Russell

Apple finally brought touch to the MacBook Pro. But is it worth paying $400 more? A closer look at the new display, the trade-offs, and who should actually buy one.

Apple is going to check what you share through public iCloud links. A lot of posts this week made it sound worse or better than it is, so here's what actually changes. Starting with iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS 27.3, anything you share from iCloud with "Anyone with the link" will be checked by Apple for harmful content. Apple's examples are photos in iCloud Photos and files in iCloud Drive. What it doesn't cover: links shared with "People you choose", Send a Copy, your private library, or your backups. Apple's page only talks about public links. The encryption part isn't new. Apple's own Advanced Data Protection docs already said public link shares aren't end to end encrypted, so Apple has held those keys for years. What's new is that Apple now says it will actually look. The part I read twice as a law student is the wording. Apple "reserves the right" to move, refuse, modify, remove or delete flagged content, disable your Apple Account, block you from making a new one with the same email or phone number, and involve law enforcement "if necessary". That's terms of service language, and it leaves Apple a lot of room. What Apple hasn't said yet: what "harmful" means, how the checks work, whether a person ever looks at a flagged file, or whether links made before 27.3 count. If you share anything sensitive, switch to People you choose or Send a Copy, and stop sharing old public links you don't need anymore. If you think Apple went too far here, or not far enough, I want to hear why.

Apple is shutting down its Support Community forums on Nov 20, after 28 years So many fixes came from random people in those threads. Feels like the end of an era.

Meta just put its Muse AI agent on the Apple Watch, with calls, texts and dictation right from your wrist. Apple still doesn't have anything like it on its own watch. This might become a real challenge for Apple

$895.4 billion. That is Anthropic's locked compute and infrastructure commitments in the amended S-1. Half due by 2030. The IPO filing reads like a power bill.

OLED iPad mini is out today. IP67, sound through the screen, A20 Pro. Still 60Hz. Starts at $699. Smallest OLED Apple sells, and the first sealed iPad

OpenAI's cyber pipeline found and patched 948 Linux privilege escalations in one run. Cost: $1.2M in API credits. About $1,279 per exploit. Pwn2Own used to pay $20K to $70K for one of those. The math flipped.

Instagram's Edits app is on Mac now. Multi-track timeline, free 4K exports, Apple silicon only. No Windows version. CapCut already lived on desktop. Meta just caught up to the bigger screen.

Apple reportedly cut some engineers' daily AI budget for tools like Claude and ChatGPT from $300 to $200, per Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. It could drop to $100. Some non-engineering teams may go from $100 to $25. Even Apple is counting tokens now.

Anthropic is going public, but whoever buys ANT won't be the one in charge. Here's what the S-1 actually says about control, from a law student's point of view: 1. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation under Delaware law. The board has to balance shareholders' money with the people affected by the company and its stated mission, not just the stock price. 2. A Long-Term Benefit Trust holds a special Class T share that elects 4 of the 7 board seats. That's a majority of the board. 3. The seven co-founders get one single Class F share through a "Founder LLC." That one share carries 50.1% of the votes on normal shareholder matters. No economic rights, just control. 4. Because the trust picks a board majority, Anthropic counts as a "controlled company" under Nasdaq rules and can skip some of the usual independence requirements. It plans to use that for its nominating committee, which will include president Daniela Amodei. 5. Regular Class A buyers get one vote per share. Together they can't outvote a 50.1% block. The money side, from the amended filing on Nov 2: about $17B in Q3 revenue, roughly 12x a year ago and up 47% from Q2, plus about $895B in compute and infrastructure commitments. And no, the IPO isn't cancelled. There's no withdrawal on file with the SEC. So the real question isn't the valuation. It's whether investors are fine owning a piece of a company they'll never get to steer.

Canva says growth slowed for the first time in a decade, and 1,271 roles get hit. That's 22% of the company xitter.twitterapi.xyz/TechCrunch/status/2117…

iOS 27.3 Beta 1 is here! Apple has started rolling out its next iOS update to developers. Time to explore what’s new, test the changes, and see what Apple has been working on. 👀 #iOS27 #Apple

Apple's biggest education deal ever for Mac didn't come from a US school district. The Philippines' Department of Education is buying 172,654 MacBook Neos for teachers and staff, with a 5 year warranty. The Neo's real market might be classrooms, not just students.

Apple is feeling the pressure of the AI boom, and it’s showing up in its margins. Apple just reported $114.5 billion in quarterly revenue, beating Wall Street expectations. But there’s a growing challenge: memory chip prices. CEO John Ternus described the increase as “unprecedented,” warning that costs will continue to rise into next year. Apple expects gross margins to fall to 45–46% in the December quarter, partly due to higher memory costs and AI-related expenses. The irony? The same AI boom driving demand for Apple’s products is also making the components behind them more expensive. AI is changing the tech industry in ways that go far beyond software.

An AI phone replacing the iPhone? Maybe one day, but not anytime soon xitter.twitterapi.xyz/AdamZinebi1/status/211…

Sony stops making discs for new PlayStation games in January 2028. Its last standalone 4K Blu-ray player is discontinued in Japan, so the PS5 is now Sony's only 4K Blu-ray player there. Digital is convenient. It also means you're renting a library you thought you owned.

California's July bar pass rate fell to 48.3%. More than half the room failed xitter.twitterapi.xyz/Reuters/status/2117343…

AI agents are not taking over online shopping just yet. DoorDash CEO Tony Xu revealed that third-party AI agents have generated only several hundred orders on the platform so far. For context, DoorDash handles millions of deliveries every day. Despite all the hype around agentic commerce, most customers are still placing their orders directly through the DoorDash app. The technology is advancing rapidly, but consumer adoption is a different story. AI agents may change how we shop. But the real question is: are people ready to let AI do the buying for them?

OpenAI is taking AI beyond chatbots and into the energy industry. ADNOC, OpenAI and G42 have signed a multi-year partnership to integrate advanced AI across ADNOC’s operations. The initiative will use OpenAI’s models and AI agents to connect decisions across the energy value chain, from oil field planning and production to refining, logistics and trading. The goal? Help manage complex operations, improve decision-making and unlock new efficiencies. What makes this particularly interesting is the bigger picture: AI is moving beyond digital products and becoming part of the infrastructure that powers entire industries. The next AI revolution won’t just be about how we work. It will be about how the world operates.

OpenAI just cut its funding target from $30B to about $20B and lowered the valuation it's pitching from $1.4T to $1.25T, per the FT. Still an enormous number. But it's the first time in a while the AI money machine has blinked. Investors want receipts now.