Jason Foster, reporting for MLB.com:

Nine-inning games during the 2025 season have, on average, clocked in at 2 hours, 38 minutes through Thursday, marking the third straight season in which the average game time was 2:40 or shorter.

Regular Season nine-inning @MLB games of three hours and thirty minutes (3:30) or longer:

• 2021: 391
• 2022: 232
• 2023: 9
• 2024: 7
• 2025: 3 (through 9/25)

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) September 26, 2025

The trend marks the first time since 1983-85 that the average nine-inning game time was 2:40 or shorter in three consecutive seasons. The average nine-inning game time was 2:36 last season and 2:40 in 2023.

I disagree with many of MLB’s recent rules changes (e.g. the 10th-inning “Manfred Man” ghost runners), but the pitch clock and limit on mound visits have been unambiguous changes for the better. They don’t make the game feel hurried at all, but prior to the pitch clock, the game often felt ponderous.

New Mac app from Martin Lexow, the developer behind App Ahead (which offers a slew of good and intriguing Mac apps):

Preview folder and archive contents (ZIP, RAR, and more) instantly in macOS Quick Look. Just select a folder and press the Space bar.

It’s just that simple. Install it from the Mac App Store — free of charge — and you can Quick Look inside archives and folders. Looks, feels, and works like a feature that ought to be built into the Finder itself. Cool.

Adobe:

Today, Adobe announced that the company is bringing its industry leading Adobe Premiere video editor to mobile in a powerful new iPhone app that empowers creators to make pro-quality video on the go. The Adobe Premiere mobile app makes it fast, free and intuitive for creators to edit their videos with precision editing on a lightning-fast multi-track timeline, produce studio-quality audio with crystal clear voiceovers and perfectly timed AI sound effects, generate unique content and access millions of free multimedia assets, and send work directly to Premiere desktop for fine tuning further on a larger screen. The new mobile app offers all the video editing essentials for free, with upgrades available for additional generative credits and storage.

It’s a little thing, but from Adobe’s press release, you’d think this new mobile version of Premiere is only available for iOS, but, as you’d hope, it’s in fact a universal app that properly supports iPadOS too. The word “iPad” doesn’t appear in Adobe’s press release.

(Via Michael Tsai.)

Anna Gross and Tim Bradshaw, reporting for the Financial Times (updated link to a syndicated version at Ars Technica, outside the FT’s parsimonious paywall):

The UK government has ordered Apple to allow access to encrypted cloud backups of British users, after a previous attempt to issue a broader demand that included US customers drew a furious backlash from the Trump administration.

The UK Home Office demanded in early September that Apple create a backdoor into users’ cloud storage service, but stipulated that the order applied only to British citizens’ data, according to people briefed on the matter. [...]

In February, Apple withdrew its most secure cloud storage service, iCloud Advanced Data Protection, from the UK.

“Apple is still unable to offer Advanced Data Protection in the United Kingdom to new users,” Apple said on Wednesday. “We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP are not available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy.” It added: “As we have said many times before, we have never built a back door or master key to any of our products or services and we never will.”

This is, as I understand it, a demand from the UK government to allow warrantless access to all UK citizens’ iCloud backups. And your iCloud backups, once decrypted, contain just about everything on your device. With Apple unable to offer Advanced Data Protection in the UK, if Apple complies, there’s no way around it. And, to make it even worse, the perversity of the UK Investigatory Powers Act is such that it’s a crime for Apple to even say they’ve been issued such a demand, to warn their UK users about it. Just brutal. The UK government could not be more wrong about this stance.

Hayden Field, The Verge:

OpenAI has a new version of the Sora AI video generator that it launched at the end of last year, and it’s arriving today alongside a new social video app, also called Sora, for iPhones. The currently invite-only app resembles TikTok with a feed of videos you can shuffle through. But instead of encouraging people to stitch together duets, it asks you to record short videos that anyone can spin into new AI-generated deepfakes — with your consent.

In a briefing with reporters on Monday, employees called it the potential “ChatGPT moment for video generation.” The Sora app is currently only available to US and Canada users, with other countries set to follow, and when someone receives access, they also get four additional invites to share with friends. There’s no word on when an Android version might be released.

Sora, though invitation-only at the moment, is currently #3 in the U.S. App Store. Meta’s Meta AI app, which contains, in a tab, their Vibes AI-generated video feed, is #97.

Also, I’m sure Sora will eventually come to Android. But, to play with it now, you need an iPhone. So tell me again how Apple is behind on AI? If you have an Android phone, you’re behind on everything except what Google itself offers (which, admittedly, is some great stuff). If you have an iPhone, you’re ahead on everything except what’s baked into iOS. Including the fact that the #1 app on the App Store today is ... Google Gemini.