Category: Apple

Google Gets to Keep Chrome and Android, Apple Gets to Keep Its $20 Billion⇢

⌘ Permalink

It’s a big day for Google, as Judge Amit Mehta has ruled in its favor in several areas:

  • Google will not have to sell off Chrome
  • Google will not have to sell off Android
  • Google can continue paying Apple and others for search engine placement

However, will be barred from exclusive contracts for placement in other products. Jennifer Elias has more at CNBC:

“Google will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment,” the decision states. “Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divesture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints.”

Continue reading ⇢

Blood Oxygen Feature Returning to U.S. Apple Watches⇢

⌘ Permalink

Chance Miller has the details:

Apple has announced that it will release a software update for iPhone and Apple Watch later today with a “redesigned Blood Oxygen feature” for Apple Watch users in the United States. This comes over 18 months after Apple began selling the Apple Watch without the Blood Oxygen feature in America due to a patent dispute.

The new feature will be made available as part of iOS 18.6.1 and watchOS 11.6.1 updates.

Continue reading ⇢

CarPlay’s Messages App for iOS 26 is Bad

⌘ Permalink

I’ve been running iOS 26 for a while now, and there’s something that has been bugging me. The Messages app in CarPlay is a disaster:

Messages in CarPlay iOS 26

I took some time to edit my friends and family out of this screenshot, but the layout and conversation names are exactly as they appear in real life.

Here are some of my issues:

  • It’s great that CarPlay’s Messages app now respects pinned conversations, but displaying them in anything but the 3-across grid from iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS breaks muscle memory in the one context where muscle memory is the most important.
  • Truncated names look terrible. I understand it on the Apple Watch, but even on the 7-inch screen in my Tacoma, there should be room to see first and last names. Making the favorites larger — and preserving their order — would help fix this.1
  • The unread badges should be in a consistent location. CarPlay shows badges for favorites to the upper-right of the image, whereas conversations in the list below have them on the left. This is something done only in CarPlay; every other Messages app shows unread dots to the left of the conversation name.
  • The “Messages” label at the top of the screen is off-centered.

All of this adds up to an interface that feels mostly forgotten. Messages should be consistent across platforms, and I hope Apple takes some time to readdress this before shipping iOS 26 this fall. Right now it looks like an Android phone app that got installed on a tablet.

Continue reading ⇢

Elon Musk Promises to Sue Apple Over Grok’s App Store Ranking⇢

⌘ Permalink

Jess Weatherbed, reporting for The Verge:

Elon Musk says that his artificial intelligence company xAI “will take immediate legal action” against Apple for allegedly manipulating its App Store rankings to the advantage of rival AI apps. In a series of X posts on Monday night, Musk suggested that Apple was “playing politics” by not placing either X or xAI’s Grok chatbot in the App Store’s list of recommended iOS apps, and that he had no choice but to file a lawsuit.

Continue reading ⇢

‘Macintosh HD’ Icon Updated in macOS Tahoe Beta 5

⌘ Permalink

Juli Clover at MacRumors spotted the change:

The existing icon still resembled a hard disk drive, but the new icon looks like a modern solid state drive. Apple’s Macs stopped using hard disk drives starting more than a decade ago. The low-cost 21.5-inch iMac was the last Mac that had a hard drive component, as it used Apple’s SSD + HDD Fusion Drive. All current Macs use SSDs.

I will miss the old icon, but as Clover points out, spinning drives are long gone for most Mac users. The new icon feels more modern and fits in much better with the rest of Tahoe’s icons:

Continue reading ⇢

3 Billion iPhones

⌘ Permalink

In January 2007, I was on a trip visiting family in rural North Carolina during the week of Macworld Expo. When I got back to my aunt’s house after a day of visiting folks, I waited as her sloooooow Internet connection loaded apple.com.

What I saw blew my mind. The iPhone had been rumored, but seeing those original web pages was really something.

Original iPhone

Here’s what that site said:

iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.

Continue reading ⇢