Apple has warned investors that future products may never be as profitable as its iPhone business, as it pushes into unproven new markets such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality headsets. From a report: The iPhone maker added the new warning on growth and profit margins to its latest annual report, in the list of "risk factors" facing the tech group's business.

"New products, services and technologies may replace or supersede existing offerings and may produce lower revenues and lower profit margins," Apple said, "which can materially adversely impact the company's business, results of operations and financial condition." Apple routinely warns investors in its annual reports that competition, foreign exchange, supply chain issues and other factors can put "volatility and downward pressure" on its margins. The same 10-K regulatory filing in previous years suggested that new product introductions could have "higher cost structures." But until now, Apple has not been so direct in addressing the financial profile of its future products.

The Atlantic complains that our chaos of different plug types "was supposed to end, with USB-C as our savior." But part of the problem is what they call "the second circle of our cable hell: My USB-C may not be the same as yours. And the USB-C you bought two years ago may not be the same as the one you got today. And that means it might not do what you now assume it can." A lack of standardization is not the problem here. The industry has designed, named, and rolled out a parade of standards that pertain to USB and all its cousins. Some of those standards live inside other standards. For example, USB 3.2 Gen 1 is also known as USB 3.0, even though it's numbered 3.2. (What? Yes.) And both of these might be applied to cables with USB-A connectors, or USB-B, or USB-Micro B, or — why not? — USB-C. The variations stretch on and on toward the horizon.

Hope persists that someday, eventually, this hell can be escaped — and that, given sufficient standardization, regulatory intervention, and consumer demand, a winner will emerge in the battle of the plugs. But the dream of having a universal cable is always and forever doomed, because cables, like humankind itself, are subject to the curse of time, the most brutal standard of them all. At any given moment, people use devices they bought last week alongside those they've owned for years; they use the old plugs in rental cars or airport-gate-lounge seats; they buy new gadgets with even better capabilities that demand new and different (if similar-looking) cables. Even if Apple puts a USB-C port in every new device, and so does every other manufacturer, that doesn't mean that they will do everything you will expect cables to do in the future. Inevitably, you will find yourself needing new ones.

Back in 1998, the New York Times told me, "If you make your move to U.S.B. now, you can be sure that your new devices will have a port to plug into." I was ready! I'm still ready. But alas, a port to plug into has never been enough.
Obligatory XKCD.

Apple is taking a 20 percent stake in its iPhone satellite connectivity partner GlobalStar -- a stake worth $400 million -- as part of an expansion of its deal with the company. From a report: GlobalStar will also receive a prepayment of $1.1 billion from Apple that is intended to improve satellite infrastructure.

Apple relies on GlobalStar's satellites to enable to send emergency text messages, iMessage reactions, and more through the skies in areas with no cell signal. GlobalStar disclosed the details of the deal expansion in an SEC filing, which includes "a new satellite constellation, expanded ground infrastructure, and increased global [mobile satellite services] licensing."

Indonesia has banned sales of Google Pixel smartphones for failing to meet a 40% local content requirement, days after blocking Apple's iPhone 16 in Southeast Asia's biggest phone market. Google must obtain local content certification before resuming sales in Indonesia, Industry Ministry spokesman Febri Hendri Antoni Arief said. The move follows last week's iPhone 16 ban after Apple failed to fulfill a $95 million investment pledge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Apple's AI features are finally starting to appear. Apple Intelligence is launching today on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, offering features like generative AI-powered writing tools, notification summaries, and a cleanup tool to take distractions out of photos. It's Apple's first official step into the AI era, but it'll be far from its last. Apple Intelligence has been available in developer and public beta builds of Apple's operating systems for the past few months, but today marks the first time it'll be available in the full public OS releases. Even so, the features will still be marked as "beta," and Apple Intelligence will very much remain a work in progress. (You'll have to get on a waitlist to try Apple Intelligence, too.) Siri gets a new look, but its most consequential new features -- like the ability to take action in apps -- probably won't arrive until well into 2025.

In the meantime, Apple has released a very "AI starter kit" set of features. "Writing Tools" will help you summarize notes, change the tone of your messages to make them friendlier or more professional, and turn a wall of text into a list or table. You'll see AI summaries in notifications and emails, along with a new focus mode that aims to filter out unimportant alerts. The updated Siri is signified by a glowing border around the screen, and it now allows for text input by double-tapping the bottom of the screen. It's helpful stuff, but we've seen a lot of this before, and it'll hardly represent a seismic shift in how you use your iPhone. Apple says that more Apple Intelligence features will arrive in December. [...] Availability will expand in December to Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK, with additional languages coming in April. Despite Apple's previous claim that Apple Intelligence wouldn't be available in the European Union due to the Digital Markets Act, the features will, in fact, be coming to Europe in April of next year.

Further reading: Apple Updates the iMac With M4 Chip

Indonesia has banned sales of Apple's iPhone 16, citing the tech giant's failure to meet local investment requirements, the country's Ministry of Industry said. The ministry said Apple's local unit has not fulfilled the mandatory 40% local content threshold for smartphones, making imported iPhone 16 units illegal for sale in Southeast Asia's largest economy.

About 9,000 iPhone 16 devices have entered Indonesia through passenger luggage since last month's launch. "These phones entered legally, but will be illegal if traded," the ministry said. Apple has invested 1.48 trillion rupiah ($108 million) of its 1.71 trillion rupiah commitment in Indonesia. The company operates four developer academies but no manufacturing facilities in the country, despite government pressure to expand its presence.

The Browser Company is developing a new, much simpler browser distinct from Arc, which has proven too complex for mainstream adoption despite a strong following among power users. The Verge's David Pierce reports: Arc is not dying, [says CEO Josh Miller]. He says that over and over, in fact, even after I tell him the YouTube video the company just released sounds like the thing companies say right before they kill a product. It's just that Arc won't change much anymore. It'll get stability updates and bug fixes, and there's a team at The Browser Company dedicated to those. "In that sense," Miller says, "it feels like a complete-ish product." Most of the team's energy and time will now be dedicated to starting from scratch. "Arc was basically this front-end, tab management innovation," Miller says. "People loved it. It grew like a weed. Then it started getting slow and started crashing a lot, and we felt bad, and we had to learn how to make it fast. And we kind of lost sight, in some ways, of the fact that we've got to do the operating system part."

The plan this time is to build not just a different interface for a browser, but a different kind of browser entirely -- one that is much more proactive, more powerful, more AI-centric, more in line with that original vision. Call it the iPhone of web browsers, or the "internet computer," or whatever other metaphor you like. The idea is to turn the browser into an app platform. Miller still wants to do it, and he wants to do it for everyone. What does that look like? Miller is a bit vague on the details. The new browser, which Miller intimates could launch as soon as the beginning of next year, is designed to come with no switching costs, which means among other things that it will have horizontal tabs and fewer ideas about organization. The idea is to "make the first 90 seconds effortless" in order to get more people to switch. And then, slowly, to reveal what this new browser can do.

The chief scientist of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center has a theory about why the world hasn't moved to IPv6. From a report: In a lengthy post to the center's blog, Geoff Huston recounts that the main reason for the development of IPv6 was a fear the world would run out of IP addresses, hampering the growth of the internet. But IPv6 represented evolution -- not revolution. "The bottom line was that IPv6 did not offer any new functionality that was not already present in IPv4. It did not introduce any significant changes to the operation of IP. It was just IP, with larger addresses," Huston wrote.

IPv6's designers assumed that the protocol would take off because demand for IPv4 was soaring. But in the years after IPv6 debuted, Huston observes, "There was no need to give the transition much thought." Internetworking wonks assumed applications, hosts, and networks would become dual stack and support IPv6 alongside IPv4, before phasing out the latter. But then mobile internet usage exploded, and network operators had to scale to meet unprecedented demand created by devices like the iPhone. "We could either concentrate our resources on meeting the incessant demands of scaling, or we could work on IPv6 deployment," Huston wrote.

Adobe's Fresco painting app is now free for everyone, in an attempt to lure illustrators to join its creative software suite. The Verge reports: Fresco is essentially Adobe's answer to apps like Procreate and Clip Studio Paint, which all provide a variety of tools for both digital art and simulating real-world materials like sketching pencils and watercolor paints. Adobe Fresco is designed for touch and stylus-supported devices, and is available on iPad, iPhone, and Windows PCs. The app already had a free-to-use tier, but premium features like access to the full Adobe Fonts library, a much wider brush selection, and the ability to import custom brushes previously required a $9.99 annual subscription. That's pretty affordable for an Adobe subscription, but still couldn't compete with Procreate's $12.99 one-time purchase model.

Starting today, all of Fresco's premium features are no longer locked behind a paywall. The app first launched in 2019 and isn't particularly well-known compared to more established Adobe apps like Photoshop and Illustrator that feature more complex, professional design tools. Fresco still has some interesting features of its own, like reflective and rotation symmetry (which mirror artwork as you draw) and the ability to quickly animate drawings with motion presets like "bounce" and "breathe."

If you want to sign up for a subscription to Hulu or Disney+, don't bother taking out your iPhone. Disney is now telling would-be customers to pay for subscriptions on Disney's own site, instead of on Apple's App Store -- though people who've already started paying for either service via Apple can keep doing that. From a report: The two companies are still working together on some projects. But the App Store split does represent a rift between two longtime partners, so it's definitely worth noting.

Disney's rationale is clear here: When customers sign up for Disney subscription services via Apple, Apple takes up to 15% of the monthly fees those services generate. And Disney CEO Bob Iger has made it clear that he doesn't want to pay that anymore. "We have to look at the way we're distributing," Iger said at an investor conference in May. "Unlike Netflix, we distribute largely through third-party app stores. There's obviously an advantage to that to some extent, but there's a cost to that, too. And we're looking at that."

An anonymous reader writes: T-Mobile and AT&T say US regulators should drop a plan to require unlocking of phones within 60 days of activation, claiming that locking phones to a carrier's network makes it possible to provide cheaper handsets to consumers. "If the Commission mandates a uniform unlocking policy, it is consumers -- not providers -- who stand to lose the most," T-Mobile alleged in an October 17 filing with the Federal Communications Commission. The proposed rule has support from consumer advocacy groups who say it will give users more choice and lower their costs.

T-Mobile has been criticized for locking phones for up to a year, which makes it impossible to use a phone on a rival's network. T-Mobile claims that with a 60-day unlocking rule, "consumers risk losing access to the benefits of free or heavily subsidized handsets because the proposal would force providers to reduce the line-up of their most compelling handset offers." If the proposed rule is enacted, "T-Mobile estimates that its prepaid customers, for example, would see subsidies reduced by 40 percent to 70 percent for both its lower and higher-end devices, such as the Moto G, Samsung A15, and iPhone 12," the carrier said. "A handset unlocking mandate would also leave providers little choice but to limit their handset offers to lower cost and often lesser performing handsets." In July, the FCC approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for the unlocking policy in a 5-0 vote.

The FCC is proposing "to require all mobile wireless service providers to unlock handsets 60 days after a consumer's handset is activated with the provider, unless within the 60-day period the service provider determines the handset was purchased through fraud."

Apple's latest iOS update has removed the "C" button from its Calculator app, replacing it with a backspace function. The change, part of iOS 18, has sparked debate among users accustomed to the traditional clear function. The removal of the "C" button represents a significant departure from decades-old calculator design conventions, The Atlantic writes. From the story: The "C" button's function is vestigial. Back when calculators were commercialized, starting in the mid-1960s, their electronics were designed to operate as efficiently as possible. If you opened up a desktop calculator in 1967, you might have found a dozen individual circuit boards to run and display its four basic mathematical functions. Among these would have been an input buffer or temporary register that could store an input value for calculation and display. The "C" button, which was sometimes labeled "CE" (Clear Entry) or "CI" (Clear Input), provided a direct interface to zero out -- or "clear" -- such a register. A second button, "AC" (All Clear), did the same thing, but for other parts of the circuit, including previously stored operations and pending calculations. (A traditional calculator's memory buttons -- "M+," "M-," "MC" -- would perform simple operations on a register.)

By 1971, Mostech and Texas Instruments had developed a "calculator on a chip," which condensed all of that into a single integrated circuit. Those chips retained the functions of their predecessors, including the ones that were engaged by "C" and "AC" buttons. And this design continued on into the era of pocket calculators, financial calculators, and even scientific calculators such as the ones you may have used in school. Some of the latter were, in essence, programmable pocket computers themselves, and they could have been configured with a backspace key. They were not.

The FBI has arrested an Alabama man who is accused of hacking the Securities and Exchange Commission's X account in January. From a report: The indictment alleges that 25-year-old Eric Council Jr. worked with co-conspirators to take control of the account and post a fake message from SEC Chair Gary Gensler about Bitcoin ETFs that caused the price of Bitcoin to jump by more than $1,000 momentarily.

To carry out this scheme, Council is accused of creating a fake ID using the information belonging to the person in control of the SEC's X account. He then allegedly tricked AT&T into providing a SIM card with the victim's phone number and install it into a new iPhone he purchased. Finally, Council was able to gain control of the SEC's account using recovery authentication codes sent to the number, and later return the iPhone to the Apple Store where he'd bought it.

Apple is enhancing its Business Connect tool, allowing companies to customize how they appear in emails, phone calls, and payment interfaces on iPhones. The Verge reports: Each registered business can confirm its info is accurate and add additional details like photos or special offers. Collecting verified, up-to-date business information could be useful for Apple if it ever launches its own search engine or inside features for Apple Intelligence instead of sending users to outside sources like Google, Yelp, or Meta. Branded Mail is a feature businesses can sign up for today before it starts rolling out to users later this year, potentially making emails easier to identify in a sea of unread messages.

Additionally, if companies opt into Business Caller ID, Apple will display their name, logo, and department on an iPhone's inbound call screen. This feature should come in handy when you're trying to figure out whether the random number that's calling you is spam, or if it's a legitimate business. It will start rolling out next year. A smaller update coming to Apple's Tap to Pay service will let companies show their logo when accepting payments instead of just displaying a category icon. You can read more about it in Apple's press release.

In a press release this morning, Apple announced a new iPad Mini with a faster A17 Pro chip that supports Apple Intelligence. The Verge reports: The new Mini is mostly a spec bump: it runs a new A17 Pro chip, which Apple says has a 30 percent faster CPU, 25 percent faster GPU, and a Neural Engine twice as fast as the previous model. The device also supports the new Apple Pencil Pro, which is a nice touch for the Mini-toting artists out there, and comes with 128GB of storage in the base model rather than 64GB. (Those AI models need all the space they can get.) The Wi-Fi 6E chip is faster, the USB-C port is faster, everything about the iPad Mini is the same as before only faster this time.

The only real design change with the new Mini is the colors. Apple's gone more colorful with a lot of its products this year, and the Mini comes in new purple and blue models. In photos they look muted rather than vivid, though, so don't expect the eye-popping new colors on the iPhone 16.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, NYC-based software developer Nick Spreen received a surprising alert on his iPhone 15 Pro, delivered through an early test version of Apple's upcoming Apple Intelligence text message summary feature. "No longer in a relationship; wants belongings from the apartment," the AI-penned message reads, summing up the content of several separate breakup texts from his girlfriend -- that arrived on his birthday, no less. Spreen shared a screenshot of the AI-generated message in a now-viral tweet on the X social network, writing, "for anyone who's wondered what an apple intelligence summary of a breakup text looks like." Spreen told Ars Technica that the screenshot does not show his ex-girlfriend's full real name, just a nickname.

This summary feature of Apple Intelligence, announced by the iPhone maker in June, isn't expected to fully ship until an iOS 18.1 update in the fall. However, it has been available in a public beta test of iOS 18 since July, which is what Spreen is running on his iPhone. It works akin to something like a stripped-down ChatGPT, reading your incoming text messages and delivering its own simplified version of their content. On X, Spreen replied to skepticism over whether the message was real in a follow-up post. "Yes this was real / yes it happened yesterday / yes it was my birthday," Spreen wrote. In response to a question about it being a fair summary of his girlfriend's messages, he wrote, "it is."

We reached out to Spreen directly via email and he delivered his own summary of his girlfriend's messages. "It was something along the lines of i can't believe you just did that, we're done, i want my stuff. we had an argument in a bar and I got up and left, then she sent the text," he wrote. How did he feel about getting the news via AI summary? "I do feel like it added a level of distance to it that wasn't a bad thing," he told Ars Technica. "Maybe a bit like a personal assistant who stays professional and has your back even in the most awful situations, but yeah, more than anything it felt unreal and dystopian."

Porch pirates across the country for months have been snatching FedEx packages that contain AT&T iPhones -- within minutes or even seconds of delivery. From a report: The key to these swift crimes, investigators say: The thieves are armed with tracking numbers. Another factor that makes packages from AT&T particularly vulnerable is that AT&T typically doesn't require signature on delivery. Doorbell camera videos show the thefts in New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Michigan, Georgia, Florida and Texas. The details are similar: A FedEx driver drops off a box with an iPhone from AT&T. Then a person walks up -- sometimes wearing an Amazon delivery vest -- and plucks the package off the front step. The heist can be so quick that in some videos, the FedEx driver and thief cross paths.

"They know what's getting delivered and the location," said Detective Lt. Matt Arsenault from the Gardner Police Department in Massachusetts, which is investigating several recent thefts. "They meet the delivery driver at the front door and take it." Since the pandemic, parcel carriers have reported a rise in porch thefts as workers have returned to offices and fewer people are home during the day to receive packages. Now, a spate of thefts that began a few months ago is targeting FedEx deliveries for AT&T. The two companies said they were working with law enforcement to investigate, and declined to disclose how many such packages have been stolen.

Alypius shares a report from 9to5Mac: It was revealed this weekend that Chinese hackers managed to access systems run by three of the largest internet service providers (ISPs) in the US. What's notable about the attack is that it compromised security backdoors deliberately created to allow for wiretaps by US law enforcement. [...] Apple famously refused the FBI's request to create a backdoor into iPhones to help access devices used by shooters in San Bernardino and Pensacola. The FBI was subsequently successful in accessing all the iPhones concerned without the assistance it sought.

Our arguments against such backdoors predate both cases, when Apple spoke out on the issue in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris more than a decade ago: "Apple is absolutely right to say that the moment you build in a backdoor for use by governments, it will only be a matter of time before hackers figure it out. You cannot have an encryption system which is only a little bit insecure any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. Encryption systems are either secure or they're not -- and if they're not then it's a question of when, rather than if, others are able to exploit the vulnerability."

This latest case perfectly illustrates the point. The law required ISPs to create backdoors that could be used for wiretaps by US law enforcement, and hackers have now found and accessed them. Exactly the same would be true if Apple created backdoors into iPhones.

9to5Mac: Following apparent photos of an M4 MacBook Pro box and a subsequent unboxing video, the unreleased model has now been offered for sale on a Russian classified ads site -- at a highly inflated price, naturally. Multiple units were advertised before the listings were removed, and it does now seem increasingly likely that the leaks are real.

Apple Pro tweeted a screengrab of one of the listing, which offered what appears to be the base model 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro, with the previously reported specs of 16GB unified memory, 512GB SSD, and three Thunderbolt 4 ports. We've also seen Geekbench results for a machine identified as "Mac 16,1" with performances in line with the reported specs. Rather than a one-off leak, it has been claimed that there are some 200 units out there. The ad on Avito was asking 720,000 rubles, which is around $7,400.

In a new 32-page filing (PDF), the Department of Justice indicated that it was considering a possible breakup of Google as an antitrust remedy for its search and advertising monopoly. The remedies necessary to "prevent and restrain monopoly maintenance could include contract requirements and prohibitions; non-discrimination product requirements; data and interoperability requirements; and structural requirements," the department said in the filing. CNBC reports: The DOJ also said it was "considering behavioral and structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features -- including emerging search access points and features, such as artificial intelligence -- over rivals or new entrants."

Additionally, the DOJ suggested limiting or prohibiting default agreements and "other revenue-sharing arrangements related to search and search-related products." That would include Google's search position agreements with Apple's iPhone and Samsung devices -- deals that cost the company billions of dollars a year in payouts. The agency suggested one way to do this is requiring a "choice screen," which could allow users to pick from other search engines. Such remedies would end "Google's control of distribution today" and ensure "Google cannot control the distribution of tomorrow."