LTA 139: March 2025

Panel:

• Bart Busschots (host) – @bartb.ie

The show starts with some quick followup on a few recently covered and long-running stories before diving into the regulatory and legal stories, a little Apple HR news, and some highlights from Apple’s services and original content. The three main stories are President Trump’s (not-)reciprocal tariffs, a big shakeup in the Apple Intelligence and Siri teams, and the release of this OS cycle’s fourth round of feature updates. The show finishes with a rundown of a few other quick Apple-related stories that made the news in March.

You’ll find detailed show notes below the fold, and if you enjoy this free show, please consider clicking on the donate button at the top of the left side bar – the show is free for you to listen to, but not for Bart to Produce!

Updates & Followup

Quick updates to long-running stories the show continues to track, and to stories covered in recent shows.

• President Trump has extended his promise not to prosecute Apple and other American companies for breaking the Protecting Americans' Data from Foreign Adversaries Act by another 75 days, extending Apple's legal exposure even further — appleinsider.com/… & appleinsider.com/…
• The dramatic story of the UK trying to force Apple to break iCloud Advanced Account Protection has gone silent in March, all we heard is that there have reportedly been private discussions between US & UK officials — www.macobserver.com/…
• Indonesia's iPhone 16 ban will finally be lifted on April 11 — appleinsider.com/…
• The parental controls and age verification features Apple announced last month were perfectly timed: New Utah law forces big tech to add age verification, Apple is already prepared — appleinsider.com/…
• Apple continues to roll out it's hearing health features: Apple expands hearing health features to Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Saudi Arabia — appleinsider.com/…
• A bidding war is reportedly underway as Visa & AmEx try to win the contract to replace Goldman Sachs & Mastercard when the current Apple Card deal ends — www.cultofmac.com/…

Regulatory Rundown

• The European commission has issues Apple with a set of explicit instructions for the changes they need to make to iOS/iPadOS (both classified as gatekeepers) to be complaint with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) — www.cultofmac.com/…, arstechnica.com/…, www.macobserver.com/… & EU Commission PR

  • There are two demands:

    1. Apple need to make changes to their process for supporting interoperability requests from other manufacturers

    2. Apple need to provide the needed APIs to open up 9 OS features:

       1. iOS Notifications
       2. Peer-to-peer wifi
       3. Proximity-triggered pairing (some of the cool stuff that makes AirPods rock)
       4. Background execution
       5. Close-range Wireless File Transfer (AirDrop)
       6. Media Casting (AirPlay)
       7. Automatic Audio Switching (more of the cool stuff that makes AirPods rock)
       8. NFC

  • These demands are negotiable, so the exact user impact remains to be seen, but there is a real possibility Apple could be forced to compromise the privacy and/or security of EU users if the commission continue to hyper-fixate on interoperability over all else

• The UK Competition & Marketing Authority (CMA) have completed their investigations of how Apple handles browsers & gaming on iOS and concluded that Apple's changes to the rules for gaming last year have solved the problem, and that they think Apple should let other browser engines onto iOS, but are not going to do anything about it — appleinsider.com/…

• Apple have been fighting to prevent Competition Commission of India (CCI) from publishing their report on Apple since last year on the basis that it contains commercially sensitive information, they've now succeeded in getting the commercially sensitive content redacted, but don't appear to have succeeded in killing the entire report like they hoped — www.macobserver.com/…

• Apple, as well as other major tech companies have received letters from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan demanding copies of communications the companies had with the Binden administration about AI — www.macobserver.com/…

  • The letters were followed by Subpoenas — appleinsider.com/…
  • Jordan claims the tech companies were conspiring the administration and governments around the world to censor AI
  • Opinion by Bart: this is nothing short of McCarthy-esque conspiracy theorising and fear mongering

• Apple has lost it's battle to prevent Germany from classing it as having Significant Market Power under German anti-trust law, opening it up more strict regulation — www.reuters.com/…

• A mixed month for Apple in Brazil:

  • Apple has successfully appealed the Brazilian court order forcing the company to allow 3rd-party app stores on iOS we discussed last month — appleinsider.com/…
  • Brazil Looks Into Apple for Unfair App Tracking Rules — www.macobserver.com/… (More ATT madness )

• Turkey have launched a formal investigation onto Apple over price fixing — appleinsider.com/…

• France has fined Apple for using App Tracking Transparency in the past, but doesn't order Apple to change anything going forward — appleinsider.com/…

  • Opinion & Analysis: Gruber explains just how nuts this ruling is — daringfireball.net/…

Legal Latest

• Apple's appeal to be allowed to take part in the remedies phase of the Google Search anti-trust case brought by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) despite not having filed the needed paperwork has failed — arstechnica.com/…
• Apple security chief found not guilty of bribery charges over firearm permits — appleinsider.com/…

Apple HR

• The Trump administration have hired a former Apple lawyer to be the lead attorney for the National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), and the board have just suspended two open cases against Apple — appleinsider.com/…

  • Opinion from Bart: This reeks of the worst kind of 'Washington swamp' corruption

• Apple's vice president of stores and retail operations is Vanessa Trigub — appleinsider.com/… (will report to Deirdre O'Brien who currently fulfils this responsibility directly)

Apple Services & Original Content Highlights

• Apple Music:

  • Two notable Apple Music Classical announcements:

    • Apple Music Classical comes to the web before the Mac — appleinsider.com/…

      • Bonus Tip, pin the web interface to your doc to get a workable Mac app!

    • Apple Music Classical gets three new features to aid discovery & learning — appleinsider.com/… (Time-synced listening guides, curated Editorial Stations, and suggestions)

  • Professional DJs can now use Apple Music tracks directly — appleinsider.com/…

  • Dolby Atmos comes to Apple Music for Windows — www.cultofmac.com/…

• Six games come to Apple Arcade in April, including new Katamari and Space Invaders games — Apple PR

  "Space Invaders Infinity Gene Evolve, the newest entry in the influential series by TAITO CORPORATION; puffies., a delightful puzzle game from Apple Design Award winner Lykke Studios; Atari’s iconic RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic+, enhanced for iPhone and iPad; The Game of Life 2+, the official sequel to Hasbro’s classic family board game from Marmalade Game Studio; and Sesame Street Mecha Builders+, a fun-filled STEM adventure for young learners from StoryToys."

• Apple TV+: Apple have renewed two of their biggest hit shows:

  • It's official — 'Ted Lasso' is getting a fourth season — appleinsider.com/…
  • 'Severance,' the biggest success on Apple TV+, will be back for a third season — appleinsider.com/…
  • Related: New Apple TV+ studio buildings taking shape in Culver City — appleinsider.com/… (In Culver City Los Angeles)

• Apple Pay:

  • Apple Pay expands to Puerto Rico — appleinsider.com/…
  • in-coming tap-to-pay is coming to 9 more European countries — appleinsider.com/… (Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia & Switzerland)

• Apple Maps: Find My finally works in South Korea — appleinsider.com/…

Main Stories

1. After months of threats, the Trump Tariffs have been unveiled, and they are the biggest disruption to world trade in decades, if not centuries, bigger than the dot.com bust, the great recession, and COVID!

   • Every company in the world that sells to Americans, or is American and relies on international supply chains in any way will be affected — i.e., just about every company you've ever heard of! That obviously includes Apple.

   • Even now there is still massive uncertainty, so this chaos is not going end any time soon, and predicting the extent of the damage is a fool's errand.

   • Worst of all, these tariffs make no economic sense — they're a bad way of addressing a 'problem' that isn't actually problematic, and are built on a foundation of fundamental economic ignorance and misunderstandings:

     • At the very foundation of so much Trumpist economic nonsense is the failure to understand that countries are fundamentally different to businesses — businesses need to optimise profit, countries need long-term stability, with countries, many government incomes are tightly coupled to government expenditures, and when you have your own currency and central bank, debt works very differently. You just can’t successfully run a country as if it was a business!

     • Trump does not understand the foundational concepts of international trade, especially the concept of comparative advantage — every country is able to produce different things more and less efficiently for all sorts of reasons, often literally geological! To maximise your economy you need to import what you can’t make efficiently and export what you can.

     • Trump doesn’t understand trade balances:

       • They’re only useful metrics in very specific scenarios — a nations total trade balance tells you something about how their economy is structured, and when getting down into the weeds of trade negotiations with specific partners the fine-grained balances matter
       • Neither positive nor negative balances are inherently good or bad — they’re not budget deficits or bank balances! Further more, America has run negative trade balances for decades while simultaneously having the biggest economy in the world!
       • When you buy more stuff than you sell you get more stuff! — American is one of the richest nations on earth and Americans really like buying stuff and are not so big on saving, so they want lots of things, hence, the trade balance!

     • Trump is only considering part of the trade balance — he’s using only the numbers for goods and ignoring the numbers for services where the US run massively positive balances. Trump is literally assuming services exported to the world like Amazon Web Services, Office 365, Google, Facebook, Netflix, OpenAI, and just about every tech company that sells things that are not hardware are valueless — that’s NUTS!

     • Trump wrongly assumes negative trade balances with individual countries are evidence of some kind of trade barrier or nefarious practice

     • Trump claims his made up formula for ‘calculating’ the tariffs other nations impose on the US does not measure tariffs at all, it’s just a measures the trade balance as a ratio to GDP — it turns the false assumption that negative balances imply malice into math!

   • Apple-Related Coverage: (beyond the basics which have been flooding just about every news outlet on planet earth)

     • Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariffs hit every one of Apple's international manufacturing partners — appleinsider.com/…
     • Apple shares hammered after Trump tariff announcement — appleinsider.com/… & Apple stock bloodbath continues after China applies retaliatory tariffs — appleinsider.com/…
     • Trump hits Apple’s global supply chain with tariffs — www.cultofmac.com/… & How and where Trump's new tariffs affect Apple — appleinsider.com/…

   • Opinion & Analysis:

     • Trump Declares A Trade War On Uninhabited Islands, US Military, And Economic Logic — www.techdirt.com/…
     • The Economist on Trump’s Mindless Tariffs — daringfireball.net/…
     • The Ezra Klein Show: Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’ — overcast.fm/…

   • Related:

     • Apple’s training program to ramp up US manufacturing starts this summer — www.cultofmac.com/…
     • More Apple chips could be made in US thanks to TSMC & Intel joint venture — appleinsider.com/…

2. Following on from Apple's admission last month that some of the most innovative and anticipated features of Apple Intelligence will be a year late at least, we have reports that Apple are taking this failure very seriously, though we have nothing official from Apple.

   • First, details were leaked of an internal Apple meeting where Robby Walker, Apple's senior director of Siri and Information Intelligence, described Apple's choice to 'demo' and advertise features that were not actually ready as "ugly and embarrassing" — appleinsider.com/…

   • This was followed by reports of a major managerial shakeup within Apple — arstechnica.com/… & daringfireball.net/…

     • Tim Cook was reported as having lost confidence in AI head John Giannandrea's ability to deliver on products, so his role is reported to have been reduced — he'll continue to lead AI R&D, but will not be overseeing AI products anymore.
     • Mike Rockwell, having successfully delivered the VisionPro, is taking over the Siri team, and he'll be reporting to software chief Craig Federighi rather than Giannandrea.

   • Unsurprisingly, there is now class action law suits claiming Apple mislead consumers with it's ads showing features we now know were vapourware in the US and Canada — appleinsider.com/… & www.macobserver.com/…(A rare example of class action suits I actually agree with!)

3. Apple released the .4 updates for it's OSes — daringfireball.net/…

   • Apple PR

     "Apple Intelligence features are now available in many new languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (simplified) — as well as localised English for Singapore and India — and are accessible in nearly all regions around the world."
     …
     "In addition, iPhone and iPad users in the EU have access to Apple Intelligence features for the first time"

   • Apple Updates Its OSes with Mail Parity Across Platforms, Recipes in News, Apple Intelligence on visionOS, and More — www.macstories.net/…

     • Apple Intelligence will separate out what it thinks are the most important notifications as Priority Notifications
     • Image Playgrounds get a new Sketch style

   • HomeKet gets support for robot vacuums across all the platforms

   • iOS & iPadOS 18.4: Everything new in iOS 18.4 — www.cultofmac.com/…

     • More control over default apps:

       • How to Set WhatsApp as Your iPhone’s Default Calling and Messaging App — www.macobserver.com/… (Available world-wide )
       • Users around the world can also set a default translation app
       • Europeans can set Google Maps as default iPhone navigation app — www.cultofmac.com/…

     • VisionPro App — appleinsider.com/…

     • Ambient Music can be added to Control Center

     • Visual Intelligence comes to the iPhone 15 Pro line

     • Hidden iOS 18.4 Features You Might Have Missed — www.macobserver.com/…

   • macOS 15.4: Everything New in macOS 15.4 — www.macobserver.com/…

     • Quick Start comes to the Mac (scan a code on your old Mac to set up your new one)

   • WatchOS 11.4: Everything New in watchOS 11.4 — www.macobserver.com/…

     • Download watchOS 11.4 Now With Smarter Alarms and Home Integration — www.macobserver.com/…

   • VisionOS 2.4:

     • Big Vision Pro update brings Apple Intelligence and new content tools — www.cultofmac.com/…
     • How to use the new, easier Guest Mode on Vision Pro — www.cultofmac.com/…

   • tvOS 18.4

     • Download tvOS 18.4 Now With Improved Content Navigation and Connectivity — www.macobserver.com/… (Captive Portal Wifi)
     • tvOS 18.4 brings Matter support for vacuums, lossless audio, and more to Apple TV — appleinsider.com/…

Quick Stories

• Apple has worked with others to get standardised End-to-End Encryption added to the RCS spec and have promised to implement it — thehackernews.com/… & www.macstories.net/…

• Apple have brought ultra-low latency and lossless audio to the recently released USB-C update to the AirPods Max — www.macstories.net/… & Apple PR

• Two minor Apple app updates:

  • Apple integrates Apple Intelligence-powered Writing Tools into new iWork updates — appleinsider.com/…
  • Final Cut Pro updates with Image Playground on Mac, portrait mode on iPad — appleinsider.com/…

• WWDC 2025 Scheduled for June 9–13 — tidbits.com/… ( Apple PR)

Legend

Note: When the textual description of a link is part of the link it is the title of the page being linked to, when the text describing a link is not part of the link it is a description written by Bart.