Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
YouTube updates its $7.99-per-month Premium Lite subscription to let users download videos for offline access and play videos in the background  —  YouTube is expanding its more affordable, $7.99 per month Premium Lite subscription service with new features, including the ability to download videos …

Ubisoft is making one of 2025's best strategy games, Anno 117: Pax Romana, free to play this weekend.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced a significant expansion of factory operations in Houston, bringing the future production of Mac mini to the U.S. for the first time. The company will also expand advanced AI server manufacturing at the factory and provide hands-on training at its new Advanced Manufacturing Center beginning later this year. Altogether, Apple’s Houston operations will create thousands of jobs.

See also: Rolfe Winkler at The Wall Street Journal (gift link, News+ link): “Inside Apple’s Push to Build an All-American Chip”.

Todd Bishop, writing at GeekWire:

Paul Brainerd, who went on to coin the term “desktop publishing” and build Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker into one of the defining programs of the personal computer era, died Sunday at his home on Bainbridge Island, Wash., after living for many years with Parkinson’s disease. He was 78 years old.

He left two legacies. The first was a piece of software that put the power of the printed page into the hands of millions of people who had never operated a typesetting machine. The second was a three-decade commitment to environmental conservation and philanthropy in the Pacific Northwest, pursuing it with the same intensity he brought to the desktop publishing revolution.

Friends and colleagues this week remembered Brainerd as a quiet, caring and detail-oriented leader with exacting standards. He insisted that PageMaker use proper curly quotation marks instead of straight ones, and obsessed over nuances such as kerning, the precise spacing between specific letter pairs.

PageMaker was years ahead of its time, and was essential to igniting the desktop publishing revolution.

Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors back on February 12:

In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, seen by the Financial Times, FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson cites recent press coverage of a report from conservative media watchdog Media Research Center (MRC), which claimed that Apple has promoted “leftist outlets” in its content choices.

The report in question by the MRC said that in January, Apple News “refrained from using any right-leaning outlets in the top 20 articles of its morning editions between Jan. 1 and Jan. 31, 2026.” The outlets named in the report include Fox News, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, Breitbart, and The Gateway Pundit.

The report went on to claim that Apple News was more favorable to outlets such as The Washington Post, The Associated Press, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal – publications that are traditionally considered either center outlets or nonpartisan.

I’d say they’re more traditionally considered trustworthy news sources, rather than propaganda outlets. Anyway, when you give a bully your lunch money — or, say, a 24-karat gold trophy emblazoned with your company’s logo — they always come back for more.