Blockbuster sports streaming news from Apple Newsroom:

Apple and Formula 1 today announced a five-year partnership that will bring all F1 races exclusively to Apple TV in the United States beginning next year. [...]

Apple TV will deliver comprehensive coverage of Formula 1, with all practice, qualifying, Sprint sessions, and Grands Prix available to Apple TV subscribers. Select races and all practice sessions will also be available for free in the Apple TV app throughout the course of the season. In addition to broadcasting Formula 1 on Apple TV, Apple will amplify the sport across Apple News, Apple Maps, Apple Music, and Apple Fitness+. Apple Sports — the free app for iPhone — will feature live updates for every qualifying, Sprint, and race for each Grand Prix across the season, with real-time leaderboards, season driver and constructor standings, Live Activities to follow on the Lock Screen, and a designated widget for the iPhone Home Screen.

F1 TV Premium, F1’s own premier content offering, will continue to be available in the U.S. via an Apple TV subscription only and will be free for those who subscribe.

If I’m reading this right, all you need to get access to everything F1-related is an Apple TV subscription (the service formerly known as TV+) and to be in the US. This even includes F1 TV Premium — normally $130/year — which Jason Snell wrote about in a piece I linked to earlier this week.

Basically, this sounds like the sort of sports broadcasting deal that Eddy Cue has been talking about as Apple’s goal for years — the rights to the entire sport, free of charge if you’re an Apple TV subscriber.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 chip does not include a charger in the box in European countries, including the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, and others, according to Apple’s online store. In the U.S. and all other countries outside of Europe, the new MacBook Pro comes with Apple’s 70W USB-C Power Adapter, but European customers miss out.

Apple has gradually stopped including chargers with many products over the years — a decision it has attributed to its environmental goals.

In this case, an Apple spokesperson told French website Numerama’s Nicolas Lellouche that the decision to not include a charger with this particular MacBook Pro was made in anticipation of a European regulation that will require Apple to provide customers with the option to purchase certain devices without a charger in the box, starting in April.

I’m not sure why there’s no power adapter in the box in the UK (I double-checked). The cited regulation is for the EU, and the UK, rather famously, left the EU in 2020.

But, still, amazing stuff continues to happen in Europe.

Good and thoughtful graphic essay by Matthew Inman, expressing why he dislikes AI-generated art. It’s been widely linked to, largely approvingly. I fundamentally disagree with the premise. Near the start, Inman writes:

When I consume AI art, it also evokes a feeling. Good, bad, neutral — whatever.

Until I find out that it’s AI art.

Then I feel deflated, grossed out, and maybe a little bit bored. This feeling isn’t a choice.

I think it very much is a choice. If your opinion about a work of art changes after you find out which tools were used to make it, or who the artist is or what they’ve done, you’re no longer judging the art. You’re making a choice not to form your opinion based on the work itself, but rather on something else. If you refuse to watch Woody Allen movies because of his personal life, that’s a choice, but you’re choosing not to watch some of the best movies that have ever been made.

Stanley Kubrick said, “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.” If an image, a song, a poem, or video evokes affection in your heart, and then that affection dissipates when you learn what tools were used to create it, that’s not a test of the work of art itself. To me it’s no different than losing affection for a movie only upon learning that special effects were created digitally, not practically. Or whether a movie — or a photograph — was shot using a digital camera or on film. Or whether a novel was written using a computer or with pen and paper.

I think most “AI art” today completely sucks. But not because it was made using AI generation tools. It just sucks period. Good art is being made with AI tools, though, and more — much more — is coming.

Thoughts and observations on the new M5 MacBook Pro, iPad Pros, and Vision Pro.

Luke Bouma, writing for Cord Cutters:

In a seismic shift for the television industry, TiVo Corporation has quietly pulled the plug on its storied digital video recorder line, effectively ending an era that redefined how consumers interacted with broadcast content. As of early October 2025, the company’s official website has scrubbed all references to its hardware DVR products, including the once-revered TiVo Edge models designed for cable subscribers and over-the-air antenna users. Visitors searching for these devices now encounter a streamlined catalog that omits any mention of physical recording hardware, signaling a complete withdrawal from the retail DVR market.

This move culminates decades of gradual decline for TiVo’s hardware ambitions, which peaked in the early 2000s when the brand became synonymous with effortless time-shifting of television programming. Launched in 1999, TiVo’s DVRs introduced features like one-touch recording, commercial skipping, and intuitive search capabilities that made traditional TV schedules feel obsolete. At its zenith, the company boasted millions of subscribers, forcing cable providers and networks to adapt to empowered viewers who could pause live broadcasts or binge-watch at will. The TiVo Edge, introduced in 2021 as a hybrid device supporting both cable cards and streaming, represented the final evolution of this hardware legacy, blending OTA tuners with 4K support and expanded storage options. Yet, even as it garnered praise for superior interface design and reliability, sales dwindled amid the cord-cutting revolution.

The writing has been on the wall for years. We’ve been a TiVo house for 25 years, but their hardware has gotten worse over the years. I forget what our second-to-last TiVo model was, but it died in 2021, and we bought a TiVo Edge. The Edge was often unreliable, and sometimes needed weekly reboots to keep working. (System software updates eventually fixed that.) But the hardware failed this summer. We’d only had it four years.

And, the Edge system software UI was a disaster, and a huge regression from the old TiVo interface. Almost everything was worse in the new “modern” TiVo interface from the old one: navigating shows you’d already recorded, the live-right-now TV guide, the interface for setting up a show to record — all of that went from really good and intuitive to clunky and confusing and slow. The one and only thing our TiVo Edge remained excellent at was playback. Fast-forwarding, rewinding, pausing — nothing else compares to TiVo for that. Even Apple’s own TV app on an Apple TV box doesn’t fast-forward or rewind with anything close to the precision and low latency TiVo’s devices have always offered. My first TiVo from 25 years ago had better fast-forward and rewind than anything on Apple TV (let alone other, lesser streaming boxes) today.

But the overall TiVo experience has been so bad — and getting worse — for so long that I’m not sad at all that they’re getting out of the game. TiVo’s one job was to provide a best-of-breed experience and they lost the plot on that a decade ago. Fuck ’em.