MyAppleMenu

The Adult-Skewing Edition Monday, June 30, 2025

Brad Pitt’s ‘F1’ Delivers Apple’s First Box Office Hit With $55.6 Million Debut, ‘M3GAN 2.0’ Fizzles With $10 Million, by Rebecca Rubin, Variety

With great reviews and a promising “A” grade on CinemaScore exit polls, “F1” landed in the middle of expectations of $50 million to $60 million. At the international box office, the film collected a strong $88.4 million from 78 markets. Those initial ticket sales are significant given “F1” is an adult-skewing tentpole that’s not part of an existing film franchise — a rarity in today’s I.P.-dominated movie theater landscape.

Apple's History Is Hiding In A Mac Font, by Corbin Davenport, The Spacebar

There is one place where PowerPC processors, Apple's Newton PDAs, and other relics of Apple's past are still present in modern Mac computers: the Apple Symbols font.

Is Technology Really Ruining Teens’ Lives?, by Molly Fischer, New Yorker

A flock of whistle-blowers, journalists, and documentarians have sought both to illuminate the situation and to service parental anxieties. Alarming statistics circulate, along with lists of milestones missed and failures of intellectual and social engagement. Talk to any high-school teacher and anecdotal evidence of a phone-beholden generation abounds. But nailing down the particulars of the problem proves more slippery. Which digital media are bad, under what circumstances, and for whom? According to one oft-cited figure from a 2022 Pew Research Center report, forty-six per cent of teens say that they are online “almost constantly,” a statement that somehow has the ring of both truth and hyperbole. It’s easy to imagine a lot of teens saying that, and harder to know what they mean. (The survey’s other possible responses were “several times a week or less often,” “about once a day,” and “several times a day,” all of which suggest a formal and polite level of acquaintance with one’s smartphone.) In 2023, the Surgeon General released an advisory titled “Social Media and Youth Mental Health,” which called for more research. “Nearly 70% of parents say parenting is now more difficult than it was 20 years ago, with technology and social media as the top two cited reasons,” the advisory notes. Yet, though it takes the form of a statistic, this statement bears only a tenuous relationship to anything quantifiable. For one thing, “parents” here refers to people with children under the age of eighteen—a pool with limited firsthand expertise about what it was like to be a parent twenty years ago.

On Security

Bluetooth Flaws Could Let Hackers Spy Through Your Microphone, by Ionut Ilascu, BleepingComputer

Researchers confirmed that 29 devices from Beyerdynamic, Bose, Sony, Marshall, Jabra, JBL, Jlab, EarisMax, MoerLabs, and Teufel are affected.

[...]

The security problems could be leveraged to take over a vulnerable product and on some phones, an attacker within connection range may be able to extract call history and contacts.

Stuff

Apple Music Launching Replay All Time, Revealing Your Most Streamed Music Ever, by Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac

Apple Music celebrates 10 years today since its June 30, 2015 launch. To mark the occasion, Apple has announced several new initiatives, including a ‘Replay All Time’ playlist where users can see their most streamed music since joining Apple Music, plus a new top 500 countdown, an LA-based “global hub for artists,” and more.

Notes

Touching The Back Wall Of The Apple Store, by Laura Michet's Blog

Here's a dumb story. When I was in high school, my friends and I had a game we used to play at the mall: we would go into the Apple store and try to make it to the back wall of the store, touch it, and exit out the front without an Apple staff person talking to us.

We were fascinated with the Apple store in the mall because it was essentially an interactive luxury goods store where they'd let you actually grasp all the luxury goods with your teenager hands. I have no idea what the current policy is in Apple stores, but in the 2000s, the Apple store in my local mall allowed crowds of greasy teens to wander in and start very obviously just fucking around and poking and prodding everything. They would, however, always try to talk to us and ask us whether they could help us.

Bottom of the Page

I am glad I can't blame any of my failures on phones.

~

Thanks for reading.