Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for TechCrunch:

Almost four years after launching a security feature called Lockdown Mode, Apple says it has yet to see a case where someone’s device was hacked with these additional security protections switched on.

“We are not aware of any successful mercenary spyware attacks against a Lockdown Mode-enabled Apple device,” Apple spokesperson Sarah O’Rourke told TechCrunch on Friday.

Apple Newsroom:

Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.

Ads on Maps builds on Apple’s broader privacy-first approach to advertising, and maintains the same privacy protections Maps users enjoy today. A user’s location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user’s Apple Account. Personal data stays on a user’s device, is not collected or stored by Apple, and is not shared with third parties.

The privacy angle is good. I don’t want to take that for granted, because few, if any, of Apple’s $1-trillion-plus market cap peers have such devotion to user privacy.

But more and more it’s becoming clear that while Apple’s devotion to protecting user privacy remains as high as ever, their devotion to delivering the best possible user experience does not. Here’s Apple’s own screenshot showing what these ads are supposedly going to look like. It looks fine. But these ads seem highly unlikely to make the overall experience of using Apple Maps better. Perhaps, in practice, they will not make the experience worse, and it’ll be a wash. But I can’t help but suspect that they’re going to make the experience worse, and the question is really just how much worse. The addition of ads to the App Store has made the experience worse.

We shall see. I’m not going to prejudge the actual experience, and you shouldn’t either. I also do not begrudge Apple for wanting to monetize Maps. But if the addition of ads does make the Apple Maps experience worse, why won’t Apple let us buy our way out of seeing them? Netflix doesn’t force us to watch their ads. YouTube Premium is arguably the best bang-for-the-buck in the entire world of content subscriptions. Why should Apple One subscribers still see these ads in Apple Maps?

Todd Spangler, Variety:

Under the new pricing, effective March 26 for new users and rolling out to current customers depending on their billing cycle, Netflix’s Standard plan (which has no ads and provides streaming on two devices simultaneously) is rising by $2, from $17.99 to $19.99/month. The ad-supported plan is going up a buck, from $7.99 to $8.99/month, and the top-tier Premium plan (no ads, streaming on up to four devices at once, Ultra HD and HDR) is increasing from $24.99 to $26.99/month.

I pay the full $27/month because I’d rather cancel Netflix than watch ads, and I suspect I’d notice the difference between 4K and 1080p. But also because money runs through my fingers like water.

Safari is no longer breaking my menu-item-icon despising heart on MacOS 26 Tahoe, but the best trick to block the Tahoe “upgrade” notice on MacOS 15 Sequoia no longer works.

Chance Miller with a big scoop at 9to5Mac:

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

The Mac Pro has lived many lives over the years. Apple released the current Mac Pro industrial design in 2019 alongside the Pro Display XDR (which was also discontinued earlier this month). That version of the Mac Pro was powered by Intel, and Apple refreshed it with the M2 Ultra chip in June 2023. It has gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price point even as Apple debuted the M3 Ultra chip in the Mac Studio last year.

In the PowerPC era, the high-end Mac desktops were called Power Macs and the pro laptops were PowerBooks. With the transition to Intel CPUs in 2006, Apple changed the names to Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. But unlike the MacBook Pro — which has seen major revisions every few years and satisfying speed bumps on a regular basis, and which has thrived in the Apple Silicon era — the Mac Pro petered out after a few years.

After its 2006 introduction, there were speed bumps in 2008, 2009, 2010, and lastly — sort of — in 2012. So far so good. (The “sort of” two sentences back refers to the fact that the 2012 “update” was very minor, arguably closer to a price cut than a speed bump.) But then came the cylindrical “trash can” Mac Pro in 2013. Perhaps the fact that Apple pre-announced it at WWDC in June before releasing it in October put a curse on the name. The cylindrical Mac Pro was never updated, and Apple being Apple, where the price is part of the product’s brand, they never dropped the price either. This culminated in a small “roundtable” discussion I was invited to in 2017, where Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi laid out Apple’s plans for the future of pro Mac desktops. Step one was the iMac Pro, a remarkable machine but a one-off, that arrived in December 2017. Then came the rejuvenated Mac Pro in 2019, the last Intel-based model and the first with the fancy drilled-hole aluminum tower enclosure. After that, there was only one revision: the M2 Ultra model in June 2023.

So after 2012 — and arguably after 2010 — there was one trash can Mac Pro in 2013, one Intel “new tower” Mac Pro in 2019, and one Apple Silicon Mac Pro in 2023. No speed bumps in between any of them. Three revisions in the last 14 years. So, yeah, not a big shock that they’re just pulling the plug officially.