Apple Watch Turns 10 ⇢

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Apple Watch

Today marks ten years since the original Apple Watch shipped. In that decade, it’s gone from a slow and constrained device that was trying to do far too much to something that I wear every day and night to track my fitness and get a very select number of notifications.

Basic Apple Guy has put together a great blog post to mark the occasion:

What follows is me meandering through the past decade of the Apple Watch, covering some of its history, my thoughts, uses, and my impressions on a decade of this unassuming yet increasingly vital product in Apple’s lineup.

Senator Elizabeth Warren Has Some Questions for Tim Cook ⇢

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Chance Miller at 9to5Mac:

Apple CEO Tim Cook is being pressed for information on his collaboration with the Trump administration surrounding tariffs. In a letter sent today, Senator Elizabeth Warren said that Cook’s collaboration with Trump “creates the appearance of impropriety.” This comes after Warren and other senators questioned $1 million donations made by Cook and others to Trump’s inauguration fund in January. 

“The circumstances surrounding Apple’s exemptions raise fresh concerns about influence-peddling by huge well-connected corporations, and their ability to gain special favors from President Trump,” Warren wrote.

Bloomberg got ahold of her letter. In it, she writes:

At best, your work to eliminate the tariffs on Apple products, and President Trump’s subsequent decision to exempt certain Apple products, creates the appearance of impropriety. However, recent reporting also raises serious questions about the extent to which it is possible for massive corporate special interests to use their money and influence to secure tariff exemptions that are unavailable to Main Street small businesses.

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Memphis Residents Receiving Mailers Making False Claims About xAI’s Environmental Impact ⇢

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Kailynn Johnson at The Memphis Flyer:

The mail said the turbines are designed to protect the air with “air quality levels similar to those from a neighborhood gas station. It cited that the Environmental Protection Agency refers to facilities like the xAI plant as “minor contributors” to air quality.

While the group said there are only 15 turbines operating, [Representative Justin] Pearson said this is false.

“Thanks to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), we know the truth – there are actually 35 gas turbines on site,” Pearson said. “The misinformation being sent to our neighbors conveniently leaves out the 20 additional gas turbines xAI failed to report.”

The mailers are being sent by a group named “Facts Over Fear.” Looking for them online — even using that P.O. Box address —doesn’t turn up much of anything useful.

Eric Hilt, writing for the SELC:

On Wednesday, a coalition of conservation and community organizations shared new information with the Shelby County Health Department that clearly shows xAI—a company founded by Elon Musk to run X’s chatbot ‘Grok’—has nearly doubled the number of on-site gas turbines at its South Memphis datacenter and is violating the Clean Air Act.

Recently, the coalition obtained aerial images of the xAI datacenter with the help of the organization SouthWings. Those images revealed that, in order to power the facility, xAI is using 35 methane gas turbines—far more than previously known and more than the company has submitted permit applications for. The number of turbines and extent of their emissions means xAI is required to have what’s called a ‘major source permit;’ however the datacenter continues to illegally operate these turbines without any permit at all.

“xAI has essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for families living in nearby communities. These dozens of gas turbines are doing significant harm to the air Memphians breathe every day. We expect local health leaders to promptly act in order to hold xAI accountable for its clear violations of the Clean Air Act,” Southern Environmental Law Center Senior Attorney Amanda Garcia said.

The Future of Tab Bars ⇢

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Ben McCarthy, writing about what they would like to see in the rumored iOS 19 redesign:

For a long while, I’ve felt that the design of iOS is too top heavy. While our phones seem to grow larger every year, our hands do not and so interface elements are pulled ever further out of reach. It’s a real micro-annoyance to have to shuffle your phone around in your hand to reach the top of the screen to activate a search bar, shuffle your phone back down so you can type comfortably and in doing so you accidentally touch part of the screen that deactivates the search field and you have to start again.

Synology to Require Synology-Branded Drives in Some Products ⇢

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Kevin Purdy, writing at Ars Technica:

Popular NAS-maker Synology has confirmed and slightly clarified a policy that appeared on its German website earlier this week: Its “Plus” tier of devices, starting with the 2025 series, will require Synology-branded hard drives for full compatibility, at least at first.

“Synology-branded drives will be needed for use in the newly announced Plus series, with plans to update the Product Compatibility List as additional drives can be thoroughly vetted in Synology systems,” a Synology representative told Ars by email. “Extensive internal testing has shown that drives that follow a rigorous validation process when paired with Synology systems are at less risk of drive failure and ongoing compatibility issues.”

Without these drives, some features will be disabled, including volume-wide deduplication and hard drive lifespan analysis.

Casey Liss:

Synology were kind enough to send me a filled, 8-bay network attached storage device back in 2013. Within a couple months I was in love. Having infinite storage available really changes how you think about your digital life. While a Synology is not for most people, it’s 10000% for people like me. I would not and did not stop talking about them. I’ve personally sold countless number of Synology units by my enthusiasm alone.

This week, things finally changed, officially. Synology will be restricting features for those who do not use Synology-branded drives. Drives that are bog-standard enterprise hard drives, possibly with some custom firmware in them.

Why? For more revenue.

Corruption is Winning

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On Friday’s episode of The Vergecast, there was an exchange that really caught my attention. David Pierce mentioned the photos of all the tech CEOs at Trump’s inauguration in January, to which Nilay Patel replied:

The thing that kills me at that is the expectation they had going into that photo was corruption. Right? Tim Cook is going to personally donate a million dollars to Trump’s library and that will take the DOJ case away from Apple. Naked corruption. That is a nakedly corrupt thought.

That’s fine in the sense that a lot of people believe the government is corrupt, and so Trump being even more corrupt does not offend them. But it’s not fine in the sense that like even when we were covering the Google case today, people on Bluesky were replying to me being like, “they’ll just buy him off.” What? That means that the system is collapsed. Like you don’t believe in it anymore. And maybe you didn’t before, but the level to which we have accepted that just naked corruption is how this works is a little more dangerous than I think people are giving it credit for.

If you believe that Google can be like, ah, screw it, write them a check and it’ll go away. Maybe you don’t think that’s right, but you think that is possible, it’s gone. You have to not believe that’s possible. You have to actually hold everybody to account and say, actually, that’s corruption.

If you give into nihilism that the corruption is already won, you’ve just given in. You should not feel helpless; you should feel outraged that the expectation of that photograph was corruption.

I am sure if we were to poll the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, and Tim Cook, they would say that they are just trying to find ways to work with this administration. With Trump, that means money. That collection of dudes doesn’t like to think pay-for-play is a corrupting force, but it is.

None of this is new — just look at the army of paid lobbyists who make a living charging these companies a zillion dollars a year — but seeing it so nakedly (as Patel put it) is sobering. Tech CEOs may think they are doing what’s in the best interest of their companies and shareholders, but their actions do the rest of us — and the country — a disservice. I like to think that this keeps some of them up at night.

They may be able to get what they want out of Trump (for now, at least) by writing checks, “opening” a factory and putting on a show, and working the phones, but the leopards are coming for their faces eventually.

Sponsor: Simple Scan: Paper to PDF to Anywhere! ⇢

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Do you love the Apple Notes document scanner, but would you like more flexibility in sending the scans to email, messages, files, or other apps? Then Simple Scan is for you. Simple Scan is the quick, easy way to scan paper documents to optimized, searchable PDF documents (or images) and send them almost anywhere.

Features include:

  • Same great scanning functionality as Apple Notes, but no need to clutter your notes data with one-off scans.
  • Creates high-resolution multi-page PDFs from your paper documents.
  • PDFs are searchable thanks to automatic Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
  • Built for simplicity. Just scan and send – no document library, no overly complicated array of settings
  • Send scans via email and messages. Or save to a file, or “Share” to send to other apps via the system share sheet.
  • Set up custom destinations with pre-filled recipients for easy “Email to Myself” and other common uses
  • Custom file destinations allow configuration of the file name and pre-selection of a destination folder to save the scan
  • Save scans directly to Photos.
  • Launches fast.
  • Never any ads or tracking. Ever.
  • Simple pricing. Choose a low-cost annual subscription or a one-time lifetime unlock!

Download and try Simple Scan for free today.

‘iOS Access for All’ Updated for iOS 18 ⇢

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Shelly Brisbin has a new update out for her book:

I’m pleased to announced that iOS Access for All (iOS 18 edition) is available now. As usual, there is more information than ever before. The book is fully updated for iOS 18 and the new iPhones and iPads that support it. There will also a new book format available soon, for those who don’t need images.

iOS 18 marks some incremental, but welcome upgrades to accessibility features, and to iOS as a whole. It also brings Apple Intelligence to the latest generation of phones. It’s all included, along with coverage of a number of updates Apple has made to iOS since first releasing iOS 18 last fall.