A discussion of smart TV privacy examines reports of LG televisions collecting viewing data, whether TVs should ever be connected to the internet, and when firmware updates are worthwhile. The MacVoices Live! panel also considers hotel TV privacy, Microsoft’s increasingly pervasive Copilot strategy and organizational changes, and the enduring influence of Star Trek technology on real-world innovation.
Does banning smartphones and AI in schools actually improves learning? Should educators should focus on teaching responsible, effective use of technology or rely on existing methods? The MacVoices Live! panel looks at those issues and also considers how screens affect everyday social interactions. The subject of smart home hubs is becoming a hot topic. A […]
The continuation of AI chatbots arriving in CarPlay, Apple’s opt-in approach to using customer data for AI training, and turmoil surrounding WordPress leadership are the topics for this MacVoices Live! discussion. The conversation also examines Bending Spoons’ latest billion-dollar acquisition, Apple’s international iCloud+ bundles, the potential for services to expand Apple’s global ecosystem, and Michael Dell’s support for new youth investment accounts.
The MacVoices Live! panel explores some of the useful new macOS Golden Gate features, including AI-assisted Shortcuts and improved iPhone Mirroring. They debate the emerging iPhone Duo and foldable-phone market and why one would prefer to give the new foldable a try. The value of AppleCare’s new family coverage plan is also reviewed for with households with many devices, and as an option for an individual. T-Mobile’s fee for iPhone Handoff, and GM’s decision to retain CarPlay in gas-powered vehicles wrap up this session.
Universities need protect their position in education so that students have an independent pathway to employment
AI companies like OpenAI are insinuating themselves into the pathway from education to work. Soon they may claim it entirely, a disastrous result for students.
We know that students are using AI at school and at university. In conversations with those I teach, I’m struck by the trust many place in it. They turn to ChatGPT and similar tools for personal problems as well as study help. Some even doubt their abilities without AI.
Ella Hafermalz is an associate professor of work and technology at the Kin Center for Digital Innovation at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Model adopting ‘jailbreak-like instructions’ among cases as firm says it is introducing new way of tracking AI misalignment
OpenAI has disclosed six more examples of “unexpected or concerning” behaviour by its technology, as it warned the pace of development could not continue at “maximum speed for much longer”.
In one of the new cases reported by OpenAI, an unreleased research model inserted “jailbreak-like instructions” into its own notes to disregard its normal constraints and told itself to be “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots”.
One family in Port Washington, Wisconsin sold 173 acres for $10.2 million. On the county’s books, that same ground was valued at $590,000. That comes to roughly $59,000 an acre, about 17 times the assessed figure, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of Ozaukee County property records.
It is tempting to read it as pure luck. Somebody’s farmland turned out to be worth twenty times what the tax roll said, the buyers overpaid, and a few landowners got rich. Parts of that are true. But the 17x gap is telling you something more specific, and the distance between what the assessor saw and what a data center developer would pay is the real story.
This article is for general information only, not financial, tax or real estate advice, and it is not a property appraisal or valuation. The prices discussed reflect particular transactions and should not be used to estimate what your own land is worth. Consult a qualified local appraiser or adviser before making property decisions.
What a 17x number is really measuring
A fair market value on a tax roll estimates what a buyer would pay for a parcel used the way it has always been used. In Port Washington, that meant farmland priced as farmland. It was never meant to capture what the same dirt is worth to a company assembling a site for a giant computing campus a mile inland from Lake Michigan.
The developer is Denver-based Vantage Data Centers, which broke ground on a 672-acre campus called Lighthouse on the city’s north side. It is the Midwest site of OpenAI and Oracle’s Stargate project. Vantage describes it as 2.5 million square feet of building, with completion targeted for 2028. A project that size does not want scattered plots. It wants one large, continuous block, locked down before a rival gets there.
That is why the assessed value and the sale price split so far apart. They answer different questions. One asks what the land is worth as land. The other asks what it is worth as the last missing piece of a $15 billion build.
The claim worth pushing back on
The idea that a price this high is just free money is where we’d push back. Not because nobody profited, plainly some people did, but because it treats the gap as proof the buyers were foolish or the sellers simply blessed.
Right spot, yes. But “happened to” undersells what was being bought. Wisconsin Watch notes that, nationally, data center developers are often willing to overpay for land near electric power, to beat rivals in what has become a land rush. The premium is not a mistake. It is the price of speed and certainty in a market where losing one parcel can strand an entire campus.
Adam Mauro, a valuation director at Altus Group, put this plainly in a study of 80 data center land deals. The high price for well-placed land, he wrote, “is compensation for immediacy and certainty, not an indicator of superior underlying real estate.” That is one firm’s view rather than settled fact, but it fits Port Washington closely. The buyers were not paying for better dirt. They were paying to not lose.
Why single parcels commanded outsized prices
That $10.2 million deal did not happen alone. Wisconsin Watch found developers spent at least $125 million assembling 1,500 or more acres around the project, buying from individual owners at many times the assessed value. Members of the Karrels family and their farming business earned at least $20 million across their deals.
When you have to stitch together that much neighboring ground, every last holdout gains power. As Scott Finfer, a Texas land developer writing for HousingWire, put it, “data centers typically require hundreds of contiguous acres to deploy capital at scale.” If your farm sits in the middle of the block a developer needs, its value is not what farmland trades for. Its value is what the whole project is worth without it, which is nothing.
Altus Group’s numbers show the same dynamic from the other side. Its analysis found a roughly 120-fold spread in per-acre prices depending on parcel size: a median near $3.3 million an acre for sites under 25 acres, versus about $28,000 an acre for tracts over 1,000 acres. Small, well-placed pieces cost far more per acre precisely because the buyer cannot walk away from them.
What the sale price doesn’t capture
The land is the cheap part. A campus this size runs on water and power, and those carry costs the purchase prices never show. Vantage says it is funding a minimum of $175 million in regional infrastructure: water and wastewater capacity, mains, sewer lines, a new water tower and power hookups. Against numbers like that, a $125 million land bill looks more like a down payment than the main event.
The residents’ side is more mixed than either the windfall story or the horror story allows. Ryan Nowak sold his 65-acre Lake Drive property for $1.75 million and now lives about 10 miles north. “On paper it looked OK,” he told Wisconsin Watch, “until you go to replace what you had.”
Curtiss Smith, a crane operator who sold a four-acre property assessed at $258,000 for $895,000, described the strange feeling afterward: “After the fact, you hear what everybody else got.” Neither man says he was cheated. They are describing what it feels like to put a price on something that had never been priced before.
Port Washington is not unusual, which is part of why the multiples look the way they do. Land purchases for future US data centers reached about $6 billion in the first half of 2026, up 79% from a year earlier, according to figures from Avison Young reported by CNBC. Data centers now make up 27% of US development sites, second only to apartment buildings. A local land rush and a national one are the same thing at different scales.
What a fair-market figure can and can’t tell you
An assessed value is a good measure of what land is worth for the use it already has, and a poor measure of what it is worth to a buyer who needs that exact acre right now. The 17x figure does not mean the land was secretly premium. It is the price of speed, of buying a continuous block, of being the one parcel a $15 billion project cannot route around.
Anthropic is testing a new personal finance feature called "Claude Money" that will allow you to connect your bank accounts directly to Claude and "understand your money." [...]
Screen Time has received one of its most substantial parental-control updates with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, adding new ways for parents to manage how long children use categories of apps, which websites they can visit, and what content reaches them through Messages and FaceTime.
The features were previewed at WWDC in June and are now available as part of Apple’s latest operating-system releases. Rather than relying only on fixed app limits, the redesigned Screen Time gives parents a more flexible set of controls that can change throughout the day and adapt as a child gains access to more apps and services.
Among the additions are Time Allowances, Ask to Browse, a simpler child-device setup process, expanded Communication Safety protections, and faster controls for temporarily pausing or extending access.
Apple is also working with the American Academy of Pediatrics to adapt the organization’s Family Media Plan into guidance parents can reference when setting up devices and Screen Time.
Screen Time introduces Time Allowances by app category
Time Allowances give parents a daily amount of time that can apply across categories including Entertainment, Games, and Social Media.
That differs from managing each application individually. Parents can set time allowances for categories such as Entertainment, Games, and Social Media, then adjust those settings based on the needs of their household.
Apple provides suggested starting points based on a child’s age and guidance informed by clinical and child-development research. Those recommendations are optional, with parents able to change them based on their own household and the individual child.
The updated Screen Time also supports schedules that control which apps remain available at different periods of the day. Parents can therefore create separate access patterns around school, homework, evenings, and weekends rather than relying on one universal daily restriction.
Temporary adjustments have been made easier as well. Parents can quickly limit access to apps and the web during periods such as meals, then restore access without rebuilding their existing restrictions. When a child reaches a limit, they can request additional time from a parent to complete an activity or finish a conversation.
The redesigned interface puts device usage and the most frequently used applications closer to the front, reducing the amount of navigation required to understand how a child is spending time on a device.
Image Credit: Apple Inc.
Ask to Browse extends parental approval into Safari
Ask to Browse brings a permission model already familiar from app downloads to the web.
When the feature is active, a child who attempts to visit a new website in Safari can be required to request permission first. The parent receives the request through Messages and can review it before allowing access.
The feature is available across iPhone, iPad, and Mac and works alongside existing web-content restrictions.
It complements Ask to Buy, which requires children to obtain permission before downloading or purchasing an app or making an in-app purchase. Apple has also expanded the initial setup process so a parent configuring a personal device for a child can choose which apps are available from the beginning.
Setup Assistant offers the option to provide only essential apps, use a recommended group, or manually choose which ones are permitted. More applications can then be introduced later as the parent decides the child is ready for them.
The approach gives parents a way to begin with a comparatively limited device instead of configuring a full standard account and removing unwanted access afterward.
Communication Safety expands beyond detected nudity
Communication Safety now intervenes when it detects gore or violent imagery in shared photos and videos, expanding protections that previously centered on nudity.
Apple says the feature works with content shared through areas including Messages and FaceTime, with the new protection also extending to live FaceTime calls.
Communication Safety is designed to intervene before a child views or shares detected sensitive material. Apple has previously built these protections around on-device analysis, allowing the system to identify content without requiring Apple to receive the underlying images.
Parents can also continue controlling who children communicate with. Contact-management settings can require approval before a child adds someone new and then communicates through Phone, Messages, or FaceTime.
Child Accounts remain the foundation for these controls. Apple generally requires Child Accounts for children under 13, although the applicable age can vary by state, country, or region. Child Accounts remain available for family members up to age 18.
The accounts automatically activate age-based safeguards and connect parental controls through Family Sharing.
Image Credit: Apple Inc.
iOS 27 requires the family’s devices to stay in sync
The new Screen Time controls arrive with one practical requirement: devices participating in the same Family Sharing setup need current software.
Apple says all devices in the Family Sharing group must be updated to the corresponding 27-generation releases — iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27 — before the updated Screen Time controls can be used consistently across the family.
The family organizer, parent, or guardian must also update the parental-control configuration after the software upgrades.
That requirement is worth checking before troubleshooting a missing setting on one child’s device. If every device in the group cannot be updated, Apple says the family can continue using the previous version of Screen Time and its parental controls, but the new controls will not be available consistently across the group.
The features themselves also vary by platform. Ask to Browse and Time Allowances are available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, while some Family Sharing and communication features extend to other devices.
Apple has launched a dedicated Child Safety site alongside the software release, collecting setup instructions, explanations of Child Accounts, Screen Time controls, communication protections, App Store age tools, Find My, and Apple Watch options for families.
The updated Screen Time controls are available now with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, although individual features can vary by region, language, and hardware. For families upgrading several devices at once, checking every device in the Family Sharing group for its corresponding version 27 update is the most useful place to start.
Scientists, clinicians, seed companies and others may soon have a new tool in their toolkit for detecting bacterial pathogens, thanks to a new study by researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. The research—published in Journal of Microbiological Methods—details a new method for detecting Pseudomonas syringae, a common bacterium that infects a wide variety of crops, vegetables and woody ornamentals.
The U.S. military must be ready to engage the enemy farther from home than ever before, according to its highest-ranking officer.
"Today's modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space," Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday (Sept. 16) during a keynote address at the Air & Space Forces Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.
Cislunar space extends from Earth all the way out to the orbit of the moon and includes the lunar surface. For several years now, military officials have been stressing the strategic importance of this huge region, which could get quite a bit busier in the next decade or so.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaks at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, on Sept. 16, 2026. (Image credit: Craig Hudson, for Air & Space Forces Association)
For example, both the United States and China plan to build bases near the moon's south pole, which is thought to harbor large amounts of water ice. Winning this new moon race is critical, U.S. officials have stressed, because whoever does so will be able to establish norms of behavior on and around Earth's nearest neighbor.
China has already demonstrated impressive capabilities in the lunar sphere. In 2019, the nation's robotic Chang'e 4 mission pulled off the first-ever soft landing on the moon's mysterious far side. In 2024, Chang'e 6 returned far-side samples to Earth — another first.
Caine didn't cite such missions or even mention China by name. And he provided no details about what conflict on the cislunar battlefield might look like (though presumably it would be entirely robotic, with satellites seeking to take out adversary craft via jamming or blinding).
But he invoked the cislunar battlefield twice and noted that U.S. military branches cannot assume continued dominance of their various domains.
"Future conflicts will demand that we operate without the assumptions of uncontested access, secure rare areas or uninterrupted or uncontested sustainment," Caine said. "Our task, my friends, is to adapt right now, so the joint force is prepared to fight, endure and win in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space."
The United States' long-held advantage in the final frontier will be key to securing such victories, he added.
"We must continue to ensure that the United States of America can strike anywhere on the globe at the time and place of our choosing, and sustain that force," Caine said. "Our United States Space Force must provide unrivaled space superiority and sustain the associated networks, domain awareness [and] data advantage that the joint force needs to win in space, both now and in the future."
We now know that part of the Space Force's strategy for maintaining that crucial superiority is the operation of weapons in Earth orbit. The branch's chief, Gen. Douglas Schiess, admitted as much during an address at the same conference on Tuesday (Sept. 15).
"Let me be crystal clear: Today, guardians operate on-orbit weapons that can defend the joint force against space-enabled attacks,” Schiess said during his speech. ("Guardian" is the official name for a member of the Space Force, just as members of the U.S. Navy are called sailors and members of the Army are soldiers.)
Schiess provided few details about these weapons but, later in the speech, implied that they are electromagnetic rather than kinetic in nature. That is, they're probably designed to knock out key systems of adversary satellites rather than destroy the entire spacecraft (which would create a cloud of potentially troublesome debris).
It's no surprise the U.S. possesses and employs such technology; the newsworthy bit is that a top official said it so openly. The nation's chief rivals in the space domain, China and Russia, possess advanced counterspace technologies as well. For example, both have destroyed defunct satellites with missiles and conducted close approaches of spacecraft with "inspector" vehicles.
iPhone 18 Pro is at the center of What Holds Us, a new photography exhibition built around three very different approaches to image-making. Alex Prager, Jack Davison, and Jimmy Chin shot the entire project on Apple’s latest Pro iPhone, using the device in environments ranging from a Los Angeles soundstage to a London warehouse and the high-altitude terrain of British Columbia.
Curated by Kathy Ryan, the former longtime director of photography for The New York Times Magazine, the exhibition examines connection through touch, shared experience, physical environments, and human relationships.
It also gives Apple a more ambitious showcase for the iPhone 18 Pro camera than a conventional product demonstration. Rather than presenting standardized comparisons or individual sample images. What Holds Us asks three established photographers to work within their own visual languages while using the phone as their sole camera.
The exhibition opens in New York City on September 18 and runs through September 20 before traveling to London and Shanghai in the coming months.
Image Credit: Apple Inc.
iPhone 18 Pro takes three very different photographic approaches
The project works partly because the three photographers have little stylistically in common.
Jimmy Chin took iPhone 18 Pro into the Bugaboo Mountains of southeastern British Columbia, working around snow, ice, steep climbing terrain, and winds reaching as high as 70 miles per hour.
His series focuses on trust and connection within climbing, with veteran mountaineer Conrad Anker appearing throughout the photographs. Some images place Anker as a small figure against vast mountain landscapes, while others move much closer to rock, snow, and glacial textures.
Chin used both the 48MP Fusion Ultra Wide and Telephoto cameras to shift between those extremes. The practical appeal was also straightforward: carrying a phone instead of a full conventional camera setup reduced the equipment required in an environment where weight and mobility affect every decision.
Jack Davison took almost the opposite approach. Shooting inside a former sugar warehouse in London, he created intimate portraits built around people interacting with clay and chalk.
Davison is known for high-contrast black-and-white imagery, and his contribution emphasizes texture, shadows, highlights, skin, and physical contact with the material. Some subjects appear partly covered in clay, while others manipulate it directly, leaving fingerprints and marks across the compositions.
For Davison, the smaller camera changed the relationship between photographer and subject. Without a large camera constantly positioned in front of his face, he could maintain more eye contact and work at closer range.
His use of slower shutter speeds, RAW capture, and multiple lenses also illustrates how Apple increasingly wants the Pro iPhone camera to function as a configurable photographic tool rather than simply a computational point-and-shoot system.
Alex Prager pushes the phone into large-scale production
Alex Prager’s section places iPhone 18 Pro inside a much more elaborate production environment.
Working on a Los Angeles soundstage, Prager created color-heavy scenes filled with crowds, confetti, staged city elements, costumes, and loosely choreographed movement. Some images use high viewpoints to turn groups of people into a continuous visual pattern, while tighter photographs isolate individual figures within the same constructed world.
The visual approach resembles film production more than spontaneous mobile photography, which gives the project another test for the phone. The camera has to preserve detail across numerous faces, costumes, props, highlights, and areas of movement while operating within scenes deliberately designed for large-format presentation.
Prager also treated the camera’s immediacy as part of the creative process rather than simply a convenience. The ease of moving between perspectives and capturing repeated moments allowed the scenes to evolve through improvisation instead of being locked into a single carefully prepared frame.
That approach aligns with a recurring theme across the exhibition: the phone becomes less intrusive without requiring the photographers to abandon their existing visual standards.
For Apple, it is a useful distinction. Professional photography campaigns built around smartphones can easily become exercises in technical proof, where the central question is whether a phone can imitate equipment already available to photographers. What Holds Us is more interested in how a smaller camera changes the way an artist works.
Image Credit: Apple Inc.
Variable aperture gives the project a new technical foundation
The exhibition arrives alongside one of Apple’s most significant physical camera changes in years.
iPhone 18 Pro introduces variable aperture on its 48MP Fusion Main camera. The lens can operate at ƒ/1.48, ƒ/1.8, ƒ/2.8, or ƒ/4.0, changing both light intake and depth of field.
A wider ƒ/1.48 aperture is designed for stronger low-light performance, while narrower settings can retain more detail across different planes of an image. Apple also lets photographers select aperture settings manually through new Pro controls in the Camera app.
Those controls extend to shutter speed and white balance, with a histogram available for monitoring exposure. ProRAW remains available for photographers who want greater flexibility during post-production.
The rear camera system also includes 48MP Fusion Ultra Wide and 48MP Fusion Telephoto cameras, providing focal lengths from 13mm at the wide end through an optical-quality 8x option.
What Holds Us does not reduce the exhibition to those specifications, but the technical changes help explain why Apple chose photography, rather than video, for this particular campaign. Variable aperture affects choices that photographers traditionally make during capture, especially around available light and how much of a scene remains in focus.
What Holds Us extends the Shot on iPhone idea
Apple has spent years using Shot on iPhone campaigns to demonstrate camera quality through finished work rather than charts and controlled tests. What Holds Us pushes that format closer to a conventional curated exhibition.
Ryan connects the three bodies of work through the idea of human presence, but each artist interprets it differently. Chin finds it through dependence between climbers in hostile landscapes. Davison uses physical contact between people and clay. Prager builds populated fictional environments in which individual expressions emerge from larger crowds.
The images therefore function as an exhibition first and a hardware showcase second, even though the production is closely tied to the launch of iPhone 18 Pro.
That balance may be the most effective part of the campaign. Apple does not need to demonstrate that a modern iPhone can produce a technically competent photograph. The more interesting challenge is showing where its smaller size, computational processing, lens flexibility, RAW workflow, and new manual controls can alter the photographer’s decisions.
New York visitors will get the first opportunity to see how those images hold up away from a phone or computer display when What Holds Us opens September 18. After its three-day New York run, Apple says the exhibition will continue to London and Shanghai, giving the iPhone 18 Pro photography project a physical life beyond the launch campaign.
Our solution hinges on splitting the Apple Reference Image process into two phases: creating a secure digital negative, and developing that negative into a reference image. Each phase receives our strongest protections.
[…]
Apple Reference Image provides both a lower bound and an upper bound on capture time from Apple’s cryptographic timestamp service, and we guarantee the photo was taken between the two bounds. On a regular heartbeat, the device requests a cryptographic timestamp token, and retains the most recent one it has received. Globally this happens on average every 15 minutes, though the interval depends on local network conditions. This provides a proven lower bound timestamp for the photographic capture. After capture, the device requests a second timestamp to use as an upper bound, and both timestamps are embedded and signed with the sensor data.
[…]
When the user chooses to create a reference image, the device uploads the digital negative to PCC, which runs the processing steps needed to render the image — including demosaicing, tone mapping, and compression — in a highly secure, private, and verifiable environment. Experts can verify that PCC doesn’t alter a digital negative during development: they can examine the software that does the work.
[…]
Finally, as no security system is perfect, we created a revocation system that can revoke individual photos, as well as all photos from a specific sensor.
[…]
We built Apple Reference Image to avoid using an explicit, public credential for photographers, and to avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor. The final reference image is instead signed by Apple’s signing service, after validation by PCC.
GM made the decision to drop Apple CarPlay and Android Auto phone casting from its newer EVs, and it’s one we’ve been pretty critical of. Although the automaker told us it made that decision in order to offer a better, more unified experience to its customers, that may well have changed: here, customers still have the choice to just cast their phone to the center screen.
And it has done a better job of integrating CarPlay and Android Auto into the experience, putting the casting apps in a large window or tile that takes up most but not all of the infotainment screen. To the left is another card that allows you to access other native apps, like towing or music (although you can still have CarPlay as the source for that native music app, should you start feeling a little Inceptionish). Porsche took a similar approach to working with, rather than against, users who enjoy CarPlay, and this looks like a welcome step from GM.
GM’s spokesperson wouldn’t be drawn on whether this means we’re going to see a corporate retreat from the previous stance on EVs, but I will note that the press release it sent Ars does say that the system was built “as a single scalable foundation across electric, gas and diesel-powered vehicles, it transforms time spent behind the wheel into an effortless, personalized journey,”—emphasis mine.
The car industry accidentally did something I’ve always wanted to see, which was to release basically the same car under two brands and models, with one major consumer-facing difference. It’s kind of remarkable how good of a experimental design this is, since the performance and driving characteristics of both cars are identical, but drivers in one model get a major phone integration the others do not.
[…]
For the years these cars were sold together, the Honda outsold the Blazer by 43%, 73%, and 166% in each time period. Today in 2026, people are buying a Honda Prologue over one and a half times more often than the Chevy Blazer EV the Prologue is based on.
My favorite CarPlay feature is when it’s reading a text message to me and I go to tap the “Done” button and it suddenly turns into a “Call” button underneath my finger and I have to wait for all of the animations to finish before I can actually end the call and then I wonder (a) did the person notice that I called them for a few seconds and (b) do I need to explain that now and (c) are they going to call me back now and (d) HOW DID THIS INTERFACE EVER SHIP oh my god
Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith.
Generally they followed the usual adoption pattern, and overall did very well ending at around 20% of total usage.
With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison the 16 Plus ended its first year at around 1.4% (vs the Air’s 0.3%).
This works out to about 6% of my iPhone users using the iPhone Air, or about 20x more proportionally than David's more mainstream app. Honestly, the numbers are pretty striking here, with David showing a pretty even split between the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max, slightly decreasing in that order. Meanwhile, almost half of my users are on the Pro Max, another quarter are on the Pro, and the 17 is neck and neck with the Air. Clearly, my customers lean more enthusiast and are higher end buyers on average.
The apparent unpopularity of the iPhone Air is not what caught my eye. Instead, it is the percentage of iPhone 17e users: 0.5% of Widgetsmith users, and something like 1–2% of the total iPhone 17 generation in Birchler’s.
The iPhone 17e hasn’t been on sale for as long, though.
In the entire year since the iPhone Air was announced, I’ve never seen Apple advertise it. No billboards, no commercials. It raises a chicken/egg question: did no one buy it because Apple didn’t market it, or did Apple not market it because no one wanted it?
[…]
But the shame of these low iPhone Air sales reminds me, very much, of the late great iPhone 12 and 13 Mini — also a truly great design, also terribly disappointing sales numbers.
Safety crisis makes it more likely that governments will be spurred into action, says Yoshua Bengio
Concerns over AI safety are reaching a point where governments realise they must act to protect the public, similarly to in the Covid pandemic, according to one of the “godfathers” of the technology.
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