Marcus Mendes (MacRumors, Hacker News, TidBITS-Talk, Mac Power Users): Affinity has announced a complete overhaul of its design suite. Starting today, the company is unifying all its tools into a single app for vector, photo, and layout work, and making it permanently free.[…]Here’s Ash Hewson, CEO of Affinity:“There’s no catch, no stripped-back version, and no […]

Apple (transcript, MacRumors, MacStories, Hacker News): “Today, Apple is very proud to report a September quarter revenue record of $102.5 billion, including a September quarter revenue record for iPhone and an all-time revenue record for Services,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. […] “Our September quarter results capped off a record fiscal year, with revenue reaching […]

Holly Borla: Swift 6.2 enables streaming transactional state changes of observable types using the new Observations async sequence type. Updates include all synchronous changes to the observable properties, and the transaction ends at the next await that suspends. This avoids redundant UI updates, improves performance, and ensures that your code reacts to a consistent snapshot […]

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

In the post-results call with financial analysts, Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America asked Cook for a little more detail about Apple’s search revenue, given its lucrative deal with Google, and whether that revenue growth might decelerate if Google’s search traffic were to be impacted by the growth of AI. Cook’s response was, if I do say so myself, an all-timer for these calls:

Cook: This is Tim. The advertising category, which is a combination of third-party and first-party, did set a record during the quarter.

Mohan: Okay, and sorry, just to be clear, both Apple’s own internal advertising and within the licensing individually set records?

Cook: I actually I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that the combination of the two set a record. We don’t divulge — I’m dodging the question intentionally because we don’t split it at that level.

Look, these calls are almost entirely Apple execs dodging the questions of fiscal analysts. At least Tim Cook admitted it this time. You want to know how much Google is paying us and if that’s growing or shrinking? Well, I’m not gonna tell you!

If Apple’s quarterly analyst calls were a podcast, “Dodging the Question Intentionally” would be a great episode title for this one.

Matt Rosoff, writing for The Register:

If Microsoft owns 27 percent of OpenAI, it stands to reason under equity accounting that it bears 27 percent of OpenAI’s losses. Microsoft’s admission that it shaved $3.1 billion off its net income to account for its share of OpenAI losses therefore suggests OpenAI lost about $11.5 billion during the quarter. Microsoft declined to comment beyond confirming that the $3.1 billion loss “this year” referred to Microsoft’s current fiscal year, which started July 1, not the calendar year. So that’s a quarterly loss, not a nine-month loss.

That’s a humongous number for OpenAI given it reportedly generated only $4.3 billion in revenue for the first half of the year, but a sum that won’t hurt Big Daddy Redmond too much given it earned $27.7 billion in net income in the last quarter alone.

A pre-IPO startup is a different animal from an established publicly-held corporation, but an $11.5 billion quarterly loss is quite different from the $20–30-ish billion quarterly profits booked by the big six.