Apple’s MacBook Neo appears to be a triumph of strategic disruption that has already cast shock waves across the industry — and that energy is still playing out.

Approximately 55,000 MacBook Neo computers have been sold every day since it was introduced in March, according to IDC data (as first noted by TechCrunch). In fact, it looks as if Apple sold 1.1 million of these Macs in the first 20 days of sale, the analysts said.

There’s no real reason to imagine that level of demand has declined very much.

MacBook Neo: Millions sold

After all, not only do these Macs continue to dominate Amazon’s US laptop charts, but supply chain rumors claim Apple has doubled its manufacturing orders. “MacBook Neo shipments have come in better than expected, with the 2026 shipment forecast raised from 5 million to 10 million units,” Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said recently. 

IDC’s March data may not capture the larger extent of the demand, as IDC analyst Navkendar Singh pointed out that MacBook Neo shipments “began to spike from early April”, which suggests demand has accelerated since then.

MacBook Neo demand exceeded expectations across multiple nations, including in India, where the company shifted 18,000 of them in the opening weeks.

Doing the business

Apple has also instructed processor maker TSMC to manufacture additional A18 processors specifically for its affordable laptop, while earlier speculation has claimed the company has been using ongoing memory price increases as a strategic competitive tool.  (The Neo starts at $599, with a pricier model set at $699.)

By expanding the potential customer base for Macs with a lower cost Neo, Apple is aiming a claim at the biggest-selling part of the PC market. And it is doing so even as rapidly increasing component prices force others to choose between higher product prices and profitability, or much-reduced margins in to compete at the same price. levels

That’s a losing battle; competitors for the most part can’t hope to match Apple’s bargaining position when it comes to the cost of components like memory because they don’t have the same scale. That means that even when component costs increase for everybody, Apple pays less, because it orders more. 

That scale means that for many component suppliers, it’s Apple’s business that keeps the meat on the table while other customers merely contribute the gravy. So, suppliers are happy to make deals with Apple to secure that main course — to continue the analogy — but are less likely to match those deals for dessert. As such, Apple is expected to be the only laptop vendor to see growth this year.

Apple’s great game

IDC’s figures confirm Apple’s strategy is working, with strong demand for the Neo, and, indeed, all Apple’s new laptops. At the same time, the researcher predicts overall global PC shipments will decline 11.3% this year, with a painful 20% sales drop envisioned for Q4. 

“We’re not seeing any relief to the memory shortage situation before the end of 2027, which means prices will continue to rise and PC manufacturers will struggle to maintain full product portfolios for the foreseeable future,” Jean Philippe Bouchard, vice president of devices and consumers at IDC said in a statement.

“The introduction of the MacBook Neo is putting real pressure on the entire PC ecosystem,” added Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC’s Consumer Devices Trackers. 

Competitors are already responding with new devices equipped with ARM-based processors and aggressive promotional pricing. But none truly match what Apple has with MacBook Neo, and all must reach profitable scale to compete long-term. 

None have yet done so.

The strategy makes sense

“The MacBook Neo launch stands out as one of Apple’s most strategically important recent Mac releases,” Counterpoint analyst David Naranjo said. 

Apple is directly targeting customers that previously saw its products as too expensive. That allows it is also to aggressively build business in parts of the market such as education that tend to be more resilient to economic headwinds. MacBook Neo is also enjoying strong demand across the enterprise.

Both these parts of the market give Apple’s competitors their lunch. “The competitive pressure from the Neo is providing a partial offset to broader price increases, keeping some low-cost notebook options alive,” Ubrani said. “But the overall trajectory for average selling prices (ASPs) is firmly upward. IDC forecasts ASP growth of 17% in 2026, and even as memory capacity expands over the next two years, pricing is unlikely to return to 2025 levels.” 

Apple’s control over its processors, along with its strategic approach to component purchasing, means it should be able to maintain its existing Mac price points for a while. “Apple’s vertical integration (own silicon, own OS) gives it more levers than competitors reliant on third-party chips and Microsoft licensing,” Hexnode CEO Apu Pavithran told me recently.

So, while PC makers either exit the market or raise prices in pursuit of profits, MacBook Neo will continue racing off the shelves, particularly to large enterprise and education customers. 

The endgame? 

The Neo is more than a lower-cost Apple notebook. It’s a hugely disruptive product that is already driving noteworthy change across the PC industry; it’s forcing competitors to make difficult choices between cost and price — even as they grapple with the existential challenges of memory shortages, component price hikes, and raw materials costs. 

That’s not bad for a product that costs your local school just $499.

Just a reminder: the original $399 iPod cost only slightly less when it was first introduced, before subsequently disrupting the music industry.

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Microsoft has developed a new AI agent that can run autonomously around the clock to complete tasks across Microsoft 365 applications.

Microsoft Scout, unveiled at the company’s Build event Tuesday, is a new type of always-on agent based on the OpenClaw agent framework that Microsoft calls “autopilots.”

These act on a user’s behalf with their own governed Entra identity, Omar Shahine, corporate vice president at Microsoft, said in a blog post.

“Autopilots stay active in the background, understand how work gets done across your apps and systems, and take action without needing to be prompted each time,” said Shahine, a Microsoft veteran who recently announced he is leading a new team to bring OpenClaw-based personal assistants to Microsoft 365 apps.

Microsoft Scout connects to apps such as Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint, and accesses data from chat, email, calendar, and contacts. Accessed via Teams, it can also interact with a user’s browser and with external apps via model context protocol (MCP). The tool functions across cloud, desktop, and the web.

Shahine said Scout can reduce mundane tasks that office workers face, such as coordinating and scheduling meeting times with colleagues, or blocking times in a user’s calendar based on upcoming work commitments. “It can also spot risks, like stalled decisions, so you can address them before they become blockers,” he said.

It’s available as an “experimental release” to customers of the company’s Frontier program, Microsoft said, and will require Intune policy configuration and “opt-in attestation.”

Scout is the latest in a range of agentic tools available in Microsoft 365 apps, including Agent Mode, where users can interact with Microsoft 365 Copilot inside apps such as Word and Excel to create content, and Copilot Cowork — Microsoft’s version of Anthropic’s Claude Cowork agent that can complete tasks independently.

Despite the company’s big AI push, Microsoft has struggled to convince businesses that Microsoft 365 Copilot is worth the additional cost; it’s advertised at $30 per user each month for large businesses. Around 3% of Microsoft 365 customers pay for the add-on subscription, the company said in January, with 15 million paid users. (Microsoft announced last month that that figure has now risen to 20 million.)

It’s not clear whether Scout will be included in Microsoft 365 Copilot subscriptions or charged separately. Microsoft did not immediately provide additional details about pricing.

The launch follows Google’s recent announcement of Spark, an autonomous agent that runs within the Google Workspace application suite. Spark can also be considered a response to the launch of OpenClaw last year, initially under the name “Clawdbot.”

OpenClaw has drawn scrutiny due to apparent security flaws, but Microsoft promises Scout is built with “enterprise-grade security and controls, so it can be trusted in your organization from day one.”

For organizations that have already deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot, Scout doesn’t introduce entirely new data risks, said Jeff Pollard, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. But it “amplifies whatever data governance problems already exist. The difference this time: instead of surfacing sensitive data to users, it can potentially act on it.

“That makes it an active risk in terms of day to day operations,” Pollard said.

Potential security concerns echo those for AI agents and are exacerbated with personal agents such as Scout: amplified data exposure (since agents can interact with data and use tools autonomously); agent manipulation or prompt injection; unexpected actions, such as using tools or acting in ways that aren’t supposed to be allowed; and observability gaps related to understanding user and agent intent and the explainability of actions.

“However, these tools exist because they make AI far more useful for individuals, so security leaders can’t draw a line in the sand and say “no.” They have to adapt and figure out how to secure them,” said Pollard.

As with most new workplace technologies, Pollard expects adoption to start with “power users” who design and develop the use cases for the agent that can then expand more widely across users.

He warned that the accuracy of tools such as Microsoft Scout can fall short of user expectations. “LLM agents still struggle with goal alignment, multi-step reasoning drifts, and tool misuse,” he said. “Users aren’t always great at explaining what they want and LLM agents aren’t always great at providing what was requested. That’s a continuing problem.”

Apple surprised everyone with the power and performance of the M1 MacBook Air when it launched the laptop in late 2020. And more than five years later, those Macs show no sign of slowing down, handling everything users care to throw at them.

The Mac still boots almost instantly, races through daily tasks, offers battery life that puts even some newer Windows laptops to shame and, perhaps most importantly, still gives millions of users no compelling reason to upgrade. 

Why the MacBook Air is still going strong

The M1 wasn’t merely better than the Intel Macs it replaced. It delivered a dramatic step forward. Silent, fast, and with remarkable energy efficiency, these laptops have proved themselves to be more reliable and longer-lasting than almost any other notebook.

Apple has continued to deliver impressive improvements ever since the M1 Macs first appeared. The recently introduced M5 MacBook Air delivers double the multi-core and 50% better single-core performance than M1; that means it provides similar performance to the MacBook Pro of around three years ago. 

Apple Silicon has improved every single year and is now extremely powerful — so much so that Apple is about to sell 10 million units of the A-series MacBook Neo, a $599 machine with an iPhone-derived chip that delivers more performance than many mainstream users need.

Meanwhile, even when using a nearly-six-year-old MacBook Air, you still experience a fast browser, responsive Office apps, great battery life and powerful photo editing capabilities. 

To the Moon and back

At the high end of Apple’s range, you’ll find Macs so accomplished they can handle almost every imaginable professional task. It means that right now, today, Apple’s product range extends from good enough to simply amazing. 

Despite heavy marketing hype from competitors who boast of their own ARM-based competitors in similar price brackets, those PCs remain compromised in comparison, if only by their use of Windows, build quality, and overall higher running costs.

Think about it: All things being equal, if you gave a typical office worker an M1 MacBook Air and an M5 MacBook Air and asked them which models they were using, how long would it take them to figure it out? 

Sure, a highly experienced Mac user would likely know. But for a lot of people, the difference would be hard to spot because what they do on their computers just isn’t particularly demanding. 

Making people happy is good for business

Surely that’s bad for Apple’s business, right? I think not. It means Apple has created a huge population of happy Mac users who are still having a good time with the Mac they acquired in 2020. Those people tell other people about their experience, which helps evangelize the platform and can’t have hurt MacBook Neo sales this year. 

They also become more interested in other Apple products, which they can afford to invest in instead of investing in the standard PC “upgrade’”cycle. After all, if you have a platform that doesn’t need an upgrade every three years, you can spend your money on something else instead. For consumers, that might be AirPods and Apple services, while for enterprise professionals that investment might become an iPad or iPhone Pro. 

Apple doesn’t mind. It still makes bank.

The company generally finds that giving people what they want is good for business. It boosts customer satisfaction scores, reduces maintenance costs, and builds repeat customers.

That long replacement cycle delivers a second benefit, too. Apple talks extensively about sustainability. With the M-series Macs, it has achieved it. 

Sustainable technology

People use these laptops longer and get more value later when they sell them on. And when they eventually get returned for recycling, Apple can tear the machines down for parts as it works toward establishing circular manufacturing within the next four years.

The M1 MacBook Air might eventually be remembered not just as the first Apple Silicon Mac, but as representing the moment when ordinary people didn’t have to worry about performance anymore. That’s why the product refuses to die — not because it’s immortal, but because for millions of users it still does everything they need. And all the M- and A-series Macs that follow it do exactly the same thing.

One more thing, however: Intel Macs will no longer be supported by macOS 27 when it ships this year. Apple typically ends support for products around 6-7 years after it removes them from sale, so when will it end support for the M1? Potentially, not too soon.

Apple only stopped selling the M1 MacBook Air in 2024, which suggests support could continue until 2030 or 2031. So, if you bought an M1 MacBook Air in 2020, you’ve actually invested in something designed to work for you for a decade. Which PCs can truly deliver that?

No wonder the M1 MacBook Air refuses to die.

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Apple will open the doors to developers at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) next week. Beyond a big push on AI and new OSes focused on stability and performance, what should developers expect? Mostly it’s about new APIs, Foundation Models, and App Intents; here’s what I’ve been able to figure out so far.

Foundation Models

Apple has been building new Apple Intelligence APIs. One way it is achieving this is to take models made with Google Gemini, then distill and shrink them to fit inside (and run on) its devices. The progression will be to introduce these as a new crop of Foundation models developers can use in their apps. There’s more:

• New APIs mean developers will be able to run Apple Intelligence tools such as summarization directly on the customer device, all offline, all private.
• Developers that use Apple’s standard text editing/entry views will gain access to improved Apple-developed tools inside their apps without custom-coding.
• Because intelligence takes place on the user’s device, neither developers nor users will need to pay for those AI tokens. This is a distinct cost and privacy-saving advantage for customers and developers.

App Intents: The next generation

Apple continues on its quest to convince developers to make features of their apps available for use via Siri with App Intents. Doing so requires developers to wrap their apps into semantic structures, enabling speech/text-based interaction. To help them achieve this, Apple is expected to introduce a complete redesign of its App Intents framework.

Speak as you wish

While users must say “Hey Siri” to invoke its attention today, the assistant will respond more dynamically to natural language. Combined with App Intents, that means users should be able to ask Siri to use a combination of apps to make things happen on the device.

A developer might build a travel app that can take an itinerary and hand it across to a budgeting tool, for example. The idea is that with a spoken or typed command, a person will be able to call on a collection of apps to identify the destination, create an itinerary, put together a to-do list, prepare relevant letters or emails, and assemble a budget — all invoked by the original command.

What about context?

We’re expecting Siri to become better at using the content of your screen, location, and other personal data as it seeks to provide more contextualized responses. We don’t yet know the extent or form in which Apple will make that information available to third-party developers to help contextualize their own apps. Apple’s focus on privacy matters a great deal, as does its relationship with regulators, some of whom will demand that data made available to Apple’s own apps be made available to third-party apps. These are important matters for Apple, app developers, and customers who want the convenience of AI without loss of privacy.

More consistent UI tools on Swift

Swift should get better at migrating legacy code, but the big speculation around it concerns Liquid Glass. Will Swift make it easier for developers to build consistent user interfaces that work properly across all Apple’s platforms? If it does, then it will help overcome one of the big criticisms of Apple’s liquid-inspired UI. Swift will also usher in the tools developers need to support agentic application coding.

Better vibes for Xcode

Vibe coding is everywhere, including within Xcode, which is expected to gain improved contextual and predictive understanding to help boost developer productivity. Xcode could also  introduce improved real-time architectural debugging hints, aiming to make it easier for developers to build bug-free apps.

A Mac you can wear: Vision OS

All the AI enhancements made available across Apple’s other products will also be offered to visionOS. That access takes the headset another step closer to becoming the Mac you wear like sunglasses.

Elsewhere

• A new Camera API means developers can build specialized, interactive buttons that users can deploy directly within the native iOS Camera interface. This should be a great way to use more sophisticated camera apps more naturally.
• Wallet Pass means apps will be able to ingest things like barcodes or gym passes for use within Wallet.
• Icon Composer might offer more tools designed to promote consistency.

Intel finally retires

Apple will abandon Intel support in macOS 27, which means developers will likely end support for legacy Intel applications in response.

After the gold rush

Once the lights go down on WWDC, Apple’s real test will be to see if its announcements help make AI useful, private, and affordable to developers and their customers. After all, if Apple gets AI right on a platform basis, it should be able to offer the kind of on-device intelligence no one else can match, at no charge to developers or users — a move that might yet kick-start AI innovation across its platforms. This will provide a moat around the Apple ecosystem, inside which developers can explore new potentials for AI to give customers the tools they need at costs they can afford.

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Intel is invading the physical AI space with a reentry into the robotics market it quit many years ago amid financial struggles.

The robotics strategy is part of the company’s larger plan to establish AI on the “edge,” in which devices have the computing capability to run AI locally. Many devices lack AI capabilities and have to offload processing to the cloud.

The chipmaker said its Intel Series 3 processors are now in 130 edge AI and robotics designs. It also had a design win with SensoryAI, which provides technology for robots that include Ella, a robotic barista made by Crown Digital.

The company’s Core Ultra Series 3 processors are derivatives of chip designs intended for laptops. But Intel has achieved a level of power efficiency for long battery life that allows those chips to be adapted for handheld devices and laptops.

Intel also said it can build advanced robotics chips thanks to its latest manufacturing technologies.

For example, many robotic functions, such as computer vision and real-time controls, can be integrated into a single chip. Previously, functions like graphics and movement and control were distributed among different cores in a chip.

SensoryAI, for example, has a chip architecture that provides the robotic barista — which is more like a robotic arm — with AI capabilities, Intel said.

The main “Avatar” agent handles customers as the main “Ella” agent reasons and executes the task. If Ella encounters errors, it passes on the issue to a Guardian agent, which helps with the recovery. Some issues could include making sense of an order, or cups that might be stuck. 

The three agents are embedded in a single piece of Core Ultra Series 3 silicon.

Intel is displaying some of those robots at the Computex trade show in Taiwan. The company shared a video of a humanoid-style robot from the floor in a X.com post  

This is not Intel’s first attempt at the robotics market. Intel sold robotics chips and kits when it was a dominant chip player in the field, but curtailed efforts in 2021 after Pat Gelsinger took over as CEO and restructured the company to focus on manufacturing.

Robotics is now back on the menu under new Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who replaced Gelsinger last year. He has restructured to company to focus on high-growth areas that can generate high returns.

A Morgan Stanley study last year indicated the robotics market could be worth $5 trillion by 2050 — and more than 1 billion humanoid robots could be in operation. 

Robots are seen to improve human productivity and manufacturing output. For example, they could help factories that are facing labor shortages or be used to complete tasks that are dangerous. 

However, challenges remain. There isn’t yet enough real-world data to train robots to do targeted work. And the AI models — generally called world models — they will need are still under development. 

Training robots to do a specific job requires a sequence of events to happen in succession without any errors. Companies are still training robots to spot and understand errors, analyze possible resolutions, and take the right corrective action.

IBM has launched a tool designed to help customers assess cloud-sovereignty risks and meet regulatory compliance requirements. 

The Sovereignty Risk Profile launch comes as digital sovereignty becomes a higher priority for organizations concerned about where data is stored and processed. According to an IBM survey, 93% of executives believe sovereignty needs to be part of their business strategy.  

Via the new tool, customers can set up policies related to regulatory and business requirements — such as where data resides and how it’s protected, for instance. These policies can be applied to specific cloud workloads, regions, or zones in the Sovereignty Risk Profile tool, allowing users to track sovereignty requirements “in real time,” IBM Cloud product manager Janet Van said in a blog post, with “visibility into configurations, encryption posture, and environmental controls.” 

It’s then possible to assess compliance and decide what workloads meet sovereignty requirements. 

Tracking the factors that contribute to sovereignty is a challenge for many organizations, said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “It is very difficult, as you don’t know about the details of the stacks; sometimes, even the location of data is not fully transparent,” he said.

The Sovereignty Risk Profile “addresses many of the compliance-related requirements associated with data residency and encryption, while also tackling sovereignty from a resilience and concentration-risk perspective,” said Dario Maisto, senior analyst at Forrester.

However, the monitoring tool can only do so much to address digital sovereignty concerns, he said. While it can help organizations identify and report on potential issues, it “does not help [make] clients more or less sovereign, per se: it has only the potential to tell that a sovereignty problem is there.”

Broader questions around digital sovereignty remain difficult to address, he said, as there’s no universally accepted definition of the concept and limited legislation to establish clear requirements. 

Mueller described a spectrum of sovereignty issues that depend on factors such as whether data is stored, processed, and backed up in a customer’s own country, as well as whether staff that operate the data are domestic nationals. “Then there is the sovereignty of the software supply chain — but here everybody is dependent,” he said.

To further complicate matters, while several US hyperscalers sell sovereign-branded cloud services to European customers — with local staff and infrastructure —  concerns remain about the potential for extra-jurisdictional access to data, due to the US CLOUD Act and the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The Sovereignty Risk Profile is available within IBM’s Security and Compliance Center Workload Protection. It’s the latest in a range of IBM Cloud products aimed at addressing customers’ sovereignty concerns, including the recently launched IBM Sovereign Core software platform. 

I will sit right down (waiting for the gift of sound and vision)
And I will sing (waiting for the gift of sound and vision)

— David Bowie

Apple is planning to sponsor and present 14 AI research papers at the annual IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in Denver next week, just days before it introduces major new AI features at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC).

The fresh research explores topics such as using LLMs in image generation, quality testing, and user interface prototyping. For months, supply chain rumors have hinted at a radical evolution for the ubiquitous AirPods in the form of built-in ambient cameras. With this in mind, it’s noteworthy that one of the research papers, “From Where Things Are to What They’re For: Benchmarking Spatial–Functional Intelligence for Multimodal LLMs,” specifically seems to cater for such use cases. 

Accessibility for the people

In application, this tech promises profound potential for accessibility. It suggests that someone with limited vision might be able to get their AirPods to guide them through an unfamiliar room. This is something that should fit well inside the company’s ongoing narrative around machine vision intelligence and accessibility. 

Accessibility is central to a second presentation to be made during the Generative AI for Sign Language Workshop at the conference. Led by Apple’s Colin Lea, who presented a session on speech tech for people with speech disabilities at a similar event, this focus on machine vision intelligence and accessibility is entirely deliberate. 

Indeed, even though the industry and critics condemn Apple for lagging behind others in the AI space, the publication of these 14 papers at a key industry session just before WWDC shows the company has been doing a great deal of foundational work behind the scenes. We expect this work to bear its first fruit at WWDC, and it is important to understand the disclosures as a power move. Apple is using the show to celebrate its strengths in AI development, and given its decade work on Apple Car, many of those strengths relate to machine vision intelligence. 

Apple is so advanced in the field it is already deploying advanced models that empower consumers. Just last week, it promised to introduce a new tool called Image Explorer in VoiceOver to help partially sighted customers later this year. Among many other features, this will arrive alongside a system to let disabled users control compatible wheelchairs with spoken word commands. 

Apple is pushing boundaries all the way. Its paper “VSAS-Bench: Real-Time Evaluation of Visual Streaming Assistant Models,” proves it is actively refining models to process live video instantly on consumer hardware. 

What matters, the human or the machine?

The difference between Apple and its competitors is deep and philosophical. I’d argue that while others build cloud-dependent chatbots, Apple is embedding AI tools that solve real human problems in its systems. 

This extends to its plans at WWDC, where it will introduce a raft of AI tools made with help from Google Gemini and a host of AI services it has developed in house. The latter will include a great many accessibility tools of the type it will discuss at the CVPR event, the beauty of which being that they will run privately and on-device. You could argue that while other tech giants are using AI to automate white-collar jobs or build a surveillance dystopia, Apple is searching for applications of machine intelligence that solve real human problems. 

The company seems pretty realistic about the ongoing AI transformation. It recognizes that its own ecosystem must become a peer player in the emerging AI-augmented environment the tech industry seems intent on building. 

With that in mind, Apple is willing to engage in strategic, mutually beneficial partnerships, such as permitting Siri to use third-party AI services to handle requests. But even as it does that, it is also focusing on those areas in which it can make a unique difference, such as the accessibility features Apple as a platform has always provided.

Open up

As the Vision Pro demonstrated, and as these mythical video-enabled AirPods will in the future suggest, computers are steadily getting smarter. So, the way we use them is also changing as we move away from the rigid boundaries of keyboards, mice, and touchscreens. Apple’s quest for ambient computing began long before the sudden gold rush for generative AI chatbots. 

In the end, as the latter services become commodified, the way humans interact with them will define the next generation of hardware. That’s exciting for Apple, given that product design is where it excels. The era of sound and vision may finally have arrived.

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Apple publishes its App Store fraud prevention report every year,. And when it does, the company presses the point that its curated system brings much value to developers and customers, including highly effective protection against fraud. It says it prevented more than $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2025 alone.

A tax worth paying

The company said it has prevented $11.2 billion in such fraud in the last six years. That’s a lot of value for the 15% or lower commission that all but the biggest-selling developers are required to pay on their store sales.

Don’t believe the hype, as most developers are not generating the $1 million a year required before the 30% payment kicks in.

You might reflect that if there is an Apple Tax, it’s a progressive tax in which those with the broadest shoulders help support the wider developer community, which is probably why some tech billionaires don’t like it. 

But I’m not here to write about taxation; I’m here to highlight the value the App Store brings. Apple diligently works to protect customers and developers against the ever-growing threat of cybercrime at a scale few other companies could hope to match. That matters in an environment dominated by ever more sophisticated attacks, including scenarios in which a developer submits a benign app for review and then modifies it once the app is online to commit financial fraud.

More than fraud prevention

It’s not just fraud Apple protects App Store customers from. It also attempts to protect privacy. Look, we know that tech firms now exist for whom privacy is a roadblock to profit; they want to take all your information for free to sell it for money, or worse. Apple stands against this and has done so for years, which is why it is under steady attack by entities that want privacy destroyed to boost their bottom line. Nation states and nation-state-adjacent attacks don’t help in the battle for your private digital life, throwing huge resources at undermining personal protections.

Apple’s report gives you a solid glimpse at the anti-privacy environment. App Store rejected 443,000 app submissions for privacy violations; it also rejected 22,000 apps for holding undocumented anti-privacy features. 

The upshot is that while Apple’s protections aren’t 100% perfect, they’re still industry leading. Where incidents do take place, they are resolved swiftly, and the bait-and-switch approach (in which an app pretends to be benign but carries malware) remains the biggest threat. That’s why customers should always verify they trust a developer before downloading apps.

The threats coming over the hill

The thing is, all of these threats are evolving, and Apple is equipped to evolve in parallel with them. In part, that’s because it has scale, in part because it has that huge 2.2-billion-device ecosystem, in part because the company entered the app store race with deep understanding of how online transactions were evolving in the first place. It didn’t run iTunes for years only to learn nothing.

Coming up over the hill we can see new-breed quantum-based threats. Along with artificial intelligence, that combination will likely spawn a mass attack of AI-generated, malware-infested apps being built and submitted at a record pace. 

We will also likely see increased attacks made against developers in order to extract their Developer ID to help in the submission of such apps. And we will see increasingly sophisticated algorithmic hacks to attack security, identity, and even app ownership. Protecting against those consequential evolutions will be neither easy nor cheap. Doing so will require near state-level protection, a degree of security no small entity can meet. We have no idea if smaller app stores can even visualize such protection — and the EU doesn’t know, either.

In time, hopefully, new businesses will emerge offering quantum-safe security to protect online purchases. But for now, we’ll mostly need to look to large entities such as Apple, or payment services providers, to make the grade. 

Near state-level protection

Will Apple put protection at scale in place to protect against these incoming threats against its App Store? It seems likely, given it is already investing in OS-level mitigations to protect encryption on its services, including around encrypted communications. 

It is also in Apple’s interest to future-proof protection around payment services, ergo also the App Store. At the same time, as Apple’s latest fraud report confirms, the threat landscape remains highly volatile. Time will show that the store’s degree of protection is well worth the cost of Apple’s progressive App Store tax. 

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Apple has spent billions of dollars to develop satellite connectivity for iPhone; I very much doubt it did so solely to rescue stranded hikers. The company will most certainly have had a bigger prize in its sights when it first began working with GlobalStar (now owned by Amazon).

The most logical reason to invest in satellite coverage for its devices is the most obvious — to provide network infrastructure for new breeds of device and new service models. You don’t acquire access to massive amounts of bandwidth for nothing. And Apple’s steady introduction of new satellite-supported services shows it is interested in introducing these services, even though the offer isn’t extensive enough yet to require iPhone users to pay for access, yet.

The decision not to charge for those satellite services suggests they’re just the thin end of the company’s plans for satellite deployment.

It’s possible the company’s ambitions were limited by GlobalStar’s ability to put satellite constellations in orbit. That work was ongoing last time I looked, and I fully expect existing Apple satellite services will be extended to new nations, even under Amazon’s watch.

Amazon enters the room

Amazon’s recent $11.6 billion acquisition of GlobalStar is interesting. You can see that Apple is now forced to work with its old frenemy, even as both partners already profit from strong, steady Apple hardware sales via the online retailer. So they know they can make money together.

“Apple and Amazon have a long and proven track record of working together through Amazon’s core infrastructure services, and we look forward to building on that collaboration with Amazon Leo,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said when the deal was announced. (The transaction isn’t expected to close until next year.)

Making money together is often seen as a strength in business relationships and Amazon has agreed to continue supporting Apple products and to collaborate with Apple on future satellite services.

When it comes to mobile telecoms, Amazon isn’t the only game in town, and neither is Starlink. Cellular operators are inking deals with satellite providers all over the world, all with the intention of bringing network access to those who otherwise can’t get a decent connection.

Just today in the UK, Virgin Media O2 announced plans to switch on the O2 Satellite service for iPhone users tomorrow, enabling customers — particularly in rural areas — to get a satellite connection where traditional cellular coverage is unavailable. It could simply identify new ways to enhance the Find My service.

Orange last year offered its own satellite comms to French customers, while Deutsche Telekom partners with others to provide SMS via satellite in Europe and the US. You’ll find similar alliances in most key territories, including Australia and Japan. The direction of travel exposes an industry embracing satellite as a way to widen existing cellular infrastructure, which makes sense given the relative cost of installing conventional masts in some regions. 

Many ways to crack it

There’s speculation Apple could become a satellite carrier, a move that would put it in competition with carrier partners. But Apple doesn’t need to do to provide satellite communication services to iPhone users, nor would it want to relinquish the symbiotically profitable relationships it’s developed with carriers.

It could, for example provide satellite calling as a hardware feature available with every iPhone across all supported carriers, possibly as an additional service that guarantees customers can get a connection, even in the countryside. It could evangelize the service as being “Private by Design,” and supplement this with data over satellite to support apps, particularly agentic AI apps. 

Combined with the next wave of AI enhancements Apple is expected to deliver for its systems, the combination of an always-on, resilient, private data connection and AI could prove invaluable to many customers. That’s particularly true for enterprise customers seeking global solutions that respect sovereign data, privacy, data retention policy and managed AI services – especially as terrestrial infrastructure becomes an attack target. Such scenarios will only become more widely understood as 6G emerges, with its built-in support for satellite infrastructure.

What will Apple do?

Will Apple move in that direction, or maintain its focus on the consumer markets? Will it decide that rather than deploying its own part-owned satellite constellations as it was with GlobalStar, it is better to work with carrier partners? Will it wait for 6G with its enhanced, standards-based support for satellite communications? 

Those are answers we don’t yet have. But it is quite clear that as satellite communications truly enter the mass market, Apple has put together many of the technical, hardware, software and infrastructure pieces it will need to ensure the iPhone is a peer player in whatever use cases emerge. 

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If ever there were a lawsuit in which a jury and judge should have ruled against both the accuser and the defendants, Elon Musk’s suit against OpenAI and Microsoft was it. 

The high-profile legal battle pitted the world’s richest man against a company worth more than $3 trillion, another that might soon launch a $1 trillion IPO, and tech execs claiming to have only the good of the world in mind, not mere filthy lucre, while they develop a technology some fear could eventually destroy humankind.

The lawsuit was eventually thrown out, but only on technical grounds. Meanwhile, unregulated AI marches on, with Musk, OpenAI and Microsoft all getting richer.

The only winner in this suit was hypocrisy. Here’s why.

Back to the beginning

To understand how this unfolded, we need to go back to OpenAI’s beginnings. The company was founded by current CEO Sam Altman, Musk and others in 2015 — back when AI was a niche technology, used primarily for image and speech recognition, robotics, and experiments in self-driving cars.

The founders funded OpenAI out of their own pockets as a nonprofit company aimed at developing AI for the good of the world. Then, as the technology evolved, Altman, Musk and others grew worried it might become so powerful that, without serious guardrails, it could pose a danger to humans. They feared what might happen if AI reached the level of a super-powerful artificial general intelligence (AGI) system, superior to humans on a variety of tasks, with general problem-solving skills rather than narrowly targeted ones – and the ability to think for itself rather than heeding humans. 

In an earlier version of Musk’s suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, Musk put their fears this way: “A.G.I. poses a grave threat to humanity — perhaps the greatest existential threat we have today.”

Early on, OpenAI wasn’t on many people’s radar. When Microsoft invested $1 billion in the company in 2019, few outside the tech industry took notice. Between 2021 and 2023 Microsoft invested $2 billion more, still without drawing a lot of attention.

Then in November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, launching the generative AI (genAI) revolution — and all the disruption that has followed since. Eventually, as it became clear how important and valuable genAI technology would become, Microsoft’s investment ballooned to $13 billion.

Nonprofit no more

OpenAI insiders were convinced several years before ChatGPT’s release that the company could become tremendously profitable. With potentially trillions of dollars at stake, in 2017 they started looking for a way to turn the nonprofit operation into a for-profit company.

It was at that point, OpenAI says, that Musk pushed to gain majority equity in the company if it went public, take control of the board, and become CEO. When the other founders balked, Musk withheld funding.

Last year, OpenAI released copies of emails he sent to it during the height of their in-fighting. In one, in February 2018, he lobbied for the creation of a for-profit arm, pointing out that, “a for-profit pivot might create a more sustainable revenue stream over time and would, with the current team, likely bring in a lot of investment.” 

Musk then suggested that OpenAI “attach to Tesla as its cash cow.” When the other founders dismissed the idea, Musk threw a fit and quit the company. OpenAI went ahead and launched a for-profit arm, becoming a hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit company in 2019.

Years later, in 2024, Musk filed suit, targeting OpenAI, Altman, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, and Microsoft — accusing them of “stealing a charity” by creating the for-profit arm of OpenAI, and taking the $13 billion Microsoft investment. He claimed they had all illegally enriched themselves through the profit/nonprofit setup and sought $150 billion in damages. (OpenAI fired back last year with a counter suit.)

It took only two hours for the jury to rule against Musk, though the ruling didn’t address his actual claims. Rather, the suit was thrown out because it had been filed after the statute of limitations had run out.

Cynicism and hypocrisy win out

Everyone in this case was driven by venality. Altman portrayed himself as only wanting to develop AI to help humanity — and as evidence, pointed out he has no equity in OpenAI. What he neglected to add, though, is that he has more than a $2 billion stake in companies that have deals with OpenAI, and stands to gain billions more if those deals grow after any IPO.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has used its investments in OpenAI to become a multi-trillion-dollar company. And if, as expected, OpenAI becomes a trillion-dollar company when it files its IPO later this year, Microsoft’s 27% ownership stake in the company would make it $270 million richer. That’s not a bad payoff for turning a blind eye to the way in which OpenAI performed a bait-and-switch from nonprofit to for-profit company. 

As for Musk…, well, what can you say about someone who claims he wants to save humankind from the evils of AI, while at the same time lobbying for OpenAI to become a for-profit company and milking it like a cash cow? 

He’s shown he’s not only the world’s wealthiest man. He’s also the world’s most hypocritical.