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The Gold-Standard Edition Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Apple Takes A Big Bite Out Of The Emmys, by Joe Reid, Vulture

A plain-text reading of this year’s most-nominated networks and platforms does not tell you the whole story of today’s Emmys announcement. HBO (an umbrella that includes the flagship HBO and its streaming sibling, HBO Max) managed to break its own record with its most-ever nominations, a total of 142. Netflix, as has often been the case during its existence, is chasing with 121. Hefty numbers to be sure, buoyed by wide-net programming strategies (Netflix) and a decadeslong reputation for excellence in dramatic television (HBO). But the real story lies in the 79 nominations for Apple TV+, which, in only its sixth Emmy season, has landed the most overall series nominations — 27 total for the second season of Severance — as well as the most nominations for a comedy with The Studio’s 23.

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Emmys-wise, there are still mountains for Apple to climb. HBO remains the gold standard in prestige television, and that is felt all over the Emmys ballot: seven directing nominations across drama, comedy, and limited series (to Apple’s four) and seven writing nominations (to Apple’s three). But Apple is more than keeping pace in the areas that get the most attention.

It’s Not Very The Studio For The Studio To Get So Many Emmy Nominations, by Fran Hoepfner, Vulture

It’s in the guest-star categories, however, that The Studio’s dominance starts to feel as absurd as the show itself. Bryan Cranston got a Guest Actor nomination for his fictional character, the former Continental head Griffin Mill, but Dave Franco, Ron Howard, Anthony Mackie, Martin Scorsese, and Zoë Kravitz all got nominated for playing themselves. Five out of six nominated male guest stars are guys from The Studio. It’s them and Jon Bernthal in noted comedy The Bear. This is also Ron Howard’s first acting nomination! And he was on Happy Days! While Scorsese has three Emmys already (for Outstanding Directing, of course), it’s possible he’ll go home with his first acting award. Imagine you see all those guys nominated and you vote for someone who’s not Scorsese? He looks so sad in The Studio when they tell him they won’t be making his Jonestown movie.

Apple’s Matt Cherniss On ‘Severance’ & ‘The Studio’ Emmy Success, ‘Pachinko’s Future & ‘Ted Lasso’s Return, by Nellie Andreeva, Deadline

“It’s thrilling and gratifying,” Apple TV+’s head of development Matt Cherniss said. “I think most of all, I’m just happy for the shows themselves, the talent involved, all the time and effort that they put into doing something original and different, and all the risks that they take along the way. To see that rewarded in shows like Severance and The Studio and Shrinking, it’s just great.”

Apple Watch

How To Choose An Apple Watch, by Victoria Song, The Verge

Apple Watches do a lot of things, from tracking your health and fitness to fielding notifications. As with other wearables, we do a mix of year-round experiential testing and benchmarks. So while we may not take a tumble down a flight of stairs, we’ll note if organically tripping during a walk triggers Fall Detection. (Or doesn’t.) We also check to see how accurate sleep tracking, heart rate, and GPS is versus long-term control devices, like the Oura Ring or a Garmin. We’ll also note how the various Apple Watch models compare to each other on factors like durability, performance, and battery life.

Apple Watch Sleep Apnea And Heart Health Features Now Available In More Countries, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

The sleep apnea detection feature that Apple's most recent Apple Watch models offer has expanded to several more countries in Europe, Asia, South America, and more.

Qi2.2

The Deluge Of Faster Qi2.2 Wireless Chargers Is Here, by Dominic Preston, The Verge

While the WPC lists Qi2.2 as having been introduced in April 2025, and Apple was reported to be working on a new MagSafe charger with Qi2.2 compatibility last month, no products using the standard have gone on sale yet. That’s set to change soon, with eight products now listed in the WPC’s product database with the latest Qi2.2.1 standard, all certified on July 15th.

Faster Wireless Chargers Coming To iPhone, But Don't Buy One Yet, by Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac

A regulatory listing spotted last month indicated Apple may be working on a MagSafe charger than supports 45W, rather than the 25W maximum of the Qi2.2 standard. No current iPhone supports this speed, but that suggests the iPhone 17 line-up may allow even faster wireless charging.

Stuff

Hot Corners Is The Best macOS Feature You're Not Using, by Justin Pot, Lifehacker

With Hot Corners, you can assign different actions to each of the four corners of your Mac's display. For example, I like moving my mouse to the top right corner to open Notification Center. It makes it easier to see my widgets at a glance, without needing to click. But there's a lot more you can do with this feature.

Gentle Parenting My Smartphone Addiction, by Kyle Chayka, New Yorker

The inspiration for Opal came from Schlenker’s time working at Google, around 2008. There, he saw how software was beginning to be designed to “hack your attention,” he said, with new interfaces and alert systems optimized to get users hooked. During the following decade, he watched app addiction spread from tech insiders to everyone else, including his relatives, young and old. He founded Opal in 2020 in order to add what he called “productive friction” to online user experience. “The entire tech industry is about removing friction, and we do the opposite,” he said.

Instapaper, An App That Lets You Read Articles Without The Clutter, by DPA

In the age of newsletter pop-ups, cookie disclaimers and overloaded website designs, the app formats pages and removes layout clutter to ensure the text is optimally readable on mobile devices.

Get The macOS Finder To Do Just About Anything By Typing Natural Language Commands, by Justin Pot, Wired

[Substage] floats under every Finder window, meaning you see it only when you're browsing files in macOS. You can type English-language sentences into it to do things like rename, convert, or compress files. The application uses the large language model to create a command, like what you could run in the Terminal. The application then shows it to you and asks whether you actually want to run it.

Cyberpunk 2077 Launching On Mac This Week, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition is a complete version of the open-world action RPG in which players control V, a mercenary operating in a futuristic city focused on power, technology, and body modification.

Notes

9-Year-Old Visual Novel Runs Just Fine But Apple Is Booting It From The App Store Anyway, by Ethan Gach, Kotaku

Wheels of Aurelia is a 2016 visual novel about a young woman on a road trip in 1970s Italy and the people she meets along the way, and it’s about to get delisted from the App Store. Developer Santa Ragione says Apple is doing that because the game hasn’t been updated in years, even though it’s feature-complete and runs just fine on modern iPhones, accusing the tech giant of undermining “cultural and artistic products” with arbitrary policies.

Apple Taught An AI Model To Reason About App Interfaces, by Marcus Mendes, 9to5Mac

A new Apple-backed study, in collaboration with Aalto University in Finland, introduces ILuvUI: a vision-language model trained to understand mobile app interfaces from screenshots and from natural language conversations.

Apple Likely To Be Banned From Selling iPhones Made With Chinese Displays, by Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac

Apple would be banned from the US sale of any iPhone whose display was made by China’s BOE, after the company was found to have stolen manufacturing techniques from Samsung.

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BOE makes only non-ProMotion displays, so Pro models would be unaffected, but other iPhone 16 models would be.

Bottom of the Page

I enjoy comedies, and I've watched four of the Emmy-nominated comedy series, and I feel that all of the four I've watched are great, but all I really want to say is this: The Bear is not a comedy series.

:-)

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And Apple has a good chance this year to win the Emmys for both drama and comedy series. (Severance and The Studio, respectively.) Both shows have also been renewed; let's hope the new seasons arrive in time to qualify for next year's Emmys.

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Thanks for reading.