During his international tour last year, Tim Cook said that "gaming is very important to Apple and not just a side project." With such ambitions for Apple's games, after what he had seen at the regional game developers showcase, Cooks seems encouraged.
"Well, I think it is flourishing," Cook said, "Gaming is a very important area for us and essential for the development community because so many want to design and play games. Gaming is one of the key things that really uses the Apple silicone chip in a significant way. I think that iOS is the best mobile platform on the planet; we put so much of ourselves and our resources into the engine of the product."
Meta is probably one of the more agreeable players in this racket, too. It hoards data; it does not share much of it. And it has a brand to protect. Data brokers are far worse because nobody knows who they are or what they collect, share, and merge. Scale the informed consent model above across all data brokers you interact with, in each app or website you use. As an example, Het Laatste Nieuws, a popular Dutch-language news site in Belgium, shows in its cookie consent dialog it has over one hundred advertising partners, among the lowest numbers I have seen. (For comparison, Le Monde has over five hundred.) True consent requires you to understand those privacy policies, too.
The new app Twodos wants to make a to-do app simple and easy. There’s no need to worry about a learning curve with the app. There are two lists—Sooner and Later. New items you add are put in Sooner by default, but you can always move it to Later.
Dolphin explains in a blog post that Apple’s resistance to apps using JIT means the App Store is still out of reach for now.
Two books published last year offer divergent takes on these questions. In Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman posit that the United States still wields a considerable amount of structural power in the global system. Anu Bradford’s Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, however, argues that the surprising superpower is neither the United States nor China but the European Union.
Both books examine the exercise of power and governance in the digital sphere. Their contrasting evaluations help explain why it is so difficult for even the sharpest observers of global affairs to agree about the current state of the world—particularly when technology is involved.
The company in question can pay 50 per cent of the previous year’s tax bill on the assumption it will be liable for a similar amount in the current year or it can pay 45 per cent of a new projected profit level on the assumption things have changed.
The speculation is that Apple has taken the latter option, projecting lower taxable profits here on the back of a decline in sales or perhaps because it can shelter a greater percentage of profits for whatever reason.
I sure hope all the non-AI tech stuff continues to be updated and improved. We still need to get all the non-sexy stuff done.
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Thanks for reading.