The Internet is going through a major upheaval. Mega-corporations are trying to box consumers into proprietary platforms. A frothy VC market chasing after the Next Big Thing is beginning to see major warning signs. Top operating systems vendors have gotten the smackdown for their monopolistic business practices, being forced to offer real choice for access to third-party browsers and other key software. A growing backlash against technology’s dominance threatens to stall the heady growth of the industry. The nerd set is fighting back against capitalist entrenchment, building new open infrastructure that respects user privacy and eliminates gatekeepers. A revolution is underway to make it even easier to publish on the web, push content and software features across networks, and find meaningful successful as an indie producer.
Wait, which decade am I describing here? The late 90s? Or now??
Exactly. 😃
Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web, its trajectory was impossible to imagine. There was no roadmap to predict the course of its evolution, it was a captivating odyssey filled with unforeseen opportunities and challenges. Underlying its whole infrastructure was the intention to allow for collaboration, foster compassion and generate creativity – what I term the 3 C’s. It was to be a tool to empower humanity. The first decade of the web fulfilled that promise – the web was decentralised with a long-tail of content and options, it created small, more localised communities, provided individual empowerment and fostered huge value. Yet in the past decade, instead of embodying these values, the web has instead played a part in eroding them. The consequences are increasingly far reaching. From the centralisation of platforms to the AI revolution, the web serves as the foundational layer of our online ecosystem – an ecosystem that is now reshaping the geopolitical landscape, driving economic shifts and influencing the lives of people around the World.
Superficially, the smartphone appeared to act as a release for hyper-anxiety. More fundamentally, it was feeding those cycles of hyper-anxiety. Pretending to be the cure, the phone was closer to the illness. If I’d been a novelist, I would have found my opening scene: how we live today; what tech has done to people; our bewildered state.
Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at New York University, uses a social scientist’s tools to address this theme: how smartphone addiction has created an unprecedented explosion of mental illness, especially for the generation that entered teenage years when the devices became ubiquitous (in the late 2000s and early 2010s). Haidt argues that this cohort was effectively offered up to Big Tech companies like guinea pigs in a cruel case study. Back then, we lacked a clear understanding of what smartphones – and in particular social media – do to the teenage mind. Interweaving distressing analysis alongside practical advice, The Anxious Generation lays bare the lasting damage.
So my gut feeling is that we’re seeing Apple adopt changes in response to unofficial feedback from the EC. If so, that suggests that the things Apple isn’t changing — like the Core Technology Fee — are either OK with the EC, or, if not, that Apple is willing to fight for them. Or perhaps we’ll be right back here with additional compliance plan changes every Tuesday for the next few weeks.
Apple will soon add 12 new languages to the virtual keyboard on the Vision Pro, based on code discovered by MacRumors. Right now, the Apple Vision Pro keyboard only supports English (US) and Emoji, which makes sense as it is limited to the United States.
The Apple Sports app has received its first update since launching last month. With version 1.1 of the app rolling out today, Apple has made optimizations for NCAA March Madness, added support for Major League Baseball, and more.
By making it more comfortable to use my laptop anywhere, the Casa has enabled me to get away from my desk more often, which has been wonderful as the weather begins to warm up.
Our existence matters to the eternal cosmos as much as a grain of salt in the bottom of the Mariana Trench matters to you while you sip your morning coffee reading this inconsequential post. The coffee that was made possible by a long chain of human beings who brought it to you from some forest in South America, each of them trying to stay afloat in their own stories of love and hate, joy and sorrow, happiness, and suffering. And yet, albeit lost in this nothingness, we all share the hope to find our way.
Well, guess what, my fellow homo sapiens: there’s an app for that, too.
I can’t say I’m handling it with perfect grace; having so much work to do is really highlighting the flaws in my time management tendencies. And as I reach the mid-semester point, I really cannot afford to fall into the procrastination habits that I used to get away with so easily. Here’s how I’ve been trying to get myself together.
Today Apple welcomed key manufacturing partners Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Murata Manufacturing as new investors in the Restore Fund, which is designed to scale global investment in high-quality, nature-based carbon removal while protecting critical ecosystems. Global semiconductor foundry TSMC will invest up to $50 million in a fund managed by Climate Asset Management, a joint venture of HSBC Asset Management and Pollination. Murata — an iPhone supplier based in Japan — will invest up to $30 million in the same fund. These new investments build on Apple’s previous commitment of up to $200 million for the Restore Fund’s second phase, bringing the total to $280 million in committed capital.
In South America’s Atlantic Forest, many suggest that life depends on a mother: the superior matriarch who provides for all. This is true for its plants and animals, and even the trees that tower above, reaching skyward to the sun while providing shade for the life that resides in their underbrush.
It is estimated there are 5,000 tree species in existence in the Atlantic Forest today. Of those species, two-thirds are threatened with extinction after centuries of exploitative, extractive practices. Restoring the rainforest — a potential 100 million-acre restoration area in Brazil alone — has been at the core of Apple-supported projects in the region, including one just inland from the coastal town of Trancoso in Bahia, Brazil, where one company is cultivating seedlings from mother trees, the most resilient trees from multiple species that have survived the rainforest’s destruction.
Epic Games isn’t done with Apple. A 2021 ruling forced Apple to allow developers of App Store apps to link to outside payments, and Epic has now filed a motion asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to enforce her original order.
Epic says Apple’s updated developer policy that still reserves 27 percent of outside payments (or 12 percent for small developers) for Apple itself is still unjustified. Epic argues these fees are “essentially the same” as those the company charges for using its payments system.
You know how everyone has been speculating that just because Apple named its first headset as Apple Vision Pro, there will be a non-Pro Apple Vision headset coming down to the road for the less-Pro customers. How it looks like, how it works, and how much cheaper it can go are questions that many have been asking out loud.
Well, I also noted that Apple named its EU-based pay-me-for-using-my-APIs fee as Core Technology Fee. Has anyone wondered if there are other technology fees coming soon? Just like developers have to request for certain entitlements in order to use certain APIs, will developers have to pay additional technology fees for some additional APIs? Like CarPlay Technology Fee, or Advanced-Siri-with-Generative-AI Technology Fee?
(Note that all developers worldwide already pay Apple additional money to use some of the weather APIs.)
~
Thanks for reading.