During closing arguments, Mehta homed in on those payments, wondering how other players in the market could possibly displace Google from that position. Since only a company with enough capital to offer Apple a comparable or better deal and the ability to create a quality search engine with limited user data could stand a chance, Mehta asked, “If that’s what it takes for somebody to dislodge Google as the default search engine, wouldn’t the folks that wrote the Sherman Act be concerned about it?”
Judge Amit P. Mehta's ruling, which holds that those deals are inhibiting competition, doesn't include his remedy. And Google says it plans to appeal his decision regardless. But if the ruling is ultimately upheld, and requires Google to stop making exclusive search deals, then it could threaten what's become an incredibly lucrative revenue stream for Apple.
But the iPhone maker has already been moving away from its dependence on traditional internet searches.
With Apple revamping its Siri digital assistant to handle queries more deftly – and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots into its software – it is betting that AI technology will eventually take over.
That underlines the government’s struggle with the technology industry - it moves so quickly that by the time a serious reckoning comes, the industry is already restructuring itself around the next innovation.
Apple’s latest developer betas launched last week with a handful of the generative AI features that were announced at WWDC and are headed to your iPhones, iPads, and Macs over the next several months. On Apple’s computers however, you can actually read the instructions programmed into the model supporting some of those Apple Intelligence features.
Apple and other heavyweight companies sold off on Monday as U.S. recession fears and Berkshire Hathaway's sale of half of its stake in the iPhone maker further deflated a months-long rally fueled by optimism about AI.
None of this is to say that AI itself doesn’t still have revolutionary potential, nor that the industry won’t eventually fulfill those dreams. The dot com crash in the early 2000s was in part due to overinvestment and overvaluation of startups of the era, but Evans notes that what was left over set the stage for mega-companies of today like Google and Meta. The same may one day be true for AI companies. But unless the financials improve, it may not be these AI companies.
All of this highlights the problem of collectively putting too much money into one technological bet when it doesn’t offer a clear case for doing so.
Disney+ has been at the forefront of offering unique environments on its Vision Pro app, so you can watch movies at Avengers Tower or on the Monsters Inc. Scare Floor. On Monday, the company is rolling out another one: Iceland! In conjunction with Disney-owned National Geographic, the new Disney+ environment is based on imagery from Thingvellir National Park in Iceland. In the daytime view, snowflakes fall around the rocky mountain scene. In the nighttime view, there’s a spectacular aurora above you.
For those who make journaling a habit, it’s common to imagine the book itself as a listener—hence the classic refrain “Dear Diary.” But what if your journal could not only hear you, but also understand and respond to you?
That’s the concept behind Rosebud, an AI-powered journal that can ask questions, carry a conversation, remember patterns, and more.
But another way to look at it is that services are just another form of software. Software that runs not on the personal computing devices Apple sells to customers, but which run on servers in the cloud. And, importantly, is sold to users via lucrative recurring subscriptions. Content often isn’t what we think of as software (like say music, movies, and TV shows) but content from the App Store is. But the key is that it’s all stuff that the users of Apple’s devices consume on those devices. Apple’s core business is designing, engineering, producing, and selling those devices. Services are just a huge, and growing, part of what users do and consume on those devices.
Ironically, back in 2000 it was CNET Networks Inc that paid $1.6 billion to acquire the then tech-publishing behemoth Ziff-Davis Inc and its online services company ZDNet. Though so much has happened in the last two decades in the form of divestments and realignments that today’s inverted purchase isn’t as ouroboric as it might seem.
Tim Cook has previously declared that Google has the best search engine in the world, so, even if Google is forced to not pay Apple for keeping Google as the default search engine on Safari, Apple will still keep Google as the default search engine. Right?
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I am surprised. Someone is willing to pay CNET for one hundred million dollars?
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Thanks for reading.