John Gruber (Mastodon, 2):

Some of [Cook’s letter] remains true, but has lost some truthiness — and truthiness matters. But some of it is no longer true, period. It’s no longer just “one small part” of Apple’s business that serves advertisers. Here in 2026, search results in the App Store not only show paid ads — frequently for casinos — but the search results are visually dominated by paid ads now that Apple has added a second ad to results. Apple News+ is a paid subscription that offers a genuinely great value for the number of paywalled publishers whose content it includes, but articles on the News app tend to include the weirdest AI-generated ads on the Internet. (How many young blond women am I supposed to believe need hearing aids?) And — at this writing, still “coming soon” — Apple is launching ads on Apple Maps. Apple Maps remains free of charge to use, so according to Tim Cook, we’re not the customer. We’re the product. Or, if you prefer, our frustration is the product.

[…]

The ratio of ads to organic results in App Store search — especially when measured in screen area — is clearly not aligned with Cook’s 2014 statement that “Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.” Obviously not. App Store search today is designed primarily to generate more revenue for Apple. That’s not criminal, but it’s a change.

[…]

What gave Tim Cook’s privacy letter heft in 2014 wasn’t just the clarity of its plain language, but the fact that you didn’t have to take his word for it that the ads Apple showed you respected your privacy, because Apple didn’t show you ads in 2014. Apple today can’t say that.

[…]

John Ternus should return Apple’s privacy policy to its 2014 clarity. The trust Apple would earn from such a move would far out-value whatever revenue these ads pad to their already hefty and ever-increasing quarterly Services numbers.

I wish that were the case, but I fear this is kind of a Hotelling’s Law situation, where Apple can get most of the benefit by being just slightly better on this axis. Where else do its customers have to go?

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon):

In the second fiscal quarter of 2018, services generated $9 billion in revenue (net sales), whereas in Q2 2026, that amount had grown to $31 billion! In this blog post, I want to focus on understanding the relative financial importance of products and services for Apple.

[…]

In 2025, services were 42% of Apple gross margin. How does 26% of net sales become 42% of gross margin? The explanation is that services have a much lower cost of sales. The products gross margin was 37% of products net sales, while the services gross margin was an astonishing 75% of services net sales. In other words, Apple services are almost pure profit!

Does this 75% account for TV and movie production costs?

With persistent general inflation, consumers do not have unlimited money to spend on Apple products. At least in the near future, it’s reasonable to question how much further room is available for growth in profits from Apple products. To satisfy the demands of investors, Apple executives including CEO-elect John Ternus may be forced to rely even more than before on growth in services, which do not face as much pressure on cost of sales as hardware products.

Previously:

• Apple Services Price Hikes 2026
• Apple Hardware Price Hikes
• App Store Personalized Recommendations and Keylogging
• Apple’s Q2 2026 Results
• A Letter to John Ternus
• Ads in Apple Maps
• Blurring App Store Ads and Search Results
• Apple Services in 2025
• More App Store Ad Spots
• Apple Services Price Hikes
• Nowhere Else to Go

Jason Koebler (tweet, Reddit):

The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media. The hacker was also able to access user information for hundreds of thousands of Suno’s customers, as well as Stripe payment information, they said.

[…]

As part of these legal proceedings, Suno previously admitted that it was trained on “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet,” which included a total of “tens of millions of recordings.” Suno has been making the argument that it is allowed to train on copyrighted works as fair use in those cases, one of which has been settled.

Corbin Bolies:

Suno has long acknowledged that its AI music generator relied on the scraping of millions of songs available across the internet, but a new hack reveals just how the company pulled from streaming services and websites[…] all while user information remained vulnerable.

[…]

“Our goal has always been to help people create original new music, not replicate someone else’s. That’s why we build our models around what we call ‘Original Creation, By Design,’” the spokesperson said in a statement. “For example, we intentionally do not use artist names as a category of training metadata because we want our models to help people create brand new songs, not music that replicates other artists’ existing work. It’s also why we built Suno with detection filters that block or prevent a user from using specific artist, song, or album names as prompts, and prevent users from uploading lyrics or sound recordings that match existing works.”

Previously:

• Apple Scraping YouTube for AI Training Data
• Disney vs. Google and OpenAI
• The New York Times Sues Perplexity
• Apple Intelligence Training Lawsuit
• Sora App
• Reuters Wins AI Copyright Case
• AI Companies Ignoring Robots.txt
• The New York Times Sues OpenAI

Adam Overholtzer:

Corners!

Simon B. Støvring:

“We fixed corner radius” was a WWDC keynote highlight. Let that sink in.

Rudrank:

This should have been since macOS 26 #WWDC26

Folks getting excited for consistent corner radius 😂

Kuba Suder:

Ehh, no change here, RIP Intel Macs… stuck on the v1 Liquid Glass forever 🫤

There was so much demand for this that the Liquid Radius haxie exists. People were willing to disable FileVault and System Integrity Protection to get consistent window corners.

Previously:

• macOS Golden Gate 27 Announced
• Tahoe Window Corners
• WWDC 2026 Keynote

Update (2026-06-23): Marcin Wichary:

Then, there’s the website you’ve just seen: elaborate, with nice “before and after” animations, and a fun landing page. I thought the installation steps, given the complexity of the effort, were exemplary and even educational. There’s also a page listing all the apps confirmed to work, and a “How Liquid Radius limits its blast radius” (ha) section, revealing the author is clear-eyed about their work being a hack, and even the dimensionality of its hackiness. Even within the tool there are nice design details.

But, as I was exploring the site, I kept switching between “this is ridiculous!” (laudatory) and “this is ridiculous!” (derogatory) in my head.