—is utterly failing, many outlets have reported.

Likely due to US companies seeking more stable supply chains, “reshoring progress is nowhere to be seen,” Fortune reported in November. That month, a dismal Bureau of Labor Statistics released a jobs report that an expert summarized as showing that the “US is losing blue-collar jobs for the first time since the pandemic.”

A month earlier, the nonpartisan policy group the Center for American Progress drew on government labor data to conclude that US employers cut 12,000 manufacturing jobs in August, and payrolls for manufacturing jobs had decreased by 42,000 since April.

As tech companies take tech tariffs on the chin, perhaps out of fears that rattling Trump could impact lucrative government contracts, other US companies have taken Trump to court. Most recently, Costco became one of the biggest corporations to sue Trump to ensure that US businesses get refunded if Trump loses the Supreme Court case, Bloomberg reported. Other recognizable companies like Revlon and Kawasaki have also sued, but small businesses have largely driven opposition to Trump’s tariffs, Bloomberg noted.

Should the Supreme Court side with businesses—analysts predict favorable odds—the US could owe up to $1 trillion in refunds. Dozens of economists told SCOTUS that Trump simply doesn’t understand why having trade deficits with certain countries isn’t a threat to US dominance, pointing out that the US “has been running a persistent surplus in trade in services for decades” precisely because the US “has the dominant technology sector in the world.”

Justices seem skeptical that IEEPA grants Trump the authority, ordinarily reserved for Congress, to impose taxes. However, during oral arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett fretted that undoing Trump’s tariffs could be “messy.” Countering that, small businesses have argued that it’s possible for Customs and Border Patrol to set up automatic refunds.

While waiting for the SCOTUS verdict (now expected in January), the CTA ended the year by advising tech companies to keep their receipts in case refunds require requests for tariffs line by line—potentially complicated by tariff rates changing so drastically and so often.

Biggest tariff nightmare may come in 2026

Looking into 2026, tech companies cannot breathe a sigh of relief even if the SCOTUS ruling swings their way, though. Under a separate, legally viable authority, Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on semiconductors and any products containing them, a move the semiconductor industry fears could cost $1 billion.

And if Trump continues imposing tariffs on materials used in popular tech products, the CTA told Ars in September that potential “tariff stacking” could become the industry’s biggest nightmare. Should that occur, US manufacturers could end up double-, triple-, or possibly even quadruple-taxed on products that may contain materials subject to individual tariffs, like semiconductors, polysilicon, or copper.

Predicting tariff costs could become so challenging that companies will have no choice but to raise prices, the CTA warned. That could threaten US tech competitiveness if, possibly over the long term, companies lose significant sales on their most popular products.

For many badly bruised by the first year of tariffs, it’s hard to see how tariffs could ever become a winning strategy for US tech dominance, as Trump has long claimed. And Americans continue to feel more than “a little pain,” as Trump forecasted, causing many to shift their views on the president.

Americans banding together to oppose tariffs could help prevent the worst possible outcomes. With prices already rising on certain goods in the US, the president reversed some tariffs as his approval ratings hit record lows. But so far, Big Tech hasn’t shown much interest in joining the fight, instead throwing money at the problem by making generous donations to things like Trump’s inaugural fund or his ballroom.

A bright light for the tech industry could be the midterm elections, which could pressure Trump to ease off aggressive tariff regimes, but that’s not a given. Trump allies have previously noted that the president typically responds to pushback on tariffs by doubling down. And one of Trump’s on-again-off-again allies, Elon Musk, noted in December in an interview that Trump ignored his warnings that tariffs would drive manufacturing out of the US.

“The president has made it clear he loves tariffs,” Musk said.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Apple hit with $115M fine for “extremely burdensome” App Store privacy policy

App Store, App Tracking, Apple, competition law, italy, personalized advertising, Policy, privacy policy / DJ Henderson / December 22, 2025

Apple was hit with a $115 million fine Monday after Italy’s competition authority alleged the tech giant was abusing its dominant position to harm third-party developers in its App Store.

In a press release, the Italian Competition Authority said that an “App Tracking Transparency” (ATT) privacy policy that Apple introduced in 2021 forced third-party developers to seek consent twice for the same data collection.

Requiring such “double consent” was “extremely burdensome” and “harmful” to some developers—especially the smallest developers, the regulator said. Many developers struggled to earn ad revenue after the policy was introduced, as users increasingly declined to opt into personalized ads.

Meanwhile, Apple may have benefited from the ATT restricting developers’ ad revenues, either “in the form of higher commissions collected from developers through the App Store and, indirectly, in terms of the growth of its own advertising service.” Since ATT was adopted, “revenues from App Store services increased,” the regulator said, as developers paid higher commissions and “likewise, Apple’s advertising division, which is not subject to the same stringent rules, ultimately benefited from increased revenues and higher volumes of intermediated ads.”

Without intervention, Apple would continue requiring third-party developers to provide an additional consent screen, which was “found to be disproportionate to the achievement of the company’s stated data protection objectives,” the press release said.

“Apple should have ensured the same level of privacy protection for users by allowing developers to obtain consent to profiling in a single step,” the regulator concluded.

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Software leaks point to the first Apple Silicon “iMac Pro,” among other devices

Apple, Apple silicon, iMac, Mac, macos 26 tahoe, Tech / DJ Henderson / December 16, 2025

Apple doesn’t like to talk about its upcoming products before it’s ready, but sometimes the company’s software does the talking for it. So far this week we’ve had a couple of software-related leaks that have outed products Apple is currently testing—one a pre-release build of iOS 26, and the other some leaked files from a kernel debug kit (both via MacRumors).

Most of the new devices referenced in these leaks are straightforward updates to products that already exist: a new Apple TV, a HomePod mini 2, new AirTags and AirPods, an M4 iPad Air, a 12th-generation iPad to replace the current A16 version, next-generation iPhones (including the 17e, 18, and the rumored foldable model), a new Studio Display model, some new smart home products we’ve already heard about elsewhere, and M5 updates for the MacBook Air, Mac mini, Mac Studio, and the other MacBook Pros. There’s also yet another reference to the lower-cost MacBook that Apple is apparently planning to replace the M1 MacBook Air it still sells via Walmart for $599.

For power users, though, the most interesting revelation might be that Apple is working on a higher-end Apple Silicon iMac powered by an M5 Max chip. The kernel debug kit references an iMac with the internal identifier J833c, based on a platform identified as H17C—and H17C is apparently based on the M5 Max, rather than a lower-end M5 chip. (For those who don’t have Apple’s branding memorized, “Max” is associated with Apple’s second-fastest chips; the M5 Max would be faster than the M5 or M5 Pro, but slower than the rumored M5 Ultra.)

This device could be the long-awaited, occasionally-rumored-but-never-launched replacement to Apple’s 27-inch iMac, which was discontinued in 2022 with no direct replacement. An M5 Max chip would also make this machine the closest thing we’ve seen to a direct replacement for the iMac Pro, a 27-inch iMac variant that was launched in late 2017 but likewise discontinued without an update or replacement.

The current M4 Max chip includes 14 or 16 CPU cores, 32 or 40 GPU cores, and between 36GB and 128GB of unified memory, specs we’d expect an M5 Max to match or beat. And because the Max chips already fit into the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, it should be no problem to fit one into an all-in-one desktop PC.

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UK to “encourage” Apple and Google to put nudity-blocking systems on phones

age verification, Apple, Google, Policy, UK / Kelly Newman / December 15, 2025

The push for device-level blocking comes after the UK implemented the Online Safety Act, a law requiring porn platforms and social media firms to verify users’ ages before letting them view adult content. The law can’t fully prevent minors from viewing porn, as many people use VPN services to get around the UK age checks. Government officials may view device-level detection of nudity as a solution to that problem, but such systems would raise concerns about user rights and the accuracy of the nudity detection.

Age-verification battles in multiple countries

Apple and Google both provide optional tools that let parents control what content their children can access. The companies could object to mandates on privacy grounds, as they have in other venues.

When Texas enacted an age-verification law for app stores, Apple and Google said they would comply but warned of risks to user privacy. A lobby group that represents Apple, Google, and other tech firms then sued Texas in an attempt to prevent the law from taking effect, saying it “imposes a broad censorship regime on the entire universe of mobile apps.”

There’s another age-verification battle in Australia, where the government decided to ban social media for users under 16. Companies said they would comply, although Reddit sued Australia on Friday in a bid to overturn the law.

Apple this year also fought a UK demand that it create a backdoor for government security officials to access encrypted data. The Trump administration claimed it convinced the UK to drop its demand, but the UK is reportedly still seeking an Apple backdoor.

In another case, the image-sharing website Imgur blocked access for UK users starting in September while facing an investigation over its age-verification practices.

Apple faced a backlash in 2021 over potential privacy violations when it announced a plan to have iPhones scan photos for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Apple ultimately dropped the plan.

UK to “encourage” Apple and Google to put nudity-blocking systems on phones Read More »

Apple loses its appeal of a scathing contempt ruling in iOS payments case

Apple, epic, epic games store, gaming, iOS, IPhone, legal, payments, Policy / 9u50fv / December 12, 2025

Back in April, District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers delivered a scathing judgment finding that Apple was in “willful violation” of her 2021 injunction intended to open up iOS App Store payments. That contempt of court finding has now been almost entirely upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a development that Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney tells Ars he hopes will “do a lot of good for developers and start to really change the App Store situation worldwide, I think.”

The ruling, signed by a panel of three appellate court judges, affirmed that Apple’s initial attempts to charge a 27 percent fee to iOS developers using outside payment options “had a prohibitive effect, in violation of the injunction.” Similarly, Apple’s restrictions on how those outside links had to be designed were overly broad; the appeals court suggests that Apple can only ensure that internal and external payment options are presented in a similar fashion.

The appeals court also agreed that Apple acted in “bad faith” by refusing to comply with the injunction, rejecting viable, compliant alternatives in internal discussions. And the appeals court was also not convinced by Apple’s process-focused arguments, saying the district court properly evaluated materials Apple argued were protected by attorney-client privilege.

While the district court barred Apple from charging any fees for payments made outside of its App Store, the appeals court now suggests that Apple should still be able to charge a “reasonable fee” based on its “actual costs to ensure user security and privacy.” It will be up to Apple and the district court to determine what that kind of “reasonable fee” should look like going forward.

Speaking to reporters Thursday night, though, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review. That should be more than enough to compensate the employees reviewing the apps to make sure outside payment links are not scams and lead to a system of “normal fees for normal businesses that sell normal things to normal customers,” Sweeney said.

Apple loses its appeal of a scathing contempt ruling in iOS payments case Read More »

ICEBlock lawsuit: Trump admin bragged about demanding App Store removal

App Store, Apple, First Amendment, free speech, ice, iceblock, immigration and customs enforcement, Policy / Mike M. / December 8, 2025

ICEBlock creator sues to protect apps that are crowd-sourcing ICE sightings.

In a lawsuit filed against top Trump administration officials on Monday, Apple was accused of caving to unconstitutional government demands by removing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement-spotting app from the App Store with more than a million users.

In his complaint, Joshua Aaron, creator of ICEBlock, cited a Fox News interview in which Attorney General Pam Bondi “made plain that the United States government used its regulatory power to coerce a private platform to suppress First Amendment-protected expression.”

Suing Bondi—along with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Acting Director of ICE Todd Lyons, White House “Border Czar” Thomas D. Homan, and unnamed others—Aaron further alleged that US officials made false statements and “unlawful threats” to criminally investigate and prosecute him for developing ICEBlock.

Currently, ICEBlock is still available to anyone who downloaded the app prior to the October removal from the App Store, but updates have been disrupted, and Aaron wants the app restored. Seeking an injunction to block any attempted criminal investigations from chilling his free speech, as well as ICEBlock users’ speech, Aaron vowed in a statement provided to Ars to fight to get ICEBlock restored.

“I created ICEBlock to keep communities safe,” Aaron said. “Growing up in a Jewish household, I learned from history about the consequences of staying silent in the face of tyranny. I will never back down from resisting the Trump Administration’s targeting of immigrants and conscripting corporations into its unconstitutional agenda.”

Expert calls out Apple for “capitulation”

Apple is not a defendant in the lawsuit and did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

Aaron’s complaint called out Apple, though, for alleged capitulation to the Trump administration that appeared to be “the first time in Apple’s nearly fifty-year history” that “Apple removed a US-based app in response to the US government’s demands.” One of his lawyers, Deirdre von Dornum, told Ars that the lawsuit is about more than just one app being targeted by the government.

“If we allow community sharing of information to be silenced, our democracy will fail,” von Dornum said. “The United States will be no different than China or Russia. We cannot stand by and allow that to happen. Every person has a right to share information under the First Amendment.”

Mario Trujillo, a staff attorney from a nonprofit digital rights group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation that’s not involved in the litigation, agreed that Apple’s ban appeared to be prompted by an unlawful government demand.

He told Ars that “there is a long history that shows documenting law enforcement performing their duties in public is protected First Amendment activity.” Aaron’s complaint pointed to a feature on one of Apple’s own products—Apple Maps—that lets users crowd-source sightings of police speed traps as one notable example. Other similar apps that Apple hosts in its App Store include other Big Tech offerings, like Google Maps and Waze, as well as apps with explicit names like Police Scanner.

Additionally, Trujillo noted that Aaron’s arguments are “backed by recent Supreme Court precedent.”

“The government acted unlawfully when it demanded Apple remove ICEBlock, while threatening others with prosecution,” Trujillo said. “While this case is rightfully only against the government, Apple should also take a hard look at its own capitulation.”

ICEBlock maker sues to stop app crackdown

ICEBlock is not the only app crowd-sourcing information on public ICE sightings to face an app store ban. Others, including an app simply collecting footage of ICE activities, have been removed by Apple and Google, 404 Media reported, as part of a broader crackdown.

Aaron’s suit is intended to end that crackdown by seeking a declaration that government demands to remove ICE-spotting apps violate the First Amendment.

“A lawsuit is the only mechanism that can bring transparency, accountability, and a binding judicial remedy when government officials cross constitutional lines,” Aaron told 404 Media. “If we don’t challenge this conduct in court, it will become a playbook for future censorship.”

In his complaint, Aaron explained that he created ICE in January to help communities hold the Trump administration accountable after Trump campaigned on a mass deportation scheme that boasted numbers far beyond the number of undocumented immigrants in the country.

“His campaign team often referenced plans to deport ’15 to 20 million’ undocumented immigrants, when in fact the number of undocumented persons in the United States is far lower,” his complaint said.

The app was not immediately approved by Apple, Aaron said. But after a thorough vetting process, Apple approved the app in April.

ICEBlock wasn’t an overnight hit but suddenly garnered hundreds of thousands of users after CNN profiled the app in June.

Trump officials attack ICEBlock with false claims

Within hours of that report, US officials began blasting the app, claiming that it was used to incite violence against ICE officers and amplifying pressure to get the app yanked from the App Store.

But Bondi may have slipped up by making comments that seemed to make it clear her intentions were to restrict disfavored speech. On Fox, Bondi claimed that CNN’s report supposedly promoting the app was dangerous, whereas the Fox News report was warning people not to use the app and was perfectly OK.

“Bondi’s statements make clear that her threats of adverse action constitute viewpoint discrimination, where speech ‘promoting’ the app is unlawful but speech ‘warning’ about the app is lawful,” the lawsuit said.

Other Trump officials were accused of making false statements and using unlawful threats to silence Aaron and ICEBlock users.

“What they’re doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities, operations, and we’re going to actually go after them,” Noem told reporters in July. In a statement, Lyons claimed that ICEBlock “basically paints a target on federal law enforcement officers’ backs” and that “officers and agents are already facing a 500 percent increase in assaults.” Echoing Lyons and Noem, Homan called for an investigation into CNN for reporting on the app, which “falsely implied that Plaintiffs’ protected speech was illegally endangering law enforcement officers,” Aaron alleged.

Not named in the lawsuit, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also allegedly made misleading statements. That included falsely claiming “that ICEBlock and similar apps are responsible for violent attacks on law enforcement officers, such as the tragic shooting of immigrants at an ICE detention facility in Dallas, Texas, on September 24, 2025,” where “no actual evidence has ever been cited to support these claims,” the lawsuit said.

Despite an apparent lack of evidence, Apple confirmed that ICEBlock was removed in October, “based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock,” a public statement said. In a notice to Aaron, Apple further explained that the app was banned “because its purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”

Apple never shared any more information with Aaron to distinguish his app from other apps allowed in the App Store that help people detect and avoid nearby law enforcement activities. The iPhone maker also didn’t confirm the source of its information, Aaron said.

However, on Fox, Bondi boasted about reaching “out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so.”

Then, later during sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she reiterated those comments, while also oddly commenting that Google received the same demand, despite ICEBlock intentionally being designed for iPhone only.

She also falsely claimed that ICEBlock “was reckless and criminal in that people were posting where ICE officers lived” but “subsequently walked back that statement,” Aaron’s complaint said.

Aaron is hoping the US District Court in the District of Columbia will agree that “Bondi’s demand to Apple to remove ICEBlock from the App store, as well as her viewpoint-based criticism of CNN for publicizing the app, constitute a ‘scheme of state censorship’ designed to ‘suppress’” Aaron’s “publication and distribution of the App.”

His lawyer, Noam Biale, told Ars that “Attorney General Bondi’s self-congratulatory claim that she succeeded in pushing Apple to remove ICEBlock is an admission that she violated our client’s constitutional rights. In America, government officials cannot suppress free speech by pressuring private companies to do it for them.”

Similarly, statements from Noem, Lyons, and Homan constituted “excessive pressure on Apple to remove the App and others like it from the App Store,” Aaron’s complaint alleged, as well as unconstitutional suppression of Aaron’s and ICEBlock users’ speech.

ICEBlock creator was one of the first Mac Geniuses

Aaron maintains that ICEBlock prominently features a disclaimer asking all users to “please note that the use of this app is for information and notification purposes only. It is not to be used for the purposes of inciting violence or interfering with law enforcement.”

In his complaint, he explained how the app worked to automatically delete ICE sightings after four hours—information that he said could not be recovered. That functionality ensures that “ICEBlock cannot be used to track ICE agents’ historical presence or movements,” Aaron’s lawsuit noted.

Rather than endangering ICE officers, Aaron argued that ICEBlock helps protect communities from dangerous ICE activity, like tear gassing and pepper spraying, or alleged racial profiling triggering arrests of US citizens and immigrants. Kids have been harmed, his complaint noted, with ICE agents documented “arresting parents and leaving young children unaccompanied” and even once “driving an arrestee’s car away from the scene of arrest with the arrestee’s young toddler still strapped into a car seat.”

Aaron’s top fear driving his development of the app was his concern that escalations in ICE enforcement—including arbitrary orders to hit 75 arrests a day—exposed “immigrants and citizens alike to violence and rampant violations of their civil liberties” that ICEBlock could shield them from.

“These operations have led to widespread and well-documented civil rights violations against citizens, lawful residents, and undocumented immigrants alike, causing serious concern among members of the public, elected officials, and federal courts,” Aaron’s complaint said.

They also “have led some people—regardless of immigration or citizenship status—to want to avoid areas of federal immigration enforcement activities altogether” and “resulted in situations where members of the public may wish, when enforcement activity becomes visible in public spaces, to observe, record, or lawfully protest against such activity.”

In 2001, Aaron worked for Apple as one of the first Mac Geniuses in its Apple Stores. These days, he flexes his self-taught developer skills by creating apps intended to do social good and help communities.

Emphasizing that he was raised in a Jewish household where he heard stories from Holocaust survivors that left a lasting mark, Aaron said that the ICEBlock app represented his “commitment to use his abilities to advocate for the protection of civil liberties.” Without an injunction, he’s concerned that he and other like-minded app makers will remain in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, as the mass deportation scheme rages on through ongoing ICE raids across the US, Aaron told 404 Media.

“More broadly, the purpose [of the lawsuit] is to hold government officials accountable for using their authority to silence lawful expression and intimidate creators of technology they disfavor,” Aaron said. “This case is about ensuring that public officials cannot circumvent the Constitution by coercing private companies or threatening individuals simply because they disagree with the message or the tool being created.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

ICEBlock lawsuit: Trump admin bragged about demanding App Store removal Read More »

Vision Pro M5 review: It’s time for Apple to make some tough choices

AI, Apple, Apple M5, apple vision pro, ar, augmented reality, Features, metaverse, Mixed Reality, spatial computing, Tech, virtual reality, vision pro, visionOS, visionos 26, vr, XR / Mike M. / November 26, 2025

A state of the union from someone who actually sort of uses the thing.

The M5 Vision Pro with the Dual Knit Band. Credit: Samuel Axon

With the recent releases of visionOS 26 and newly refreshed Vision Pro hardware, it’s an ideal time to check in on Apple’s Vision Pro headset—a device I was simultaneously amazed and disappointed by when it launched in early 2024.

I still like the Vision Pro, but I can tell it’s hanging on by a thread. Content is light, developer support is tepid, and while Apple has taken action to improve both, it’s not enough, and I’m concerned it might be too late.

When I got a Vision Pro, I used it a lot: I watched movies on planes and in hotel rooms, I walked around my house placing application windows and testing out weird new ways of working. I tried all the neat games and educational apps, and I watched all the immersive videos I could get ahold of. I even tried my hand at developing my own applications for it.

As the months went on, though, I used it less and less. The novelty wore off, and as cool as it remained, practicality beat coolness. By the time Apple sent me the newer model a couple of weeks ago, I had only put the original one on a few times in the prior couple of months. I had mostly stopped using it at home, but I still took it on trips as an entertainment device for hotel rooms now and then.

That’s not an uncommon story. You even see it in the subreddit for Vision Pro owners, which ought to be the home of the device’s most dedicated fans. Even there, people say, “This is really cool, but I have to go out of my way to keep using it.”

Perhaps it would have been easier to bake it into my day-to-day habits if developer and content creator support had been more robust, a classic chicken-and-egg problem.

After a few weeks of using the new Vision Pro hardware refresh daily, it’s clear to me that the platform needs a bigger rethink. As a fan of the device, I’m concerned it won’t get that, because all the rumors point to Apple pouring its future resources into smart glasses, which, to me, are a completely different product category.

What changed in the new model?

For many users, the most notable change here will be something you can buy separately (albeit at great expense) for the old model: A new headband that balances the device’s weight on your head better, making it more comfortable to wear for long sessions.

Dubbed the Dual Knit Band, it comes with an ingeniously simple adjustment knob that can be used to tighten or loosen either the band that goes across the back of your head (similar to the old band) or the one that wraps around the top.

It’s well-designed, and it will probably make the Vision Pro easier to use for many people who found the old model to be too uncomfortable—even though this model is slightly heavier than its predecessor.

The band fit is adjusted with this knob. You can turn it to loosen or tighten one strap, then pull it out and turn it again to adjust the other. Credit: Samuel Axon

I’m one of the lucky few who never had any discomfort problems with the Vision Pro, but I know a bunch of folks who said the pressure the device put on their foreheads was unbearable. That’s exactly what this new band remedies, so it’s nice to see.

The M5 chip offers more than just speed

Whereas the first Vision Pro had Apple’s M2 chip—which was already a little behind the times when it launched—the new one adds the M5. It’s much faster, especially for graphics-processing and machine-learning tasks. We’ve written a lot about the M5 in our articles on other Apple products if you’re interested to learn more about it.

Functionally, this means a lot of little things are a bit faster, like launching certain applications or generating a Persona avatar. I’ll be frank: I didn’t notice any difference that significantly impacted the user experience. I’m not saying I couldn’t tell it was faster sometimes. I’m just saying it wasn’t faster in a way that’s meaningful enough to change any attitudes about the device.

It’s most noticeable with games—both native mixed-reality Vision Pro titles and the iPad versions of demanding games that you can run on a virtual display on the device. Demanding 3D games look and run nicer, in many cases. The M5 also supports more recent graphics advancements like ray tracing and mesh shading, though very few games support them, even in terms of iPad versions.

All this is to say that while I always welcome performance improvements, they are definitely not enough to convince an M2 Vision Pro owner to upgrade, and they won’t tip things over for anyone who has been on the fence about buying one of these things.

The main perk of the new chip is improved efficiency, which is the driving force behind modestly increased battery life. When I first took the M2 Vision Pro on a plane, I tried watching 2021’s Dune. I made it through the movie, but just barely; the battery ran out during the closing credits. It’s not a short movie, but there are longer ones.

Now, the new headset can easily get another 30 or 60 minutes, depending on what you’re doing, which finally puts it in “watch any movie you want” territory.

Given how short battery life was in the original version, even a modest bump like that makes a big difference. That, alongside a marginally increased field of view (about 10 percent) and a new 120 Hz maximum refresh rate for passthrough are the best things about the new hardware. These are nice-to-haves, but they’re not transformational by any means.

We already knew the Vision Pro offered excellent hardware (even if it’s overkill for most users), but the platform’s appeal is really driven by software. Unfortunately, this is where things are running behind expectations.

For content, it’s quality over quantity

When the first Vision Pro launched, I was bullish about the promise of the platform—but a lot of that was contingent on a strong content cadence and third-party developer support.

And as I’ve written since, the content cadence for the first year was a disappointment. Whereas I expected weekly episodes of Apple’s Immersive Videos in the TV app, those short videos arrived with gaps of several months. There’s an enormous wealth of great immersive content outside of Apple’s walled garden, but Apple didn’t seem interested in making that easily accessible to Vision Pro owners. Third-party apps did some of that work, but they lagged behind those on other platforms.

The first-party content cadence picked up after the first year, though. Plus, Apple introduced the Spatial Gallery, a built-in app that aggregates immersive 3D photos and the like. It’s almost TikTok-like in that it lets you scroll through short-form content that leverages what makes the device unique, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that the platform so badly needed at launch.

The Spatial Gallery is sort of like a horizontally-scrolling TikTok for 3D photos and video. Credit: Samuel Axon

The content that is there—whether in the TV app or the Spatial Gallery—is fantastic. It’s beautifully, professionally produced stuff that really leans on the hardware. For example, there is an autobiographical film focused on U2’s Bono that does some inventive things with the format that I had never seen or even imagined before.

Bono, of course, isn’t everybody’s favorite, but if you can stomach the film’s bloviating, it’s worth watching just with an eye to what a spatial video production can or should be.

I still think there’s significant room to grow, but the content situation is better than ever. It’s not enough to keep you entertained for hours a day, but it’s enough to make putting on the headset for a bit once a week or so worth it. That wasn’t there a year ago.

The software support situation is in a similar state.

App support is mostly frozen in the year 2024

Many of us have a suite of go-to apps that are foundational to our individual approaches to daily productivity. For me, primarily a macOS user, they are:

Firefox
Spark
Todoist
Obsidian
Raycast
Slack
Visual Studio Code
Claude
1Password

As you can see, I don’t use most of Apple’s built-in apps—no Safari, no Mail, no Reminders, no Passwords, no Notes… no Spotlight, even. All that may be atypical, but it has never been a problem on macOS, nor has it been on iOS for a few years now.

Impressively, almost all of these are available on visionOS—but only because it can run iPad apps as flat, virtual windows. Firefox, Spark, Todoist, Obsidian, Slack, 1Password, and even Raycast are all available as supported iPad apps, but surprisingly, Claude isn’t, even though there is a Claude app for iPads. (ChatGPT’s iPad app works, though.) VS Code isn’t available, of course, but I wasn’t expecting it to be.

Not a single one of these applications has a true visionOS app. That’s too bad, because I can think of lots of neat things spatial computing versions could do. Imagine browsing your Obsidian graph in augmented reality! Alas, I can only dream.

You can tell the native apps from the iPad ones: The iPad ones have rectangular icons nested within circles, whereas the native apps fill the whole circle. Credit: Samuel Axon

If you’re not such a huge productivity software geek like me and you use Apple’s built-in apps, things look a little better, but surprisingly, there are still a few apps that you would imagine would have really cool spatial computing features—like Apple Maps—that don’t. Maps, too, is just an iPad app.

Even if you set productivity aside and focus on entertainment, there are still frustrating gaps. Almost two years later, there is still no Netflix or YouTube app. There are decent-enough third-party options for YouTube, but you have to watch Netflix in a browser, which is lower-quality than in a native app and looks horrible on one of the Vision Pro’s big virtual screens.

To be clear, there is a modest trickle of interesting spatial app experiences coming in—most of them games, educational apps, or cool one-off ideas that are fun to check out for a few minutes.

All this is to say that nothing has really changed since February 2024. There was an influx of apps at launch that included a small number of show-stoppers (mostly educational apps), but the rest ranged from “basically the iPad app but with one or two throwaway tech-demo-style spatial features you won’t try more than once” to “basically the iPad app but a little more native-feeling” to “literally just the iPad app.” As far as support from popular, cross-platform apps, it’s mostly the same list today as it was then.

Its killer app is that it’s a killer monitor

Even though Apple hasn’t made a big leap forward in developer support, it has made big strides in making the Vision Pro a nifty companion to the Mac.

From the start, it has had a feature that lets you simply look at a Mac’s built-in display, tap your fingers, and launch a large, resizable virtual monitor. I have my own big, multi-monitor setup at home, but I have used the Vision Pro this way sometimes when traveling.

I had some complaints at the start, though. It could only do one monitor, and that monitor was limited to 60 Hz and a standard widescreen resolution. That’s better than just using a 14-inch MacBook Pro screen, but it’s a far cry from the sort of high-end setup a $3,500 price tag suggests. Furthermore, it didn’t allow you to switch audio between the two devices.

Thanks to both software and hardware updates, that has all changed. visionOS now supports three different monitor sizes: the standard widescreen aspect ratio, a wider one that resembles a standard ultra-wide monitor, and a gigantic, ultra-ultra-wide wrap-around display that I can assure you will leave no one wanting for desktop space. It looks great. Problem solved! Likewise, it will now transfer your Mac audio to the Vision Pro or its Bluetooth headphones automatically.

All of that works not just on the new Vision Pro, but also on the M2 model. The new M5 model exclusively addresses the last of my complaints: You can now achieve higher refresh rates for that virtual monitor than 60 Hz. Apple says it goes “up to 120 Hz,” but there’s no available tool for measuring exactly where it’s landing. Still, I’m happy to see any improvement here.

This is the standard width for the Mac monitor feature… Samuel Axon

Through a series of updates, Apple has turned a neat proof-of-concept feature into something that is genuinely valuable—especially for folks who like ultra-wide or multi-monitor setups but have to travel a lot (like myself) or who just don’t want to invest in the display hardware at home.

You can also play your Mac games on this monitor. I tried playing No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 on it with a controller, and it was a fantastic experience.

This, alongside spatial video and watching movies, is the Vision Pro’s current killer app and one of the main areas where Apple has clearly put a lot of effort into improving the platform.

Stop trying to make Personas happen

Strangely, another area where Apple has invested quite a bit to make things better is in the Vision Pro’s usefulness as a communications and meetings device. Personas—the 3D avatars of yourself that you create for Zoom calls and the like—were absolutely terrible when the M2 Vision Pro came out.

There is also EyeSight, which uses your Persona to show a simulacrum of your eyes to people around you in the real world, letting them know you are aware of your surroundings and even allowing them to follow your gaze. I understand the thought behind this feature—Apple doesn’t want mixed reality to be socially isolating—but it sometimes puts your eyes in the wrong place, it’s kind of hard to see, and it honestly seems like a waste of expensive hardware.

Primarily via software updates, I’m pleased to report that Personas are drastically improved. Mine now actually looks like me, and it moves more naturally, too.

I joined a FaceTime call with Apple reps where they showed me how Personas float and emote around each other, and how we could look at the same files and assets together. It was indisputably cool and way better than before, thanks to the improved Personas.

I can’t say as much for EyeSight, which looks the same. It’s hard for me to fathom that Apple has put multiple sensors and screens on this thing to support this feature.

In my view, dropping EyeSight would be the single best thing Apple could do for this headset. Most people don’t like it, and most people don’t want it, yet there is no question that its inclusion adds a not-insignificant amount to both the price and the weight, the product’s two biggest barriers to adoption.

Likewise, Personas are theoretically cool, and it is a novel and fun experience to join a FaceTime call with people and see how it works and what you could do. But it’s just that: a novel experience. Once you’ve done it, you’ll never feel the need to do it again. I can barely imagine anyone who would rather show up to a call as a Persona than take the headset off for 30 minutes to dial in on their computer.

Much of this headset is dedicated to this idea that it can be a device that connects you with others, but maintaining that priority is simply the wrong decision. Mixed reality is isolating, and Apple is treating that like a problem to be solved, but I consider that part of its appeal.

If this headset were capable of out-in-the-world AR applications, I would not feel that way, but the Vision Pro doesn’t support any application that would involve taking it outside the home into public spaces. A lot of the cool, theoretical AR uses I can think of would involve that, but still no dice here.

The metaverse (it’s telling that this is the first time I’ve typed that word in at least a year) already exists: It’s on our phones, in Instagram and TikTok and WeChat and Fortnite. It doesn’t need to be invented, and it doesn’t need a new, clever approach to finally make it take off. It has already been invented. It’s already in orbit.

Like the iPad and the Apple Watch before it, the Vision Pro needs to stop trying to be a general-purpose device and instead needs to lean into what makes it special.

In doing so, it will become a better user experience, and it will get lighter and cheaper, too. There’s real potential there. Unfortunately, Apple may not go that route if leaks and insider reports are to be believed.

There’s still a ways to go, so hopefully this isn’t a dead end

The M5 Vision Pro was the first of four planned new releases in the product line, according to generally reliable industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Next up, he predicted, would be a full Vision Pro 2 release with a redesign, and a Vision Air, a cheaper, lighter alternative. Those would all precede true smart glasses many years down the road.

I liked that plan: keep the full-featured Vision Pro for folks who want the most premium mixed reality experience possible (but maybe drop EyeSight), and launch a cheaper version to compete more directly with headsets like Meta’s Quest line of products, or the newly announced Steam Frame VR headset from Valve, along with planned competitors by Google, Samsung, and others.

True augmented reality glasses are an amazing dream, but there are serious problems of optics and user experience that we’re still a ways off from solving before those can truly replace the smartphone as Tim Cook once predicted.

All that said, it looks like that plan has been called into question. A Bloomberg report in October claimed that Apple CEO Tim Cook had told employees that the company was redirecting resources from future passthrough HMD products to accelerate work on smart glasses.

Let’s be real: It’s always going to be a once-in-a-while device, not a daily driver. For many people, that would be fine if it cost $1,000. At $3,500, it’s still a nonstarter for most consumers.

I believe there is room for this product in the marketplace. I still think it’s amazing. It’s not going to be as big as the iPhone, or probably even the iPad, but it has already found a small audience that could grow significantly if the price and weight could come down. Removing all the hardware related to Personas and EyeSight would help with that.

I hope Apple keeps working on it. When Apple released the Apple Watch, it wasn’t entirely clear what its niche would be in users’ lives. The answer (health and fitness) became crystal clear over time, and the other ambitions of the device faded away while the company began building on top of what was working best.

You see Apple doing that a little bit with the expanded Mac spatial display functionality. That can be the start of an intriguing journey. But writers have a somewhat crass phrase: “kill your darlings.” It means that you need to be clear-eyed about your work and unsentimentally cut anything that’s not working, even if you personally love it—even if it was the main thing that got you excited about starting the project in the first place.

It’s past time for Apple to start killing some darlings with the Vision Pro, but I truly hope it doesn’t go too far and kill the whole platform.

Samuel Axon is the editorial lead for tech and gaming coverage at Ars Technica. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

Vision Pro M5 review: It’s time for Apple to make some tough choices Read More »

Testing shows Apple N1 Wi-Fi chip improves on older Broadcom chips in every way

Apple, IPhone, iphone 17, iphone 17 pro, iphone air, Tech / Mike M. / November 19, 2025

This year’s newest iPhones included one momentous change that marked a new phase in the evolution of Apple Silicon: the Apple N1, Apple’s first in-house chip made to handle local wireless connections. The N1 supports Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and the Thread smart home communication protocol, and it replaces the third-party wireless chips (mostly made by Broadcom) that Apple used in older iPhones.

Apple claimed that the N1 would enable more reliable connectivity for local communication features like AirPlay and AirDrop but didn’t say anything about how users could expect it to perform. But Ookla, the folks behind the SpeedTest app and website, have analyzed about five weeks’ worth of users’ testing data to get an idea of how the iPhone 17 lineup stacks up to the iPhone 16, as well as Android phones with Wi-Fi chips from Qualcomm, MediaTek, and others.

While the N1 isn’t at the top of the charts, Ookla says Apple’s Wi-Fi chip “delivered higher download and upload speeds on Wi-Fi compared to the iPhone 16 across every studied percentile and virtually every region.” The median download speed for the iPhone 17 series was 329.56Mbps, compared to 236.46Mbps for the iPhone 16; the upload speed also jumped from 73.68Mbps to 103.26Mbps.

Ookla noted that the N1’s best performance seemed to improve scores most of all in the bottom 10th percentile of performance tests, “implying Apple’s custom silicon lifts the floor more than the ceiling.” The iPhone 17 also didn’t top Ookla’s global performance charts—Ookla found that the Pixel 10 Pro series slightly edges out the iPhone 17 in download speed, while a Xiaomi 15T Pro with MediaTek Wi-Fi silicon featured better upload speeds.

Testing shows Apple N1 Wi-Fi chip improves on older Broadcom chips in every way Read More »

Report claims that Apple has yet again put the Mac Pro “on the back burner”

Apple, Apple silicon, M2 Ultra, m3 ultra, m5 ultra, Mac Pro, Mac Studio, Tech / Kelly Newman / November 17, 2025

Do we still need a Mac Pro, though?

Regardless of what Apple does with the Mac Pro, the desktop makes less sense than ever in the Apple Silicon era. Part of the appeal of the early 2010s and the 2019 Mac Pro towers was their internal expandability, particularly with respect to storage, graphics cards, and RAM. But while the Apple Silicon Mac Pro does include six internal PCI Express slots, it supports neither RAM upgrades nor third-party GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel. Thunderbolt 5’s 120 Gbps transfer speeds are also more than fast enough to support high-speed external storage devices.

That leaves even the most powerful of power users with few practical reasons to prefer a $7,000 Mac Pro tower to a $4,000 Mac Studio. And that would be true even if both desktops used the same chip—currently, the M3 Ultra Studio comes with more and newer CPU cores, newer GPU cores, and 32GB more RAM for that price, making the comparison even more lopsided.

Mac Pro aside, the Mac should have a pretty active 2026. Every laptop other than the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro should get an Apple M5 upgrade, with Pro and Max chips coming for the higher-end Pros. Those chips, plus the M5 Ultra, would give Apple all the ingredients it would need to refresh the iMac, Mac mini, and Mac Studio lineups as well.

Insistent rumors also indicate that Apple will be introducing a new, lower-cost MacBook model with an iPhone-class chip inside, a device that seems made to replace the 2020 M1 MacBook Air that Apple has continued to sell via Walmart for between $600 and $650. It remains to be seen whether this new MacBook would remain a Walmart exclusive or if Apple also plans to offer the laptop through other retailers and its own store.

Report claims that Apple has yet again put the Mac Pro “on the back burner” Read More »

After years of saying no, Tesla reportedly adding Apple CarPlay to its cars

Apple, Apple CarPlay, Cars, Tesla / Beth Washington / November 13, 2025

Apple CarPlay, the interface that lets you cast your phone to your car’s infotainment screen, may finally be coming to Tesla’s electric vehicles. CarPlay is nearly a decade old at this point, and it has become so popular that almost half of car buyers have said they won’t consider a car without the feature, and the overwhelming majority of automakers have included CarPlay in their vehicles.

Until now, that hasn’t included Tesla. CEO Elon Musk doesn’t appear to have opined on the omission, though he has frequently criticized Apple. In the past, Musk has said the goal of Tesla infotainment is to be “the most amount of fun you can have in a car.” Tesla has regularly added purile features like fart noises to the system, and it has also integrated video games that drivers can play while they charge.

For customers who want to stream music, Tesla has instead offered Spotify, Tidal, and even Apple Music apps.

But Tesla is no longer riding high—its sales are crashing, and its market share is shrinking around the world as car buyers tire of a stale and outdated lineup of essentially two models at a time when competition has never been higher from legacy and startup automakers.

According to Bloomberg, which cites “people with knowledge of the matter,” the feature could be added within months if it isn’t cancelled internally.

Tesla is not the only automaker to reject Apple CarPlay. The startup Lucid took some time to add the feature to its high-end EVs, and Rivian still refuses to consider including the system, claiming that a third-party system would degrade the user experience. And of course, General Motors famously removed CarPlay from its new EVs, and it may do the same to its other vehicles in the future.

After years of saying no, Tesla reportedly adding Apple CarPlay to its cars Read More »

Apple TV execs dismiss introducing an ad tier, buying Warner Bros. Discovery

ads, Apple, Apple TV, streaming, Tech / Shannon Garcia / November 10, 2025

Focused on original content

Another obvious way to grow Apple TV is through more subscribers. With talk of Warner Bros. Discovery considering a sale, it’s worth wondering if Apple TV may try to grow through acquisition. But the execs Screen International spoke with seemed focused on building out Apple TV’s library with originals. Cue noted that “at least in the timeframe that we’re thinking about right now, we’re not looking at licensing any content or adding anything to our service.”

“We’re building an all-original services; we’re not building on the back of pre-existing IP or library,” Jamie Erlicht, one of Apple’s heads of worldwide video, said.

More directly, when asked if Apple might buy Warner Bros., A24, or Disney, Cue pointed out that Apple hasn’t historically done “a lot of major acquisitions.”

“We do very small acquisitions in general, not related to Apple TV, so I don’t see that happening because we like what we’re doing,” Cue said.

Since its 2019 debut, some have questioned whether Apple TV is an authentic attempt to improve streaming options for customers, or if Apple TV is a “vanity project,” as Screen International put it, or if the service is merely a tool for getting people to buy other Apple products. Naturally, the interviewed executives claimed that the service is built on a commitment to distributing unique and premium shows and movies.

The interview provided more insight on how Apple TV leadership defines the latter. Zack Van Amburg, one of Apple’s heads of worldwide video, said:

A core tenet of everything Apple does is the notion that humanity needs to be at the center of it, and that’s everything from app design to hardware engineering, to everything in between. We try to think a little more deeply about that.

Our shows and our movies tend to be about the emotional experience, the stakes involved, even when we’re doing a comedy.

Apple TV execs dismiss introducing an ad tier, buying Warner Bros. Discovery Read More »