Verizon, in an announcement on Twitter/X regarding their daylong outage this week:

Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence you expect and that we expect of ourselves. To help provide some relief to those affected, we will give you a $20 account credit that can be easily redeemed by logging into the myVerizon app. You will receive a text message when the credit is available. On average, this covers multiple days of service. Business customers will be contacted directly about their credits.

This credit isn’t meant to make up for what happened. No credit really can. But it’s a way of acknowledging your time and showing that this matters to us.

I got the text message last night (screenshot), and redeemed it this morning. It wasn’t too hard to redeem, partly because I already had the My Verizon app installed and had my account credentials saved.

But you know what would actually be easy, and would actually acknowledge our time and show that this really matters to Verizon? If they just took $20 off every customer’s next bill. Automatic. Just take $20 off next month. If a good restaurant screws up an item you ordered, they apologize and take the item off your bill (and maybe give you a free dessert or something). They don’t give you a code to redeem.

It would also better show that they care if the text message spelled the app “My Verizon”, which is the app’s actual name.

As for how many days of service $20 covers, we pay $329/month for a “5G Do More” family plan for me, my wife, and son. Three phones, three Apple Watches, and two iPads. (I’m the one without a cellular iPad plan, because I so seldom use an iPad.) That’s about $11/day. Verizon only sent us one $20 credit, not three, so that covers roughly two days of service — which is, indeed, multiple days.

By and large, iPhone owners do not care about third-party app marketplaces and they care even less about third-party browser engines. Popular demand isn’t going to come about from additional regulatory mandates or pocket-change fines imposed on Apple.

I’d been anticipating the Apple Watch SE 3 for a while because I wanted: A faster watch—I was happy with the original SE’s functionality, but it always felt slow. Longer battery life—I had started to need Low Power Mode to get through longer days. The ability to run newer software—the original SE was stuck at […]

OpenAI:

With this launch, ChatGPT now offers three subscription tiers globally:

• ChatGPT Go at $8 USD/month
• ChatGPT Plus at $20 USD/month
• ChatGPT Pro at $200 USD/month

And perhaps the bigger news:

We plan to begin testing ads in the free tier and ChatGPT Go in the US soon. Ads support our commitment to making AI accessible to everyone by helping us keep ChatGPT available at free and affordable price points.

Their pricing page has a comparison chart showing the differences in their four consumer tiers (free, Go, Plus, Pro). Screenshot, for posterity. The big difference that will keep me on the $20/month Plus plan for now is that the Go plan doesn’t have access to the Thinking model.

Keith Broni, writing at Emojipedia, has a good illustrated survey of how most emoji sets have converged in meaning — almost entirely toward Apple’s designs:

There are several structural reasons why Apple’s designs so often become the gravitational center of emoji convergence.

First, Apple is widely regarded as the “default” emoji design set in the West. This status dates back to 2008, when Apple introduced emoji support on the iPhone years before emoji were formally incorporated into Unicode.

It’s also the case that Apple’s emoji icons are the best, and they’re the most consistent. The only ones Apple has changed the meaning of are ones where the Unicode Consortium has changed or clarified the standard description. The pistol emoji is the exception that proves the rule. Apple, and Apple alone, changed its pistol emoji (🔫) from a realistic firearm to a green plastic squirt gun in 2016. By 2018, all the other major emoji sets had changed their pistols from firearms to plastic toys — almost all of them green squirt guns in particular. (Broni’s post documents this progression year by year.)

One thing that remains interesting to me is that Apple left its emoji style alone when they instituted the great flattening with iOS 7. Apple’s emoji icons are, loosely, in the style of Apple’s application and toolbar icon designs from the Aqua era. People love emoji, and at this point, changing their style to something that felt aligned with the icon designs for Apple’s version 26 OSes would generate outrage. But if Apple were to change its icon style back to this rich 3D textured style, the majority of users wouldn’t object — they’d think it was fun.

Basically, Apple’s emoji style is fun. Apple’s icon style is no-fun. People like having fun.