Apple is announcing a new AppleCare subscription called AppleCare One that lets you cover multiple products with a single plan. For $19.99 per month, AppleCare One covers up to three products, and tacking on a new product costs $5.99 per month each.
With the products covered under AppleCare One, you get the same coverage you would under AppleCare Plus, including battery coverage, unlimited repairs for accidental damage, and 24/7 priority support.
Where the new service shines is if you own some of Apple’s most expensive products, like the iPhone 16 Pro, the Apple Vision Pro, and a 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the M4 chip. [...] For a more typical product buildout — like the base iPhone 16, AirPods Pro, and the latest 13-inch MacBook Air — the savings are far more modest.
Separately, Apple is also introducing individual AppleCare+ Theft and Loss plans for Apple Watch and iPad for the first time.
Apple News+ Audio is primarily designed for Apple News+ subscribers, and it provides professionally narrated versions of the best stories from Apple News. [...] In Australia, Canada, and the UK, Apple News+ Audio includes audio stories from local publications as well as stories from the U.S.
We learned earlier this month that a new Apple store was coming to Osaka, Japan, and the company has today shared photos ahead of Saturday’s official opening. Accessibility is cited a key factor in the store design.
Apple is expanding the capability of its In-App Purchase framework with a new retention messaging API. This means, for the first time, developers will be able to show offers to users when they go to cancel a subscription in the global Subscriptions screen inside the Settings app.
Apps will be able to show a simple static message, display dynamic progress based on the user’s app state, or present a special offer to try and dissuade the user from cancelling their payment altogether.
In the fourth beta of iOS 26, there's some curious wording for a HomePod setting that references a HomePod with a display, perhaps hinting at a future product that could come out sometime in the not too distant future.
In a 3-0 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said reasonable consumers in the proposed class action would not have been misled by Apple's promises about storage capacity in its iCloud+ plans.
[...]
"Apple's statements are not false and deceptive merely because [they] may be unreasonably misunderstood by an insignificant and unrepresentative segment of consumers," Smith wrote.
To be fair, The Emoji Movie may not really have been the act of a deranged cabal of art criminals bent on destroying our culture. But emoji themselves may represent something darker: a shift to communicating without context, to being reduced to simpler and more emotional responses. Every day, more and more people allow chatbots to intercede in their word-making, and it is not hard to imagine a time when the companies who run these machines have a far greater command of human speech, emotion and behaviour. They will run the world then, and all we’ll be able to say about it is: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I have had four back-to-back meetings at work today; one face-to-face, two Teams, and one Zoom.
I can't wait to be never ever have to launch any of those apps ever again.
~
Thanks for reading.