Apple has a design for AI life. It hopes to build on the outstanding hardware performance its systems already provide to create a fantastic environment in which AI developers can thrive. If this plan sounds familiar it’s because it’s all about the App Store, and while it’s easy to expect Apple’s revenue share to change, the plan still makes the company the custodian of the AI age.
The way it should work is if app developers see that one way to bring their AI services to billions of iPhones, iPad, and Mac users is to make AI agents available via Apple’s own portals. These will likely be via App Intents, enabling Siri to execute actions inside their apps without actively opening them.
The Information reports some developers are resistant to joining the initiative, in part because they want to avoid paying any fees. All the same, consider the moment, consider the meaning, and I think the significance is that Apple has at last got its act together with AI.
Ecosystem, services, store
Apple
Apple’s key manufacturing partner Foxconn has confirmed its US factories suffered a ransomware attack in recent days after the gang responsible claimed to have stolen 8TB of data from the company — including confidential Apple information.
This isn’t the first attack to hit Foxconn, and such is the scale and value of the company that it is unlikely to be the last. Criminals understand the value of the information it has and see it as a prime target. That it is an industrial company actively deploying smart factory infrastructure across its premises just makes it an even more interesting challenge; what happens if the machinery itself is attacked?
Industrial defenses have improved; so have attacks
In practice, most large industrial facilities are moving to secure their own internal factory networks using technologies such as SD-WAN, private 5G networks, network segregation, isolation of production environments from the corporate network, and active monitoring against threats to factory
Invitation to be part of group including Elon Musk and Tim Cook highlights American AI and tech ambitions
The billionaire chief executive of the chipmaker Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has joined Donald Trump’s China delegation after a reported last-minute invitation, highlighting the US’s AI and tech ambitions.
Huang will join a roster of US bosses including the Tesla chief executive and X owner, Elon Musk, the Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, and Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon at Trump’s 36-hour meeting with the China president, Xi Jinping.
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The FTC's enforcement of the Take It Down Act signals increased regulatory scrutiny on tech giants, potentially reshaping digital privacy norms.
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Apple's stock resilience amid geopolitical tensions highlights its ability to mitigate economic risks, influencing market confidence and dynamics.
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The FTC's action signals increased regulatory scrutiny on tech giants, potentially reshaping compliance norms and privacy safeguards industry-wide.
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As Apple heads toward next month’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), cast your mind back almost 30 years. That’s when something happened that arguably put events in motion that led to Apple becoming the company it is today. That was when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs returned to the top job at WWDC 1997 — the first such event after Apple acquired NeXT.
The big debt to NS
It took until 2000 to fully realize what the NeXT purchase meant; that’s when the Mac OS X Public Beta was released. The operating system has seen many twists and turns since then, but the NeXTStep OS acquisition forms the basis on which the Apple software ecosystem has been built. Mac, iPhone, iPad – even Apple Watch and Vision Pro – all share elements of it.
You can see its traces each time you use an application that makes use of a macOS API that uses the NS — ‘NeXTStep’ prefix. That means you’re using NeXT when you work in SwiftUI, use Apple’s core frameworks, or write code for use across different platforms in
If you haven’t heard of Arm, you haven’t been paying attention to how ubiquitous the chipmaker has become. Arm’s processor designs power Macs, iPhones, and every other major smartphone line. Queries made through ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude pass through an Arm-based chip at some point.
For more than 40 years, Arm’s focus was on chip design. Major device and AI chip makers then licensed those designs and turned them into hardware.
But the company’s focus is changing: Arm is now making hardware using its own AGI CPU, which OpenAI and Meta will use and which will allow the chipmaker itself to compete with the likes of Apple, Intel, Nvidia, Amazon and Google.
Arm’s envisions its new Performix software suite using “recipes” and AI insights to help engineers identify suspect code and CPU hotspots.
Alex Spinelli, who leads Arm’s software initiatives as senior vice president for AI and developer platforms, is as AI-native an engineer as you’ll find; he played a central role in the TensorFlow st
Apple’s platforms are secure by design, but when it comes to authentication, the company seems to be protecting employees more than it protects IT admins. It’s an attack vector just waiting to be exploited — if it hasn’t been already.
As noted first by Six Colors, the problem is that administrator and People Manager accounts on Apple Business Manager (ABM) can’t sign in using federated authentication, even though they manage the federation process for everyone else.
What are the implications?
What this means in practice is that when admins engage with the authentication process, they need to do so using non-federated Apple Account sign-in with Apple’s two‑factor authentication (typically via a trusted device or trusted phone number using SMS/voice). That’s weird; it means the key accounts that manage protection for sometimes thousands of devices are still only protected by a six-digit SMS code sent to a specified phone number. We know that SMS authentication is risky, with three well-