Starting with a few words on the new app icons.

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.