2026-01-17 06:41:57
Verizon, in an announcement on Twitter/X regarding their daylong outage this week:
Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence you expect and that we expect of ourselves. To help provide some relief to those affected, we will give you a $20 account credit that can be easily redeemed by logging into the myVerizon app. You will receive a text message when the credit is available. On average, this covers multiple days of service. Business customers will be contacted directly about their credits.
This credit isn’t meant to make up for what happened. No credit really can. But it’s a way of acknowledging your time and showing that this matters to us.
I got the text message last night (screenshot), and redeemed it this morning. It wasn’t too hard to redeem, partly because I already had the My Verizon app installed and had my account credentials saved.
But you know what would actually be easy, and would actually acknowledge our time and show that this really matters to Verizon? If they just took $20 off every customer’s next bill. Automatic. Just take $20 off next month. If a good restaurant screws up an item you ordered, they apologize and take the item off your bill (and maybe give you a free dessert or something). They don’t give you a code to redeem.
It would also better show that they care if the text message spelled the app “My Verizon”, which is the app’s actual name.
As for how many days of service $20 covers, we pay $329/month for a “5G Do More” family plan for me, my wife, and son. Three phones, three Apple Watches, and two iPads. (I’m the one without a cellular iPad plan, because I so seldom use an iPad.) That’s about $11/day. Verizon only sent us one $20 credit, not three, so that covers roughly two days of service — which is, indeed, multiple days.
2026-01-17 05:17:57
Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors:
The service will officially cease operating on February 16, 2026. Setapp Mobile launched in open beta in September 2024.
In a support page, MacPaw said Setapp Mobile is being closed because of app marketplaces’ “still-evolving and complex business terms that don’t fit Setapp’s current business model,” suggesting it was not profitable for the company.
For users in the EU who accessed iOS apps through Setapp’s subscription store, those apps will be removed from the platform after the shutdown date. Setapp advises users to back up any important data before then, as the apps will no longer be available once the service ends. Setapp’s separate subscription-based Mac app store will continue to operate as normal.
Steve Troughton-Smith, on Mastodon:
Clear indicator that Apple’s DMA implementation never actually met its obligations under the DMA in the first place. Apple scared developers away from ever signing up to their poison pill Core Technology Fee terms, so alternative app stores simply have no apps to offer.
It’s kind of the same situation as BrowserEngineKit. Apple is going to say that they did all this work and there was no adoption, so that proves the EU was wrong; there’s no demand because customers prefer Apple’s “protections.” The developers will say that Apple designed third-party browsers and marketplaces to fail, or at least didn’t care very much about solving the reported problems; they tried their best in spite of this, but it wasn’t enough. I guess at some point the EU will decide whether it thinks there was malicious compliance.
My take is that none of these things had any chance of success. It’s not the Core Technology Fee in particular that doomed EU app marketplaces to obscurity. It’s the fact that Apple doesn’t think app marketplaces are a good idea, users are not clamoring for them, and the EU just isn’t a big enough market to matter on its own. If the U.S. mandated that Apple allow third-party app marketplaces, that might be enough to generate enough support from developers to matter. Probably not, but maybe. But just the EU, and now Japan? Nope. But that sort of mandate is unlikely to come from the U.S. because there isn’t popular demand for it.
The EU can force Apple to enable things like alternative app marketplaces and browser engines on iOS. They can’t force Apple to make them available outside the EU. Nor can they somehow force Apple to make them popular even within the EU — either with users or developers. It’s just bureaucratic folly. Legislation and regulation based on ideals, not practical reality. The core problem with these mandates from the EU is that they’re not based on demand from users. Users don’t care about third-party browser rendering engines. Users don’t even know what third-party browser rendering engines are. Users, by and large, not only are not asking for third-party app marketplaces for iOS, they in fact prefer the App Store’s role as the exclusive source for third-party software. The mandates from the DMA that Apple most strenuously objects to — and thus complies with the most begrudgingly — are based on the desires of Apple’s competitors (like Meta and Spotify) and web developer advocates who object to closed platforms on ideological grounds, not the popular demands of EU citizens who own iPhones.
Apple is getting away what some describe as “malicious compliance” because they’re under no popular demand from their actual customers to comply in any other way. If Apple’s DMA compliance features were unpopular, the outcry might force them to adapt in popular ways. But the only things that register as popular or unpopular are things people care about. By and large, iPhone owners do not care about third-party app marketplaces and they care even less about third-party browser engines. Popular demand isn’t going to come about from additional regulatory mandates or pocket-change fines imposed on Apple.
Anyone who does care about these things, and wants to see iOS change to enable them to thrive, should focus their efforts on creating popular demand for them. Good luck with that.
2026-01-17 03:59:53
OpenAI:
With this launch, ChatGPT now offers three subscription tiers globally:
- ChatGPT Go at $8 USD/month
- ChatGPT Plus at $20 USD/month
- ChatGPT Pro at $200 USD/month
And perhaps the bigger news:
We plan to begin testing ads in the free tier and ChatGPT Go in the US soon. Ads support our commitment to making AI accessible to everyone by helping us keep ChatGPT available at free and affordable price points.
Their pricing page has a comparison chart showing the differences in their four consumer tiers (free, Go, Plus, Pro). Screenshot, for posterity. The big difference that will keep me on the $20/month Plus plan for now is that the Go plan doesn’t have access to the Thinking model.
2026-01-16 23:20:25
Keith Broni, writing at Emojipedia, has a good illustrated survey of how most emoji sets have converged in meaning — almost entirely toward Apple’s designs:
There are several structural reasons why Apple’s designs so often become the gravitational center of emoji convergence.
First, Apple is widely regarded as the “default” emoji design set in the West. This status dates back to 2008, when Apple introduced emoji support on the iPhone years before emoji were formally incorporated into Unicode.
It’s also the case that Apple’s emoji icons are the best, and they’re the most consistent. The only ones Apple has changed the meaning of are ones where the Unicode Consortium has changed or clarified the standard description. The pistol emoji is the exception that proves the rule. Apple, and Apple alone, changed its pistol emoji (🔫) from a realistic firearm to a green plastic squirt gun in 2016. By 2018, all the other major emoji sets had changed their pistols from firearms to plastic toys — almost all of them green squirt guns in particular. (Broni’s post documents this progression year by year.)
One thing that remains interesting to me is that Apple left its emoji style alone when they instituted the great flattening with iOS 7. Apple’s emoji icons are, loosely, in the style of Apple’s application and toolbar icon designs from the Aqua era. People love emoji, and at this point, changing their style to something that felt aligned with the icon designs for Apple’s version 26 OSes would generate outrage. But if Apple were to change its icon style back to this rich 3D textured style, the majority of users wouldn’t object — they’d think it was fun.
Basically, Apple’s emoji style is fun. Apple’s icon style is no-fun. People like having fun.
2026-01-15 08:08:25
Matt Richman, back in 2012:
In 2009, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007 and 2008 combined. In 2010, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007, 2008, and 2009 combined. Last year, Apple sold 93.1 million iPhones, slightly more than it did in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 combined. The pattern continued.
I referenced this old post earlier today, attempting to put into context Meta’s “leak” that they’ve got concepts of a plan to ramp Meta Glasses production up to 20 million units per year. It’s easy to forget — or if you’re young enough, to just accept as history — just how astonishing the growth of the iPhone was in its early years. Every year wasn’t just bigger than the previous year — it was bigger than all previous years combined. Year after year. That pattern only ended after Apple had run out of new countries, new carriers, and new customers to introduce it to.
There’s never been a product like it before, and quite possibly never will be again. In January 2007 no one had ever even seen a device like an iPhone. By 2015 or so, almost everyone in the world who could afford one either had an iPhone or they had an Android phone that looked and worked like an iPhone.
2026-01-15 07:17:02
Karissa Bell, Engadget:
Several of Meta’s VR studios have been affected by the company’s metaverse-focused layoffs. The company has shuttered three of its VR studios, including Armature, Sanzaru and Twisted Pixel. VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer be updated with fresh content.
Employees at Twisted Pixel, which released Marvel’s Deadpool VR in November, and Sanzaru, known for Asgard’s Wrath, posted on social media about the closures. Bloomberg reported that Armature, which brought Resident Evil 4 to Quest back in 2021 has also closed and that the popular VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer get updates.
“Due to recent organizational changes to our Studio, Supernatural will no longer receive new content or feature updates starting today,” the company wrote in an update on Facebook. The app “will remain active” for existing users. [...]
The cuts raise questions about Meta’s commitment to supporting a VR ecosystem it has invested heavily in.
Raises questions, indeed! It was only four years ago that Mark Zuckerberg renamed the company from Facebook to Meta and proclaimed the entire company would now be “metaverse-first”.
A reader told me today that a friend of his who works (well, worked) at one of Meta’s now-shuttered VR studios was vaguely concerned just last weekend because he suspected “about 20 percent” of the company to be laid off. Not him, but probably some people he was required to stack-rank. Turns out he was correct to be worried but his “about 20 percent” guess was off by ... checks with calculator ... about 80 percent. People within Meta who believed Zuckerberg’s public statements have clearly been caught flat-footed by the fact that he’s clearly lost all interest in VR and the so-called metaverse.
The workout app Supernatural is a perfect example. Meta announced their intention to acquire Supernatural in 2021, at the start of their all-in-on-the-metaverse phase, for $400 million. They battled the FTC for approval and it finally went through in February 2023. Now, less than three years later, they’re shutting it down. Devoted Supernatural users are, unsurprisingly, not happy.
It really does raise questions about Meta’s commitment.
