Enlarge/ The Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California.
Apple’s earnings report for the second quarter of the company’s 2024 fiscal year showed a slide in hardware sales, especially for the iPhone. Nonetheless, Apple beat analysts’ estimates for the quarter thanks to the company’s rapidly growing services revenue.
iPhone revenue dropped from $51.33 billion in the same quarter last year to $45.96 billion, a fall of about 10 percent. This was the second consecutive quarter with declining iPhone revenues. That said, investors feared a sharp drop before the earnings call.
Notably, Apple’s revenue in the region it dubs Greater China (which includes China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong) fell 8 percent overall. The company fared a little better in other regions. China’s economy is slowing even as China-based Huawei is taking bigger slices of the pie in the region.
Globally, Mac revenue was $7.5 billion compared to last year’s $7.12 billion. Other products—which include the Watch, AirPods, Apple TV 4K, HomePod, and the new Vision Pro headset—were down to $7.9 billion from last year’s $8.76 billion, despite the fact this quarter included the launch of the Vision Pro.
iPad revenue was also down, at $5.6 billion from $6.67 billion. Apple is expected to launch new iPads next week, which suggests that those updates are needed to achieve the company’s business goals.
The rosiest revenue category was services, which includes everything from Apple Music to iCloud. Its revenue was $23.9 billion, up from Q2 2023’s $20.91 billion.
The company also announced authorization of $110 billion for share purchases.
Enlarge/ John Schmidtlein, partner at Williams & Connolly LLP and lead litigator for Alphabet Inc.’s Google, arrives to federal court in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, Oct. 2, 2023.
Halfway through the first day of closing arguments in the Department of Justice’s big antitrust trial against Google, US District Judge Amit Mehta posed the question that likely many Google users have pondered over years of DOJ claims that Google’s market dominance has harmed users.
“What should Google have done to remain outside the crosshairs of the DOJ?” Mehta asked plaintiffs halfway through the first of two full days of closing arguments.
According to the DOJ and state attorneys general suing, Google has diminished search quality everywhere online, primarily by locking rivals out of default positions on devices and in browsers. By paying billions for default placements that the government has argued allowed Google to hoard traffic and profits, Google allegedly made it nearly impossible for rivals to secure enough traffic to compete, ultimately decreasing competition and innovation in search by limiting the number of viable search engines in the market.
The DOJ’s lead litigator, Kenneth Dintzer, told Mehta that what Google should have done was acknowledge that the search giant had an enormous market share and consider its duties more carefully under antitrust law. Instead, Dintzer alleged, Google chose the route of “hiding” and “destroying documents” because it was aware of conflicts with antitrust law.
“What should Google have done?” Dintzer told Mehta. “They should have recognized that by demanding locking down every default that they were opening themselves up to a challenge on the conduct.”
The most controversial default agreement that Google has made is a 21-year deal with Apple that Mehta has described as the “heart” of the government’s case against Google. During the trial, a witness accidentally blurted out Google’s carefully guarded secret of just how highly it values the Apple deal, revealing that Google pays 36 percent of its search advertising revenue from Safari just to remain the default search tool in Apple’s browser. In 2022 alone, trial documents revealed that Google paid Apple $20 billion for the deal, Bloomberg reported.
That’s in stark contrast to the 12 percent of revenue that Android manufacturers get from their default deals with Google. The government wants the court to consider all these default deals to be anti-competitive, with Dintzer suggesting during closing arguments that they are the “centerpiece” of “a lot” of Google’s exclusionary behavior that ultimately allowed Google to become the best search engine today—by “capturing the default and preventing rivals from getting access to those defaults.”
Google’s lawyers have argued that Google succeeds on its merits. Today, lead litigator John Schmidtlein repeatedly pointed out that antitrust law is designed to protect the competitive process, not specific competitors who fail to invest and innovate—as Microsoft did by failing to recognize how crucial mobile search would become.
“Merely getting advantages by winning on quality, they may have an effect on a rival, but the question is, does it have an anti-competitive effect?” Schmidtlein argued, noting that the DOJ hadn’t “shown that absent the agreements, Microsoft would have toppled Google.”
But Dintzer argued that “a mistake by one rival doesn’t mean that Google gets to monopolize this market forever.” When asked to explain why everyone—including some of Google’s rivals—testified that Google won contracts purely because it was the best search engine, Dintzer warned Mehta that the fact that Google’s rivals “may be happy cashing Google’s checks doesn’t tell us anything.”
According to Schmidtlein, Google could have crossed the line with the Apple deal, but it didn’t.
“Google didn’t go on to say to Apple, if you don’t make us the default, no Google search on Apple devices at all,” Schmidtlein argued. “That would be suicide for Google.”
It’s still unclear how Mehta may be leaning in this case, interrogating both sides with care and making it clear that he expects all his biggest questions to be answered after closing arguments conclude Friday evening.
But Mehta did suggest at one point today that it seemed potentially “impossible” for anyone to compete with Google for default placements.
“How would anybody be able to spend billions and billions of dollars to possibly dislodge Google?” Mehta asked. “Is there any real competition for the default spot?”
According to Schmidtlein, that is precisely what “competition on the merits” looks like.
“Google is winning because it’s better, and Apple is deciding Google is better for users,” Schmidtlein argued. “The antitrust laws are not designed to ensure a competitive market. They’re designed to ensure a competitive process.”
Proving the potential anti-competitive effects of Google’s default agreements, particularly the Apple deal, has long been regarded as the most critical point in order to win the government’s case. So it’s no surprise that the attorney representing state attorneys general, Bill Cavanaugh, praised Mehta for asking, “What should Google have done?” According to Cavanaugh, that was the “right question” to pose in this trial.
“What should they have done 10 years ago when there was a recognition” that “we’re monopolists” and “we have substantial control in markets” is ask, “How should we proceed with our contracts?” Cavanaugh argued. “That’s the question that they answered, but they answered it in the wrong way.”
Seemingly if Google’s default contracts posed fewer exclusionary concerns, the government seems to be arguing, there would be more competition and therefore more investment and innovation in search. But as long as Google controls the general search market, the government alleged that users won’t be able to search the web the way that they want.
Google is hoping that Mehta will reject the government’s theories and instead rule that Google has done nothing to stop rivals from improving the search landscape. Early in the day, Mehta told the DOJ that he was “struggling to see” how Google has either stopped innovating or degraded its search engine as a result of lack of competition.
Closing arguments continue on Friday. Mehta is not expected to rule until late summer or early fall.
Enlarge/Assassin’s Creed Mirage returned to the earlier games’ focus on stealth assassinations in a historical urban environment.
Ubisoft
Apple has spent the last year trying to convince gamers that they can get a console-like, triple-A experience on the latest iPhones. The newest test of that promise will be Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which now has a release date and pricing information.
Mirage will land on compatible iPhones—the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max—on June 6, according to Ubisoft (though the App Store listing says June 10.) That coincides pretty closely with Apple’s annual developer conference, so we’d expect it to get a shoutout there. Ubisoft’s blog post also says it will come to the iPad Air and iPad Pro models with an M1 chip or later.
The game will be a free download with a 90-minute free trial. After that, you’ll have to pay $50 to keep playing, which is pretty close to what the game costs on PC and consoles. It will support cross-progression, provided you sign into Ubisoft Connect. Ubisoft Connect is not exactly beloved by players, but it’s nice to be able to take your saves back and forth between other platforms if you can stomach it.
That cross-progression feature is key because the game launched several months ago on other platforms, so players interested in it probably already have made some progress in the story, if they haven’t finished it already.
Mirage is well over a dozen mainline games into the franchise, but it’s a smaller, more focused game than 2018’s Odyssey or 2020’s Valhalla. While those games expanded the franchise away from its stealth roots to become more of a full-fledged The Witcher 3-like open-world RPG experience, Mirage goes back to the old style of gameplay. It originally started as DLC for Valhalla but was expanded into a full game.
It won’t be the first triple-A game to hit the iPhone 15 and later, though the list has been short so far. A couple of Resident Evil games have made their way to phones (Resident Evil 4‘s remake and Resident Evil Village), and Apple has also managed to get respectable ports of No Man’s Sky, Death Stranding, and Baldur’s Gate 3 to Apple Silicon Macs.
When we tested the Resident Evil titles on the iPhone 15, we found that the graphics and performance were quite respectable—perhaps comparable to what you’d get on a PlayStation 4 Pro, a mid-range gaming laptop, or a Steam Deck—but that the touch controls never seem to cut it, so you’ll want to use a controller. iOS supports the latest PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo controllers, as well as attachable controllers like the Razer Kishi. Mirage will also support those controllers.
Enlarge/ An iPhone in Standby mode, charging wirelessly on a desk.
Apple
If your iPhone’s alarm hasn’t woken you lately, it seems you’re not alone: Apple has confirmed to Today that a software bug is to blame, following user complaints on TikTok and other social platforms.
Apple is “aware of an issue causing some iPhone alarms to not play the expected sound,” according to the report and “is working on a fix.” The company’s official statement didn’t go into more detail on what caused the bug or why it seems to affect some users but not others.
These sorts of bugs usually relate to some kind of time change; one circa 2010 iOS alarm bug was caused by Daylight Saving Time, and another cropped up in the first two days of 2011 when alarms suddenly stopped working for the first two days of the year (for whatever reason. they began working properly again on January 3 without any kind of software update). Daylight Saving Time in 2024 kicked in all the way back in mid-March, so it’s hard to say whether the problem is related to the change this time around.
If you aren’t affected by the bug—my alarms have been working fine—you can still keep this bug in your pocket for when you’re late for something for another reason.
Starting in March with the release of iOS 17.4, iPhones in the European Union have been subject to the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a batch of regulations that (among other things) forced Apple to support alternate app stores, app sideloading, and third-party browser engines in iOS for the first time. Today, EU regulators announced that they are also categorizing Apple’s iPadOS as a “gatekeeper,” meaning that the iPad will soon be subject to the same regulations as the iPhone.
The EU began investigating whether iPadOS would qualify as a gatekeeper in September 2023, the same day it decided that iOS, the Safari browser, and the App Store were all gatekeepers.
“Apple now has six months to ensure full compliance of iPadOS with the DMA obligations,” reads the EU’s blog post about the change.
Apple technically split the iPad’s operating system from the iPhone’s in 2019 when it began calling its tablet operating system “iPadOS” instead of iOS. But practically speaking, little separates the two operating systems under the hood. Both iOS and iPadOS share the same software build numbers, they’re updated in lockstep (with rare exceptions), and most importantly for DMA compliance purposes, they pull software from the same locked-down App Store with the same Apple-imposed restrictions in place.
Apps distributed through alternate app stores or third-party websites will have to abide by many of Apple’s rules and will still generally be limited to using Apple’s public APIs. However, the ability to use alternate app stores and browser engines on the iPad’s large screen (and the desktop-class M-series chips) could make the tablets better laptop replacements by allowing them to do more of the things that Mac users can do on their systems.
Though Apple has made multiple changes to iOS in the EU to comply with the DMA, EU regulators are already investigating Apple (as well as Google and Meta) for “non-compliance.” Depending on the results of that investigation, the EU may require Apple to make more changes to the way it allows third-party apps to be installed in iOS and to the way that third-party developers are allowed to advertise non-Apple app store and payment options. Any changes that Apple makes to iOS to comply with the investigation’s findings will presumably trickle down to the iPad as well.
Of course, none of this directly affects US-based iPhone or iPad users, whose devices remain restricted to Apple’s app stores and the WebKit browsing engine. That said, we have seen some recent App Store rule changes that have arguably trickled down from Apple’s attempts to comply with the DMA, most notably policy changes that have allowed (some, not all) retro game console emulators into the App Store for the first time.
In the world of AI, what might be called “small language models” have been growing in popularity recently because they can be run on a local device instead of requiring data center-grade computers in the cloud. On Wednesday, Apple introduced a set of tiny source-available AI language models called OpenELM that are small enough to run directly on a smartphone. They’re mostly proof-of-concept research models for now, but they could form the basis of future on-device AI offerings from Apple.
Apple’s new AI models, collectively named OpenELM for “Open-source Efficient Language Models,” are currently available on the Hugging Face under an Apple Sample Code License. Since there are some restrictions in the license, it may not fit the commonly accepted definition of “open source,” but the source code for OpenELM is available.
On Tuesday, we covered Microsoft’s Phi-3 models, which aim to achieve something similar: a useful level of language understanding and processing performance in small AI models that can run locally. Phi-3-mini features 3.8 billion parameters, but some of Apple’s OpenELM models are much smaller, ranging from 270 million to 3 billion parameters in eight distinct models.
In comparison, the largest model yet released in Meta’s Llama 3 family includes 70 billion parameters (with a 400 billion version on the way), and OpenAI’s GPT-3 from 2020 shipped with 175 billion parameters. Parameter count serves as a rough measure of AI model capability and complexity, but recent research has focused on making smaller AI language models as capable as larger ones were a few years ago.
The eight OpenELM models come in two flavors: four as “pretrained” (basically a raw, next-token version of the model) and four as instruction-tuned (fine-tuned for instruction following, which is more ideal for developing AI assistants and chatbots):
OpenELM features a 2048-token maximum context window. The models were trained on the publicly available datasets RefinedWeb, a version of PILE with duplications removed, a subset of RedPajama, and a subset of Dolma v1.6, which Apple says totals around 1.8 trillion tokens of data. Tokens are fragmented representations of data used by AI language models for processing.
Apple says its approach with OpenELM includes a “layer-wise scaling strategy” that reportedly allocates parameters more efficiently across each layer, saving not only computational resources but also improving the model’s performance while being trained on fewer tokens. According to Apple’s released white paper, this strategy has enabled OpenELM to achieve a 2.36 percent improvement in accuracy over Allen AI’s OLMo 1B (another small language model) while requiring half as many pre-training tokens.
Enlarge/ An table comparing OpenELM with other small AI language models in a similar class, taken from the OpenELM research paper by Apple.
Apple
Apple also released the code for CoreNet, a library it used to train OpenELM—and it also included reproducible training recipes that allow the weights (neural network files) to be replicated, which is unusual for a major tech company so far. As Apple says in its OpenELM paper abstract, transparency is a key goal for the company: “The reproducibility and transparency of large language models are crucial for advancing open research, ensuring the trustworthiness of results, and enabling investigations into data and model biases, as well as potential risks.”
By releasing the source code, model weights, and training materials, Apple says it aims to “empower and enrich the open research community.” However, it also cautions that since the models were trained on publicly sourced datasets, “there exists the possibility of these models producing outputs that are inaccurate, harmful, biased, or objectionable in response to user prompts.”
While Apple has not yet integrated this new wave of AI language model capabilities into its consumer devices, the upcoming iOS 18 update (expected to be revealed in June at WWDC) is rumored to include new AI features that utilize on-device processing to ensure user privacy—though the company may potentially hire Google or OpenAI to handle more complex, off-device AI processing to give Siri a long-overdue boost.
Last year, Apple introduced the ability to set multiple timers at once in the Clock app on its various platforms.
“We truly live in an age of wonders,” deadpanned Apple’s Craig Federighi in the company’s official presentation, tacitly acknowledging the gap between the apparent simplicity of the feature and the amount of time that Apple took to implement it.
The next version of iPadOS may contain another of these “age of wonders” features, an apparently simple thing that Apple has chosen never to do for reasons that the company can’t or won’t explain. According to MacRumors, iPadOS 18 may finally be the update that brings a version of Apple’s first-party Calculator app to the iPad.
Calculator was one of the very first iPhone apps that shipped with the iPhone back in 2007 but was mysteriously and inexplicably absent from the iPad when it launched in 2010. It’s also the very last of those original missing apps to find its way to the iPad’s home screen—Stocks, Clock, Voice Memos, and Weather had all made the jump previously, with the Weather app coming as recently as 2022.
It’s not that the iPad is incapable of calculating; the Spotlight search feature can already handle basic off-the-cuff math and conversion questions, and third-party calculator apps like PCalc, Numerical², Calcbot, and innumerable free-to-download no-name calculator apps have stepped up to fill the gap. But it was never clear why Apple decided against shipping a first-party Calculator app with the iPad, when it had shipped one with every iPhone since 2007 and every Mac since 1984.
The new Calculator app should be more than just a straightforward port of the current iOS or macOS app. Apple is apparently planning a small overhaul of the Calculator app for macOS 15 with a history tape for tracking past calculations, a resizable window, and an updated round-button design that more closely imitates the iOS version. The iPad and macOS versions of many of Apple’s apps share a lot of code these days—Stocks, Voice Memos, News, Home, Weather, Clock, and others share essentially the same design and layout in both operating systems—so it’s a fair bet that this redesigned Mac app and the newly introduced iPad app will be the same software.
At least one developer of a prominent iPad calculator seemed undaunted by the news that his app could be Sherlocked this fall.
“Yes, I saw the MacRumors article,” wrote PCalc developer James Thomson on his Mastodon account, responding to no one in particular. “Yes, it’s fine.”
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman thinks that Apple’s M4 chips for Macs are coming sooner rather than later—possibly as early as “late this year,” per a report from earlier this month. Now Gurman says Apple could completely skip the M3 generation for some Macs, most notably the Mac mini.
To be clear, Gurman doesn’t have specific insider information confirming that Apple is planning to skip the M3 mini. But based on Apple’s alleged late-2024-into-early-2025 timeline for the M4 mini, he believes that it’s “probably safe to say” that there’s not enough space on the calendar for an M3 mini to be released between now and then.
This wouldn’t be the first time an Apple Silicon Mac had skipped a chip generation—the 24-inch iMac was never updated with the M2, instead jumping directly from the M1 to the M3. The Mac Pro also skipped the M1 series, leapfrogging from Intel chips to the M2.
But if the M4 does come out by the end of 2024, it would be a much faster turnaround than we’ve seen for other Apple Silicon chips so far. Roughly a year and a half passed between the introduction of the first M1 Macs in late 2020 and the first M2 Macs in the summer of 2022; about the same amount of time passed between mid-2022 and the late-2023 introduction of the first M3 Macs. If Apple holds to a more typical 18-month gap between the first M3 Macs and the first M4 Macs, there’s still plenty of time for an M3-based Mac mini refresh to be released.
Apple last updated the Mac mini in January of 2022, replacing the M1 model with an M2 version and introducing a new variant with an M2 Pro chip that included more Thunderbolt ports, better external display support, and better CPU and GPU performance. Most of Apple’s desktops—both Mac minis, as well as the Mac Studio and Mac Pro—are still using Apple’s M2 chips, while all of the laptops and the iMac have gotten an M3 refresh at this point.
Gurman’s previous reporting on the M4 suggests that it will be an “AI-focused” chip series, which probably means that it will beef up the processors’ Neural Engine to power the on-device generative AI features that are expected to come with iOS 18 and Apple’s other major operating system updates this year. Apple already has a head start on the PC ecosystem in this respect—all of the M-series chips and A-series chips going all the way back to 2017’s A11 Bionic have included a version of the Neural Engine. Intel and AMD’s processors have only begun to include similar neural processing units (NPUs) within the last year or so.
Gurman hasn’t reported on the M4 series’ specifications, but he has said it will include at least three performance tiers: a base model codenamed “Donan,” a midrange version codenamed “Brava,” and a high-end model codenamed “Hidra.” It remains to be seen which of these chips would replace the Pro, Max, and Ultra processors in current-generation M2 and M3 Macs.
Enlarge/ Photos of iGBA that appeared on the App Store before the app was taken down.
Over the weekend, developer Mattia La Spina launched iGBA as one of the first retro game emulators legitimately available on the iOS App Store following Apple’s rules change regarding such emulators earlier this month. As of Monday morning, though, iGBA has been pulled from the App Store following controversy over the unauthorized reuse of source code from a different emulator project.
Shortly after iGBA’s launch, some people on social media began noticing that the project appeared to be based on the code for GBA4iOS, a nearly decade-old emulator that developer Riley Testut and a partner developed as high-schoolers (and distributed via a temporary security hole in the iOS App Store). Testut took to social media Sunday morning to call iGBA a “knock-off” of GBA4iOS. “I did not give anyone permission to do this, yet it’s now sitting at the top of the charts (despite being filled with ads + tracking),” he wrote.
GBA4iOS is an open source program released under the GNU GPLv2 license, with licensing terms that let anyone “use, modify, and distribute my original code for this project without fear of legal consequences.” But those expansive licensing terms only apply “unless you plan to submit your app to Apple’s App Store, in which case written permission from me is explicitly required.”
Images from the original, circa 2014 version of GBA4iOS.
“To be clear, I’m not pissed at the developer [of iGBA],” Testut added on social media. “I’m pissed that Apple took the time to change the App Store rules to allow emulators and then approved a knock-off of my own app.”
Hurry up and wait
MacRumors reports that Apple cited two sections of its App Store guidelines in removing iGBA: one related to spam (Section 4.3) and one related to copyright (section 5.2). Right now, it’s a bit ambiguous whether the copyright violation refers to the copyright on the emulator source code itself or the emulator’s ability to easily play copyrighted games from Nintendo and others.
As we discussed earlier this month, the wording of Apple’s recent App Store guidelines update makes it unclear if developers can release general-purpose emulators with the ability to play ROMs they don’t control the rights to. Aside from iGBA, a Commodore 64 emulator named Emu64 XL and built off of the open source VICE project was recently launched on the iOS App Store.
Apple has yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica. But Testut wrote early Monday morning that “to Apple’s credit, though, once they were aware of the issue, they did take it seriously. So I really don’t believe this was malicious at all — just an unfortunate situation for everyone involved.” Testut added that iGBA maker La Spina “reached out to me via email to personally apologize for the mess. So no hard feelings there.”
But Testut did have some hard feelings regarding Apple’s treatment of AltStore, an alternative marketplace for sideloading iOS apps that he’s trying to launch under the EU’s new regulations. That would provide Testut with a legitimate way to distribute Delta, a “sequel” to GBA4iOS that emulates many classic Nintendo consoles on Apple devices.
“My frustration stemmed entirely from the fact we’ve been ready to launch Delta since last month,” Tetstut wrote on social media. “This whole situation could’ve been avoided if Apple hadn’t delayed approving us until after changing their rules to allow emulators.”
Enlarge/ The Fairbuds and their replaceable components, including the notably hand-friendly, non-soldered batteries.
Fairphone
Fairphone has spent years showing us that it could do what major phone manufacturers suggest is impossible: make a modern-looking phone, make it brazenly easy to open up, design it so battery swaps are something you could do on lunch break, and also provide software support for an unbelievable eight to 10 years.
Bluetooth headphones, specifically wireless earbuds, seemed destined to never receive this kind of eco-friendly, ownership-oriented upgrade, in large part because of how small they are. But the Fairbuds have arrived, and Fairphone has made them in its phones’ image. They’re only available in the EU at the moment, for 149 euro (or roughly $160 USD). Like the Fairphone 4, there’s a chance interest could bring them to the US.
The highlights include:
Seven replaceable parts from the buds and charging case, all sold by Fairphone
A two-year warranty, expanded to three if you register them
Batteries in both the case and buds that are replaceable
IP54 sweat and water resistance
Individual left or right buds and a charging case that Fairphone will sell to you
Made with “fair and recycled materials,” in “fair factories,” and “climate conscious and electronic waste neutral,” (as explained by Fairphone).
Of course, the buds also, you know, produce sound, with 11 mm titanium drivers. The Fairbuds sport active noise-canceling and ambient sound modes, Bluetooth 5.3 with “dual point connectivity” for quick-switching between devices, and a Fairbuds app for customizing EQ and preset settings. The buds’ 45 mAh batteries carry about six hours of listening per charge, and their 500 mAh case adds another 20 hours.
Fairbuds in exploded view.
Fairphone
Fairbuds and their charging case, which also come in black.
Fairphone
The battery removal process from a Fairbud.
Fairphone
Closeup on the white Fairbuds.
Fairphone
The back of the Fairbuds charging case and a battery you just… put into it. With your fingers. I’m sorry, it’s weird to type that now.
Fairphone
It’s not Fairphone’s first foray into fair, repairable sound devices. The firm previously made the since-discontinued True Wireless Stereo Earbuds and still offers Fairbuds XL, which are not buds at all but full over-ear headphones (and also EU-only).
The best that major-brand earbuds have ever done in repairability is “maybe you can do it, if you’re careful, and you don’t mind losing water resistance.” Taylor Dixon took apart six buds for iFixit back in 2020, and only Sony’s WF-1000XM3 didn’t require soldering, cutting and re-applying glue, and a steady hand working in very small spaces.
AirPods? AirPods are something else. One firm, The Swap Club, has figured out some means of getting the battery out of AirPods and selling them refurbished. But they only accept regular AirPods, not AirPods Pro. Alternatively, Apple will send you a pre-paid label to send in your spent AirPods for recycling, though with no trade-in credit. Even if Apple gets some kind of material out of the AirPods, a lot of them (and nearly every other wireless earbud) end up as waste after 18 months or however long their batteries last.
Fairbuds may or may not take a big chunk out of the market for AirPods, Beats, Pixel Buds, or other use-and-toss airbuds. But at a minimum, they give people something to point to as proof this category could be a lot better.
Disclosure: Kevin Purdy used to work for iFixit. He has no financial ties to the company.
Former Apple design lead Jony Ive and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are seeking funding for a new company that will produce an “artificial intelligence-powered personal device,” according to The Information‘s sources, who are said to be familiar with the plans.
The exact nature of the device is unknown, but it will not look anything like a smartphone, according to the sources. We first heard tell of this venture in the fall of 2023, but The Information’s story reveals that talks are moving forward to get the company off the ground.
Ive and Altman hope to raise at least $1 billion for the new company. The complete list of potential funding sources they’ve spoken with is unknown, but The Information’s sources say they are in talks with frequent OpenAI investor Thrive Capital as well as Emerson Collective, a venture capital firm founded by Laurene Powell Jobs.
SoftBank CEO and super-investor Masayoshi Son is also said to have spoken with Altman and Ive about the venture. Financial Times previously reported that Son wanted Arm (another company he has backed) to be involved in the project.
Obviously, those are some of the well-established and famous names within today’s tech industry. Personal connections may play a role; for example, Jobs is said to have a friendship with both Ive and Altman. That might be critical because the pedigree involved could scare off smaller investors since the big names could drive up the initial cost of investment.
Although we don’t know anything about the device yet, it would likely put Ive in direct competition with his former employer, Apple. It has been reported elsewhere that Apple is working on bringing powerful new AI features to iOS 18 and later versions of the software for iPhones, iPads, and the company’s other devices.
Altman already has his hands in several other AI ventures besides OpenAI. The Information reports that there is no indication yet that OpenAI would be directly involved in the new hardware company.
Enlarge/ The classic Sega Genesis game Sonic the Hedgehog running on an iPhone—in this case, as a standalone app.
Samuel Axon
When Apple posted its latest update to the App Store’s app review and submission policies for developers, it included language that appears to explicitly allow a new kind of app for emulating retro console games.
Apple has long forbidden apps that run code from an external source, but today’s announced changes now allow “software that is not embedded in the binary” in certain cases, with “retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games” specifically listed as one of those cases.
4.7 Mini apps, mini games, streaming games, chatbots, plug-ins, and game emulators
Apps may offer certain software that is not embedded in the binary, specifically HTML5 mini apps and mini games, streaming games, chatbots, and plug-ins. Additionally, retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games. You are responsible for all such software offered in your app, including ensuring that such software complies with these Guidelines and all applicable laws. Software that does not comply with one or more guidelines will lead to the rejection of your app. You must also ensure that the software adheres to the additional rules that follow in 4.7.1 and 4.7.5. These additional rules are important to preserve the experience that App Store customers expect, and to help ensure user safety.
It’s a little fuzzy how this will play out, but it may not allow the kind of emulators you see on Android and desktop, which let you play retro games from any outside source.
Retro game emulators run what are colloquially called ROM files, which are more or less images of the game cartridges or discs that played on console hardware. By now, it’s well-established that the emulators themselves are completely legal, but the legality of the ROM files downloaded from ROM sites on the Internet depends on the specific files and circumstances.
There are ROMs that are entirely public domain or in some license where the creator allows distribution; there are ROMs that are technically copyrighted intellectual property but where the original owner no longer exists, and the current ownership is unknown or unenforced; and there are some ROMs (like many games made by Nintendo) where the owner still has an interest in controlling distribution and often takes action to try to curb illegal sharing and use of the files.
Additionally, many game publishers use emulators to run ROMs of their own retro games, which they sell to consumers either as standalone games or in collections for modern platforms.
It’s not completely clear from Apple’s wording, but our interpretation of Apple’s new rules is that it’s likely only the last of those examples will be possible; companies that own the intellectual property could launch emulator apps for downloading ROMs of their (and only their) games. So, for example, Sega could offer a Sega app that would allow users to download an ever-expanding library of Sega games, either as part of a subscription, for free, or as in-app purchases. Sega has offered its retro games on the iPhone before in emulation but with a standalone app for each game.
“You are responsible for all such software offered in your app, including ensuring that such software complies with these Guidelines and all applicable laws,” Apple writes. And it specifically says “retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games” in the list of exceptions to the rules against “software that is not embedded inside the binary”—but it doesn’t list any other method for retro game console emulator apps.
Whatever the case, this update is not limited to the European Union. Apple has been subjected to regulatory scrutiny in both the EU and the United States regarding its App Store rules. It’s likely the company is making this change to preempt criticism in this area, though it did not name its reasons when announcing the change other than to say it has been made to “support updated policies, upcoming features, and to provide clarification.”
