Commotion of Apple links for the week ending October 28, 2025
Not exactly an avalanche of Apple news this week. The good stuff was well-worth my writing about at length on the site.
If you've been following the exciting "Andy Improves His AppleScripts For Creating These Things" adventure: I no longer need to step in when one of two specific edge-case situations pop up. I've added a couple of new tweaks! It was easyish because the goal of the recent Big Total Rewrite was to tidy everything up, change the flow of the script to make it way more modular (and hence easier to swap out or modify any one module), and let me dive back into it more quickly. ⓘ
Earnings Call
Apple results: Holiday dunks and questions dodged
https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/10/apple-results-holiday-dunks-and-questions-dodged/
To sum up: If Apple were a single human, and they were ordering a takeout burrito, and they had an impulse to add guac, but the menu board they’re ordering off of didn’t say how much that would add to the cost of the burrito…yes, Apple had a strong enough quarter that they would just order the guac without worrying about it.
All the records Apple said it broke in Q4 2025
https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/10/30/here-are-all-the-records-apple-said-broke-in-q4-2025-on-the-earnings-call
If Tim had done any more dunkin’ about breaking records, he’d have been wearing an orange visor and handing out iced coffees through a drive-up window.
OS 26.1
Apple releases macOS Tahoe 26.1, here’s everything new
https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/03/macos-tahoe-26-1-released/
Yup, it’s worth the update. Congratulations for having done the smart thing instead of installing the Point Zero release. Tell me: what is it like to be able to launch apps from the Spotlight window? Is it still wonderful? At this point, I’ve nearly forgotten…
Apple releases iOS 26.1 for iPhone with these changes
https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/03/apple-releases-ios-26-1-for-iphone-with-these-changes/
Apple’s “Okay, maybe we were a little hasty about forcing some of these changes on you…” update. Sure, go ahead, citizen: dial the Liquid Glass effect all the way down to Zero if y’like.
Apple releases iPadOS 26.1, here’s everything new
https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/03/apple-releases-ipados-26-1-heres-everything-new/
Apple’s “Okay, maybe we were a little hasty about forcing some of these changes on you…” update, iPad Edition. Sure, go ahead, citizen: you can use Slide-Over Multitasking again if y’like. (Which makes me happy. Sometimes I don’t need another app window or tile. I just need to a certain app to be right there when I need it.)
AI (Also, AI)
[via Gurman] Apple’s new Siri will secretly use Google Gemini models behind the scenes
https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/03/apple-iphone-new-siri-google-gemini-deal/
I’ve got a full post about this. From an Apple perspective, this is great news and a relief. From a Google perspective, this is just further validation of their strategy and their position.
Pico-Banana-400K: A Large-Scale Dataset for Text-Guided Image Editing
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/pico-banana
Apple used Google Gemini Nano Banana to create a huge training set of triplet images for training AI image editors: a “before” image, a prompt for an image edit, and an “after” image. Released it on GitHub.
Company
Paywalled How Tim Cook Evaded Disaster at Apple This Year
https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-2025-tim-cook-36af914a
In summary: smooching butt in the Oval Office, sending Eddy Cue to testify in Google’s defense during the antitrust remedy hearings and thus helping protect the $20b Apple gets every year from the Google deal, the iPhone 17, services revenue. Tim very much Knows What He’s Doing and proves it every quarter.
Tim Cook just turned 65, renewing speculation about his successor as CEO
https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/04/tim-cook-just-turned-65-renewing-speculation-about-his-successor-as-ceo/
I will Speculate that Tim Cook will remain CEO for as long as he is physically fit to do so. He has one of those Apple Watch things. So I reckon that he won’t be leaving for the foreseeable future. I’m just putting this in here to send Happy Birthday greetings to my fellow “loyal, passionate, intense, strong, and independent” (according to no less of an authority than Cosmopolitan’s staff horoscope contributor) Scorpio.
Big Tech lobby budgets hit record levels
https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/10/big-tech-lobby-budgets-hit-record-levels
Corporate Europe Observatory (a watchdog) lists spending and access in EU lobbying efforts. Apple tied for second with Microsoft and Amazon, way behind Meta. $7M in spending doesn’t seem like an immensity for a $4 trillion company. But it’s effective, and the spend is increasing, as is the number of visits to EU staff and European Parliament members. And tech lobbying outstrips other kinds by a big margin. Naturally. They’re running out of time to disembowel regulatory limits on how much damage US companies can inflict on EU citizens through AI services.
Apple One Gets New Colorful Logo Following Apple TV Rebrand [Updated]
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/03/apple-one-new-logo/
Everybody was excited about this because they thought it was a brand-new logo. It turns out that it had made an earlier appearance that had gone mostly unnoticed. But it’s cool! I’d love to see Apple play with the logo, like how Google lets its own logo off the leash from time to time. As-is, Apple only does this kind of thing when they send out invites for media events.
The Future, Soon
Paywalled Apple Plans MacBook Air, iPad Air and iPad Mini With Overhauled Displays
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-28/apple-plans-oled-for-ipad-mini-ipad-air-macbook-air-mini-water-resistance
OLED on everything but the cheapest iPad. Yay! Gurman also says Apple plans to bring iPhone-style water resistance to the iPad Mini, which sounds like a terrific and overdue move. The Mini is a real scrapper: it’s used plenty in medicine, field work, and by pilots. Durability is highly relevant.
Showbiz
Finneas on Creating a New Mnemonic Intro for Apple Originals — His Shortest Music Ever, but Possibly Soon to Be the Most Ubiquitous (EXCLUSIVE)
https://variety.com/2025/music/news/finneas-discusses-apple-tv-originals-mnemonic-intro-1236568433/
Fabulous deep-dive into something so simple…a tiny blip of music to accompany a logo! And yet, as the ID that will be earwormed into every episodic and feature-length offering by a prestige producer, it’s the sort of thing that just has to land.
“We needed to build this ourselves”: Apple’s Eddy Cue, Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht talk ‘F1’ and Emmys success, upcoming slate, and launching a platform
https://www.screendaily.com/features/apple-content-team-on-f1-emmys-success-and-launching-a-platform/5210477.article
I had imagined this to be a puff piece promoting F1, but it’s a good interview. ZVA: “We have a new original nearly every single week [in 2026]” “The interesting thing for us at Apple is we want movies and shows to come out differently – but I want them to resonate with an audience a little more deeply and thoughtfully.”
Misc
Apple Launches App Store for the Web
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/03/apple-launches-app-store-for-the-web/
Meh. I got way too excited by the headline. I think Apple wanted to announce this as “Learning about apps on the Web now sucks marginally less” but Bare Bones Software refused to budge on the licensing demands for the slogan.
Why we made Affinity free, and how we’ll keep it that way
https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity-free/
The Affinity suite – a terrific collection of commercial creative apps, each with a large user base and a stellar reputation — is now free. A weary, cynical populace was immediately suspicious of this move. So the company felt they needed to release a separate blog post, in which the company founder explains how releasing free, 99% feature-complete apps fits into the company’s business plan. (The AI features cost money. But they also cost money to run, so that’s fine)
OpenAI acquires Software Applications Incorporated, maker of Sky
https://openai.com/index/openai-acquires-software-applications-incorporated/
Okay, it makes sense as a business story. The next buzzword keeping the AI bubble (hopefully) growing is “agentic”: AIs that can actually interact with user interfaces and APIs, and perform tasks on the user’s behalf as though the user were clicking buttons and opening websites on their own. But why invest in a third-party platform that will cease to function on the day that Apple chooses to stop tolerating its existence? Is OpenAI just interested in SAI’s (considerable) expertise?
Apple’s Family Sharing Helps Keep Children Safe. Until It Doesn’t
https://www.wired.com/story/apples-family-sharing-helps-keep-children-safe-until-it-doesnt/
WIRED points out a flaw in AFS administration: when parents split, Apple provides no mechanism for kids to move to a new Family account with a new custodian (the spouse with custody of kids); the spouse with the custodian role can control lives after split, possibly maliciously (via device tracking, seeing all photos and calendars synced to iCloud, etc.).
An AI tool detected structural heart disease in adults using a smartwatch
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/an-ai-tool-detected-structural-heart-disease-in-adults-using-a-smartwatch
Prelim Yale research asserts that single-lead EEGs collected by Apple Watch, when spiced up with an AI model, can identity certain kinds of heart damage. AI correctly identified the patients with heart damage 86% of the time, and correctly ruled it out 99% of the time. Neat! But preliminary. Hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. Also, observations are based on a small sample size…600 patients. AI was trained with 266,000 single-lead EEG recordings.
Introducing WhatsApp for Apple Watch
https://blog.whatsapp.com/introducing-whatsapp-for-apple-watch
…You mean, the world’s most popular messaging platform wasn’t already on Apple Watch this whole time? No. It’s because the Apple Watch only works with the iPhone, and outside of the US, it’s emphatically an Android world. We in the US tend to forget. Welp, Meta finally got around to it.
Google's AI 'Big Sleep' Finds 5 New Vulnerabilities in Apple's Safari WebKit
https://thehackernews.com/2025/11/googles-ai-big-sleep-finds-5-new.html
The next time I mutter to myself about a super-lame AI-generated YouTube thumbnail video, or (for Heaven’s sake) a holiday ad produced by one of the world’s wealthiest brands, I will add “But AI is also spotting security issues on my Mac and my iPad that slipped by all of us meatbags.” (Still, Coca-Cola people: whiskey tango foxtrot?!)
Apple invites the UK to participate in Your Tree on Battersea and express creativity on iPad this Christmas
https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2025/11/apple-invites-the-uk-to-participate-in-your-tree-on-battersea-this-christmas/
Design a tree on an iPad using Apple’s provided template, submit it via this website, and it could be projected on the smokestacks of Battersea Station. I’m sure that during internal discussions about this promotion, they considered the topic “but aren’t half of the submissions just going to be crude drawings of…you know…?” Anyway, the links to the iPad template and the submission page are in the Newsroom article. Don’t you love the fact that an industrial facility that might have once been considered an eyesore is becoming the hub of a whole bunch of lovely new holiday memories every year?