Oliver Darcy, reporting for Status (paywalled, alas):

According to the data obtained by Status, BI ended 2023 with roughly 160,000 paid subscribers, a drop of about 14 percent from the prior year when it boasted about 185,000 subscribers. The slide did not stop there, however. In 2024, it closed the year with roughly 150,000 subscribers, a further six percent decline. And in 2025, the number fell again, to about 135,000 paid subscribers — another 10 percent drop.

All told, over roughly three years, BI saw its subscription base plummet by about 50,000, or a jarring 27 percent.

Not the sort of momentum you want.

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 unquestionably 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.

Chance Miller (Hacker News, Mac Power Users, Slashdot): 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 […]